7. Wanna Know a Secret?
SEVEN
Wanna Know a Secret?
Harry
H e knew it was a mistake by the time they were half a block down from the station heading toward the Double D.
It wasn’t lost on Harry well before Dern’s downfall that he was a popular guy.
Whether they liked it or not, people needed police.
You had a cop you didn’t trust, you cleaved to the cop you did.
He also knew by the turnout at Winnie’s funeral.
She was well-liked, but a lot of those people were there for him.
So, years later, Harry should have known that walking down the street with a beautiful woman, when he had not done something like that since Winnie died, was going to cause a stir in a small town where people got into other people’s business like it was their job.
And he saw and felt a lot of eyes on them, most of them not trying to hide it.
But Lillian needed to eat, so he couldn’t turn back.
And part of him, a part he wasn’t quite at one with, a part he wasn’t allowing fully to surface, but a part that was still there, thought they’d have to get used to it, so they might as well start now.
Including Lillian.
Though, to give Lillian a break, when they got to the diner, he led them to a booth at the side, not easily visible from the front windows.
They’d barely settled across from each other before Heidi, their waitress, was there.
She opened her mouth, took one look at Lillian after she pulled off her sunglasses, then Heidi’s gaze shot to Harry.
Harry subtly shook his head.
Heidi’s eyes grew melancholy before she blanked it and turned back to Lillian.
“Hey, Lill,” she greeted cheerily. “The usual?”
And there it was.
Lillian lived her life, she was a part of Misted Pines, she had a usual for breakfast at the Double D, and Harry had been so out of it, he’d never noticed her.
Christ.
He wasn’t ever going to share this shit with Doc. He’d never hear the end of it.
“I think I just want coffee,” Lillian ordered.
“She’ll have a full stack of cashew granola pancakes, and a side of bacon,” Harry ordered for her.
Heidi pressed her lips together, but now her eyes were dancing.
“Harry, I can’t eat all that,” Lillian protested.
Harry worked out daily and ate healthy. He did this because his job demanded it. He did this because he represented the sheriff’s department on the whole. And he did it because he didn’t like to feel bloated, weighed down or lackadaisical, which eating shit made him feel.
His mother used to say he was Popeye; spinach gave him superpowers.
She was right.
He allowed himself to splurge seven days of the year: his birthday, the Fourth of July, Halloween (he had a weakness for candy), Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and if he was invited to a Memorial Day party (which he always was).
In the meantime, he’d have a beer, or a drink, he’d chow down on a burger or dig into a steak, and he couldn’t eat a baked potato without all the fixin’s, but other than that, Harry ate clean.
“I’ll finish what you don’t eat,” he said.
“I see you dragged in the competitor’s product to mock us,” Heidi noted, dipping her head to the Aromacobana cup he still held.
And he was glad she did, because it made Lillian emit a short chuckle.
“I got two sips left so I’ll need another,” he told Heidi.
“On it,” Heidi said and walked away.
“I have some things for you,” Lillian told him, taking his attention to her.
She was pulling an envelope out of her purse.
She slid it across the table to him. “Pictures of Mom and Dad. Just in case you need them for some reason.” She hesitated, rolling her lips together. “I’ll, um…want them back.”
He took the envelope and tucked it carefully into his breast pocket, saying, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll make certain you get them back.”
She stared at his pocket like she was going to leap across the table and reclaim the envelope.
And Harry felt that with her. He knew how precious they became when pictures and possessions were all you had left of someone you loved.
She got a handle on it, though she didn’t look him in the eye as she said, “I also talked to their dentist. Well, not to their actual dentist. He retired. But the practice is there. They think they might still have their records. I mean, they don’t. Not at the office. But they might have them in a storage unit, and they said they’d send someone to look. I’ve given permission to send them to the station if they have them. I don’t know if I actually needed to do that, but, I just…I don’t know…”
“Felt the need to do something,” he filled in for her.
“Yeah,” she mumbled. She took a visible breath and asked, “Will that make things go faster?”
“Depends on if Idaho has Rapid DNA, which has cut DNA identification time down by a lot. Though, usually a dental ID goes faster. I just didn’t expect after all this time?—”
She cut him off. “I get it.”
“Dentists usually only keep records for six years after a patient’s last visit,” Harry said quietly. “If they can locate them, we can significantly speed this up.”
“Great,” she replied, though she definitely didn’t think it was great.
Heidi showed with their coffees, set them down, and again walked away.
“Otherwise, how are you hanging in there?” he asked.
“You have to ask?” she pointed to her eyes while still avoiding his. “I put cucumbers on them, and green tea bags when the cukes didn’t work, and finally a cold cloth. And I still look like I ran eyes wide open through a dust storm.”
“Crying is healing,” he said.
“Well, I should be healed by now,” she muttered, reaching for the cream and dropping some in her mug. She then slid it across the table toward him and finished, “But I’m not.”
