by Chris Culver
“I got a call last night from a woman claiming to have information about Dominique Girard.”
“What is that, the fourth this week?”
“This one is different. You sitting down?”
Vince hesitated. “Yeah. What’s wrong?”
“It’s Tess Girard. I met her at Bread Co. last night.”
I counted to eight before Vince reacted. “You’re sure it’s her?”
“Positive,” I said, reining in my dog so he wouldn’t run into the street at a stop sign. Simon sat on my foot and grinned up at me, and I stroked his head absently before checking for traffic.
“How is she?”
“She looks good.”
Vince sighed. “I’m glad. I always liked Tess.” He paused. “We’re going to have to tell Isaac.”
“Eventually,” I said, starting across the street. “But let’s hold off until we have some more information. I don’t want to give him reason to overreact.”
“And he would overreact,” said Vince. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t have a clue. Do we treat her like an old friend? Do we ignore her? I don’t know.”
“How do you feel about her?”
“She’s a friend, I guess, but I’m married and I love my wife.”
“What does she want?”
I slowed and then stopped and sat on a bench someone had placed along the sidewalk. A few leaves drifted to the ground around me as the wind blew. Simon sat on my foot and grinned at me again, and I petted the back of his head. His blatant attempt to get my attention used to annoy me, but I now I find it to be one of his more endearing quirks.
“She said she wanted to talk to me about Dominique. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
“As glad as I am to hear she’s okay and as much as I’d like to see her, she needs to go. Talk to her and send her on her way.”
I trusted Tess, and maybe a part of me even still loved her as a friend. But that cold look in her eyes, the one hidden behind her smile, unsettled me.
“I will, but I’d like you to look her up first, maybe find out where she’s been.”
“I don’t know if I’m the best person for that. Aren’t you tight with Gabe Fontaine from the second-district police station?”
I grunted. “Gabe’s too smart. I don’t want him putting too many pieces together.”
“Fair point,” said Vince. “What can you give me on her?”
“Not much,” I said. “She said she’s staying in the Ritz-Carlton under the name Holly Olson. That name ring any bells for you?”
“No.”
“Me, neither, but it’s what I’ve got. Run the name and see if she has a criminal record or list of aliases. I’ll take it from there. I don’t want her showing up at my house. It would scare Ashley, and I don’t even know how Katherine would react.”
Vince knew enough about my sister and her daughter to understand the situation. “How is Ashley?”
“She misses her mom and she has nightmares, but they’re getting better. Simon’s been sleeping beside her bed. He makes her feel safe.”
Vince exhaled loudly. “Okay. I’ll look up Holly Olson and see what there is to see.”
Despite the chilly temperature, I was starting to sweat and I could feel my shirt sticking to my lower back. I fanned my corduroy jacket.
“Thank you. I’ll owe you one.”
“I’m sure this will blow over, but yes, you will owe me one. I’ll take Cardinals tickets as payment. You plan to renew your season tickets next year, don’t you?”
“You can have a couple of night games next season, but I’m keeping the afternoon ones.”
“That sounds fair to me,” said Vince.
I thanked him again before hanging up and walking the remaining three blocks to my dad’s old office. At one time, Hale and Hale had been one of the more successful divorce practices in the county, which made sense with my father at the helm. Old Man Hale had a gift for divorce. He had likely caused half a dozen with his promiscuity, and he wasn’t too bad at representing wealthy divorcees in court, either. Now that my dad was dead and I owned the building, I used the second floor as a writing studio and rented out the first floor to an ice cream parlor.
I unlocked the ground-level front door and took the stairs to my office, where I threw my keys and wallet on an oak desk on the left side of the room and then grabbed a rawhide for Simon from a box in the supply closet. After that, I turned on my laptop and started a pot of coffee. I didn’t want to think about Tess or the mistakes of my past, so I did what I always try to do when I need to get my mind off something: I went to work.
As I had hoped, the events of the past few days disappeared as I set my mind to my newest novel. Unfortunately, reality pulled me back just as quickly, as my cell phone rang twenty minutes after I started writing. I pulled it out without looking at the caller ID.
“Vince?”
“No. It’s me.”
Tess. For some reason, my brain told me to slam the phone down and leave town, pretend nothing happened. Even without conscious direction, my mind began running through the scenarios, plotting ways this conversation could go wrong. I cleared my throat, glanced at my watch, and then switched the phone from one hand to the other.
“I’m sorry about our meeting earlier,” I said. “I was a little out of sorts. It’s just been so long since we’ve talked. A lot has happened. Dad died a couple of years back, and then Ashley moved in with us a few months ago. I’m married now, too . . .” I stopped talking, realizing that I was rambling.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” said Tess. “But since you brought it up, do you have time for a date with an old friend? I’d love to catch up.”
I nodded to myself, knowing that I owed her a meeting, even if it wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation.
“I’d like that, too,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t catch the lie.
She read off an address, which I wrote down on a scratch pad beside my phone.
