“Uhh ... no, just the one.”
“You must have really wanted to keep Roy from leavin’ town.”
“I don’t,” she said. “There’s no reason for me to care what happens to him. Not anymore.”
“Wanna guess where I am right now?”
Why was he asking such pointed questions?
“I don’t know where you are. How could I?”
“I’m at Roy’s house, standin’ on his front lawn, admirin’ your handiwork.”
“What handiwork?”
“You can cut the innocent act, Quinn. Roy says he knows you did it.”
“Did what?”
“Really? We’re still playin’ this game?”
His tone was annoying. “I suppose we are.”
“All four of his truck tires are flat, Quinn. They’ve been slashed.”
Quinn reflected back to earlier, to the words Ruby had uttered outside the office. She’d said Roy wasn’t going anywhere. And she was right. He wasn’t. Not tonight.
“Roy can think whatever he likes. I didn’t do it. How could I? Aren’t the cops watching him?”
“A witness came forward tonight, an alibi who stated she was with Roy when Evie was murdered. He’s a free man. We’ve been lookin’ in the wrong direction this entire time.”
“I really didn’t have anything to do with Roy’s tires, Kyle. I was in a work meeting at Evie’s business until a couple hours ago.”
“Are you going to look into the whereabouts of Marissa Lewis or not?”
“Oh, I dunno. Maybe you should wait until your guard dog’s available, get him to help you. And hey, it was nice hanging out with you last night, but I got the message. I’ll back off.”
Guard dog? Did he mean Bo? And what wasn’t she telling him that had Kyle so agitated?
“What message?”
“I talked to Bo today, told him I had plans to ask you out again. He told me to back off, said you weren’t interested. Message received. And hey, next time you want to use me for information, call someone else.”
CHAPTER 40
“What do you want?”
Beer bottle in hand, Rowdy swung the front door open, barely making eye contact with Quinn before returning to his recliner. She stood on the porch for a moment, unsure whether or not she’d been invited in. “Can I talk to you?”
“The game’s on. Come back later.”
Quinn stepped inside. “Who’s playing?”
His eyes remained on the television. “Seriously? You expect me to believe you follow football?”
“A little. My dad’s a Broncos fan. You?”
“Same.”
She hoped the sports banter might lighten things up between them, until he clicked a button on the television remote, boosting the volume by several notches.
“I just need five minutes of your time.”
He gulped another swig of his beer, made a two-pointer into a plastic wastebasket several feet away, and walked into the kitchen. “Like I said, I’m watching the game.”
“So pause it.”
He cracked open a fresh can and said, “Two minutes.”
“Five. And if you want to keep negotiating, I’ll leave, and you won’t ever get your job back.”
“What makes you think I want it?”
“You want it more than everyone there. You weren’t just angry today; you were passionate, which means you care. It’s not just a job to you. It’s part of who you are.”
“You got all that from one meeting?”
“You were Evie’s go-to person, the one who managed everything. Right?”
He belched into the open air like a primitive ruffian, ensuring his given name lived up to its full potential.
“Beer?” he asked.
“What?”
“Would you like a beer?”
“No thanks.”
He laughed. “Worried it will taint your figure?”
It had been some time since she’d sparred with someone like this. It felt better than she cared to admit. Empowering.
“I could accept your olive branch, if that’s what it is, but then you’d witness my face twist into several different shapes as I pretend to like the taste of something I find nauseating. And I can’t do that. Not even to you. Not only would it put us back where we started, you’d have even less respect for me than you do now.”
He cracked a smile. “Oh ... I don’t know. You tell it straight. It’s ballsy in a sweet, innocent kind of way.”
“Do I get my five minutes?”
He paused the television.
“How old are you?” Quinn asked.
“You came all the way here to ask me about my age?”
“I’m just curious.”
“I’m twenty-one. You?”
“Add five years and you’re there,” she said. “You were young when you started working for Evie.”
“Still in high school. She helped me through a difficult time in my life.”
“Yeah, I know. Had to do with drugs, didn’t it?”
There it was at last—his full attention.
“How do you know about my past?”
“Evie told me,” she said.
“At the meeting today, you acted like you didn’t know a thing about me—about any of us.”
“Evie mainly talked about you and Felicity. You were the one person she knew she could rely on no matter what. That’s why she put you in charge last year. To be honest, having you around kept her sane during her divorce. She told me she finally felt she could take a break from work and not worry about the business suffering in her absence. The way you stepped up, it meant a lot to her.”
He pressed his hands together. “I would have done anything for Evie. She was a good friend. The best.”
“I know,” Quinn said. “So please, stay. Work with me. I need you. I’m not trying to take over. I’m just trying to keep it going. With Gage and Marissa not showing up today, we’re already down two people. Don’t make it three.”
“Wait a second ... are you saying Marissa never showed after I left?”
“I haven’t seen her since this morning. Why? Do you know her well?”
“More than I know some of the others.”
“Are you two dating?”
