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“My dad was more into hunting than Shirley Temple, so I learned how to shoot.”
Brianna took her hand back and studied me, and suddenly I could see that maybe Heidi didn’t just take after her dad. “Funny how things work out. You grow up to be a cop, and I grow up to be a Realtor that meets her husband on the job.”
“Things work out, I guess,” I said, “and if you could give us the name of the club and the dancer that took Jocelyn up onstage, we’ll get out of your hair.”
“And the time you arrived and left the club,” Olaf said from the couch.
I glanced behind me at him, and it was almost jarring that he was still there while I was holding a baby and remembering my mother. He seemed to belong to a different life from the one that had my mother and Shirley Temple marathons in it.
Brianna gave us the information. Olaf wrote it down in his phone while we girls continued to hold the babies. Normally I’d have given Heidi back to her mom, but she seemed content, and Clara was happy in her mother’s arms. It just seemed logical to keep the babies happy and quiet while we got the rest of the information. Yeah, it was just logic, not that some part of me enjoyed holding the baby.
I handed Heidi back to her mother at the door, so Brianna had a baby in each arm. She encouraged them to wave bye-bye. Clara waved first and then Heidi. I waved back to them as we went to get in Olaf’s rental. He threw a hand up in their direction, which made Brianna smile brighter, though Heidi stopped waving. She was going to be the smart one.
54
I CALLED EDWARD from the car and got put straight to voice mail, so I texted him. If they didn’t need us to question the second friend, we’d head to the strip club to try to get an address for the dancer who was part of Jocelyn’s alibi. I punched the address of the strip club into my phone so we could find it. We’d have to start there to find the dancer since they all used stage names.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about taking Olaf to a strip club. It was like taking the fox to the chicken coop and trusting he wouldn’t eat any of them, but he’d given his word he would behave himself. Either I trusted him to keep his word, or I didn’t. After the interview with Brianna, it just seemed like a day designed to test his limits.
“You enjoyed holding the baby,” Olaf said, and there was something in his voice that I wasn’t sure of: accusation, surprise?
I fought not to squirm as I tried to figure out what to say. “It wasn’t awful,” I said finally, and even to me it sounded lame.
Olaf made a disdainful sound, somewhere between a snort and a growl. “Are you lying to me or yourself?”
“I’m not lying. I just don’t know what to say, okay?”
“This makes you uncomfortable,” he said.
“Yeah, it does, so can we change topics?”
“Why does it bother you that you enjoyed holding the baby?”
“Why does it bother you?” I asked.
“I did not say that it bothered me.”
“Now who’s lying?”
Olaf spoke to Nicky in the backseat. “You must have felt that she enjoyed interacting with the baby.”
“Like Anita said, she didn’t hate it, but she was too conflicted to actually enjoy it.”
I didn’t really want to share my biological-clock issues with Olaf, of all people. Or that one of my fiancés was pushing for babies. Nicky was almost neutral on the topic, which was a nice change from everyone else having an opinion about what I did with my womb.
My phone rang with Edward’s ringtone, “Bad to the Bone,” so I knew to answer it.
He didn’t bother to say hello, just went straight to the point. “We’re headed back to the sheriff’s station. Meet us there.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The Marchands’ cook, Helen Grimes, came into the station and backed up Jocelyn Marchand’s story. She brought Bobby Marchand’s phone in with more damning evidence against him.”
“What kind of evidence?” I asked.
“Sheriff says we need to head that way and see it. He seems to feel it wraps the case up nice and tidy.”
“Well, shit,” I said.
