Firefly Rain (27 page)

“Very interesting, Mr. Logan.” Her tone was guarded, and I nearly grinned when I saw her hands curl protectively, reflexively, around the coffee. “But I’m not quite sure I understand where you’re going with this.”

“It ain’t where I’m going, Officer
Lee
,” I spat out. “It’s where you’ve been. I don’t know what the hell you’re playing at, telling me all about small town this and small town that, but I don’t really care for it. It’s intimidation, is what it is, and I don’t even know why. So why don’t you cut that crap out and try to do some actual police work finding my stolen car, and I’ll try to forget that you came running here from the closest thing this state has to a big city to hide out when things got hot.”

“You don’t know shit, Logan,” she said icily, and she stood. “Remember that the next time you go shooting your mouth off about stuff you don’t really understand.” She put the mug down on the table. “Crappy coffee, by the way. You used to buy all yours at Starbucks, didn’t you?”

“Preferred tea until I got back home,” I said, standing up to show her I wasn’t intimidated. “Can I show you out?”

“No, you can’t.” She marched past me to the kitchen door and put a meaty hand on the knob. “If there’s any word on your car, I’ll call.”

“You do that,” I said, and I sat back down. “Have a nice trip back to town, Officer.”

The only response I got was the door slamming as she went out.

I waited until I heard the police car tearing down the road before finishing my coffee. Even then, I was half expecting Hanratty to kick in the door and arrest me for malicious newspaper reading, or crappy coffee making, or maybe indecent exposure if she was feeling particularly creative. I knew I’d hit a nerve, and hit it hard. My guess was that most of the folks in town were too polite to try to find out anything about their new cop, and the rest too embarrassed to talk about it. Only a big-city boy like myself—and I had to laugh at that description—was rude and brash and ornery enough to throw it in her face, never mind that she’d been applying a form of harassment that usually ended up involving the words “You ain’t from around here, are you, boy?”

Well, screw her. Maybe there was something that I didn’t know about her circumstances. In fact, I’d be shocked if there hadn’t been. That being said, all I wanted out of her was a little public service, not lectures on my hometown or suspicious smirks or visits at odd hours.

Of more immediate concern was the fact that my car, complete with mysterious driver, had been spotted near the library. Maybe that was coincidence—by sufficiently loose definition, two-thirds of town was near the library, after all—but it still felt worrisome.

Frowning, I reached across the table for Hanratty’s half-full cup and stopped.

Leaning forward, I could see something else on the table—a pair of black-rimmed glasses peeking out from behind the napkin holder. Hanratty couldn’t possibly have failed to see them. Only I was that stupid.

No doubt Hanratty knew whose glasses those were. She probably knew every prescription in town, now that I thought on it, convincing herself that it was something small-town folks did. Hell, if someone convinced her that it was customary, she’d probably put on a Minnie Pearl hat and a smile, then go line-dance through the town square.

In the meantime, though, she had a bit more information on my comings and goings than I wanted, and some on Adrienne’s, too. The pieces of this puzzle weren’t fitting together yet, but they were all on the same table, and I was getting the vague sense of an ugly-ass picture waiting to be formed.

There was nothing I could do at the moment, though, unless I wanted to pelt down the road in hopes of outrunning Hanratty’s police car. With all due deliberateness, I took the coffee cups over to the sink and dumped Hanratty’s out. After some fiddling with sponges and coffee grounds, I surveyed the kitchen and felt that it was good enough for the time being. My stomach wasn’t settled enough for breakfast, not after last night’s adventure and the morning’s dustup, so I just let the notion go and went around turning the house back into something habitable. That damned Nickel Creek song was in my head, and I found myself whistling bits of it off and on as I went.

But it was morning, with the sun shining and the night’s rain gone. Even with a sore back from sleeping curled up on the mudroom floor, I felt better than I had in days. Maybe it was the mud between my toes, maybe it was the satisfaction of telling Hanratty off, maybe it was just the fact that by the light of day, I couldn’t
see ghosts and magical fireflies anymore. Maybe I’d start worrying about them again once the sun went down, but for now I had real flesh-and-blood problems to worry about.

