Downtime (34 page)

“Archie isn’t as vocal as your Sully. He merely says that you not go—his way?” His brows drew together and he shook his head. “I don’t know what that may mean, but he….” Ezra paused, slipping a hand over mine as he leaned forward. “I believe it must be very important,” he whispered. “There are tears in his eyes.”

His weren’t the only ones. “I’m not going his way,” I muttered, a reaction that was still instinctive after so many years. As usual, Dad had impeccable timing. “Can you tell him—”

“You can,” Ezra reminded me with a gentle squeeze of my hand.

I tried to grin. “He’ll more likely listen to you.”

“Nonsense. He loves you.”

“He told you that?” In the fourteen years my dad had been a part of my life, those particular words hadn’t been in his vocabulary. When Ezra hesitated, I half-expected him to lie out of kindness.

“He didn’t need to tell me.”

I swallowed against the ache in my throat and it only determinedly spread to my chest. “Yeah, he didn’t need to tell anyone. So where is he?”

Ezra’s eyes were suspiciously bright. He didn’t persist in trying to convince me Dad loved me. He just nodded toward the foot of the bed. I let my gaze shift, but there was nothing to be seen.

What the hell.

“Hey, Dad. I’m doing my job, all right?” On that, I wasn’t about to be budged. “Didn’t you always say hard work never killed anyone?”

“He says this isn’t your job.”

I snorted. “Yeah, Sully put him up to it. Look, I won’t go barging into trouble on my own anymore—so that pretty much means I’m not going your way.” Goddamnit. I really didn’t mean to sound so angry, did I? I checked a sigh and opened my mouth to apologize, but Ezra was shaking his head.

“He’s gone, Morgan.”

I let out a breath and sat back on the pillows. “Yeah, well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Ezra’s thumb brushed back and forth over my wrist and I could feel his worried eyes on me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Really, that went about as well as all our other conversations.”

Ezra shucked off the rest of his clothes and, persuading me to lie down, moved close enough that I could feel his breath in my ear. “Are you all right?” he said, this time with an emphasis that let me know he wasn’t going to drop it until I answered honestly.

“You know, he really doesn’t have any business giving me hell for doing my job. He was always working.”

“Farming?”

I nodded. “Did he tell you he was a sheriff’s deputy too? I think in the end he preferred it to farming. Even though it got him killed.”

Ezra cupped my cheek, turning my face toward his. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned he was here, not after the day you’ve already had. He seemed so worried.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the feeling.”

“You were fourteen?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah. He pulled over a trucker transporting drugs and got a bullet in the head. Just like that, he was gone.”

“Why are you blaming yourself?” came the next question, even more quietly.

“He took me with him sometimes, in the car. Not often. Not when we were fighting about something—but once in a while. We’d drive through town and he’d stop and talk to people. Kept up with things and knew what was going on, knew who the troublemakers were so he could keep them in line. A woman I didn’t know came up to me after the funeral. Said she’d never felt more reassured than when she saw Archie Nash driving by. I didn’t tell her he might still be alive if he and I hadn’t fought over my grades the Friday before. That if I’d been with him in the car, I’d have seen the gun. I’d have warned him and he would’ve had a fighting chance.”

Too close to breaking down altogether, I shut up and stared at the fluttering leaf shadows on a moonlit wall that was a hundred years from home. I didn’t know why I’d told Ezra all that. I’d never told anyone else, not even Sully.

Ezra didn’t say anything. Arms still around me, he pressed a comforting kiss on my cheek and as I turned to him, another, warm on my lips. The hand on my back moved in slow tender circles but, plastered together as we were, the slow kisses progressed to something a little more heated. The tenderness remained in the way we touched and, even though neither of us spoke, in everything that was said when our eyes met. The comfort remained and we both needed it. Sully and my mom had been around to keep me together after Archie’s death. I had a feeling no one had been around to pick up Ezra’s pieces after he’d lost his mom.

I wanted to ask but, curled around him a little while later, I fell asleep without remembering to. I must have drifted off thinking about Archie, because I dreamt of him as I’d seen him so many times, riding his horse in the golden light before sunset. I rode with him a ways, cantering along the dirt road that stretched past the fields and on to the horizon. With the scent of mown grass in the fresh wind and the hum of bugs all around, I kept up with him, and though we didn’t talk, I felt close to him in a way I’d seldom ever felt. The lack of good-byes didn’t seem to matter as much as they had in the past.

The next morning was as fog-bound as the night before. Ezra was up and out already but he had gone quietly, letting me sleep in. Emerging from the cocoon of blankets, I sat on the edge of the overstuffed mattress and contemplated the mistakes I’d made, topped off with last night’s disaster. True, I wasn’t familiar with the area, but that hadn’t stopped me from tracking down a suspect in the past. I was underestimating this one, despite the legend; he was quick and smart and knew how to escape. Others had come as close as I had to capturing him, and he’d gotten away from us all.