“I’m not familiar with that street,” I said. “Where is it?”
“It’s a coffee shop in Arnold. People won’t recognize us there.”
“You don’t think it’d be too risky to meet in public?” I asked.
“It is a risk, but I think it’s worth it. You’ve got the address. I’ll see you in half an hour. We have so much to talk about.”
5
I ran Simon back to the house and then got in my car. Arnold was one of those small towns that I had heard of on weather reports but knew little about, leaving me no idea of what to expect. I put the address Tess had given me into the GPS on my phone and headed toward the interstate.
Many of the businesses near the address Tess had given me had loading docks for deliveries and large parking lots for displaying outdoor equipment or heavy machinery. None of them looked like a coffee shop. As I pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the business Tess directed me to, I rechecked my GPS to ensure that I had come to the right spot. I had, so I called her on my cell phone.
“Hey. Are you sure you gave me the correct address? It looks like a gun range.”
“Yes. It’s a shooting range, but they’ve got a coffee bar. I’m in the pro shop.”
Had I been meeting a stranger, I might have refused. Reluctantly, I slipped the phone in my pocket and crossed the gravel lot to the range’s front door. The interior had a retail space directly in front of the doors and a coffee shop on the left side of the store. The right side of the shop had gray lockers arranged around a solid oak receptionist’s desk, while frosted glass doors led to the range. Tess stood inside the retail section, a package of orange foam earplugs in one hand and two pairs of plastic safety glasses in the other.
As I walked toward her, she flashed me the sort of smile that could make otherwise sane men do incredibly stupid things just to get her attention. Standing near her in my corduroy jacket and jeans, I felt like a thistle beside a rose. Tess looked at the floor and then back to me, her smile turni
ng almost coy.
“I got you some earplugs and safety glasses,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t think you’d bring any.”
I looked around the shop, noting its exits in the front and back. “I didn’t know you wanted to meet me at a gun range.”
“I like shooting. It makes me feel safe.”
“I’ll wait for you in the coffee bar,” I said. ‘Take your time.”
“I want you to come with me. It’ll be fun.” She leaned close enough that I could smell the lilac from her hand lotion, the same one she had been using since high school. “At least go through the motions and pretend. We’ll both look out of place if we don’t.”
I surveyed the range’s other patrons. Already, the clerk at the register of the retail section was staring at us, so maybe she was right. I acquiesced, and she checked us in at the counter beside the gun range. I thought she had just brought the firearm on her hip, but she used a key to open one of the lockers beside the receptionist’s desk and pulled out a black metal case. She handed it to me, and we walked through the doors. The range was small and narrow, with ten lanes for shooters and five metal tables for those waiting. Only one man stood at a lane, and he stared downfield so intently that he didn’t even notice us.
Tess walked to the lane as far from the other shooter as possible and set up a paper target at roughly ten yards. Each round she fired pierced the paper within six inches of the target’s simulated center of mass. When she finished the magazine, she slid her firearm into the holster on her belt and looked back at me.
“Your turn.”
I shook my head. “No, thank you. I didn’t bring a gun.”
“That’s why I brought this one,” she said, walking toward me. She took the black case I had been holding and opened it on the nearest table. “It’s a Smith & Wesson 1911 converted to shoot a .22 long rifle cartridge. It won’t kick too much.”
“I’d rather not.”
Tess took my hand and put it on top of the firearm. “You came all the way out here, so you might as well try. You might like it. I’ll even help if you’ve never shot before.”
I didn’t mind guns, and I could understand why many people liked shooting them, but in all the years I’d known Tess, not once did she ever express any desire whatsoever to shoot anything. In fact, just the opposite. She had told me time and again how she didn’t like it when her stepfather’s security team openly carried firearms on vacation. Time changes people, evidently.
“I don’t have a choice in this, do I?”
Tess winked. “Nope.”
I removed the weapon from its case and slid a magazine into the grip.
“Just try to have some fun,” said Tess.
I walked to the same lane she had used, and since I didn’t care how I did, I didn’t bother setting up a new target before racking the slide. Under normal circumstances, I could shoot well, but this time, I simply pointed the weapon downfield and pulled the trigger, nearly missing the target entirely.
“Steve,” said Tess. “I’m walking towards you. I’m going to help you out.”
I looked over my shoulder at her to let her know that I had heard. She leaned into me, and I once again smelled her lilac hand lotion, and once more, I was transported back to the days when Tess and I were together, when a single word from her could set my heart racing and a touch sent blood rushing through my system. When she put her hands on my shoulders to square me to the target, an awkward, nervous flutter traveled down my back.
“Now relax and spread your legs,” she said. I did as she suggested, and she patted me on the back and whispered into my ear. “You remember when you told me that in high school?”
She laughed, but I pretended not to hear as I raised the firearm. I finished the magazine, but I found my thoughts continually straying to the woman behind me. Once I finished, I took a step back from the lane and started to hand the gun back to Tess.
