“You want to leave, right?” Temple held up his car keys. “I have wheels.”
“You’re coming with me?”
He smiled. "Only for the day. Then I’ll bring you back here and you can do whatever you’re going to do. There’s a place I’d like to show you first. You might enjoy it."
"Why should I go with you? I don’t have to.”
“True,” he said. "Do you remember that story for another time?" Why the others hated him. Except for Chase but he seemed to get along with everybody. “If you’re leaving, there’s not really another time, is there? This is it.”
He offered to tell me about the curious case of Agent Lysander Temple. The hero who rescued poor innocent abducted people from a terrible fate yet the department treated him like a villain.
Dammit. Curiosity won out. I agreed to a field trip.
~
Max
Only when we set out and started driving did I realize the other questions I should have asked before our little adventure started.
“Is it too late to ask where we’re going?”
“Wearealmost there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then pretend I asked ten minutes ago.”
Temple smiled as he made a turn. “Hey, you’re funny.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a detective?”
“You were too scared when we met to be funny.”
"Weird, I usually do my best work when terrified."
Temple laughed. Lightly, but it startled me like a gunshot. My dark humor never really fazed Aaron or Chase. But it wasn’t exactly Chase’s style and Aaron rarely played along because he called it a defense mechanism.
I coughed. “You still didn’t tell me where we’re going.”
“Oh, sorry! Fairview Fields.”
That answered that question. And told me absolutely nothing. Then he nodded ahead. We’d reached our destination. A decorated front entrance with a cheery sign proclaimed this Fairview Fields, an apartment complex. Our field trip involved visiting this detective’s apartment?
Uh-oh. I definitely should have asked about our destination earlier. Was the situation dire enough to unbuckle my seat belt and bail out?
“We aren’t going inside,” Temple said. “This is where I stayed after moving to Ashvale. I don’t live here anymore.”
Temple navigated through the parking lots and modern apartment buildings towards the back of the property. We parked near the edge of a perfectly green lawn and walked to an area with a few trees and a small pond.
The occasional honk and flapping wings alerted me to the other presences. A few geese floated on the water’s surface but most milled around the pond. Ignoring us, they perked up when Temple opened the canvas Food Lion bag looped over one arm and produced a packaged loaf of bread.
The whole thing felt surreal. Temple was supposed to convince me to stay at the rehab facility, to get through to me where everyone else had failed. Part of me wanted to see what he’d do next. I just hadn’t expected… he brought me to a place he didn’t even live anymore to feed some geese?
He offered me a slice, warning me as I reached out to accept the bread.
“We aren’t supposed to feed the geese.” Indeed a sign next to him in an angry red color expressly forbid this activity. “And technically we’re trespassing.”
So if anyone saw us, we might need to make a quick escape or face angry tenants yelling.
“I can handle a little danger,” I said, the understatement of the fucking century. “You owe me a story.”
