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“What’s going on?” he said into the silence.
Rose turned and put an elbow on the kitchen table, looking at him. “You two have a problem,” she said. “I’ll help you, I suppose.”
“A problem?” I said as Eddie came toward us across the living room.
Rose gave me a look like I was stupid. “Well, let’s see. You got Rhonda Jean dead in your car, Detective Quentin thinks you’re a murderer, and whoever killed that girl knows you picked her up. I’d call that a problem, wouldn’t you?” She leaned back in her chair. “I seem to remember the police took your car away. Right?”
Eddie was standing next to my chair now. He put his hand on the back of it. You told her, that gesture said.
“Yeah,” he said to Rose. “They took our car.”
“I thought so. You need to figure your way out of this.” She picked up the bowl and held it out to Eddie. “Want a chip? I’m going to lend you Robbie’s car.”
CHAPTER TEN
When he was alive, Robbie drove a gray Honda Accord, boring and boxy. The interior smelled like old cigarette smoke and something that resembled musty cardboard. The car was kept in the garage beside the breezeway, where the heat tried to penetrate curls of chilled damp air and almost succeeded.
Eddie had showered and changed, and now he wore his jeans and a faded Tigers T-shirt. As usual with any vehicle, when he got into Robbie’s car he had to push the seat all the way back to fit his legs in.
“I guess it’s because you’re a military guy,” Rose said in surprise as she watched Eddie try to get comfortable. “I thought Robbie was tall. Looks like I was wrong.”
“This sure is nice of you, Rose,” Eddie said as we buckled ourselves in. Eddie had rolled down the driver’s side window, and he leaned an elbow on it and gave her a smile where she stood by the rack of dusty gardening tools. It was a sincere smile, the only kind Eddie had, and it made Rose visibly melt a little. “April and I appreciate it.”
“They won’t know you’re gone,” Rose said. “The Coldlake PD doesn’t have enough manpower to follow you around all day and night. They’ll probably do a drive-by to make sure you’re still here, but I’ll just say you two are sleeping. You have a few hours at least.”
“What happens in a few hours?” I asked her.
Rose shrugged. “More questions, maybe. They won’t want to leave you alone too long. Until you’re cleared, they want to keep you on your toes. That’s what Robbie would do.” She pointed. “When you leave the driveway, go left, then left again at the stop sign. A mile down you’ll see the signs for Atticus Line and Hunter Beach. I’d start there if I were you. Rhonda Jean was probably headed there when she was killed. Someone there might know her.”
“The police will probably already have been there,” Eddie said.
Rose gave a snort that was the purest sound of derision I’d ever heard. “Maybe, maybe not, but if any of those kids told the truth to a cop, I’m my aunt Fanny. You should have better luck than they do.”
Eddie followed her directions, and we drove in silence for a few minutes. It was the first time we had been completely alone, without the possibility of someone listening in, since we’d pulled up at the hospital with Rhonda Jean last night.
Finally, Eddie spoke, his voice soft. “You told her.”
“Not much,” I said. “Just that someone might have been following us.” I glanced at him, at the tight clench of his jaw as he drove. It wasn’t anger; it was embarrassment. Eddie hated the idea of anyone knowing about his problem with seeing things. “We can’t just ignore it,” I said. “Rose is right. I saw the truck, too. Whoever killed Rhonda Jean knows who we are. We have to do something.”
“I know.” He looked tormented for a moment. “The sight of that girl keeps going around and around in my head. Clinging to the side of the truck bed as it drove. And I don’t know if I even saw her. Just now, on my run, when I was on my way back—” He shook his head.
“Tell me,” I said.
He hesitated, but I was the only person in the world that Eddie told these things to. So he said, “I came around the corner and was jogging up the sidewalk toward Rose’s house. I thought I saw a man go around the side of the house toward the backyard. So I followed him. But when I got to the backyard, there was no one there.”
“Maybe it was a neighbor,” I said.
“If it was a neighbor, I would have seen him in the yard. But I’m telling you, the yard was empty, and there was nowhere to hide. The man was wearing jeans and rubber boots, a gray sweatshirt. I saw all of it as clear as I can see you now. April, I’m going crazy.”
“That’s not true.” I shook my head. “I know you, and you’re not crazy.”
“Then explain what I saw.”
I blew out a breath. “Didn’t those cops say Rose’s house was haunted? Maybe that’s what it was.”
“Haunted by a dead gardener?”
We both laughed at that, the sound of it diffusing the tension. “He was pulling his celestial weeds,” I said.
