He looked at the paperbacks without seeing them. “After she was gone, I worked harder. It helped.”
Margot picked up a paperback. Small, pale blue cover, bent spine. She turned it over, read the back, set it down, then picked it up again. Like she’d forgotten she was allowed to buy something for no reason.
They kept walking. At the corner by the coffee shop, she stopped and looked at the menu board in the window. “The coffee inside or the fries at the place next door?”
“It’s ten fifteen in the morning.”
“The place next door makes fries all day. I could smell them from the gallery.”
He looked at her. She was holding the paperback in one hand and glancing at the fry place next door. “Both.”
They got fries in a paper basket, coffee in paper cups and sat on the bench outside the bookstore in the shade. The fries were salty and good, the coffee was strong, and the street was quiet in the mid-morning lull between the early tourists and the lunch crowd.
She ate three fries, looked at the evidence folder on the bench between them, and said, “He was at the gallery three months ago. He’s been planning this longer than we thought.”
“Which means someone else has been helping him longer than we thought.”
She looked at him. The same thought, same moment. “We still don’t know who.”
“We will.” He ate a fry. “We find the boat and it’ll pull the thread.”
Her gaze moved down the street. The bookstore. A couple walking past with ice cream, sharing from the same cup, disagreeing about something small and laughing about it. “What happens when the expo ends?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
He picked up his coffee cup. “Haven’t finished thinking yet.”
She looked at him then. “Neither have I.”
They sat on the bench in the shade until the fries were gone.
Then they drove back to the resort with the windows down and the evidence folder between them.
Neither of them mentioned what happened after the expo.
The question rode back with them anyway.
Chapter thirty-two
Where the Breaks Are
Evan’sphonebuzzedwitha text at 8:47 p.m. Margot. Four words.Tomorrow. Dawn. Dock shed.
He read the message twice, then set the phone on the workbench and looked at it again anyway. He smiled at the screen.
They’d spent the day chasing leads through Harbor’s Hope. The gallery. The marina. The bookstore. Fries at ten in the morning because Margot had decided the normal rules of breakfast didn’t apply to potatoes.
Somewhere between the gallery and Front Street, the investigation had stopped feeling like the most important thing in the truck. She wasn’t planning to spend another day talking around whatever was waiting at the end of the expo. Neither was he.
The smile faded as he looked at the butcher paper wall.
Tomorrow morning wouldn’t matter much if Harker arrested the wrong person first. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Time to finish this.
He changed into a clean shirt because he was going to see a detective.
Also, because somewhere in the back of his head a voice that sounded suspiciously like Lauren was reminding him that clean shirts existed for a reason.
