My panic flared again, but I was proud I kept my voice even. “So?”
“That seems like a coincidence.”
“What are you insinuating, Louise?” I asked with a laugh that sounded almost real. “That I’m having a torrid affair with James Malcolm?”
“Who said anything about an affair?”
I’d walked right into that one.
“Then what are you insinuating?” I asked, my tone still light.
“It’s odd timing,” she said. “And the day you supposedly first went to your grandparents, he wasn’t at the tavern. He’s always at the tavern.”
“Maybe he realized that all work and no play make a person boring,” I countered.
Her silence hung in the air like an anvil.
“And I did go to my grandparents’ place,” I said. “I found out that my mother lied to me and my father about why we stopped seeing them. That’s what I was going to talk to him about last week, but then decided it was water under the bridge. It wouldn’t change anything.”
“She lied?” The edge in her tone was gone. “Why?”
I hadn’t planned to get into any of this, but I had to tell her something. “She found out my father was having an affair, and she didn’t want her parents to know.” Not the full truth, or the order of events, but it was close enough.
“If they didn’t know, how did you figure it out?”
“I saw my aunt too. She saw my father with his mistress and told my mom.” I swallowed. “So, my mom cut them off.”
That one was closer to the actual truth.
“That’s messed up,” Louise said, disgust curling her words.
“What’s even more messed up is she told them I didn’t want anything to do with them either.” My throat tightened. “They sent me birthday cards for years and she sent them back without ever showing them to me.”
“Harper.” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” My voice cracked. “So I needed to get away for a while to process everything.”
“I can believe that,” she said, then her tone shifted. “You should know that I also got a call from your former partner, Keith Kemper.”
Shit.
“Why in God’s name would Keith be calling you?”
“He wanted to know if I knew why you’d contacted the lead counsel for the State Attorney General.”
She let the silence do the work.
Keith had called me about the same thing, but he hadn’t said whether Mason Deveraux had indicated why I’d placed the call. If Keith knew and had told Louise…
Was she giving me enough rope to hang myself?
She really was going to make a great detective.
Then something else hit me.
“Wait. How does he know we’re friends?” I asked. “We weren’t friends in Little Rock, and until he called me last week, asking the same thing, I hadn’t spoken to him in months.”
“I asked him about that,” she said. “He told me you’d mentioned it to him.”
