And if Quin was involved in this, what kind of game was it, pulling me into his confidence?
“Edith thinks she’s got it figured out,” Marisa said. “She can’t see that she’s given up the best part of herself.Soldit. Ever since her husband died, she’s been struggling—to keep up appearances, you know? And more than that, not just money. Struggling to find her way.”
“Aren’t we all?” I muttered into the knot at her ankle.
“But then she was doing so well, so busy,” Marisa said. “She needed office help, and I thought I could do that. And maybe I’ll get my real estate license, now that… I had more free time.”
She was crying again.
“Is that why you came to the pub? To warn me about Alex selling the pub?”
“And other reasons,” Marisa said softly, her cow eyes on me.
“Don’t,” I commanded. I’d left that snowflake-wrapped package back in another lifetime.
“I tried to warn you,” she said. “And I don’t blame you for not—but Alex wouldn’t listen either. I think the only people willing to listen to me that night were the guys sitting at the bar.”
“They like a show,” I said. I could picture the three Jims lined up, listening and pretending not to. “He wouldn’t have wanted to talk about selling the pub in front of them. Or with me in the room.”
“And then Edith was driving by,” Marisa said. “She spotted me leaving the pub. She thought I’d been drinking and wanted to drive me home. But it felt like… like a setup or something. I guess I had stopped trusting her.” She shook her head sadly. “We used to be good friends.”
“Her asking you if you were drinking gave you the idea to say you were going to check back into rehab?”
Marisa’s eyes roved over me, confused. “How did you…? I just needed to buy a little time. I had a plan to get my, um… to get out of town. Then I could figure out what to do, who to call. I never got to my car.”
I got her right foot freed, and reached for the last binding, the one she hadn’t been working on at her right wrist. She sucked through her teeth, her left hand fluttering toward it. “It hurts.”
“I’ll try to be gentle. Then what?”
“It was so fast,” she said. “He came out of nowhere. He covered my mouth and dragged me… here. I was sure they were going to kill me. Ah!”
I’d hurt her wrist. “Sorry.They, again. What did the other one look like?”
“I’ve never seen him, only heard his voice. He’s older, I think. He said— Oh, God, I don’t want to hear his voice again.”
“But you saw the young one?”
“He’s… tall? But I was always sitting, so maybe not that tall. Oh, I don’tknow. Just a regularperson.”
“Curly hair?”
“No. I don’t— No. Not curly.”
Not Joey, then. At least I didn’t have to think of him as a kidnapper and whatever else all this was. But it certainly didn’t let Quin off the hook.
“I did see a man with curly hair,” she offered. “In the alley.”
The last binding was still tight around Marisa’s swollen wrist. The tips of my guitar string–calloused fingers were opened up and raw from digging at the knots. “Like… lying in the alley?”
“He wasfallingdown drunk.” She hissed through clenched teeth at my efforts at her wrist. “What kind of place is Alexrunning?” she muttered.
But Alex didn’t overserve people. “Falling down drunk,” I said.
“He was out of it. His friend was trying to help him but it was icy.”
Oh, man, star witness here to someone manhandling Joey’sbody—and snatched to keep her mouth shut? Until they could wrap up downstairs? I thought again of the truck in the alley. Or had they meant to come back and shut her up completely? We had to get out of here. I worked at the knot, trying to be careful. “What did that friend in the alley look like?” I asked conversationally. “Was he, like… fit? Like he just came in from chopping down a tree?”
“What does it matter— Ah!”