“What? No. She’s only sixteen. I mean, she’ll be seventeen in a couple months, but ... we’re just friends. I called her a few times tonight. Went straight to voicemail.”
Friends who call each other a few times a day.
“If you’re just friends, why call her so many times in one day?” Quinn asked.
He shrugged. “I wondered if she made it to the meeting. I was going to ask her what happened after I left. That’s all.”
Only it wasn’t all. He’d wiped his brow twice over the past minute alone. He could distort the truth all he wanted. Quinn suspected there was something between them.
“You want to know something? For several days now I suspected Roy killed Evie. After the work meeting, I found out he had a solid alibi for the night she died. He was with someone.”
“How do you know the alibi is reliable?”
“She had no reason to lie to me,” Quinn said. “By telling the truth, she actually risks losing everything.”
“Maybe she’s just trying to protect him.”
“Or maybe she’s telling the truth. You know Evie well. Who do you think did it?”
He sank back onto the chair. “I’ve thought about it so many times. I know every person in her life. None of them seem capable of murder.”
“What if it wasn’t a friend or a lover? What if it was a client?”
“It’s a gardening business. You get that, right? We’re fair, honest, and on time, every time. We meet all of our deadlines. No one has ever complained about anything that Evie didn’t go out of her way to make right.”
It was worth a try.
“Well, I promised five minutes, and I’ve been here ten, so I’ll go,” Quinn said. “See you at work tomorrow?”
/>
“What about what Ruby said earlier?”
Quinn flicked a hand through the air, winked. “I’m in charge now. What about her?”
CHAPTER 41
With Marissa gone, Quinn couldn’t help but wonder if her disappearance had anything to do with what happened to Evie. Or whether the business was involved somehow. Everyone swore their allegiance to Evie, all behaving as if they mourned her death like they would the loss of any valued friend or family member. Did they really? Or was there one loose cannon in the bunch? Remove the right piece in Jenga’s infrastructure and everything comes crashing down. The real question was—which piece would lead to the killer?
Questions dominated Quinn’s mind as she took the short trek from Rowdy’s house to the car—in the dark, with nothing but Rowdy’s shoddy porch light to guide her. Roy was innocent, Marissa was missing, and Rowdy was hiding something. She didn’t know how she knew it—she just did. And she suspected it had something to do with Marissa.
Who could she trust anymore?
Aside from Bo and her parents, no one.
A faint breeze blew rhythm into a wind chime dangling from a string between two wooden slats on Rowdy’s porch. And then cracking, a faint rustling sound vibrating from the edge of the property, between a few aggregations of trees. Quinn squinted, like she expected the gesture to magnify the darkness somehow. When the noise reproduced, she increased her speed while reaching down, grappling for the cold, hard security only Evie’s gun could offer. The steel felt good gripped around her fingers, made her feel secure. Brave.
From the safe confines of the car, she pressed down on the door locks, flipped the high beams on, and pulled out of Rowdy’s driveway. She leaned toward the dashboard, her head protruding so far forward her chin practically rested on the top of the steering wheel, like scooting her body closer to the windshield made things any better than they were. The sky was dark. Pitch black. And the road leading away from Rowdy’s wasn’t fit for night driving. The few street signs she passed were fuzzy, the words blending together like a cloudy bowl of alphabet soup.
Hands nervously clutching the rubber grips of the steering wheel, she tried to focus. It wasn’t working. And there was a simple reason why—she didn’t have her glasses. She despised glasses, despised wearing them, so she almost never did. They made her feel old. And forget contact lenses. She’d tried them once, dipping a finger into the soft, squishy wetness of the see-through lens before stabbing it onto her eyeball. It didn’t seem natural. It felt weird. And she felt weird in them, like the bionic woman but without any super powers.
She was sure she’d been circling the same three streets for over a half hour now, seeing the same signs repeatedly, all sense of direction dashed inside a car with a GPS that mapped her current location as an “unverified area.” Of the five street lamps she’d passed, one of them was out, and another was blinking, flashing off and on, taunting her like, “now you see me, now you don’t.” The town had changed over the years. New subdivisions, more homes being built on the outskirts of town. Rowdy’s was one of them. She felt like Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer who hadn’t the slightest clue where he was going either. Poor guy. The only legacy he left behind when he died was a silly swimming game. A mockery, really.
Lights twinkled in the distance, and she could see the roadway leading back to town. She reached the stop sign and turned on the main road, exhaling what felt like the first real breath she’d taken since dipping inside her car at Rowdy’s. Old lady or not, she made a vow to herself—no more night driving without her glasses.
She’d driven less than a quarter of a mile when she saw the vehicle approaching from behind. It was fast, relentless, coming in hot. Brights beaming so violently through her back windshield, it was like they had the ability to penetrate her brain. Did the driver see her? There was little time to assume he had, mere seconds for her to react. She jerked the wheel to the right, attempting to yield to the oncoming vehicle, give him the road.
It should have worked, but it didn’t.
