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“I get that,” he said, sitting on the opposite side of the picnic table. “Your mom knows I’m looking for it. I swear it’s okay for you to tell me where you left it. Actually, it’s important that you do.”
Her head instantly lifted. “You’ve seen my mom?”
This was the hard part, determining what someone should or shouldn’t know. “I have not.” Which was the truth.
Her small shoulders instantly fell.
“But I’m hoping the diary might help your mom.”
She fidgeted. “It’s at the Wayward Inn. At least that’s where I was the last time I had it. I wanted to go back to get it but I didn’t have a ride.”
“Thanks, kiddo,” Grant said. Another trip into town, but it was worth it.
He stood, but the worried look on Mia’s face practically did him in. Reminding him of another young girl he had loved and worried incessantly about.
“You doing okay?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I might have done something wrong.”
“Like what?”
“I read some things in the diary to Pinkie and her friends.”
“Why’d you do that?” he asked, more curious than judgmental.
“I thought they could help me to… I don’t know, restore my mom’s reputation.”
“By reading the diary to them?”
“There’s a lot of stuff in it. Stuff that people needed to know about my mom.”
“Okay.”
“But I don’t want anyone to get their hands on the diary because, there’s other things in it that I don’t want them to know about.”
He considered that. Diaries for girls were private and considered sacrosanct. It was the same for Rachel.
“How ’bout, when I find the diary, I promise not to read it. I’ll give it directly to your mom.” Besides, what mattered to him was the thumb drive and what he hoped was the evidence necessary to bring charges against Errol and his mother.
“Okay, I would appreciate that,” she said with a weak smile. And then, as if a last-ditch effort, she said, “If you happen to see my mom, will you tell her I love her?”
“Of course.” He held out his arms, and she wrapped hers around his waist, giving him a big hug. She was a really good kid. “Now, let me drive over to the Inn and get the diary. Okay?”
She smiled. “Thanks, Uncle Grant.” Before walking back inside, she added, “Be sure to tell my mom I love her.”
* * *
After leaving Bernadette’s,with every intention of making a quick stop at the Inn and hopefully retrieving the diary, he got a call from his deputy, asking for his coordinates and if he could make a stop at the Grind House.
Fenton was at it again, drunk as a skunk and demanding the whereabouts of his ex-wife, Gloria. What the man couldn’t seem to recall when inebriated was his wife left him years ago for an orthopedic surgeon she’d met at Burning Man.
The yearly event, once considered an underground gathering for bohemians and free spirits of all stripes, had since evolved into a destination for social media influencers, celebrities, and the Silicon Valley elite.
At the time, word around town was Gloria was instantly dazzled by an attending doctor who had easy access to a plethora of designer drugs, as opposed to Fenton who was more of the bohemian type and who enjoyed the thrill of searching out new altered states with his wife more so than actually being in them.
Unfortunately, he’d given up his free spirit stripes and had since crawled into a bottle, sick with the dregs of unrequited love and on an ongoing search, when drunk, for Gloria.
Stepping inside the glass front entrance, Grant spotted Fenton staring down dejectedly at what looked to be a tray of coffee mugs that had been thrown to the ground, shards of pottery acting as a barrier between a heaving, despondent Fenton and a fed-up Casper Nutley, the proprietor.
