After a quick roast beef sandwich at Trudy’s Roadside Diner, served by none other than Trudy, Steve returns to Campton Street to interview Parsons’s other neighbors. It’s so hot it feels as if every ounce of water has been leached from his body, and he wonders how anyone manages to live here.
The answer he receives from each neighbor is the same: nobody saw anything, and nobody cares.
He’s almost back to Parsons’s house when he gets his first possible lead.
Mrs. Bronson lives in the house between Parsons and Denise. Well into her eighties, she has raisin skin, a bent spine, and piercing blue eyes. “I told you. I saw a large hunter walking behind the house Wednesday morning.” She thumbs her hand toward the desert.
“Yes,” Steve says. “But what makes you believe he was a hunter? Did he have a gun, a deer slung over his shoulders?”
“No need for sass, young man.”
Steve conceals his smirk. The woman reminds him of his grandmother, and it wouldn’t surprise him if she twisted his ear if he sasses her again. “Sorry,” he says.
Her frown straightens. “He just looked like a hunter. He was big and wearing a red-and-black checkered shirt and was skulking.” She hunches her thin shoulders in imitation.
The rest of the description is useless—blue hat, possibly tan pants, glasses.
Steve thanks her and leaves. The timeline works. Parsons worked Wednesday but didn’t show up for his shift the following day.
He starts back toward his rental car, then changes his mind.
“Hello again,” Denise says. “Miss me already?”
“Sorry to bother you, Miss Raynes. I was just wondering if I might be able to use your bathroom?”
“Only if you stop calling me Miss Raynes.” She rolls her eyes and opens the door wider.
He gives a small bow. “Denise.”
In the bathroom, he counts to twenty, flushes the toilet, runs the water, and returns to the living room.
“Find what you were looking for?” she asks with a knowing grin.
His skin warms. “It’s just a suspicion I had,” then adds quickly, “not about you.”
Her brows arch.
Not seeing the harm, he says, “Mr. Parsons’s house is the same as yours, but his bathroom seemed small. I wanted to confirm the size.” He offers a contrite shrug. “Sorry.”
She giggles. “It’s okay. It’s your job to be sneaky.”
“Well, thank you.” He gives an imaginary tip of a hat before continuing toward the door. Before reaching it, he turns back. “I was wondering if there’s somewhere other than Trudy’s to eat around here?” The roast beef sandwich he ate at lunch sits like a rock in his gut.
She laughs again. “I’m surprised Trudy isn’t on your most-wanted list for attempted murder against hundreds of innocent people.”
“I might consider adding her after the lunch she nearly killed me with.”
“You could try the truck stop in Lone Pine, though the food’s not much better.”
He starts to nod when she adds, “Or you could stay and join us for dinner?”
He tilts his head.
“You seem like a decent fellow, fighting for justice and all, so I’d feel kind of bad if I didn’t try to intervene to save your life.”
“Are you sure?” he says, his mouth watering as he thinks about the delicious cookies from earlier. It’s been a long time since he’s had a home-cooked meal.
Charlotte was a wonderful cook, and he used to tease her that he married her for her food. The truth is he married her for a million reasons, including her food. Then he ruined it. And now, three years later, she is cooking for someone else, and he is eating takeout most nights.
“I don’t want to intrude,” he says.
“We’d love the company. Follow me, and I’ll put you to work.”
He traipses after her, feeling a little like a stray puppy who’s been adopted, and he believes, if he did in fact have a tail, it would be wagging.
“Chop,” Denise says, handing him a cutting board, a head of lettuce, three carrots, and an onion.
As he makes the salad, Denise makes fried chicken, roasted potatoes, and green beans, and the smells dizzy him and spiral him back in time to another life, one complete with a wife and son and frequent meals just like this.
“Jesse! Dinner!” Denise hollers, completing the chimera, and he wonders if all moms are inherently born with the same singsong notes for calling their young to food.
Jesse bounds in. “Hey,” he says to Steve.
“Did you wash your hands?”
Jesse groans, then disappears back down the hall.
When he returns, Dee says, “Now, properly introduce yourself.”
“Hi,” he says obediently. “I’m Jesse.”
“Steve,” Steve says and extends his hand.
The boy does a good job with his handshake, and Steve wonders who taught him.
The dinner is delicious as it smells, and the conversation is comfortable and easy. Jesse is bright and curious and asks a lot of questions about Steve’s job.
“How’d you end up being in the FBI?” Jesse asks.