One thing Harry learned losing Winnie, and giving death notices, and attending funerals of people he knew, and victims he didn’t, there was nothing anyone could say that made it better.
Nothing.
When you were stuck in grief, the only thing that helped even the slightest was knowing people were thinking of you and they gave a shit.
And he was doing that.
But fuck him, he wished he could do more.
“Though, you know, they were together,” she said softly, stirring her coffee. “If it’s them, that means they died together, and were buried together, and have been resting together ever since. And they’d want it like that.”
She lifted her cup, took a sip, put it down, and finally gave him her direct gaze, and it absolutely gutted him to see the depths of sorrow dug deep there.
“It doesn’t help a lot, but it helps a little,” she concluded.
“That’s good,” he murmured, sipping his own coffee.
“Also, if it’s them, knowing why they didn’t get in touch. Just…”—she shrugged—“ knowing . You hear people talk about closure. You watch those true crime shows and the victims’ families and friends talking about getting answers, and how that helps. And now I can say I guess it does. I mean, we don’t know yet, not for sure. But I just…I just…”—she cleared her throat—“I just can’t help but think it’ll feel better because I know where they are and I’ll get them back. Not like I want, but they’ll be back with me.”
“That makes complete sense,” Harry said. “And if it’s them, we’ll get them back as soon as we can.”
Her lip quivered, as did her nostrils, but she sucked in a breath and got a lock on it.
Harry decided to move them out of this.
“Did you take off work today?”
Her head twitched like that was a surprise question, then she said, “No. I kinda make my own hours.”
“What do you do?”
“I’ve got a property management company.” Her lips tipped up just a tad. “That makes it sound fancy. It’s not fancy. I don’t have an office or anything. But I look after fourteen properties of people who have weekend or holiday places in and around MP. I rake the pine needles, make sure the appliances and furnace and water heater are running, the roof isn’t leaking, rodents aren’t getting in. I close them down for the winter, but head out regularly and have a look around to make sure all is good. And when they come, I go in and tidy them, turn on the furnace, stock them with groceries.” She gave him a slightly bigger smile. “I don’t do windows or toilets or hedge clippers. If they want a full clean, I work with my friend Kay’s cleaning business, and Jenna’s husband does landscaping, so if there’s anything like that, I contract out to Trey. But I will run a vacuum or dust and wipe down counters.”
She took another sip of coffee and Harry was pleased as hell she warmed to her theme and kept talking.
“I got a hankering to blow out the back wall of my house and give myself a proper master bedroom with walk-in closet and another bathroom, and on the other side a TV room or maybe a big mud room, so I took on some Vrbo and Airbnb properties.”
She made a face and kept right on going.
“Found out real fast people treat other’s possessions with a disrespect I wasn’t expecting. And the owners of those are cheap as all heck. Kay also wouldn’t take the cleaning jobs for what they wanted to pay, especially for the mess people left behind. Since most of them ran through every cleaning service in the county, Kay eventually got some of the business at her rates, not what they think her rates should be. But I was always getting calls at all hours about people being loud or doing stupid stuff, and neighbors getting mad, and renters breaking stuff that had to be fixed. It was a hassle, so I let those properties go.”
Harry knew all about Vrbo and Airbnb renters, and she was not wrong. There were some real assholes who rented those properties, behaving like they rented a house on the moon that no one else would ever use, not something someone owned and gave a shit about with neighbors who had to put up with their crap.
“Did you get your master bedroom before you did?” Harry asked.
Lillian shook her head. “No. And just to say, I didn’t manage to get my degree, but I did take a course in editing and proofreading. The property management thing wasn’t exactly cutting it, so I had to find something that bridged the gap. I had some clients, independent authors. After I lost the vacation rentals, I picked up a few more writers. I’ll be saving maybe another year, then I’ll have enough to get that project done.”
Like her parents, she saved, then when she had the cash, she’d take the plunge.
It was a smart way to live.
And learning all this gave Harry some reasons why he might not have noticed her, because part of her work was scattered across the county, and all of it was very solitary.
Seeing as it appeared they ran the course of that conversational line, he changed it.
“I went to see Rita Zowkower yesterday.”
Her eyes got wide. “Really?”
“Is that a problem?” he asked.
Her gaze went vague while she thought about that.
“I haven’t spoken directly to Rita in, God…I don’t know how many years.” Her attention refocused on him. “She blocked me on her phone ages ago.”
“We’re actively looking for Willie, Lillian, so I’m gonna ask again if that family has given you trouble.”
“Rita runs those boys like a general,” she told him something he knew. “But I’m no threat to her, and she doesn’t have time for people who, in her estimation, don’t matter. The minute I kicked Willie out, I ceased to matter. That said, I didn’t matter much when Willie was with me, either.”
Heidi showed again and put Lillian’s pancakes and a plate of bacon in front of her.
