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I shook my head. “I can’t believe I married you. How did I ever find you?”
Eddie squished his sandwich flat, making the lettuce crunch. He was smiling now. “You came out of your room with no shirt on, as I remember.”
“And it was a done deal.”
He shrugged, his eyes on his sandwich, but his cheeks went just a little bit red.
“I wish I’d known how to find the right man earlier,” I teased him. “I wouldn’t have worn a shirt for all of 1994.”
“Too bad,” he said decisively. “I found you first.”
It was my turn to feel warm. Would this feeling wear off, I wondered? In twenty years, would I be sitting across from Eddie, thinking he was nothing but a nuisance and a pain in the ass? Maybe, but right now it was hard to picture it. I wondered if he knew that his compliments made me go gooey inside. I didn’t think he did.
“It can’t have just been the bra,” I said, sipping my Coke. “I mean, you’d seen a topless woman before.”
“We’re not talking about that,” he said, his voice firm, his previous tension gone now. Aside from the fact that he’d had a couple of girlfriends, Eddie never gave salacious details. I didn’t marry them, was his explanation. I married you.
“So it was the bra,” I said.
Eddie paused, as if he wanted to say something else, and then he said, “It was blue. I’d never seen a blue one before. You know what? You’ve never told me why you said yes to me that day, considering I was basically a Peeping Tom and I had my shirt on.”
Why had I said yes to him? I hadn’t been on the hunt for a boyfriend, or even a date. I had never let anyone get close to me. I’d just been on my way to get laundry. I should have forgotten about Eddie Carter in minutes, the way I forgot about most of the boys I met. But I hadn’t.
“It’s because I’m not stupid,” I said, spearing a forkful of salad. “Any woman who turns you down is stupid. But it’s too bad for the rest of them, because I found you first.”
“And here we are,” he said. I knew in that moment that he found it as unlikely as I did, that we were married. That we’d been married for nearly five days.
“Here we are,” I replied. “And I guess we just agreed to try and find the Lost Girl.”
Eddie sighed. “What do we know?”
“Not a lot. Gretchen said she was murdered in the seventies and her body was left by the side of the road. They never solved it or found out who she was.”
We were quiet for a moment. It really wasn’t much to go on, and neither of us was an investigator. We didn’t know where to start.
“We know what she looked like,” Eddie said, his voice soft. “No one else knows that.”
I closed my eyes. I could picture the girl we’d seen, with long hair parted in the middle. I could picture the clothes she was wearing. But her face—would I recognize her face if I saw it in a picture?
“We could look at newspapers,” I suggested. “This is a small town. A murdered girl would be in the papers, especially if they didn’t know who she was.”
“We’d have to read a whole decade’s worth if we don’t know the year,” Eddie said. “Do you think Officer Syed would help us?”
I nodded. “The police will have a file, right? He probably won’t let us read it, but he can give us something to go on so we don’t have to spend a week in the library.”
“Someone missed her,” Eddie said. “Someone knew she was gone, wondered where she went, maybe filed a report. But she could be from anywhere.” His gaze flicked past my shoulder to something, and he frowned before looking back to me.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“That girl in the next booth is looking at us.”
“A lot of people are looking at us in here.” It was true. Some of the people coming in and out of the diner paid us no mind, but others gave us intent stares, as if they didn’t care if we noticed. I knew right away what the difference was between a local and a tourist. The locals had heard that a girl was murdered; the tourists hadn’t.
“I know, but that girl is really staring,” Eddie said. “She barely looks old enough to drive. Why is she staring at us?”
I craned my neck and twisted around. Sure enough, in the booth behind us was a teenage girl, sitting alone. Her brown permed hair was tied in a ponytail, and she had sunglasses perched on the top of her head, like me. She had a glass of Coke in front of her and was wearing an oversize tee. She caught me looking, and I narrowed my eyes, giving her a warning signal. She blinked back at me slowly and sipped Coke through her straw.
I turned back to Eddie, affronted. “What is her problem?”
