Now
Wilson’s was a bar utterly without personality; it didn’t slouch into dive bar territory or manage the gloss necessary to be trendy. It was a bar you only ever ended up at because it was the only one open or the only one close by.
As soon as she opened the door she spotted the man she was looking for down at the end of the bar, pulling a pint. At forty, Logan Ellis had a few flecks of gray in his hair and more definition to his jaw, but little else about him had changed. Still good-looking in that slightly off-putting way, still with those pale eyes. His attention flicked up to her, and he raised a few fingers in a perfunctory greeting, not showing a glimmer of recognition. She made her way down to the other end of the bar and sat, watching as he delivered the beer to the only other patron in the bar before coming back her way.
Logan approached. A puzzled smile crossed his features, and he rested his hands on the bar. “Emma Palmer. My dad mentioned you were back in town.”
“I’m sure he’s thrilled,” Emma said.
He laughed, not unpleasantly. “Yeah, he’s not exactly your biggest fan. What can I get you? Club soda and lime?”
“Sure.” His father must have told him that, too. He set the drink in front of her. There were tattoos climbing up his arms, smudged with age. Clumsy images of demons and dice, an anchor with an unreadable banner. She caught the edge of the smell of him, musk and soap.
She took a sip, remembering that she hated club soda. Studied him while he studied her. Her ice clinked in her glass as she tipped it back and forth in her hand idly.
“Why are you here, Emma Palmer?” he asked. “It’s not for the drink and it’s not for the ambience, so what is it?”
“You and my sister,” she said.
“Me and your sister,” he replied with a half grin. “So you heard about that.”
“I was kind of hoping it wasn’t true,” she said.
“Can’t imagine someone like me with the perfect princess of Arden Hills?” he asked, and laughed. It was an unkind sound, like a crow’s warning call.
“Is that why you slept with her? You wanted to ruin the pretty princess?” Emma asked.
His face darkened. “No. Look. I liked her. I did. A lot more than she liked me, I think.”
Emma considered him. She’d met Logan a handful of times as a kid. Her dad wasn’t close to Ellis like he was with Hadley, but they were friendly. When Logan was a teenager, he’d been around the house a few times when they had dinner with the Ellises. She remembered a boy who couldn’t seem to hold still, constant motion and a tension in the air that made her nervous. He seemed more settled now, but there was still a taut feeling to the air. Something getting ready to snap.
“Were you at the Saracen house the night my parents died?” she asked.
He set his weight back a bit, surprised. “Jesus, you don’t beat around the bush.”
“Were you?”
“Playing detective?”
“Just asking questions,” she told him. “Please. Help me out?” she asked, and she didn’t have to fake the desperate plea in her voice.
Something shifted in his face—a look of sympathy or maybe pity appearing briefly in his eyes before he nodded reluctantly. He glanced over at the guy with the beer at the end of the bar. Dropped his voice. “Sure, I was there at some point.”
“And Juliette?”
He didn’t answer right away. She just waited, eyes locked with his. “She was with me for a while. She took off,” he said at last.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, irritation roughening his voice. “She wasn’t in a talking mood. We had an argument, sort of. She ran off on me.”
“And you didn’t see her again? You don’t know where she went?” Emma asked.
“No,” he insisted, but his eyes dodged away from her. He was lying, Emma thought—or hiding something.
“Did you give my sister anything?” Emma asked.
“Oh, that’s low-hanging fruit,” he said with a lewd chuckle she thought was a bit performative.
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“She partook on occasion,” he acknowledged.
“That night?”
“Probably.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Would’ve been oxy. Benzos, maybe. Look. Juliette was a good kid who wanted to be bad for a while. She would’ve gotten bored with me pretty soon, if things hadn’t happened the way they did.”
“But she took something, and she ran off. That’s why you were looking for her,” Emma said. She was still struggling to imagine Juliette out in the woods. Juliette high. Juliette having sex. In her memory, Juliette was a white cardigan and fingers resting lightly on ivory keys.
If Juliette had been on something and came back to the house, could she have lost it? Done something?
Logan folded his arms. “I wanted her to have a good time, that’s all. I wouldn’t have given her much. And she was a lightweight. Didn’t take after her mother in that respect.”
Emma jerked in surprise, her mouth dropping open. The flash of satisfaction on his face told her the effect was intentional. “You’re saying my mother was a client?” she asked. She ought to have been offended, incredulous, but it made a certain amount of sense. The “migraine pills” Emma didn’t remember her ever going to the pharmacy for, the way she would just seem to vanish from herself from time to time.
“Yeah. Now and then,” Logan said with an easy shrug.
“What did she use?” Emma asked, and Logan gave her a strange look. She supposed she should have acted more shocked and less genuinely curious.
“Why do you want to know?” Logan asked.
“I’m not here to get you in trouble,” Emma said, spreading her hands. “I want answers about my family. Help me out.”
Logan grunted. “It’s been a long time,” he hedged. “She probably bought what all the rich not-that-kind-of-junkie junkies bought. Valium, Vicodin, oxy, whatever their preferred flavor. A few at first and then more and then too much, and either they got clean, got in trouble, or got above my pay grade.”
