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“What about him?”
“Wife beater.” Tate said it the same way he’d say any other fact. “Can’t do anything. She always goes back to that asshole.”
Les set down his glass. “Don’t call him that. He’s not convicted.”
“You haven’t seen her the last time she fell down the stairs, Les.” Tate looked at Keith. “Two broken ribs and a shiner. You scared to call things by their names, too?”
“No,” Keith said. He was still watching Watson, who’d looked up at whatever was happening on the street and then looked down again. “But you calling him that with no context doesn’t do anything. With context, it’s not needed. You could just say Watson, and we’d all be on the same page.”
Les pointed at him. “Exactly. I want professional in my office. That means in here, too.” He paused. “No—“ he seemed to weigh the word ”—crazy shit.”
Tate looked like he had opinions about this, but he took a long drink of his beer instead.
The performer started her set properly—a low, unhurried intro, and then she started to sing, and Keith, who had been about to check whether there were more cobwebs he’d missed, stopped. She had a voice that belonged somewhere larger than this room, clear and a little rough at the edges, the kind of voice that had earned its texture. A few people near the stage turned to look at her. Then a few more.
Keith found himself listening.
The evening settled around him—his ginger ale and low light and the sound of a woman singing like she wasn’t trying to impress anyone—and for the first time since he’d pulled up to the Maple Lane Falls town limits at ten this morning, the steady low-level noise in his head quieted a fraction.
Les was talking about the fall festival, the parking situation on Moss Street, a man named Ronny who handled the event permits and had strong feelings about them. Keith half-listened, watching the room the way he always watched rooms, tracking movement and noise and the small shifts that meant change.
That was when the door opened.
The noise came first—a wave of it, laughter and high voices and the particular pitch of a group of women who were having an evening. They came in wearing matching pink shirts, Team Bride in block letters, one of them with a tiara perched in her blonde hair and a white shirt that read bride. The six of them moved in a cheerful, slightly unsteady cluster toward the bar.
Harmless. Keith’s initial threat assessment didn’t hold for longer than a minute. He changed it to harmless and slightly obnoxious, in that order.
He looked back at Les. Les was talking about the performer. Keith heard about half of it.
And then, without deciding to, he looked back at the bachelorette party.
One of them caught his eye. Not the bride—one of the others, laughing, but with her eyes still moving across the room. Blonde highlights that didn’t look like they had come from anywhere in this small town. Tourist, then. The team bride shirt did nobody any favors, and she was wearing it anyway, and she was the only one who was both fully in the party and quietly clocking her surroundings.
Then she looked at him.
He didn’t look away fast enough.
Keith felt his sternum tighten in a way it had no business doing. Dark eyes, steady and a little amused. She held his gaze for a beat longer than a glance, and then turned back to her group.
“Well,” Les said.
Keith looked at his ginger ale.
“That one had your attention,” Tate observed, sounding pleased about it.
“I’m surveying the room.”
“Sure, you are.”
Keith surveyed the room very carefully from that point forward, with great attention to the original-wood ceiling beams and the condition of the lighting fixtures, and not at all to the woman across the bar. He was thorough about it. He surveyed the room until Lina came back with another round, and Les got into an extended conversation about the festival route with an older man named Gerald or possibly Gareth, and the performer finished another song to applause, and a whistle or two from the back.
Chapter 2
Picking Her Mark
Bachelorette parties were the worst.
Rachel had been to two in her early twenties, and both of them had confirmed it. Her best friend Ana had skipped the tradition entirely when she got engaged—I’m not wearing a sash, Rach, I’m thirty-four—which Rachel had considered one of the great mercies of her adult life. She’d assumed she was done with them. She was thirty-seven. Her era of team bride shirts should have been over.