“Just put it in the box for me,” she said, nodding toward the black metal case. While I did that, she removed the empty magazine from her own weapon and pulled the slide back to clear the chamber. Never in my life did I imagine I’d watch her field strip a weapon, so seeing her do it was a little surreal.
“You’ve learned a couple of things since you’ve been away,” I said, once she had the gun cleaned and reassembled.
“You’d be surprised at how easy it is to learn something when your life is on the line,” she said, checking the sight lines and dry firing the weapon. She looked back at me and smiled. “It hasn’t been all bad, though. There have been happy moments, too.”
“I’m glad.”
After putting her weapon back in her holster, she took a hesitant half step toward me, looking almost as if she were going to kiss me. I turned my head away and stepped back before she could.
“Let’s talk in the shop,” I said, fingering my wedding ring. “I think we’ve both got a lot to say.”
6
Once we left the range, Tess excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, while I ordered two cups of coffee at the coffee bar. By the time she joined me again, I had already taken a seat at a corner table, as far from other patrons as I could get. The large, open room afforded us little privacy, but the distance from others helped.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” said Tess.
“Nine years.”
Tess smiled and then waved at the table awkwardly, reminding me of the girl I knew. “You still drink coffee, I see.”
“I do,” I said, looking around to make sure no one was watching us. When I caught her gaze after my sweep, her eyes were so cold and devoid of emotion that they might as well been made of glass. I almost shuddered and quickly looked down at my coffee.
“The way your eyes dart away,” she said. “It almost makes me think you’re nervous.”
I stirred my coffee. “Sorry. I’m just . . . I . . .” I took a breath, collecting myself and blinking away the memory of the look I had just seen. When I looked up again, my old friend was back, her smile and her eyes as warm as ever. “I never expected to see you again. I thought you were gone.”
“You can stare. I don’t mind,” she said, scooting her chair closer to the table and relaxing her posture. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, about what I’d say to you when I saw you again. I missed you at Montauk State Park.”
The night before my friends and I helped Tess disappear, she and I spent the night together in her apartment, where, after making love for the last time, I asked her to promise me that she’d forget about us and move on. She refused and said it was unfair of me to even ask. We eventually came up with a compromise: if we still cared about each other in five years, we would meet on a certain day in a certain parking lot at Montauk State Park and disappear together. If one of us didn’t show, it meant he or she had found someone else.
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t make it.”
Tess looked down and stirred her coffee. “I hear you married the girl.”
“Yeah. We’d been engaged for a while, but we finally got married about six months ago.”
When she looked up from her coffee, she smiled but I caught a flicker of pain in her eyes and an only partially concealed grimace on her lips. “You going to keep me in suspense, or are you going to tell me about her?”
I looked at my coffee and then to Tess. “I married Katherine McNeil.”
“Oh,” said Tess, the smile leaving her face. “You married one of my sorority sisters. A friend of mine.”
“She’s pregnant.”
I didn’t even know where that came from. I simply blurted it out, as if that were some kind of excuse. Tess covered her grimace with a too-tight smile. Maybe that was what I had seen in her eyes earlier. It wasn’t a cold look; it was a pained one.
“Congratulations.”
We settled into an uneasy silence with both of us looking everywhere but at the person in front of us. After a few minutes of that, I sighed.
“This is
more difficult than I thought it would be.”
Tess finally looked at me. “Nobody said it’d be easy.” She started and stopped talking before getting a complete sentence out. “Is Hellboy still alive?”
“Yeah, he’s hanging in there, but I don’t know for how much longer. After you disappeared, I renamed him Simon, after my Uncle Simon.”
She looked down at her coffee. “Probably a better name with a child on the way.”
We slipped into another silence, but with the awkwardness previously acknowledged, it seemed easier to take. Tess blinked rapidly and stirred her coffee. I didn’t know if I should say anything or let her lead the conversation, but eventually I cleared my throat. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” she said, shrugging. “I finished college. Go Utes!”
She halfheartedly pumped her fist in the air, and then smiled sheepishly and looked at the table.
“What is a Ute?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. I returned her smile and found it came easier than I had expected. She turned her attention to her hands. “Did you go to Dominique’s execution?”
I nodded. “I was one of the witnesses.”
“Did you see my mother there?” she asked, looking up and squinting at me.
I shook my head. “No one visited him.”
“Good. He deserved to die alone.”
“Did he?” I asked. “I don’t know any more.”
She looked directly in my eyes, an intimate gesture I normally shy away from, but I held her gaze. “Yes,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Believe me. He deserved everything that happened to him.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I wanted to give you a second chance,” she said.
“For what?” I asked, furrowing my brow.
“To choose me.”
I didn’t have any coffee left, but I picked up the cup and pretended to drink anyway. “I’m glad to see you, but a lot has happened since you left. I’m married, I’ve got a mortgage, a family. I can’t leave that.”
Tess started to reach across the table, presumably for my hand, but I pulled my arms back before she could. She crossed her arms on the table.