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Mostly it held song lyrics sketched out in Gault’s spiky handwriting. They were all songs he’d worked on with her at his side on the piano bench, or on his lap when she was younger.
She picked one of them up and hummed the melody she remembered him picking out on the keyboard. It brought her right back to that time. He’d been interrupted by a call—not from her mother, for once.
“Hey big fella…Have you thought about what I said?” His face went grim and he turned over his notepaper and jotted something on the back. “I don’t know, Conover. It doesn’t sit right. That’s your kid. Okay, don’t panic, man. We’ll figure it out.”
He hung up the phone and put his arm around Bliss. “You know I’m always around for you, right, B?”
She nodded and leaned against him, but didn’t smile. She was sad because the boy had disappeared. She’d looked everywhere—the cabin, the dock, the beach fort—but he was definitely gone.
Bliss came back to the present moment with a start. Slowly, she turned over the song lyrics and checked the back. Sure enough, a note was written there.Nora. Lump sum?
Her head spun. Had she happened to overhear a conversation between Gault and Granger’s unidentified father? The timing made sense. What was the name he’d said? Conover? The name wasn’t familiar to her. But Gault knew a lot of people.
She pulled up her phone and did a quick search for “Conover” in Minnesota. There were quite a few Conovers, and there was no guarantee that the man even lived in Minnesota. Gault knew people all over the world.
But there was no harm in shooting off a few emails, was there? She could say that she was Gault’s daughter, trying to get ahold of an old friend of his.
Should she mention any of this to Granger? She didn’t want to get his hopes up, and it might go nowhere. No, she decided. She’d make a few calls and see where it went first.
Twenty-Eight
Granger went through the motions of life for the next few days. Everything felt off and empty. He sent an email to his sister Marqui, and a few days later she was able to call him from the Philippines. He was shopping at the time, making his way past early season visitors buying groceries for the cabins and ice for their coolers. Beer was a hot commodity, and marshmallows.
“Something must be wrong,” she said right away. “Just get it out, I don’t have much time.”
He told her the entire story in the most abbreviated way possible and ending with, “She said no.”
“Damn, first you get stabbed, then you get rejected. You’ve been going through it. I wish you’d called me earlier.”
“I know. Sorry. I’ve been…”
“Caught up in a woman. I get it. And then she said no to your spreadsheet proposal? Wish you could see my shocked face.”
“There was no spreadsheet,” he corrected, annoyed. He hadn’t gone that far.
“There was amentalspreadsheet. If she’s as sensitive as you describe, I’m sure she sensed it.”
“Well, so what if there was? I’m a logical guy. That’s how I organize my thoughts.”
“I know the FBI loved that about you, but a pregnant, hormonal model ain’t the FBI.”
“She’s a lot more than a model.” Now he was even more annoyed. Maybe this call had been a mistake. “She also happens to be highly intelligent and intuitive and brave and principled. For a civilian to do what she did takes a lot of guts.”
“Does it, though? Seems like a case of doing the right thing, that’s it.” Spoken like a naval officer who wasn’t afraid of much, he thought.
“A lot of people would be too scared to do what she did. And once they came after her, I kept thinking she’d give in and back out of testifying. Delete the video and claim it was a mistake. She didn’t do any of that. She might come across as all sunshine and roses, but there’s a lot of layers to her.”
“Reminds me of someone.”
“Who?”
“You, you dunce. You have a lot of layers too. Except yours are in the opposite order. The sunshine and roses are on the inside. You have to get past all the nailed-up boards and electric fences first.”
Granger put three cans of diced tomatoes in his cart. He was planning to make chili tonight, because Bliss was craving beans. How could anyone crave beans? It boggled the mind.
“I don’t know what your point is,” he told his sister. “I know me and Bliss are opposites. We both know that. We joke about it all the time.”
“So you joke around together?”