Like, for example, the one that had nearly torn through my laundry room door.

It was pure coincidence that I was at the far end of the house, shutting the mudroom door and locking it, when the phone rang. I thought about letting it go, but curiosity got the better of me, and I ended up running down the hall just in time to catch it.

“Hello?” I asked, a little breathless.

“Mr. Logan?” I heard Adrienne reply. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

I checked the kitchen clock. It was a quarter past nine—a perfectly reasonable time for someone to call. “Just an early time, that’s all. I try to exercise my constitutional right to be a lazy son of a gun these days.” She started to apologize, and I shushed her. “Really, it’s fine. What can I do for you?”

“Well, it’s about yesterday,” she said.

I let out an exaggerated sigh, full of the blues. “Why do I have the feeling you’re not going to tell me you did some more research on my problem and found the one clue that will magically solve everything?”

“I’m afraid not,” she replied, from the sounds of things smothering a giggle as she did so. “But I did leave my glasses at your house last night.”

“That you did,” I agreed. “And I’m going to be holding them for ransom. Leave three hundred dollars in small unmarked bills by the statue of Joe Johnston downtown, or you’ll never see them again.”

“Not on a librarian’s salary,” she said sweetly, “and in case you’ve forgotten, there is no statue of General Johnston.”

I snapped my fingers up near the phone so she could hear. “Damn. I knew there was a flaw in my cunning plan. So what now?”

She took a deep breath. “I was thinking I could come out there to retrieve them after work, if that’s all right with you. And if you don’t mind, I could maybe bring some dinner along with me. Just to thank you for looking after the glasses.”

“That’s better than trusting my cooking,” I heard myself saying. “I’d be honored.”

“Great.” You could actually hear her smile over the phone. “I’ll be there around six thirty?”

“Sounds good to me,” I told her. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me, too,” she said, and she broke the connection.

The next few hours were spent doing what no man in his right mind enjoys doing, which is to say tidying up in hopes of impressing a woman. There was something soothing about it, though, a pleasant change from all the worrying and hurrying and scurrying I’d been doing. By the time I was finished, everything except that scratched-up door looked presentable, which was no mean feat considering my state of mind.

At quarter after six, I declared the place as done as it was going to get, and I moved to take care of the last two special items on the agenda. First was the shotgun, which I propped up in the mudroom with the safety off and the inside door closed.

Second came the door to Mother and Father’s bedroom. I opened it, meeting no resistance. “Don’t make me look bad this time,” I said into the empty air, and then I propped the door open with a book off Father’s shelf—a well-worn hardback copy of
Catch-22
. I’d never noticed it there before, but then again, there were a lot of things I’d never bothered to notice about Father.

I could explore them later, though. Now, I needed to wait for a pretty lady to show up.

Show up she did, more or less on schedule. I was waiting on the porch, feeling like a schoolboy, when she did. She was wearing a sundress all covered in pink flowers, neck cut high and hem way down low.

I hate the color pink. On her, it looked perfect.

In her hand, Adrienne had a brown paper bag, which I supposed held dinner. She bounced up the steps and smiled, holding the bag up as if it had been a treasure. “Fried catfish and slaw all right?” she asked.

“Perfect,” I told her. “Come on in. I know the head waiter. He’ll give us the best seats in the house.”

We went in then, and she busied herself pulling the various foodstuffs out of the bag while I pulled out plates, glasses, and flatware. By the time I pulled the pitcher of lemonade out of the fridge, she had everything neatly portioned on the plates and was sitting, waiting for me.

“You’re making me look bad here,” I told her, and I settled in across the table from her.

“You look all right to me,” she replied, putting knife and fork to her food. “How was your day?”

“All right,” I told her around a mouthful of catfish. “I had a visit from Officer Hanratty this morning. She updated me on my car.”

“That was nice of her.” Cole slaw started disappearing at an alarming rate.

I nodded in agreement, not trusting myself to manage a proper tone of voice. “Other than that, it was just housekeeping and being a bum. I find I rather enjoy that.”

Adrienne looked past me out the window. “So does the grass, from what I can see. Going to mow that any time soon?”