Jack had to be known to all the women he’d killed. My list of suspects began with that conviction and I intended to eliminate those suspects before extending my search. I began the day with another inquest, Catherine’s. Ezra joined me, and afterward we continued with our own interviews, collecting another half-dozen sets of prints in the process.

Ezra, I noted with amusement, had gained a certain confidence and with it an impressive authority that kept down any objections to our questions and print collecting. In another era—mine—he might have done all right in law enforcement or even British Intelligence. He had a way of phrasing even the most probing questions with a sympathy that gained trust. It was work he might enjoy more than cataloging books, assuming he planned to return to his old job once he was free of the responsibility of watching after me.

It was an idea I mentioned to him around beer and sandwiches at lunch, and all it got me was a hearty laugh. “A detective? I don’t have the temperament to put the fear of God into the rogues. And I don’t believe I could bat a fellow over the head, no matter how he’d misbehaved.”

“He’d probably prefer it to a good talking-to.” I grinned. “Anyway, you’ve got a real advantage, with your connections. And I don’t mean the earthly kind.”

“All the more reason they’ll want none of me,” Ezra retorted with dark cheer. “I think they should rather like to have you, though, with your fingerprinting and—what did you call it—profiling? If anything should happen and you must stay, that is.”

There was a subject I didn’t feel like exploring. I had enough on my mind. “You going to that Adelaide thing tonight?”

Ezra blinked in surprise. “You remember that?”

“Sure. Since you guys made a big deal of it at the time. At least, you did, grumbling about being the night’s entertainment.”

“Yes, well, I did say I’d attend, but I suspect I shall be declining those invitations more often in the future. I think Charlotte liked it more.” He fell quiet, pushing a pat of butter idly around on his plate with the knife.

“Do you miss her?”

“I miss her friendship,” Ezra admitted, with a glance at me. “You know, she may be there tonight.”

“Even if she knows you’ll be there?”

“Well, perhaps not then.” He went back to pondering and I kicked him gently under the table.

“Don’t let it bug you. She’ll meet someone else and get married and you’ll see that it was the right thing to do, even if you have doubts now.” I hesitated. “Want me to come with you?”

“Tonight?” His face brightened with affection. “You seem to detest the parties. I thought you might prefer to stay at home.”

“Well, yeah, most of the people at these things are pretty unbearable,” I said. “But there’s always one person there I like.” I hooked a finger around his and gave it a tug. “Come on. One more interview and we’ll go home. We want enough time to clean up before the big blowout.”

Bemused but smiling, he paid for lunch and we hunted down the last name on my list. It led to a pawn shop in a busy square and I went inside without much hope of success. Pawn shop owners were generally a jaded lot, and they wouldn’t buy Ezra as a detective as easily as the other witnesses had. I took a different tack, presenting myself as the investigator to the shop owner, a middle-aged woman in a worn, red shawl who sat on a battered sofa near the front window, knitting away. She looked me over with a jaundiced eye before returning to her work. “I’ve told my story to the police. If you want to hear it, you’ll talk to them.”

“Yes ma’am. The police don’t really like to share their information with independent investigators—”

“As well they shouldn’t.” Ezra, at the counter, glanced around at me with a gleam of amusement in his eyes, then quickly looked away again.

I cleared my throat. “I beg your pardon?”

Doffing his hat to the woman, Ezra favored me with stark disapproval. “It’s from America you are?”

“Yes, but—”

“Aye, and what business is this of an American detective? You’re thinking we cannot catch the fellow on our own?”

I swallowed a laugh at the flawless imitation of Derry’s buoyant brogue, noticing that Ezra’s questions had caught the attention of several people and the place had gone dead quiet. The shop owner looked sharply from Ezra to me, and I tried to stammer out a reply. “I was thinking you’d maybe appreciate a little help. That’s all.”

“And that’s fair reason to bother a good Christian woman in her work, is it?”

“Well, I just wanted to ask—”

“Questions the Yard’s already asked her, yes, so I hear. Tell us, sir. Is it true, then, that manners are as unheard of in America as a decent cup of tea?”

That brought a laugh all around, and I decided it was time to go before I was lynched. “Look, pal, I’m just doing my job. You folks are obviously having a little trouble catching this guy and we’re just trying to help out.”

“Helping out, are you? Pray, let me return the favor.” He grabbed a handful of my sleeve and hustled me out the door and into the street. As the door shut, I could hear another round of laughter from inside. He’d endeared himself easily enough. I hoped he was as successful getting our questions answered. I had to grin as I ducked round the corner and dropped onto a stoop to wait. He’d make a detective yet.

Twenty minutes later, he appeared at the corner, looking around for me. I waved him over and he came, with a Cheshire cat smile and an even more pronounced bounce in his step than usual. “What’d you get?”