Regardless of her protestations about not being hungry, Lillian grabbed the syrup and her knife and dug right in.
“You don’t have to answer this, it’s none of my business, but you and Willie don’t seem like a fit,” Harry noted.
Smearing whipped butter and pouring syrup at the same time, Lillian gave it up freely.
“I was out at the Halfway having drinks with Molly.” She took her attention from her pancakes and gave him a small smile. “And yes, sheriff, I was underage.”
“Think the statute of limitations on that has expired too,” he joked, and was pleased as all hell that got him a full smile, and honest to God, he’d never seen a smile so damned pretty.
After giving him that, Lillian turned back to her food. “I really didn’t want anything to do with him because, okay, he’s good-looking, but he started chatting me up and it was clear he was on the make. So I shut it down. Somehow, he got my number and called to ask me out for coffee the next day. I don’t know why. He was charming, and I was freaked about Mom and Dad being gone, feeling lonely, and I guess that made me stupid. So I went. Before we even finished half our coffee, he asked me to dinner the next night. There was something sweet about that, how obvious he was about liking to spend time with me, wanting more.”
Harry never thought in his life Willie Zowkower would teach him something, but he sure as fuck filed that away.
She forked into her pancakes, took a bite, and after she swallowed, she looked at him and said, “I think it kinda reminded me of my parents. How keen he was to be with me. I fell in love fast, convinced what they found was what I found.”
“Honey,” he murmured sympathetically.
“I did love him, Harry,” she replied quietly. “I mean, it was real. But I wanted what my parents had, and it wasn’t that. Not to mention, Willie’s family was constantly in our lives. They’d knock on the door at all hours. They were always trying to get him involved in stuff he never told me about, but I knew if it came from a knock at two in the morning, it wasn’t right. He just,”—she flipped one hand one way, her fork the other—“couldn’t say no.”
She took another bite, put her fork down, went for a rasher of bacon, munched it and returned to him.
“Rita had a definite hierarchy in her family, and she expected me to take the role she assigned, that being letting Willie do what he wanted, support his brothers and father, and just cook the food for the table and keep her son satisfied in bed.”
Holy fuck.
“Jesus, was she that open with that shit?” Harry asked.
“Entirely,” Lillian answered. “This was not what my parents had, and Willie was too weak to stick up for me or put up boundaries. I eventually got fed up with it and kicked him out.”
Harry snatched a piece of bacon and got another smile from her when he did.
Then she started talking again. “The thing that makes me sad about it is, in that family, Willie was the odd man out. I hurt for him, knowing he knew he didn’t fit. I sometimes wonder if he fell so fast for me because I had my own house, and he thought he could escape. And honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did something blatant, something big that would make Rita send him on the run, doing it just for an excuse to get away from all the oppression.”
Harry couldn’t say he’d noticed Willie was the dark sheep, but he’d never been married to him.
What he could say was that none of the Zowkowers had ever done anything as brazen as fucking a man up with plenty of witnesses, necessitating him getting out of town fast, and staying out.
So what Lillian said definitely held merit.
On this thought, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, looked that way and noted Kimmy, MP’s lovable but crotchety and criminally (though, regrettably not officially) nosy loon, bearing down on them.
He gave her a look.
She shot one back.
Then her gaze turned to Lillian, who peered over her shoulder to see what had Harry’s attention.
Kimmy took one look at Lillian and her swollen eyes, she stopped dead, pivoted and marched right out.
“Oh my God,” Lillian breathed, and Harry looked to her to see her beautiful face filled with marvel. “We discovered a way to stop Kimmy from bellying all the way up in our business. I just have to learn to cry on cue.”
He laughed softly and she smiled at him as he did.
She then frowned, but it was obviously fake.
She did this before she said, “You suck.”
He nearly barked out a laugh, but instead asked, “Why’s that?”
She pointed at her plate with her fork. “Because I was hungry.”
“Not a fan of being wrong?” he teased.
The frown that earned was not fake.
“Not a fan of why you knew I was hungry.”
He wasn’t sure if she was talking about his job, or his understanding of grief due to his dead wife.
She told him. “MP is small, nothing in Fret County much bigger, but you sure do see your fair share of crap, don’t you, sheriff?”
“I sure do, honey.”
She scrunched her nose.
It was bottom line adorable.
He leaned into the table toward her. “Wanna know a secret?”
She nodded.
“It’s going to make me sound insane.”
“Sock it to me,” she invited.
“There’s not another job on Earth I’d want to do.”
For a beat, her face froze.
Then it got soft, those startling green eyes of hers got warm, and she whispered, “On the floor of my tiny bathroom.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Harry. Just…I see that because you’re real good at it.”
Jesus, why did that feel so damned fantastic?
“Thanks, sweetheart.”
Pink hit Lillian’s cheeks and she returned to her pancakes.
Harry let her.
And he watched her devour them as he sipped his coffee.