“The grass ain’t bothering me, so why should I bother it?” She looked stunned at that, like the idea of letting the grass grow hadn’t even occurred to her. It was nearly enough to make me shoot lemonade out my nose. I swallowed hastily, coughing, and put the glass down. “Actually, I just don’t know where Carl stashed the mower. It’s not in the shed, ’cause I don’t have one.” And, when she looked at me in a way that said that answer wasn’t quite good enough, I said, “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Soon, even.”

She was about to say something that I had hopes was approving when the phone rang. Instead, she turned to look at it. I did the same.

It rang again.
Jenna
, I thought. Crud. I’d forgotten all about her calling.

“Are you going to get that?” she asked.

“Nope,” I told her, and I took another bite of catfish. “It’s dinnertime. I don’t answer the phone during dinner. I also don’t answer the phone when I have company. It’s rude.”

Third ring, this one somehow shriller than the last two.

“Is it now?” Adrienne arched her eyebrows, trying for one and getting both. “And that’s your reason?”

Fourth ring. Jenna always hung up after five, I remembered.

“Yup.” I nodded and looked down into my plate to keep from meeting her eyes. “Besides, I only have three jokes, and if I use them on the phone, then I can’t tell ’em to you.”

The fifth ring cut the air, then cut itself off.

Silence.

Adrienne gave me an appraising look, one I couldn’t read. “I’m sure they’re good jokes, and they would bear repeating. Now
finish eating. I’ve got red velvet cake in the bag still, and the frosting’s probably all melted now.”

“Yes’m,” I said, and I went back to work on my catfish.

Dinner was long gone, replaced by conversation, when panic suddenly grabbed me. I turned to look out the window and felt my breath sink its hooks into the back of my throat. The sky had gone from powder blue to something getting on toward navy while we’d been talking, and I’d never noticed.

Last night, the dog had started hunting me in the middle of the night. What if it came back tonight?

What if it came back earlier? What if Adrienne was still here?

She noticed my distraction and followed my look. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?” she said more than asked. I nodded.

“That it is, and I know you have to work tomorrow. I’d hate to keep you too late just because I like to hear myself talk.”

Adrienne tilted her head and gave me an odd look. “You know, any other man would be working overtime to try to get me to stay later. You certainly are a strange one.”

“Too strange for my own good,” I admitted, “and I’d love to keep you here as late as possible, except Hanratty’s probably hiding in the shrubs with a video camera. Honestly, it’s not that I don’t enjoy your company, it’s just that, well, maybe slow is a good way to go. With anything.”

Her eyes narrowed. “This doesn’t have anything to do with that phone call, does it?”

I shook my head, and I was pretty sure I meant it. “Cross my heart. That was a friend of mine from Boston who’s coming in to town to help me sort out a few things. At least, I’m pretty sure it was. The other options are Hanratty or Carl.”

“Or Sam Fuller,” she added. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “Absolutely. I look forward to introducing you to Jenna when she gets down here.”

She took a deep breath. “It’ll be interesting to meet another friend of yours.” While I chewed over what exactly she meant by that, she stood and carried her plate over to the sink. I watched her, silhouetted as she was by the kitchen light in a way that was absolutely ordinary and absolutely beautiful.

I coughed and looked down at my plate. “You don’t need to worry about that, you know. I’ll clean up.”

“Too late,” she said brightly. “But if you want to be a gentleman, you can walk me out to my car.”

“That I can do.” I stood and walked to the door. “After you,” I said. As I pulled the door open, I made a grand gesture I’d stolen from an old ZZ Top video.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she replied, sweeping past me. I followed her across the porch and down the steps, a couple of seconds behind her the whole way.

When we reached her car, she stopped and turned. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said, “and for taking care of my glasses.”

“It was my pleasure,” I told her. “Thank you for coming back out here, especially after last night.”

She shrugged. “I told you—you ought not to be alone out here. It’s plain to see. Whether it’s me or Mr. Powell or you getting a puppy that’s the answer, I don’t know, but it’s something to think about. Last night just proves it.” Then, more shyly, she added, “Besides, I like talking to you.”