Page 30 of Still Missing You

“I figured you’d find me faster,” he says. A chill creeps through me. Someone warned him that we were looking.

“You know who I am?” I ask.

“I heard two guys were asking about me.” His gaze bounces between Dylan and me. “Which one of you is the cousin?”

“Me,” Dylan says, and Kirkland looks him up and down. It takes everything I have not to shove him away from Dylan. Given his reputation, I don’t want him anywhere near him.

“So what do you want?” Kirkland asks.

“We want to know what you did with Matthew,” Dylan says, and I can hear the anger tightening his voice.

Kirkland snorts and takes another swig from the bottle. “I didn’t do anything to Matthew. He split almost two months ago. Instead of saying anything, he took all the cash I had in my wallet. The little shit owes me two hundred bucks.”

“Do you think maybe the bruises you left on his throat had anything to do with him leaving?” Dylan demands.

Kirkland’s expression hardens, and he turns his attention back to Dylan. “Is that what he told you?”

“Are you going to tell me you didn’t do that to him?”

“Shit,” he says almost to himself, shaking his head. “He’s a fucking liar, you know.”

“If he’s a liar, why have you been avoiding us? Why not tell us what you know? Tell us the truth?” I ask, pulling his attention away from Dylan.

“I didn’t want to get mixed up in his shit.”

“What did he lie to you about?” I ask.

“Pretty much everything, but I wasn’t the only one. He was lying to everybody in town.”

“About what?” I ask again.

“His movie, mostly. He said he was a documentary filmmaker in Coldwater to make a movie.”

I glance at Dylan, trying to get an idea if he knows anything about this, but he just shrugs and shakes his head.

I turn my attention back to Kirkland. “He was making a movie about the town.”

Kirkland shrugs. “He never said, but I’m guessing whatever his movie was about would have pissed someone off, and that’s why he was so secretive about it.”

Kirkland smirks, his gaze shifting back to Dylan. I tense. “Seems like, as his cousin, you would have known what he did for a living. Just as you would have known that Matthew isn’t his first name. It’s his middle.”

Chapter Twelve

Dylan

It’s dark by the time we get back to the inn. There’s no sign of Nancy or Jim, and I breathe a silent sigh of relief. Not that they aren’t lovely people, but after everything with Kirkland, I just don’t have the energy for small talk.

Once we are back in our room, I collapse onto the bed, while Hunter shuts and locks the door. He lets the strap of his laptop bag slide down his arm and sets it carefully next to the desk. After finding things moved in our room yesterday, Hunter refused to leave anything valuable behind while we were out today. There’s no way he’d leave his computer, or anything else of value in our room now.

“God, I’m tired,” I say while trying to stifle a yawn at the same time. “What time is it?”

Hunter slips his phone from his pocket, glances down at the screen. “It’s nearly eight.”

“That can’t be right. It feels like midnight.”

He chuckles and sits down on the corner of the bed next to me. “It’s because we ate so early.”

After Kirkland tossed his cash on the bar and walked out, Hunter and I settled into one of the booths and ate dinner, the food surprisingly good. Neither Hunter nor I said much while we ate, both of us lost in our own thoughts.