Chapter 21
Hinckley High School turned out to be a two-story, all-brick building that looked like it had been built in the sixties. The architecture was boxy. Two wings fanned out left and right from an understated entryway. The windows were high and sectioned, and the bricks were pale and faded. Older cars in the parking lot added to the sense that we’d traveled to a bygone time.
But the presence of any cars at all held promise. They meant there might be someone there to let us in. Finding someone who had known Annelise Rogers way-back-when was a tall order, but I was confident we would glean something from a trip like this.
“You need to do the talking on this one,” I instructed Buck as he helped me out of the car. When he’d done the same at the gas station earlier, he’d nearly scared me out of my wits. I wasn’t used to men assisting me out of vehicles I could easily exit myself. I also wasn’t used to anyone pumping my gas.
“What’s our story?” He shut my door and ushered us toward the entrance, placing his hand on the small of my back in a way that distracted me from communicating the plan.
“You tell them your mom went to high school here, that her birthday’s coming up, and you want to surprise her with a few old pictures. We’re looking for anything they might have, from yearbooks to old school papers and—by the way—it’s a surprise, so could they please keep it quiet that you came by to ask?”
“And I tell them my momma’s Annelise Rogers?”
I shook my head. “Don’t volunteer anything. But, don’t lie if you’re directly asked. You’ve been in the public eye enough that only the truth will work.”
“It’s a good plan,” he admitted as we stepped onto the curb and started up the walkway.
“Good plans are the only kind I create.”
I didn’t tell Buck that I’d done recon on the layout of the school, placing a fake call about a book delivery that got me to an approximate location of the library. I’d placed another call from a different phone posing as a reporter researching the former First Lady of Tennessee. I’d asked whether they had any artifacts they could share, or any interviews Annelise might have done whenever she’d come back to speak. The phone receptionist had informed me with a measure of spite that Annelise had never been back, though she had certainly been asked.
I’d started to be careful with certain details, wary of worrying Buck. The incomprehensibility of it all was getting to him, a fact he hadn’t tried to hide. I’d share all of it eventually, but not until I’d made better sense of the situation in my own mind.
We strode into the building, walked straight past the office door, and took the first left. The hallways were dim and empty, with drab old lockers and bare wells. The air smelled lightly of industrial floor wax and the floors were polished and clean. If the place was as deserted as it seemed, we wouldn’t have to use our cover story at all.
“I think we ought to be a couple,” Buck said with quiet calm.
“You think what?” I whisper-hissed.
“If we run into somebody. I think we ought to tell ’em we’re together. To add credibility. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think we ought to be talking about this while we are literally in the middle of a job. And I don’t think anyone would believe that we’re together.”
Buck had the nerve to look at me like I was being ridiculous. “What would make you say a thing like that?”
He stopped in the middle of the hallway, long enough to lean in and give me an intense look.
“Buck,” I scolded, just as the quiet of the hallway was sliced through by the opening of a heavy door. The sound came from down the hall. Buck’s hand returned to the small of my back just in time for me to catch sight of a diminutive woman holding a Tupperware emerge.
“May I help you?”
She was young, in her early thirties—clearly on her way to lunch.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Buck chimed in with his first pleasantries. The woman paid me no mind. She was too busy feasting on him with her eyes, her actual lunch feast momentarily forgotten.
“My girlfriend and I are looking for the library.”
As he smiled at her, I detected a subtle smirk that was meant for me.
The woman stared at him for another weighty moment. When her gaze swung to me, the wonder in her eyes faded.
“That’s the library.” She inclined her head toward the door she’d just exited. “And I’m the librarian.”
“Looks like we got lucky then.” Buck swung his arm over my shoulder and pulled me close. “I’m looking for yearbooks and things. My momma went here and I want to find some old pictures.”
She melted a little under Buck’s charming gaze.
“Well, we do have our archives. I wouldn’t mind showing you?—”
I didn’t let her finish. “We wouldn’t want to trouble you when you’re headed to lunch.”
