Page 29
“Mmhmm.” She nodded gravely. “Last week he told me one winked at him through the kitchen window. I told him that was just his reflection, but he says that’s exactly what they want us to think.”
On the other side of me, Sterling was still hovering, his forearm braced on the bar, body angled toward me, and his attention glued to my every micro-movement. The heat of him pressed along my side even with an inch of air between us.
As I reached for my second Coke, a rough cough sounded from the corner, dragging my attention toward a man hunched over the counter. He was older, sixties maybe, broad-shouldered beneath a worn flannel, his thick fingers trembling around the edges of a paper newspaper.
A paper newspaper. I didn’t know people still read those outside of train stations and noir films. The page was creased down the middle, and the headline blared in heavy black letters:
RUNAWAY GIRL FOUND DEAD NEAR TRAIN TRACKS—INVESTIGATION ONGOING
Something in my chest tugged, that quiet, awful drop that came when the words “girl” and “dead” and “found” sat in a row like that.
“What happened to her?” I asked before I could stop myself.
The man’s head jerked up, startled, like he wasn’t used to anyone addressing him. His jaw gave a faint, audible click as his bloodshot eyes found mine beneath the brim of his cap before he looked back down at the paper. “Teen from out by Ridgeline. Took off a while back. Folks have been lookin’.” He tapped the headline with one thick finger. “Wild animal got her. Or somethin’ else did.”
Hattie shot him a look. “Harvey, let’s not scare our guest.”
“What?” he grumbled. “It’s in print. That makes it educational.”
I swallowed, the air suddenly denser. Images flashed through my mind—the Serial Killer Museum, the plaque about Blackwood’s “colorful history.”
“Is that…normal here?” I asked carefully. “Girls going missing? Or showing up near train tracks? Because your town has an entire museum dedicated to murder memorabilia, so I’m just trying to gauge the baseline.”
“In Blackwood?” Harvey snorted. “Normal is just what hasn’t been dug up yet.”
“Fucking hell,” Babs muttered.
She tipped her head toward a table near the jukebox, where three women in matching hot-pink sashes were several drinks in. One of them wore a cheap plastic tiara. Another kept waving a novelty veil in the air like she was lassoing invisible cattle. They were attempting to take a group selfie with the moose head above the jukebox.
“If anybody’s ending up on the tracks, it’s those three,” Babs muttered. “Or in the creek. Or married to Randy Phelps, which is basically the same thing.”
I blinked, trying to remember what day it even was. Tuesday? Saturday? Time had dissolved sometime between the storm, the crash, and Sterling Hayes existing within a foot of my body.
“Wait,” I said slowly. “They’re having a bachelorette party…right now?”
Hattie followed my gaze, her brows lifting. “Seems like it.”
As if on cue, the tiara girl shrieked when her sash snagged on the moose antlers. Her friend lunged to help and managed to take out an entire flight of shots with her elbow.
Babs groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I told them not to start before noon.”
“It’s eleven forty,” I pointed out.
“Exactly.”
I blew out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Your tourism board must have a hell of a time.”
“You’d be surprised what people will travel for,” Babs said. “Good whiskey. Worse men. A museum full of murderers.”
“And Dot’s pie,” Hattie added.
“Obviously,” Babs said. “We’re not animals.”
Sterling’s voice slid in low at my side, warm enough to cut through the chill that newspaper had left on my skin.
“You shouldn’t be walkin’ all over town yet, by the way,” he said. “Did you get dizzy?”
“No,” I lied. In reality, my head had absolutely done a faint, swimmy swoop a few times, but that had less to do with my skull bouncing off Big Hank and more to do with the man sitting unfairly close to me.
