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Right. I nodded and headed in the direction he’d indicated, then went in the bathroom and closed the door. It was only a powder room, with a toilet and a pretty antique wooden cabinet acting as the vanity, complete with a hand-painted sink of Mexican ceramic.
Being a tribal police chief must pay better than I thought.
Or maybe he’d built the place himself, or inherited it. I didn’t know, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. Still, I thought it must be a positive sign from the universe that I felt so comfortable in Calvin’s house…or at least, I would once I was out of those wet clothes.
I peeled myself out of my wet jeans and T-shirt, then debated for a moment whether I should leave on my bra and panties or go commando. Something about that felt just a little too risky, so I decided to keep them on, although I blotted the bra with one of the hand towels. Honestly, my panties weren’t completely soaked, just sort of damp, and so I hoped they’d dry quickly once I was wearing Calvin’s sweats.
To my infinite relief, my phone seemed to have survived. The key fob I’d just have to test once I got back to the car, but since the phone appeared intact, I had to hope the fob was similarly none the worse for wear.
After I’d changed — and rolled up the bottoms of the sweatpants and the sleeves of the sweatshirt so I wasn’t tripping over myself, then stuck my phone and key fob in the sweatshirt’s kangaroo pocket — I wadded my clothes into a ball and went back outside. He was still waiting in the living room, although he reached for the bundle of clothing I carried as soon as I got close.
“Let me throw those in the dryer,” he said. “You might as well follow me — the laundry room is off the kitchen, and I’ll get the tea going once these have started drying.”
That sounded like a sensible plan, so I padded along after him in my bare feet as he headed down the hall toward the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it seemed pretty luxe for a rural police chief living on his own — polished concrete counters and stainless appliances, including a high-end six-burner Viking monstrosity that I coveted immediately. The kitchen in my own apartment had been updated beautifully, but there just wasn’t room for anything quite that lavish.
Calvin disappeared through a door that opened off the kitchen. After a few beeps I assumed came from him pushing his selections on the dryer, he came back in and headed over to the stove so he could collect the kettle that waited there. He filled it and set it down on one of the front burners, then turned back toward me.
“Any particular tea preferences? I think I have some English Breakfast, or there’s chamomile, peppermint, Lemon Zinger — ”
“Lemon Zinger,” I said, figuring that would pep me up a bit. It had always been one of my favorite herbal teas, although my supply was getting low and I’d probably have to mail-order it, since I couldn’t find it at the local Walmart.
He got out a couple of mugs and some tea bags. Once that was done, he leaned against the counter and sent me a very direct look.
I did what I could to match his stare. The one good thing about my dunking in the San Ramon River was that it hadn’t been deep enough for me to get entirely underwater, so I had to hope my makeup was intact. The ends of my hair had gotten wet, but it was so stick straight that it had just dried back to more or less its natural state.
“Did you sense anything out there?” he asked abruptly.
“Yes,” I said, again because I’d resolved to tell him the truth. Lying would only make me look guilty.
“What did you feel?”
“Fear…pain,” I replied. “It wasn’t pleasant.”
His fingers tapped against the edge of the concrete counter. “No, I guess not. You think it was him?”
Calvin hadn’t said who he meant by “him,” but I didn’t have to ask. “I don’t see who else it could be,” I replied. “Well, unless you get a lot of people murdered down by the river.”
“Not generally, no,” he said. “That is, we had a case of drowning one year when a tourist decided it would be a really good idea to go wading in the river after he had a twelve-pack of Coors, but as a general rule, it’s a pretty quiet spot.”
I reflected that it was quite an accomplishment to drown yourself in a river that wasn’t even two feet deep. But maybe there were sections where it wasn’t quite as shallow.
“Did you see anything else?”
For a moment, I hesitated. Yes, I’d sworn to tell Calvin the truth, but I didn’t know whether I wanted to let him know about that metallic glint I’d detected down amongst the river stones. It could have been nothing — a smashed beer can or something similar. The glinting object had looked smaller than that, though, like a coin or maybe a piece of jewelry.
But then I reminded myself that he was the professional, that just because I’d decided to play Nancy Drew didn’t mean I had the right to withhold information about something that might be an important piece of evidence.
“Not in a vision or anything,” I said. “But I was just about to pick up something I saw down in the riverbed when you interrupted me.”
His brows drew together in a frown I was beginning to recognize. “Why didn’t you say something when we were back there?”
“Oh, I don’t know…because I’d just fallen in a river? I sort of had other things occupying my mind.”
For a second, it looked as though he was going to utter some kind of retort. Then he appeared to think better of it, because he said, “What was it?”
“I don’t know for sure. Something metallic, maybe about this big.” I held up my hand and made a circle with my thumb and forefinger around the size of a silver dollar. “It’s hard to say for sure, because water distorts things.”
The kettle began to whistle then, so he went to the stove and turned off the gas. Silence for a moment as he poured hot water into the mugs he’d set out earlier, and then he said, “I’ll go back and look in the morning. It’s going to be too dark by the time I get you back to your car. I don’t know how my deputies and I missed something like that, though.”