The vehicle sped up, ramming into her back bumper before swerving around, darting up the road and out of sight. She braced the wheel for support as the car spiraled out of control, spinning off the road like spokes on a windmill. The hood of the car bowed into an upside-down “V,” crashing into a brick noise-barrier wall surrounding an upscale neighborhood.
Car fully stopped, she remained still for several moments, allowing the swift beating of her heart time to slow, her brain time to process. The truck was gone. The street empty. The nightmare over. For now. Something she’d done in her pursuit to find the killer had finally made an impact, triggering the events of the evening. She just needed to find out what that something was and how it was tied to Evie’s murder.
The soft blur of headlights slowed to a stop behind her. Her first instinct was to panic, to assume the man was back, that he was coming for her. Then she noticed it wasn’t a truck that had stopped. It was a car. And inside the car, a woman. Quinn released her seatbelt, opened the car door, and looked up, thanking God for keeping her alive.
CHAPTER 42
Two accidents in two weeks. It had to be some kind of record. One self-inflicted, the other a big, black question mark. Since her own car was still in the shop for repairs in Utah, Quinn had been driving her father’s Volvo. And now she had to do what she thought she’d never have to do again, except this time, she wasn’t a kid; she was an adult. That adult would have to face her father and tell him the hood of his new Volvo looked like a metal tent for two. Moments like these made her feel like a teenager again, giving her the same knotty lump in her throat she used to get right before one of her parents uttered the words “you’re grounded.”
Over the last half hour, three people she’d never met before had pulled to the side of the road to check on her, inquiring if she was all right, offering their help. Recent days had caused her to dismiss the town she remembered. Forget the people. Forget how friendly they were, waving as she drove by whether she knew them or not, or tonight, stopping even though they had other places to be.
She’d hardened. Evie’s death had changed her. Made her feel less. Judge more. But in this moment, in this very moment as a woman she’d known less than five minutes cloaked her in a blanket from the back-seat of her car, Quinn’s heart grew, swelling fuller than it had in a long time. The same woman called the police and then a towing company. And then she held Quinn’s quivering hand and assured her everything was going to be all right.
For a moment, Quinn believed it.
It didn’t take long for the police to arrive. Kyle’s eyes expanded when he stepped from the patrol car, but he didn’t say much. He barked an order at the other officer who surveyed the damaged car with a flashlight, noting the hit-and-run vehicle they were looking for was silver, as evidenced by the streaks of paint left on the Volvo’s bumper.
The scene was processed. Kyle asked Quinn to fill out a report. She said she’d try, but even now, she didn’t know for sure what had actually happened. He escorted her to his squad car, told her to get inside, get warmed up. He offered her a ride home. She refused. She’d already called someone. The only person she knew to call. All she needed to do now was to sit and wait.
Kyle rounded the side of the car, opened the door, sat down next to her. “Are you sure it was just a hit and run, Quinn?”
“I’m not sure of anything. It was over so fast. Five seconds. Ten maybe. Tops.”
“I know it was dark, but try and explain what happened.”
“I turned onto the main road to town, saw headlights behind me, blaring into my car. It didn’t look like the person driving was going to slow down. At first I thought he didn’t see me. Now I ... I don’t know.”
“Were your headlights on?”
“Of course they were.”
“What happened next?”
“I tried to get out of the way. He hit me anyway. Or she. I couldn’t tell.”
“On p
urpose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Quinn. Think about it. Who have you been talkin’ to today?”
Everyone.
“I spent most of the afternoon and the evening with Evie’s employees. We had a meeting.”
“How did the meeting go?”
“Not bad for the first one,” she said.
“No one left angry or seemed upset?”
Almost all of them did, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “It’s hard to say.”
Kyle sighed. “Okay, Quinn. If you think of anything else, you have to tell me. Okay?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Being here. Waiting with me.”
“It’s what I do.”
There was that tone again.
“I never said I wasn’t interested in you,” she said. “What I mean is, I didn’t have a conversation with Bo about you. Not the kind you think we had.”
“I know. After all these years, he still has a thing for you, doesn’t he?”
“He’s with someone, Kyle. Even if he wasn’t, I’m ... I don’t know ... preoccupied with other things is probably the best way to describe it.”
Preoccupied. The most understated understatement of the year. More like pulled in opposite directions, like a Stretch Armstrong action figure.
“I just wanted you to know,” she continued. “I didn’t go out with you to frisk you for information. I went out with you because we’re friends.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re upset with me. I can tell.”
“It’s just ...”
“Just what?”
He bent a thumb to the side. “Looks like your ride’s here.”
CHAPTER 43
“Thanks for coming,” Quinn said.
Astrid turned the radio down. “I’m guessing I was the last person you called and the first to answer?”
“I ... yes. I tried Dad. He didn’t pick up.”
“He went to bed about an hour ago. Probably didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“And Mom?”
“It’s ladies’ night at Town Hall. Bingo. She’s way into it. She took her phone, but it’s probably buried in her purse somewhere under a thousand other things she doesn’t ever need but can’t leave home without. Hey, you all right?”
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