That was how Reyna ended conversations. I admired the hell out of it. Every time I hung up on someone, they told me I was an asshole. Reyna did it and she was a boss.
Before returning to emails, I made the call I’d put off for two weeks.
I knew Dex’s team was on the West Coast for a five-game swing this week but my brother hadn’t been on the field in a month. I didn’t know if he was traveling with the team, at home in his Camelback Mountain mansion, or fucking off somewhere else. As the call went to voicemail—as it always did—I debated how much energy I could devote to Dex with everything else going on. Honestly, it wasn’t much but I’d never been one to pay attention to my limits.
“Hey, Dex,” I said, noticing for the first time that the wall calendar on the back of the kitchen door was two years out of date and there was a reminder scrawled on the message board about Parker’s eighth grade end-of-year field trip. “I need you to give me a call. Dad’s been arrested and Mom is—technically, she’s a fugitive but, you know, it’s Mom. If you haven’t been asked about this yet, you will be soon. Anyway, I’m back in Rhode Island, looking after Parker and SPOC. Call me. I don’t care what time it is. Texts work too. Just…get in touch.”
I ripped the calendar off the wall and erased the chalkboard. Sunlight had baked the letters in, leaving behind the ghosts ofFriday, June 14andBeavertail Lighthouse hike + picnic. A quick survey of the kitchen cupboards revealed entire shelves of food that had long since expired while others were crammed with cereal and microwavable macaroni and cheese cups. Another held spools of yarn, phone bills, and cans of dog food.
My parents didn’t have any pets and, as far as I knew, they didn’t knit.
As I shoved it all in trash bags, I placed a call to Adrian. He picked up immediately, saying, “Stop trying to poach my staff. It’s not helping your case.”
“Your hourly rate is all the help you need,” I said, trashing an assortment of takeout containers. “Any news for me?”
“A truck showed up this morning with sixty-two boxes from the prosecution. To say we have some evidence on our hands would be a massive understatement.”
“Fantastic.” I dropped four empty bottles of dish soap into the bag. No need to wonder why they’d kept four empty bottles. The explanation was always irrelevant. It was just how we did things around here. “Let’s schedule a day to get out to the federal facility where they’re holding my dad and see what he can tell us about all that evidence.”
Because there’s no way in hell he did any of this.
Adrian snorted. “Just as soon as we read it all.”
“Right.”
“My crew will get some motions cooking. If this goes the way I’m thinking it will, at least half of it will be circumstantial. Unless they have him on tape, carrying a bag of cash out of the restaurant and handing it over to the lobster guy with the explicit, spoken directive of sailing it to Canada, it will be hard to nail him on the big counts.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay. Let’s hope there isn’t a video.”
“Let us pray.” He laughed. “Any word from your mother?”
“She called,” I said with a sigh. “Didn’t say where she was but that she’d lost her passport and that’s why she missed the flight.”
“Just like you said.” There was a touch of skepticism in Adrian’s comment.
“Yeah, well, I’ve known Sandy Loew for thirty-six years. I’ve been to a lot of her rodeos. They usually involve her losing shit, getting lost, or losing shit while lost and making friends with strangers.” I edged around the refrigerator to get a look out the front windows. Agent Price was parked at the curb. “If I was conspiring with her, I sure as hell wouldn’t say that on a phone line that’s more than likely under surveillance.”
“With respect to that, let’s keep our conversations offline. I’ll get back to you once we put a dent in all this discovery. Talk soon.”
I pulled a cabinet open only for the door to fall off and knock me on the head. “Thanks, Adrian.”
* * *
I leanedagainst the door to the kitchen, half listening as Chef walked the servers through tonight’s specials. Ninety percent of these servers were new to SPOC, though Mel swore they could hack it. Even the two who were entirely new to food service.
I had no choice but to trust her.
My phone buzzed with a message from a local number I didn’t recognize.
Unknown:Good to see you back in town! Can I count on you to sponsor some of the Grad Week events for our high school seniors? We sure could use your help.
“Hey.” Mel nudged my arm and jerked her chin toward the front entrance. “Something tells me she’s here for you.”
I glanced over Mel’s head to find Sunny Du Jardin flinging the door open, her dark hair loose and streaming over her shoulders in waves. It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at her since that morning at the dock, though it was far from the first time the sight of her hit me like a gulp of too-hot coffee, burning its way down my throat while I stood there, incrementally dying until I learned to swallow around the discomfort.
She wore another one of those long, flowy skirts, though, and as she marched toward the kitchen, I realized this one was held in place by a knot at her waist. This seemed unwise. It also did terrible things to me. If the only mechanism securing that skirt to her body was one little knot, I would never survive. I would perish if I had to think about her walking around in a loose scrap of fabric hastily gathered at her waist.
And that certain death didn’t account for her shirt. It was a little sleeveless thing with the wordsGET NAKEDemblazoned across her chest. This did nothing good for my mental health. Not a single thing.
