“All right, mate. I’m not trying to cause you any grief. I’ll buy these, and I’ll be out of your hair,” Falk tried again, pushing his dinner closer over the counter. “And I won’t tell anyone you served me—Scout’s honor.”
The man continued to stare past him. “Next.”
“Really?” Falk could hear the anger in his voice. “This town’s dying on its feet, and you can afford to turn down a sale, can you?”
The shopkeeper looked away and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Falk was considering taking the items and leaving the money on the counter, when Willis opened his mouth.
“I heard you were back. Mandy Vaser reckons you’ve been bothering kiddies in the park.” He tried to sound disgusted but couldn’t disguise the malicious glee in his voice.
“You are joking,” Falk said.
His old classmate shook his head, resuming his stare into the middle distance. “So I’m not interested in serving you. Not today, not ever.”
Falk stared at him. The guy had probably been waiting twenty years to feel superior to someone and wasn’t about to waste his chance, Falk realized. He opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. It was the very definition of wasted energy.
“Forget it.” Falk left the items on the counter. “Good luck to you, Ian. You’ll need it round here.” The door chime rang behind him as he pushed out into the heat.
Raco had put his phone away and looked from Falk’s empty hands to the expression on his face.
“What happened?”
“Changed my mind.”
Raco glanced at the shop and back to Falk, comprehension settling in.
“You want me to have a word?”
“No, leave it. Thanks, anyway. I’ll see you tomorrow. Work out the plan for Sullivan.”
Falk turned, feeling more unnerved than he wanted to admit about the exchange in the shop. He was suddenly keen to get away from there, even though all that was waiting for him was a long evening in his tiny pub room. Raco eyeballed the shop once more, tempted, then looked back at Falk.
“Look. Come for dinner. Round mine,” Raco said. “My wife’s been on at me for days to ask you.”
“No, honestly, it’s OK—”
“Mate, either I argue it out with you now, or I argue it out with her later. At least I’ve got a chance of winning against you.”
25
Forty minutes later Rita Raco placed a steaming bowl of pasta in front of Falk. She moved away with a feather-light touch on his shoulder and returned a moment later with a bottle of wine. They sat outdoors around a small pine table covered with a colorful cloth as the sky turned a deep indigo. The Racos lived in a converted former shop at the far end of the main street. Walking distance to the police station. The back garden housed a lavender bush and a lemon tree, and fairy lights strung along the fence gave the scene a festive glow.
Light spilled from the kitchen windows, and Falk watched Rita as she disappeared inside to fetch this and that. He tried to help, but she waved him down with a smile. A tiny, compact woman with a halo of shiny brown hair falling over her shoulders, she ran her hand unconsciously over the swell of her pregnant belly. She seemed to harbor a huge concentration of energy and, despite the pregnancy, moved smoothly between any one of a dozen tasks with seamless efficiency.
When she smiled, which was often, a deep dimple appeared in her left cheek, and by the time she put the food in front of Falk he could see why Raco was in love with her. As they began to eat—a rich concoction of tomatoes and eggplant and spicy sausage washed down with a decent shiraz—he felt he was a little bit in love with her himself.
The night air was warm, but the dark seemed to soak up some of the heat. Rita sipped mineral water and looked with good-natured longing at the shiraz.
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give. It’s been so long,” she said, and she laughed at her husband’s disapproving expression. She reached out and stroked the back of his neck until he smiled. “He’s so worried about the baby,” she told Falk. “So overprotective, and she’s not even here yet.”
“When are you due?” Falk asked. To his untrained eye she looked right on the verge.
“Four weeks.” She caught her husband’s eye and smiled. “Four long, enormous weeks still to go.”
Over good food, the talk came easily. They spoke about politics, religion, football. Anything but what was happening in Kiewarra. Anything but the Hadlers. Only when Raco cleared the table and disappeared inside the house with the plates did Rita finally ask.
“Tell me,” she said to Falk. “Honestly, please. Is everything going to be all right?”
She looked toward the kitchen door, and Falk knew she wasn’t talking just about the Hadler case.
“Look, it’s never an easy job, policing a small community,” he said. “You’re on a hiding to nowhere in lots of ways. There are politics involved, too many people who know too much about each other. But your husband’s doing an excellent job. Really. He’s smart. Genuinely dedicated. The top brass recognize things like that. He’ll go far.”
“Oh.” Rita made a gently dismissive noise and flapped a hand. “He’s not worried about that so much. His dad was a community officer his whole life. Out on a tiny dot on the map, somewhere near the South Australian border. You won’t know it. No one does.” Her gaze drifted toward the empty doorway again. “He was highly respected, though, I understand. He ran the town like a firm but fair patriarch, and they loved him for it. Up until the day he retired and beyond.”
She paused. Reached over and shared the dregs of the wine between Falk’s glass and her own.
“Shh,” she said, and she put a finger to her lips as she raised the glass. Falk smiled.
“Is that where you met? In South Australia?”
“Yes, but not in his town. No one would ever go there,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was in my parents’ restaurant in Adelaide. He was working nearby. It was his first job with the force, and he was so proper. So keen to make his dad proud.” She smiled at the memory and drained her small glass. “But he was lonely and used to come into our restaurant all the time, until I took pity on him and let him ask me out for a drink.” She rubbed a hand over her stomach. “He waited while I finished my master’s, and then we got married straight away. That was two years ago.”
“Master’s in what?”
“Pharmacology.”
Falk hesitated. He couldn’t think how to phrase the question. Rita saved him.
“I know,” she said with a smile. “So what am I doing barefoot and pregnant in the middle of nowhere, when I could be putting my qualifications to use somewhere else?” She shrugged. “It’s for my husband, and it’s not forever. His ambitions, you know, they’re not the same as some others’. He worships his father, and he’s the youngest of three boys, so I think he feels—wrongly, in my opinion—that he always has to fight for his dad’s attention. So we moved to this small rural town, and he had such high hopes that it would be like it was for his father, but almost immediately everything went so—” She hesitated. “Wrong. He has a weight on him constantly. He was the one who found that little boy’s body, did he tell you?”