“I started out in the army. It’s what the men in my family do. And when I got out, the FBI recruited me.”
“You ever shoot anyone?” Jesse asks, eyes hopeful.
“Jesse!” Denise says.
Steve smiles at her. “It’s okay. I’ve been asked that before. Truthfully, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Jesse says.
“As an agent, I’ve never discharged my weapon, but when I served in Iraq, there were a few times when we were engaged. And war’s weird that way. Most of the time you have no idea who you’re shooting at or who’s shooting at you. You’re just following orders and hoping the other side’s losing. It’s only after the battle’s over that it sinks in that some of your trigger pulls might have been responsible for the dead or dying you’re then trying to save.”
Denise stands abruptly and carries her plate to the sink.
Steve follows with his own plate. “Sorry,” he mumbles, realizing he stepped way over the line of polite dinner conversation.
She nods curtly and turns back to the table with a painted-on smile. “Homework,” she says to Jesse, and Jesse groans and slinks from the room.
“Really,” Steve says, feeling like a first-rate idiot. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine,” Denise says, though clearly it’s not. “I’m just not a big fan of guns.” She scrubs extra hard at the plate in her hand.
“Me neither,” Steve says. “These days I prefer to kill people with my charm.” He hits her with a big toothy grin.
She huff-laughs, and he sighs with relief. Though he barely knows her, he never wants to be responsible for dimming her remarkable brightness again, not even for a second, and wishes he could think of something else funny to say.
Setting the plate in the dish rack, she picks up their wine glasses from the table along with the half-empty bottle of Chardonnay and carries them to the living room.
“You used to play football?” she says as Steve sits in the chair and she sits on the couch.
“What gave me away?”
“You don’t reach so well with your right. I used to date a football player.”
Steve flushes. “Second-string offensive lineman for West Point.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I reach.” He smirks, and she smiles.
“Where’d you go to school?” he asks.
“I didn’t. My life sort of got derailed when I was seventeen, then I had Jesse at eighteen and never fully got back on track.”
Steve calculates. Jesse’s eleven, which makes her twenty-nine, twenty years his junior and only a year older than Danny would have been.
Time a trick, for a moment, he’d forgotten his own age and thought she might be flirting.
As if to further confuse him, she reaches over and touches his knee as her other hand moves to her lips. “Shhh,” she says.
He freezes.
“Do you hear them?”
Steve arches his eyebrows, the only sound he hears the crazy pounding of his heart, the tips of her fingers warm through the cotton of his pants.
“Listen.”
He strains his ears, and she flitters her nails on his kneecap.
“You don’t hear that?”
Past the siren of his pulse is a faint noise that sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks in fast-forward.
He nods, and she smiles. She has a wonderful smile, her lower lip riding up slightly over the bottom of her upper teeth.
She leans back, and he breathes.
“I used to be scared of them,” she says. “As a little girl, when the bats would come out, I’d hide under my covers. But now, each night, I listen for them.”
Jesse reemerges. He wears navy boxers emblazoned with baseballs and a white T-shirt.
“Ready,” he announces.
Steve remembers Danny at that age, independent but not so grown up as to give up being tucked into bed and kissed goodnight.
Denise stands, and so does Steve, realizing he’s probably overstayed his welcome. “Thank you, Denise.” He extends his hand to Jesse. “And thank you, young man.”
Jesse shakes it. “You’re welcome.”
“Don’t run out now,” Denise says. “This will only take a second.”
She disappears before he can respond. He listens to them talking and giggling behind the door, and then their mutual “I love yous.” And a second later, she is back.
“Denise, I really should go. I still have some work to finish—”
“At Otis’s?”
“That and some other things.”
“I want to come with you.”
He tilts his head. “Come with me? Where?”
“To Otis’s.” Her jaw slides out.
“Why?”
“I want to see it.”
“Why?” he repeats.
Her boldness falters, her chin trembling as her eyes drop to the floor between them. “To know that he’s gone.”
“He is,” Steve says gently.
“I need to know. To see his empty, vacant house and know.”
“Denise—”
She shakes her head. “For twelve years, every time I’ve walked by that house, it has haunted me, and I want to know it’s no longer something to be afraid of.”
“It’s not. It’s just a house.”
“Maybe to you. To me it’s every nightmare I’ve ever had.”
The words strike a chord, his own nights haunted by the same recurring dream of running toward Danny and arriving too late.
“That probably sounds silly to you,” she says.
Not silly, he thinks, but perhaps naïve, things not always what they seem and some things better left unknown.