I smiled sweetly and found myself leaning in, squeezing myself to Buck’s side in my own possessive hold, putting my hand on his chest. He was tall enough and I was short enough that he could tuck me under his arm. He kissed me on my temple as I leaned in.
“It’s a bit of a mess in there,” the librarian protested. “I’m busy reshelving, getting ready for school to start again. Maybe I ought to just wait while you look. I’m not supposed to leave the library unattended.”
“That rule sounds more suited to teenagers than adults,” Buck replied sensibly, somehow charming her all at the same time as looking cozy with me. “We’ll take good care of it. Now go on and eat your lunch.”
With that, Buck led us past the woman and gave a little nod as we walked inside. It seemed we would have the empty library all to ourselves.
“Our conversation isn’t over,” Buck said in a low voice as we entered the space. A circulation desk stood opposite the door. The narrow landing strip that separated said door and said desk was flanked with book boxes piled high. He gave my shoulder a brief squeeze before he took the path left. I allowed myself exactly seven seconds to dread the conversation I absolutely did not want to have with Buck, then kicked myself into gear and headed right.
“Found ’em!” I hollered five minutes later upon locating what we sought. Calling it an archives section was a gross overstatement. It wasn’t a room or an area laden with artifacts and periodicals documenting the history of the school. It was a single shelf and it only held yearbooks.
By the time Buck reached me, I’d pulled out yearbooks from all of Annelise’s time at the school. We made our way to the nearest table. For the next twenty minutes, we pored over all four volumes.
“She’s like a ghost.” Buck had gone deadly silent as soon as the searching had begun. Now, his voice was a mixture of sadness and awe. “She’s in all the pictures you have to pose for—the ones with those boring blue backgrounds. But I can’t find her anywhere else. It’s like she didn’t exist.”
“He did,” I said, showing him the book I’d been looking at. “In your mother’s freshman yearbook, he’s everywhere at once. In the machine shop. In the band. On the varsity football team. But in her sophomore yearbook, he just drops off.”
“She drops off, too,” Buck said in the grim voice of a man who had uncovered something. “There’s no picture for her senior year.”
“Maybe she missed picture day,” I speculated, not really believing it but not wanting to jump to conclusions.
But Buck shook his head. “There’s a different page that names all graduates. Her name’s not on the list.”
I closed my eyes for a moment to give me a second to think. “Did she ever tell you she dropped out?”
“No. Though, I don’t think she’d be ashamed. Plenty of people leave home to chase their dreams. They might have kept it quiet, if my dad didn’t want people to know.”
“What’s the first thing your mother did when she left Hinckley?”
“She went to Nashville to become a singer.”
“But she had no job. No prospects,” I speculated. “A diploma would have helped her get a decent job until she was discovered.”
“Maybe she hated school, or she had some big audition,” Buck volleyed back.
I’d already put together that Tim was older; he was listed as a senior in the graduating class the same year Annelise had been a junior. Now I had a theory that might explain their simultaneous disappearance.
“Maybe she didn’t go on her own.”
Buck went quiet, and seemed to go somewhere else in his head, then nodded in the uncertain way people did when they only had half a story. I kept quiet rather than telling him again that the truth came out in fits and starts.
“So what now?” he asked.
“We document what we found, then go back home and try to piece together a timeline—when your mother really left Hinckley; whether Tim ever left and, if so, when he moved back; the exact timing of when your mother met your father and when they really got married; when you were really born.”
“You think my birth certificate could be a forgery?”
This was a theory I hadn’t shared. The birth certificate his mother had given him was a replacement issued around the time when Buck had turned eight. It had coincided with his father’s gubernatorial run. If Rex Rogers had needed to bury information that might have surfaced as part of opposition research, falsifying documents right before announcing his bid would have been the ideal time.
“I think we need to gather the facts and not jump to conclusions.”
I used my most disarming voice, then pulled out my phone to finish the job.
