He starts to say something but stops himself, as if he does remember one final time that there’s a lady present. So he just turns and walks slowly back to his car.
“Buy a girl a cup of coffee?” Taylor says.
“Thought you’d never ask.”
“You do still have a smart mouth. Sometimes at the most inopportune times.”
“I’m trying to quit.”
She watches Nash Hader pull out onto Pine Street now, lights still flashing on top of his car, one more thing he does because he can.
“Try harder,” Taylor says.
TWENTY-FOUR
PINE STREET BREW is mostly empty in the late afternoon, so we have no problem scoring our favorite table by the window.
Taylor McCarter Webb is dressed as simply as always: navy sweater accented by a white shirt collar, jeans, old-fashioned black Converse sneakers. I’ve never come out and said this to her, but I’ve always thought she was beautiful, even before she actually was, when she was still a skinny tomboy, back when you could still call a girl that and not have somebody put the cuffs on you for it.
“Okay, what were you doing there?” I ask when we have iced coffees in front of us.
She waggles a finger at me. “You first.”
“How come you always get to make the rules?”
“I’m the girl,” she says. “So how’d you happen to end up at school today?”
“It all pretty much happened the way I told Nash Hader,” I say. “I was out driving around, maybe even hoping I’d see you on the road, and then decided to head over to the stadium.”
“First of all, Silas Tucker,” she says, “you don’t have tohopeto runinto me. All you have to do is call. Or return a call, as the case may be.”
“I meant to call you back after EJ gave me the message, I really did. Then I just up and forgot.”
She slaps her forehead and gives me one of her better smiles. She has a lot of them. “Wow, you forgetting to return a phone call,” she says. “Did not seethatcoming.”
“You always did say I lack a few basic social skills.”
“Afew?” Taylor says. “I swear, the only place you’ve ever been truly organized is in a huddle.”
Then she tells me she’d just finished a camp run, had parked her bus in the middle school lot, and was driving past the high school when she spotted my truck.
“I saw what I saw, Tay,” I tell her. “And that punk was right about one thing: I did lose it, but not because he hurt my feelings.”
She smiles again. “I frankly couldn’t tell who got the worst of it, those boys or that hoopty truck of theirs.”
“I didn’t even tell the sheriff that there were a couple of high school girls in that truck before he showed up to the party,” I say, “before I told them to scoot.” I look out the window and then back at her. “And all of a sudden, I was thinking about those missing girls and the drugs that are killing kids around here… and then it all just ganged up on me before I ganged up on them.”
“One against three,” she says. “Not much of a fair fight when the one is you.”
“That’s apparently the way Sheriff Hader saw it,” I say. “Even though he didn’t actually see a damn thing.”
“Burt hates that man,” Taylor says. “There’s this ongoing turf war between county and local in this town, and most of the time Nash Hader would rather be tougher on my husband than he is on somebody like Briar Crockett.”
“How’s Burt doing with all that’s going on?”
“The best way to say it is that what killed you this afternoon has been killing him for a lot longer,” she says. “When he came home the other night after Molly Brendle had disappeared, he said he was the one who’d been driving around, trying to calm himself down, that’s how much he wanted to hit somebody.”
I smile at her now. “Know the feeling.”
