She pauses and says, “By the way? Pretty sure I recognized the boys in that truck.”
“You got names on them?” I ask. “Because I’d like to have names on them.”
She shakes her head. “I saw them hanging around the field, or outside the gym, is all, after some games last year. They should have been carrying signs about what they were trying to do. Burt even tried to light them up one time after a football game, but when he did his stop-and-frisk thing, they were all clean. Said they were from Old Mill and were just there for the game.”
“So they’re from around here.”
“Isn’t everybody, Silas?”
I tell her then about Leamon Ridenour’s visit to the farm, all the hurt he’d brought with him.
“I heard he was there,” she says.
“You’ve got better intel than EJ.Doyou think it might do some good if I went to talk to Briar?”
She takes a long time before she answers, her face serious. Almost solemn. One thing has never changed with her, at least from where I’m sitting. I can almost hear her thinking, same as she used to tell me she could hear me growing.
Finally, she says, “My husband isn’t just a good man, Silas. He’s a great cop, even having to work around a jerk like Nash Hader. But if Burt can’t get anywhere with all the bad things happening around here, what makes you think you can?”
A couple of high school girls come through the door, giggling.They don’t look any older than the girls from the truck. Or much older than Holly Ridenour was when she was taken out of her own house that night.
“This isn’t football, Silas,” she says. “Nobody knows better than me what a natural-born leader you always were, from high school on, and why quarterback was the only position you ever could have played, not just because of your arm but because of your need to be in charge of things. But this isn’t something where you can play hero ball.”
“I’m trying hard to tell myself the same thing.”
Another smile. “Try harder,” she says again. “You have to know that if you get sideways with a man like Briar Crockett, he will run you over for real. And then back up and do it again just for the fun of it.” She leans forward and uses both of her hands to cover one of mine.
“Worrying about my husband is already a full-time job,” Taylor says. “I’ll need more bandwidth to worry about you, too.”
Neither one of us speaks, until I say, “How are you doing, Tay?”
“You mean, enough about you?”
“You know me better than that.”
“Sometimes better than you know yourself.”
I say, “Not just sometimes.”
I hear her phone buzz. She takes it out, looks at it, says, “Burt wants to know if we can have an early dinner tonight.”
“Selfish bastard.”
We both laugh, and then I pay our check and walk her to her car. She hugs me before I hug her.
“To be continued.”
“Absolutely.”
“We need to get you over for dinner,” she says.
I tell her I’d like that. She gets into the Jeep and drives back up Pine Street. When she’s out of sight, I get into my truck and do the same, having no idea that I’m being watched.
TWENTY-FIVE
I’VE NEVER BEEN a very religious person. I know it about myself. EJ knows it. We just don’t talk about it.
Oh, I went to church like a good boy, first with my parents and later with EJ after they were gone, until I stopped going in high school and she stopped fighting me over it.