“Come on. Let’s take pictures of all the photos we found. It’ll all go in the file.”
I leafed back through the yearbook in front of me and Buck quietly followed suit. A calm set in as we settled into our task. The library held special peace. The windows were open and warm air wafted in. I imagined the Annelise and Tim who I’d seen in the pictures sitting together in this library, holding hands as they walked the halls, teenagers in love.
After we’d finished with the pictures, we rose to replace the yearbooks on their shelf. I only made it a few steps before Buck relieved me of the books I carried and fixed me with a smile. I gave him a little eye roll but I handed over the books.
“We got interrupted, before.”
I raised an eyebrow as I walked. “Interrupted?”
“You were gonna tell me why no one would believe we’re a couple.”
We stopped at the shelf from which we’d removed the books. Buck cradled them in his arm while replacing them on the shelf.
“Buck, how old are you?”
He smiled coquettishly and leaned his hip against the shelf. “A gentleman never tells.”
I pinned him with a look that told him to stop messing around. “You’re twenty-six. And I’m thirty-five.” I revealed what he was too much of a gentleman to ask.
Buck took a step closer and threw down a cocky smile.
“We didn’t have any trouble convincing that librarian. And we didn’t get any strange looks that day when we were in disguise.”
It was the first time he’d mentioned the fake kiss that had felt too real.
“When you were kissing me, no one could see our faces,” I pointed out.
“I told you, that wasn’t a kiss.” His voice went low.
I commanded myself to keep talking, and to think.
“The point is, there’s a difference between people thinking you’re a couple from a context clue versus when they can see your face.”
His eyes went dark and serious, all previous playfulness gone. “Loretta. You’ll know when I kiss you.”
It was the same thing he’d said to me that day. And it hadn’t sounded brash or cocky; he’d spoken it like a vow. I’d tried to dismiss it. Commanded myself to forget it. Ignored all the times I’d seen the recollection in his eyes. But some part of me had known that what was coming was bound to happen. Some part of me had known that he’d make good.
I took a step back, not to get away from him—but to position myself against the bookshelf. Some part of me knew instinctively that his kiss would knock me off my feet. Of its own volition, my hand shot out to the center of his chest. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him in. The weight of his body fell against me, trapping me in the most delicious way. A gasping breath—half surprise, half ecstasy—was all I could manage before he dipped his chin and pressed his mouth on mine.
Hot damn.
Nothing about him this time was tentative or light. He captured my lips like he meant it, pulling them in with a delicious tug. He took an indulgent suck of my bottom lip in a way that left my mouth parted. His hands came to my jaw as he slid his tongue inside.
My eyes already being closed didn’t stop them from rolling to the back of my head, and I tipped my chin upward to give him better access as he claimed my mouth. My palms, which had flattened at some point against the bookshelf, found their way around his waist and up his back. His tongue stroked me so deeply, so lavishly, that I wanted him even closer. The next thing I knew, my hands were on the back of his neck, my fingers in his hair.
We kissed for what felt like minutes, so long and so good that Buck proved himself right. What we’d done standing in that doorway downtown hadn’t been kissing at all. This...this was transcendent. It blew away every comparable moment in my life. It showed me I’d never truly been kissed before.
We finally came up for breath and I wanted him again. I wanted more than kissing. We were both out of breath and we clung together in a way that told me he did, too. Some small corner of my rational mind pierced through my disorientation, reminding me we were on a job.
“Loretta...” He finally pulled back far enough to pin me with his eyes. My God, this man was gorgeous, and strong and sinful and sweet. His deep voice ensorcelled me as thoroughly as his kiss. “I like you, Loretta. I like you a lot. But you’ve already figured that out.”
“Buck—” But I cut myself off, not knowing what I planned to say.
“I know you have objections,” he began again. “And I know we’re working on a case. And I don’t want to make you feel like every time we’re together I’m gonna pounce. The truth is, I want to kiss you every time I see you. But from here on out, I’ll control myself. It’s up to you to make the next move.”