“Above your pay grade meaning…” she prompted.
“Heroin,” he said simply. Emma gave him a skeptical look. “Never heard of the opioid epidemic? Eventually the semilegal stuff stops doing the job. But like I said, above my pay grade. If it wasn’t something you could at least theoretically get with a doctor’s note, I didn’t stock it.”
“Right. So how long?” she asked.
“How long did I sell to her, you mean? I think about five years,” Logan said, scratching his chin as he did the math in his head.
“Right under your dad’s nose.”
He smirked a little. “No risk, no reward, right? Besides, he’s not the white knight he likes to let people think he is.”
She thought of Ellis across the table, playing the concerned father figure while urging her to incriminate herself. How frustration had crept in quickly, his face turning red as his voice got louder.
“And what about now?” she asked. “Still selling?”
“Clean as a whistle,” he said. Leaned an elbow on the bar. Leaned in too close. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
His eyes fixed on hers. He did have pretty eyes, she thought. Maybe that was what Juliette saw in him. Or maybe it was only that he was so unlike what she was supposed to want. That, Emma could understand.
“Did my mother always pay on time, Logan?” Emma asked lightly.
He chuckled. “Nice try. I wasn’t even selling to her at that point.”
“So she got clean, got in trouble, or went above your pay grade?” she asked. She would have known if her mother was using heroin, wouldn’t she?
“Or she was getting it from somewhere else,” Logan said.
“Where?”
He worked his jaw, like he was considering not telling her. “I can’t say for sure.”
“But you have a theory,” Emma said, raising an eyebrow. He wanted to talk. He wanted her leaning in close, listening to what he had to say; he wanted to be important, and there were precious few opportunities to be important when you worked at a place like Wilson’s, lived in a place like Arden.
“It’s nothing.” Logan shook his head.
“Does it have to do with my father?” Emma guessed, and Logan froze. Something illegal, involving her father. Drugs wouldn’t have been her guess. Her law-and-order father thought they should bring the firing squad back, thought “druggies” should be rounded up and put in camps—preferably along with liberals, IRS agents, and anyone who called their pets “fur babies.”
But she was realizing more and more how little she’d known him—or any of them. Her parents, her sisters. She’d been so wrapped up in her own anger and misery, she’d never looked twice at the people closest to her.
Logan wetted his lips. “Emma. I was a cuddly teddy bear compared to some of the people out there. I was a dumbass with a lucrative hobby, and I don’t mind talking about it. Other people, they’re not going to be so nice, if you ask questions.”
“My father is dead. He’s not going to hurt anyone,” Emma said.
“Yeah, he’s dead. And someone killed him.”
“General wisdom says that was me,” Emma reminded him.
“Nah,” he said. “I never bought that.”
“You might be the only one.”
“I’m good at reading people,” he said. “You might act tough, Emma Palmer, but you’re a gooey chocolate chip cookie on the inside.”
“You have a way with words,” she said dryly.
He waggled his eyebrows. “It’s not the only thing I have a way with.”
“I’m married,” she told him.
“And does he make you happy, Emma Palmer?” Logan asked, jokingly.
“He makes me feel less alone,” she said. Logan fell silent, both of them startled by the answer. He shifted his weight, uncomfortable.
“Emma, all I know is that one of your dad’s guys paid me a hundred bucks to spend a night shifting cargo between trucks after hours. I don’t know what it was and I don’t know where it came from, but it can’t have been legal. But maybe go ask Gabriel Mahoney why his dad got fired. Or don’t. Like I said, there’s a lot of bad people out there. I wouldn’t want a nice girl like you getting involved with them.”
“I can look after myself.”
“You sure about that?” Logan asked. All that sleepiness was gone. His gaze was intent. Intrusive. He put a glass in front of her and poured a trickle of amber liquid in it, barely a swallow.
“I can’t,” she said.
“One sip won’t hurt anything, and you need it.”
She picked up the glass, staring at it for a moment. Whiskey. Her father’s favored drink, faithfully transferred to a crystal decanter each week. He didn’t often drink to excess, but he drank steadily, from the time he got home to the time he went to bed. This stuff was cheaper than that; she could smell it from here. She knocked it back. Hardly a swallow, but it scorched all the way down.
“That’s better,” he said.
Emma made an unamused noise in the back of her throat. “I should go.”
“But you don’t want to,” he replied, unsmiling.
He was wrong. She did want to go home. Because Nathan was at home, and she loved Nathan. Maybe she’d never fallen in love with him, but she loved him. She had to. Because he was the man who had never left her. Even when he had the option. She knew him. She knew his flaws and she knew the worst thing he was capable of.
That had been enough before. It would have to be enough now.
She rose, reaching for her wallet. “Thank you for the drink.”
“On the house,” he said. “And tell you what. Give me your number. Could be I think of a few things from back then. I can let you know.”
She didn’t trust Logan’s affability, that easy way he let things roll off him. There was a hard glint hiding behind those eyes. He let things go in the moment, she thought, but she doubted he forgot them.
Still.
She scribbled her number on a napkin and put a bill down on the bar. “Thanks again, Logan,” she said, and made her way to the door.