“You’re upset,” Erma said.
She was right. I was distracted and unhappy. I must have broadcast it with every gesture and word. I felt as if I was dangling. I didn’t have a phone so I couldn’t call him, and calls from his parents had gone unanswered. I just wanted to talk to him. Nothing more.
“I don’t know why he thinks it would matter to me.”
She put Nicole’s ice cream bowl in the dishwasher while she wasn’t looking.
“When he first moved out there he had a lot of people telling him what to do. People who wanted to help him. And things happened so fast for him, he couldn’t get his feet under him, so he listened to them.” She wiped the counter pensively. “One of the things they told him was that if people knew it took him so long to read, they wouldn’t hire him. He didn’t go all the way out there to not get work.” She pointed to my face and said to Nicole, “You missed a spot, sweetheart.”
“Thank you, Grandma.” Nicole wiped a spot on my forehead and put the towel down. “See? That’s how you’re supposed to do it.”
“I want to tell him it’s all right.”
“He’s probably down at Buddy’s,” Milton grumbled, walking in from the living room. With his phone to his ear, he shouted a second later. “Yeah! Buddy! It’s . . . Yes! I’m fine! Is my son in there! . . . When?! . . . All right! Thank you!”
He clicked off. “Left an hour ago.”
What followed was a good half hour of calls, shouts, a few segues into gossip as Erma and Milton Sinclair tried to track down their son. Calls came in. Calls went out. Susan came in with suggestions and made more calls. Brad had been to Buddy’s, peeled off with a couple of high school friends, bought dinner for everyone at Jack’s Chicken and Fries, hung out in the parking lot of the Chevron convenience store drinking beer with his friends before Deputy Froman had gotten his autograph and told them to move on. Apparently, he went back to Buddy’s and put Theresa Crump on the Harley because she was too drunk to make it out of the lot, much less three miles to Hensley.
And that was the last we heard from him. Theresa Crump didn’t answer her phone. Brad didn’t answer his.
I wasn’t worried about Theresa Crump, though I felt sympathy for her hangover. I wasn’t worried Brad’s dick was going to find its way into her. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was worried that he was running around town because he thought I was angry at him. I was worried he was partying to cover up some grand hurt I’d exposed.
“He’s there?” Susan shouted into the phone. “Tell him not to move. Keep him. Tie him down.”
She put the phone away from her face and mouthed “Em-and-Pee” to her mother.
“Find out who he’s with,” Milton said.
“Sherri—hang on.” She put her hand over the bottom of the phone. “No one. He’s getting a bottle of water. Talking to Winch Welton.”
“So he’s on his way back.” Erma threw her hands up as if it was decided. “He can sure make us crazy, and we love him.” She pointed to me. “But he owes you an apology.”
“If he was coming back, he’d get water here,” I said to myself but loud enough for everyone to hear. “Theresa Crump’s home. She can get her own water. He’s going somewhere without a sink and he’s staying there.”
Where had we been in these few days? More importantly, where had we not been? Who had he avoided?
“Can she get him to stay there?” I asked Susan.
She rolled her eyes and took her hand off the mic. “Sherri. Is he still there?” She nodded to me. “All right . . . tell Winch to keep talking . . . it’s his field of expertise . . . I know, honey . . . see you . . .”
Milton tossed me the keys to the Buick.
“You know how to get to the M&P? Left out the driveway. Two lights. Right on Wolfe. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
CHAPTER 63
CARA
I didn’t think I’d make it to the M&P supermarket in time to catch him, but I went anyway. A flyer was stuck between the doors. When they whooshed open for me, they released the paper. I grabbed it.
REDFIELD LUMBER’S GOT WHAT YOU NEED!
It was a sign from the heavens.
“I’m so sorry, Miss.” Sherri rushed out of the manager booth in a blue, zip-front pantsuit. “Winch and Barn tried to chat him up, but he said he had to go.” She tripped on a neat stack of just-delivered newspapers. When they fell they fanned out in a multicolored spray of rectangles.
“It’s fine.” I put the flyer to the side and kneeled with her to pick them up. “He was on the bike?”
“Buddy’s Harley. Yeah.”
The papers were slick with wax and full-color ink. They’d fallen front down so all I saw were weight-reduction ads and classifieds. Sherri took a stack and slapped them down to make the edges even.
“We see him all the time in these papers.” Sherri smiled ruefully. “Perks up the whole town.”
Meg Birch was on the cover of Hollywood Magazine with her soon-to-be ex, looking as if she’d been under the knife ten too many times.
“You should go catch him,” Sherri said, blonde hair escaping from her clips. “I got this.”
“Thank you.”
I got up and walked toward the automatic sliding doors. They slid open and as I went to step through, I saw the stack that was under the one Sherri had knocked over.
I was on the front page with him.
I stopped.
His face was huge, midsentence, eyes half down, unprepared. He looked drunk or angry. Not gorgeous. The picture from the middle of the roll a friend would have discarded was the front page of the paper. And I was cut and pasted right behind him. They’d reddened my lips and made it look as though I was about to kiss him.
DADDY SINCLAIR TAPS THE NANNY
Right in Front of Sweet Nicole!
Behind that, in a separate rectangle, was a picture of us on the teacups. The camera angle made it look as though we were in the middle of a lip-locked embrace.
I’d imagined a moment like this a few hundred times and recoiled, blocking out the horror of it with other thoughts, other visualizations.
Anything but that.
Anything but what happened to Blakely.
“Can I grab one of these?” I asked Sherri.
She stepped over to me, slipping on the papers, righting herself, and looking at what I pointed at.
“You’re prettier in real life,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I guess he dropped Paula Blount.” She shrugged. “Maybe she’ll stop harping on it now.”
“I think she dumped him.”
Sherri let out a pfft as if I was talking crazy, then handed me a paper. “Go ahead. Take it.”
I reached into my purse to pay for it, but she waved away the idea.
“Just take it for helping me clean up.”