Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

When he was alive, Robbie drove a gray Honda Accord, boring and boxy. The interior smelled like old cigarette smoke and something that resembled musty cardboard. The car was kept in the garage beside the breezeway, where the heat tried to penetrate curls of chilled damp air and almost succeeded.

Eddie had showered and changed, and now he wore his jeans and a faded Tigers T-shirt. As usual with any vehicle, when he got into Robbie’s car he had to push the seat all the way back to fit his legs in.

“I guess it’s because you’re a military guy,” Rose said in surprise as she watched Eddie try to get comfortable. “I thought Robbie was tall. Looks like I was wrong.”

“This sure is nice of you, Rose,” Eddie said as we buckled ourselves in. Eddie had rolled down the driver’s side window, and he leaned an elbow on it and gave her a smile where she stood by the rack of dusty gardening tools. It was a sincere smile, the only kind Eddie had, and it made Rose visibly melt a little. “April and I appreciate it.”

“They won’t know you’re gone,” Rose said. “The Coldlake PD doesn’t have enough manpower to follow you around all day and night. They’ll probably do a drive-by to make sure you’re still here, but I’ll just say you two are sleeping. You have a few hours at least.”

“What happens in a few hours?” I asked her.

Rose shrugged. “More questions, maybe. They won’t want to leave you alone too long. Until you’re cleared, they want to keep you on your toes. That’s what Robbie would do.” She pointed. “When you leave the driveway, go left, then left again at the stop sign. A mile down you’ll see the signs for Atticus Line and Hunter Beach. I’d start there if I were you. Rhonda Jean was probably headed there when she was killed. Someone there might know her.”

“The police will probably already have been there,” Eddie said.

Rose gave a snort that was the purest sound of derision I’d ever heard. “Maybe, maybe not, but if any of those kids told the truth to a cop, I’m my aunt Fanny. You should have better luck than they do.”

Eddie followed her directions, and we drove in silence for a few minutes. It was the first time we had been completely alone, without the possibility of someone listening in, since we’d pulled up at the hospital with Rhonda Jean last night.

Finally, Eddie spoke, his voice soft. “You told her.”

“Not much,” I said. “Just that someone might have been following us.” I glanced at him, at the tight clench of his jaw as he drove. It wasn’t anger; it was embarrassment. Eddie hated the idea of anyone knowing about his problem with seeing things. “We can’t just ignore it,” I said. “Rose is right. I saw the truck, too. Whoever killed Rhonda Jean knows who we are. We have to do something.”

“I know.” He looked tormented for a moment. “The sight of that girl keeps going around and around in my head. Clinging to the side of the truck bed as it drove. And I don’t know if I even saw her. Just now, on my run, when I was on my way back—” He shook his head.

“Tell me,” I said.

He hesitated, but I was the only person in the world that Eddie told these things to. So he said, “I came around the corner and was jogging up the sidewalk toward Rose’s house. I thought I saw a man go around the side of the house toward the backyard. So I followed him. But when I got to the backyard, there was no one there.”

“Maybe it was a neighbor,” I said.

“If it was a neighbor, I would have seen him in the yard. But I’m telling you, the yard was empty, and there was nowhere to hide. The man was wearing jeans and rubber boots, a gray sweatshirt. I saw all of it as clear as I can see you now. April, I’m going crazy.”

“That’s not true.” I shook my head. “I know you, and you’re not crazy.”

“Then explain what I saw.”

I blew out a breath. “Didn’t those cops say Rose’s house was haunted? Maybe that’s what it was.”

“Haunted by a dead gardener?”

We both laughed at that, the sound of it diffusing the tension. “He was pulling his celestial weeds,” I said.

“Watering his heavenly grass.”

“Telling ghostly kids to get off his lawn.” I looked over at him, and I couldn’t help it. I leaned across the divide between the passenger seat and the driver’s seat and put my arms around his neck, kissing the warm, rough skin of his jaw where the stubble came in.

“April, I’m driving,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I kissed along his jaw and the skin of his cheek, then back toward his ear. I could feel the reassuring muscles of his shoulders under my arms, and I ran my fingers up the back of his neck, where the hair was growing in longer than the military would allow.

“I’ll get pulled over,” he protested, but he didn’t shrug me off.

I kissed beneath his ear and felt a small tremor go through him. The tension in his body, brought on by the conversation, fizzled gently away. His skin smelled like soap and the sweat he’d washed off from his run, like hot sunshine, and I breathed it in. “You have summer skin,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s summer.” He sounded resigned, but he liked it. He still hadn’t shrugged me off.

“Let’s pull over somewhere and park.”

“In Robbie’s old car?”

“Why not? He won’t care.”

“I’m not a back seat type of guy.”

I smiled against his skin. “Never?”

“Never.”

That was news to me, but I immediately knew it was true. Eddie really wasn’t a back seat type of guy. “I guess I have to wait, then.”

He lifted a hand from the wheel and circled my wrist with his fingers, halfway between a protest and a caress. “You do, because Hunter Beach is just up ahead.” He pointed to a sign that went by out the window.

I kissed him once more, feeling that tremor again, and then I reluctantly dropped my arms and slid back into my seat. The paved highway ended and the road turned to gravel, the Accord bumping like an amusement park ride. The trees pressed close to the narrow road, but up ahead I could see a blue stripe of water—the lake. We had arrived.