Chapter Sixteen
The apartment above Honor’s Edge Investigations Office
Jill stood outside the back door of Honor’s Edge Investigations questioning all her choices.
Cal tended to bring that out in her, didn’t he?
And for some reason, you like the guy.
Which was neither here nor there. This was not a social call, even if she could have sent all this information in an email. Face-to-face was just sometimes better.
Or so she told herself.
Besides, she hadn’t even come just to speak with him. She would share everything with Sam and Nate too. Especially in times like these, when the more brains working on something the better. They could all brainstorm.
But Cal’s number was the one she’d texted when the front door hadn’t been open when she’d arrived. When she’d gone around to the back, and that door had been locked too, even though Nate and Sam’s vehicles were there.
She wasn’t quite sure why the office wasn’t open. It left her a little worried. Especially when nearly five minutes later, Cal still hadn’t responded to her text.
Maybe she should just get back in her car and go to the diner. Email him all her notes on all the phone calls she’d made, then work on her book. Forget any worry.
Whatever was going on wasn’t hers to worry about. Even if Cal had insisted she was a part of this and all that. She should keep herself scarce. Help where she could when directly asked, but otherwise—
The door jerked open, and Jill flinched in surprise.
Cal looked rough. He hadn’t shaved, his hair was sticking up at all sorts of angles and getting a little long, all things considered. He had circles under his eyes and, strangest of all, a sock on one foot and not the other.
“Is everything all right?”
“No,” was his quick and harsh answer, but he moved out of the doorway and gestured her to follow him inside.
When he walked up the stairs, she felt like she had no choice but to follow him up there too. The door on the second floor was open, and he stalked inside.
She glanced back downstairs. Quiet and dark. She figured they’d talk in the office, but she supposed if Sam wasn’t open yet, and technically the office wasn’t Cal’s, the apartment upstairs made sense.
She’d never been up here. Hadn’t anticipated being up here. Cal was living up here, so it felt like a private place and going into it was … weird.
Not that she could fully articulate why. Cal had been in the tiny cabin up on the mountain more times than she could count, and that was her living space. So why shouldn’t she be invited into his?
It was cute. Small, but the old historical building details gave it a kind of charm. From where she stood by the door, she could see most of the apartment.
Some of that cute was detracted by a very large TV dominating one wall in the living room and, across from it, a kind of recliner that looked exactly like the kind of chair one would expect a single man who made a decent amount of money to have in his apartment.
Leather, but weirdly modern. With a cupholder.
The kitchen was a little galley separated from the living room by a counter. He had a very fancy-looking coffeemaker taking up half the space there, seemingly incongruous to the older appliances.
The giant rug over the slightly uneven wood floor from kitchen counter to wall of windows was pretty though. A misty kind of watercolor pattern. Maybe Sam had left that, because it certainly didn’t match anything else.
The windows that dominated the living room wall were beautiful too.
And Jill bet it was kind of neat to look down on Main Street and see the goings on of a spring morning.
Feel the very slow bustle of Marietta waking up.
So different than Boston as a whole, but maybe not totally different from her little neighborhood back home.
But she wasn’t here for the view, or reminiscing, something she was reminded of harshly when Cal spoke.
“Nate was arrested.”
Jill turned from the windows to look at him and found herself utterly speechless. Arrested. But…
Cal stood in his kitchen, gripping the counter in a kind of wide stance that had him hanging his head down in between.
He looked so lost and alone. She took a few steps toward him, some inner desire to comfort that she managed to stop herself from offering.
Because they were casual friends … not hugging friends.
“I can’t figure out what kind of fucking evidence they could have to get this warrant. Everything I know about is circumstantial. No self-respecting judge issues on that.” He looked up at her then, dark eyes shadowed and intense. “What the hell do they think they have?”
“You haven’t slept,” she said instead of answering his question.
A wave of sympathy swam through her. She’d seen Cal in a lot of less-than-complimentary situations.
She’d seen him lost in his own memories, terrified by his own trauma.
She had seen him furious and determined, like with his father’s case last winter, but she had never seen this kind of baffled frustration.
