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Rose didn’t have many answers, and she didn’t seem to need them. “They thought it was you,” was her explanation as she drove us back to her B and B in her Volvo. “Then they found out it wasn’t you. That’s all you need to know. If you were in real trouble, they would have arrested you back there.”
“Is it a trap?” Eddie asked. “Like they’re pretending not to suspect us, but they think we’ll slip up?”
Rose snorted. “That’s an idea just dumb enough for them to try, but no. Quentin doesn’t work that way. He narrows in on his suspect, then goes in for the kill. That’s how Robbie always put it. Everyone in the Coldlake Falls PD has heard stories about Quentin. The Coldlake PD is too small to handle the bigger cases, so anything bigger than drunk kids or a domestic dispute got handed to the state police.” She shook her head. “Robbie was stuck writing traffic tickets and finding wandering grandmas for his whole career, but when the bigger cases came along, he’d pitch in by knocking on doors. They all did. But it was always the detectives’ show.”
“How long has Quentin been a detective?” I asked.
“Ten years or so.” Rose was in a talkative mood, probably because the topic orbited around Robbie. “He didn’t come up in uniform, at least not around here. He just showed up one day as the new detective at state. Came from nowhere, like a spook, Robbie said. No one knows much about his personal life, and he never goes to the Fourth of July barbecue. Robbie said he closed cases, even though he treated Robbie like trash. If he really believed you killed that girl, you’d still be at the police station, and you’d be calling a lawyer while they booked you.”
I turned to Eddie. “What did Quentin say to you?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. He looked as exhausted and hungry as I felt. There was still gravel in his hair. “I met plenty of bullies in the army. He’s a little like that, but he’s smarter. He kept asking me about the trip to Atticus Line this morning. He made me go over again how I took the turnoff last night. What made me decide. Whether I had ever been here before.” He was quiet for a moment, and I studied his face. He looked stricken. “I kept telling him it was a mistake, but after a while I wasn’t sure I believed myself. Then the door opened and someone told him he had a phone call. And that was it.”
We pulled into Rose’s driveway. I thought I saw a silhouette in a dark upstairs window, but then the wind blew branches of a nearby tree across my line of sight and the silhouette was gone. “It has to be the backpack,” I said, staring at the window for another second before getting out of the car. “There’s something in there that points to the guy who attacked you. Or to someone else. Something that leads away from us.”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t our problem,” Eddie said as we followed Rose to the door. It was dark, and the air was heavy, the breeze sporadic and soft. Crickets chirped at a fever pitch. A beautiful July night on my honeymoon.
“I guess not,” I said.
“I cooked those burgers,” Rose said as she snapped the overhead light on and walked to the kitchen. “They’re cold now, but I got buns and ketchup and mustard.”
“Thank you, Mrs.Jones,” Eddie said. I realized I didn’t know Rose’s last name, but Eddie did. Rose pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, flustered.
“So that’s it?” I asked as I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. “That guy, Max Shandler, picked up Rhonda Jean at random, stabbed her, and left her? Then he waited, saw us pick her up, and followed us? It was just something he decided to do?”
Eddie put his burger patty on a bun and picked up the ketchup. The burgers weren’t hot, but we were starving. “Mrs.Jones, what do you know about Max Shandler? He’s a local.”
Rose looked briefly flustered at the use of her last name again, and then she said, “I don’t know the Shandlers too well. They’ve owned that farm for generations. I don’t remember Max being in any particular kind of trouble. They keep to themselves.” She sat down in the chair across from me. “Maybe he just snapped.”
“What about the others?” I asked. “The other hitchhikers? What about Katharine O’Connor, and the ones before her? The kids at Hunter Beach said the murders go back to the seventies. Is Max Shandler a serial killer?”
“Like Ted Bundy?” Rose looked outraged. “We don’t have lowlifes like that in this town. Except for the idiots, we’re decent people. If Max Shandler killed that girl, he probably knew her. If she was staying at Hunter Beach, they could have met. Maybe he was jealous. Besides, Max can’t have been killing people since the seventies. He’s only in his twenties.”
The man who attacked Eddie hadn’t looked much older than us. Katharine O’Connor had been killed just a few years ago, right in Max Shandler’s territory. He could have killed her. But even if he had, what about the others that went back decades?
I wasn’t going to get answers tonight, and tomorrow—if we got our car back—we were leaving town.
We ate our lukewarm hamburgers, and then Eddie and I took turns in the shower. I was in bed when Eddie came back from the bathroom, wrapped in a large white bathrobe that—of course—had been Robbie’s. I was lying on my back, propped on the pillows in the light of the lamp on the bedside table next to me. I had pulled the frilly coverlet up to my collarbones and was trying not to think about Princess Diana hanging above my head.
Eddie closed the door behind him and looked at me. His hair was damp and I could see a drop of water on his temple, about to roll down into his late-night scruff. He had a red mark on one cheek and scrapes on his forearms from scuffing on the gravel. We were both so incredibly tired, but still our gazes locked and something arced between us.
“April Carter,” my husband said gently, his gaze taking me in.
I sat up, biting my lip. “That door doesn’t lock.”
With perfect gallantry, Eddie slid the delicate, white-painted dresser along the wall and in front of the bedroom door. Then he rounded to the window and double-checked that the blinds were closed all the way.
He undid the bathrobe, and I turned out the lamp, pulling my nightgown off over my head.
I slid down onto my back, feeling the lick of anticipation in my veins. The bed sagged gently as Eddie’s big body got in next to mine. Princess Diana was about to get a show, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
Eddie’s warm body rolled onto mine, skin to skin, and he pressed his face into my neck. “April Carter,” he said again.
“Eddie Carter,” I said.
His hands moved down my body, over my waist, my hips. Until Eddie, I had always found the sensation of a man’s hands on my skin to be invasive, even when part of me liked it. Too much of a man’s touch was like sandpaper, because I was always waiting for the next thing—the dig of thumbs into my soft flesh, the heartlessness, the letdown. My father had hated me, and the men since had used me. Those two things were what I knew. I didn’t expect better.
My first time with Eddie, six whole weeks into dating, had been surprisingly fumbling on both our parts. We’d touched each other tentatively in the dark like neither of us had done this before, and in a way, neither of us had. Eddie had had girlfriends, but with me he was obviously nervous, as if he was afraid I’d scream and run. I’d been locked in my own head, overwhelmed with feelings that hit me like a freight train, too distracted and unwilling to put on a show and pretend I was in ecstasy. By all measures, it hadn’t been an auspicious beginning.
