I looked at my watch. “In a perfect world, I’d have forty-five minutes. In this world, I probably have thirty minutes max before someone is out here looking for me.”
I took a seat and he placed the bag in my lap.
He took the seat beside me and stretched his long legs out in front of him. His arms went to the bench at my back, one stretching out behind me, and the other going at an angle so the only thing resting was the back of his arm.
It was a normal move, and something that in no way should’ve appeared as sexy as it was.
I also shouldn’t find his current running shorts and a sweatshirt attractive, but I did.
Even his knees were sexy.
“Tell me what you found,” he ordered.
I unwrapped a generic turkey sandwich and took a bite.
I grimaced when I tasted tomato, then chewed quickly before spreading my sandwich apart and removing the tomato from both halves.
I tossed it into the bushes for the birds and went on to explain to him what I’d found.
“All of the parents had a connection.” I wiped my mouth and pulled out my phone. “All three went on playdates at the local playground on Saturday mornings. They played parkour with a city park employee.”
“Parkour?” He sounded surprised.
“Yes, it’s something that usually the younger crowd is interested in. It’s where you jump over things and stuff like that.”
“I know what parkour is,” he admitted. “I just didn’t realize that we had an organized parkour planned meeting.”
“It’s apparently really popular,” I said. “It’s taught by a local. I haven’t found that local’s name yet, though.”
He pulled out his phone and called someone.
He put it on speaker and stole one of my chips.
The phone rang and a woman answered with, “City of Bear Pass Recreation Department.”
“Cilia, this is Deputy Ryan. Do y’all have an organized parkour thing for the city’s youth?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cilia answered, sounding overly excited. “It’s a big thing around here, too. We took two months or so off for the regular parkour teacher to be on maternity leave, that then turned into bereavement leave after her son was stillborn. The youth of Bear Pass were in an uproar not having their parkour time. It was apparently very, very popular. I’ve never seen so many crying kids in my life as parent after parent came in asking when it would start up again.”
That actually sounded really cute, though sad.
“Who teaches it now?”
“It’s kind of just a fill in as you go thing as we wait for Mrs. Marren to come back. Sometimes it’s the city manager that fills in. Heck, one time we even got the city’s secretary to fill in, though she wasn’t very happy about it. One time it was a random park manager, one of your friends, I think. Creed? The teacher is supposed to be back in a week and a half if all things go well.”
“Names?” he repeated, sounding terse.
Cilia shot off the names of the people who covered it, including the woman that’d been on maternity leave.
“Anything wrong, Deputy Ryan?”
“Nothing,” he lied. “Just doing some research.”
He wrote the names down in a book he’d pulled out of his pocket, then took a photo of the names and sent it via text to Black.
His writing was small, blocky, and very man-like.
I loved it.