He looked around the apartment as if surprised to discover her observation was true. “Sleep? No. Too much to do.”
“But surely you need some sleep to do it effectively.”
His gaze sharpened. “My brother is in jail. For murder.”
Okay, so she wasn’t going to be able to convince him to take care of himself. “Have you eaten?” she asked, moving toward the kitchen. “I could make you some breakfast.” He’d have better luck if she went and got him something from the diner, but she didn’t think he should be alone. Not just yet.
She marched over to his refrigerator and opened it. There was next to nothing in there. Not even eggs. She could have scrambled some eggs.
“Aly rub off on you or something?”
She laughed in spite of herself and closed the fridge. “I don’t quite have Aly’s kitchen skills, even after taking care of Grandma, but I can make some toast or something. Do you have bread?”
He sighed. Moved to a cabinet and pulled out a loaf of bread. “I’ll handle it,” he muttered. “You eat yet?”
“Well, no, but I’ll just get something at the diner later.”
“Sit,” he ordered.
She didn’t think he should be the one ordering her around under the circumstances, but it was his apartment, and he knew where everything was. Besides, if he actually ate, she supposed she could accept being ordered around.
She took a seat on the stool on the other side of the counter while he moved around the kitchen. He put the bread in the toaster, fooled around with his giant coffee machine until it began to sputter.
When the toast popped, he didn’t ask her what she wanted on it.
Just slathered one piece in peanut butter, and the other in regular butter.
He handed her the one with butter, then took one of the now-filled mugs of coffee and put it in front of her.
Before she could even say thank you, he returned to the fridge and pulled out some milk. “I don’t have cream,” he said.
For a moment, she didn’t have anything to say. He knew how she preferred her toast and coffee? How? Why?
She didn’t voice those questions, but they must have been obvious because he answered them anyway.
“I’ve been at the diner with you when you’ve eaten breakfast or ordered coffee more than once.”
Right. Sure. After all, she knew next to nothing about his food preferences except that he wasn’t currently drinking alcohol; she was pretty sure, anyway.
Which was neither here nor there.
“So, why were you coming by today?” he asked. He didn’t do anything to doctor his own coffee. Just drank it black.
“Well, I talked to a bunch of different people at the Livingston and Bozeman police departments. I don’t think I found anything of help, or anything you don’t know.
Basically, they told me that if someone called with the information I gave them, they would transfer them to a detective.
But it wouldn’t be a high priority without a specific, criminal event.
I compiled a list of all the detectives at both departments, but I don’t really know what to do with it. ”
Cal raked a hand through his hair, making it even more unruly. Which might have been distractingly cute if this weren’t such an awful situation.
“Sam made contact with Jules’s friend yesterday. Maybe we can get the list to her, see if she remembers Jules talking about any of them.”
“That’d be a step.”
“I’m so fucking tired of steps,” he muttered.
She wished she could ease his frustration somehow, but she didn’t know what else to do except keep taking steps. “Well, if this were a book, I’d have better ideas. Sadly, real life sucks.”
“Boy does it,” he muttered, but then his gaze kind of sharpened. He stared at her from across the counter. He wasn’t touching his toast, but he took a big sip of the coffee. “If you were writing this, who would have done it?”
“Oh. Cal. That’s … so silly.”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
He looked so serious, so intent. It made her nervous and, well, worried. That he wasn’t handling this well. Not that there was any way to handle this well, but maybe humoring him would help in some way.
So she did what he asked and sipped the coffee—amazing, really, even with lower octane dairy than she preferred—and considered the problem at hand like a story, rather than this real life with real people who she knew and liked. Characters. How would she write it? “The husband is too obvious.”
“Yeah,” Cal agreed.
“But in real life, the obvious is usually—”
“Jill, humor me. Plot it out like it’s a book. Don’t worry about real life.”
She blew out a breath. It felt ridiculous, but if he wanted to be humored, she supposed she should oblige. He was clearly a wreck, and this wouldn’t help anything, but if it soothed him in some way, maybe … maybe that was help enough.