Shane stared at him, uncertain what to say, so I quickly swooped in.
“Well, it’s been great seeing you, Shane, but I’ve got to get John out of here. We think that if he can walk around, he’ll remember who he is.” I grabbed Rufus by the arm and started to drag him away. “Listen, call me, okay?”
When we were outside, I dropped Rufus’s arm as if it were on fire.
“Did I embarrass you?” he asked, his eyes glinting.
I could have killed him.“Your malady might have a different cause?What is that, Middle English?”
Rufus’s cheeks tinged red. “I apologize if my phrasing is off-putting.”
“It is,” I growled. “It’s very off-putting.” We reached my truck. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Rufus studied me. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friend. Are you sure you should be out and about? Maybe you should be at home, resting. I think that Shane fellow would love to bring you some chicken noodle soup.”
I stopped, my fingers curled on the door handle. I stared at Rufus over the hood. His face filled with sympathy, and it irked me. Yes, it did. First he’d told a story to the children, and now he gazed at me with a look I’d never seen on his face before.
He wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be easy to hate.
“Maybe you should go home,” he repeated.
I exploded. “I can’t go home because I’ve discovered that my dead best friend drained our bank account dry. There is nothing in our business account. I can’t even buy a twenty-dollar milk can, for heck’s sake. Not only that, but payday is here and I don’t have a check for Liam to give his workers. Also, Sadie was charging insane amounts of money to a place called Frank’s—I have no idea what that is—and Tuney Sluggs declared her death an accident. An accident! Have you ever heard of such an asinine thing? No grown woman falls face-first in cement and doesn’t get up unless her face is shoved in it.”
Throughout my entire tirade, Rufus watched me quietly. When I finished spewing the mess that had invaded my mind, I waited to hear what he’d have to say about it. Was he going to tell me to go home? Because that wasn’t happening. A lot of crap had fallen on my shoulders all of a sudden, and the last thing I needed was to babysit an amnesiac wizard who didn’t remember that he had a penchant for playing Frankenstein.
“And now you have to take care of me,” Rufus said quietly. “Doesn’t exactly ease your stress, does it?”
Now I felt bad.Why did I feel bad?It was ludicrous. But there was no denying the feelings that lived in my chest. I felt like a violin and someone just struck my guilty chord.
Without a word Rufus rounded the hood and approached me, openhanded. “Give me the keys.”
I crushed them to my heart. “No. Why?”
“Because you’re in no state to drive.”
“Why? Because I’m emotional and a woman?”
His jaw hardened. “No, it has nothing to do with your gender. This has to do with the fact that you’re having an emotional overload. Goodness knows that I’m not exactly in the best of shape myself. I don’t even know my name, but I can still try to help you.” He thumbed toward Bender’s. “Unless you’d prefer I grab that ruggedly handsome gentleman you were talking to before you gazed at my crotch, that is.”
I barked a laugh. I needed that, to get rid of some of the tension rising in my body. As much as getting Shane to help me sounded great, I couldn’t ask him. He was everyone’s go-to guy in Peachwood. It wouldn’t do to bother him about any of this.
“No,” I said. “I won’t ask Shane.”
Rufus took the keys from my hand without a word of complaint from me. “So. How about the first thing we do is talk to the police, see what they have to say about your friend—Sadie, was it?”
I nodded.
“We go find out what they have to say about her.”
I shook my head. “It’s no use. They’re not going to change their mind.”
Rufus smiled. “They might not change their mind, but they might reveal something that will help us.”
“Help us how?” I asked, frowning. What was Rufus up to?
“We may just find something that will help us discover what really happened to Sadie last night.”
“What are you talking about?”
