Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The bar was basically empty and had been for the past hour. It felt strange to stand there when the only other person in the room was the mysterious reader who enjoyed her privacy, her glass of wine, and her latest adventure novel.
I couldn’t see what the new book in her hands was titled, but I could tell from even this distance that it wasn’t the same book as before. I glanced at the clock and stifled a groan as I realized only ten minutes had passed since the last time I checked.
Everyone who usually came to the bar—all the regulars and semi-regulars—were at the Alexandra Tate Memorial.
There was no doubt in my mind now that the body Rogue and I found in that river belonged to Lexi. I shuddered at the cold feeling of water on my hands and around my ankles, hair twining between my fingers.
Even after I left the river behind, coaxing Rogue to follow me back to the car with copious amounts of treats and promises of dinner, I was left to wonder how he had known that Lexi’s body was there in the first place.
Had another foster taken him on that hike and he’d simply smelled the decomposing body, or had he actually been there when Lexi died?
He had to have been there, I’d decided even as I loaded him up in the back seat of the Accord. He was too precise in locating her body and too insistent about coming back here over and over again to reach her.
He was connected to this case and I would even go so far as to guess that he’d belonged to Lexi, except no one who spoke of her ever talked about her owning a puppy. And he would have been just a puppy when she died.
I didn’t know anything for certain, and I probably never would, but on the drive back to the cottage my mind wandered back to Kenna’s question.
What made her change her mind?
Lexi had planned to meet Kenna for coffee, to share her big news. Kenna assumed the big news was that she was leaving. Her things packed away and her rent paid up pointed to her leaving.
But we didn’t know for certain where Lexi was planning to go, or why. She very well could have been going on an extended vacation, or—no, it didn’t make any sense.
If Lexi had adopted Rogue at the same time she was making these big changes in her life, her friends and family might not have known about him yet, but his presence in her life back then didn’t explain why she was dead now.
Another flash ran through my mind, the feeling of pulling wet hair off my fingers with a doggy bag causing me to gag a little. I had a fairly strong stomach, but knowing how long Lexi had been down there under the water, slowly falling apart, was almost more than I could bare.
No doubt the Bend Police Department would keep the body’s discovery a secret for several more days as they worked to identify it, and even then, it would only be close friends and family who found out.
The news would still spread like wildfire, and all the people currently grieving at that memorial would be swept into the current of grief once more as the truth finally came to light.
But the case would no longer be cold, and the Bend Police Department would be able to give her family the answers they were looking for.
The door to the bar swung open, and I stood at attention, curious who would be the first to start trickling in.
The familiar face of Gracie Shepherd walking through the door put me on my back foot. The memorial was tonight, wasn’t it?
As I took her in, I confirmed that she was indeed dressed in all black, her face a mask of misery as she walked up to the bar and sat down.
“Double vodka, neat,” she said. From her tone and posture, I could tell she wasn’t interested in having a conversation or answering any questions, so I simply poured the vodka into a glass and passed it over to her, waving away her credit card.
“It’s on the house,” I told her.
She made a sour face, like I had managed to ruin the only good thing left going for her. Still, she took the drink and shot it back, barely flinching at the burn of alcohol that I knew I would have made a face at.
“Another,” she said, and I frowned.
“Hey, are you—” I started but quickly stopped at the glare she sent my way.
Of course she wasn’t okay.
“They found her,” Gracie said. Her voice was rough and wobbled as she spoke, staring down at her hands where they were wrapped around the empty glass.
“I couldn’t. I just couldn’t stand there listening to people talking about Lexi and reminiscing. Not when I knew her body was lying in the morgue. They want to keep it quiet for now. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but I just?—”
I let the silence hang between us, trying to look surprised that Lexi’s body was in the morgue when last I was supposed to know, she was still missing. But Gracie wasn’t paying me much attention, still at a loss for words, so I switched tactics.
“What good is a bartender if they can’t keep your secrets?” I said with a conspiratorial wink, grabbing the bottle of vodka. “And to keep the drinks flowing.”
I poured another double shot into her glass as I spoke. I hated to see what my poorly timed discovery of Lexi’s remains had done to her, and Trick had instructed me that Gracie’s drinks were on the house tonight anyway.
“Thanks,” Gracie said with a little sniff. I turned away and pretended to be wiping down some counters to give her a little bit of privacy.
Over the next hour, she sipped at her second double vodka and ordered a lemon drop afterwards, sitting slumped in that same seat and not looking up or showing any indication that she wanted to talk.
I couldn’t blame her. I knew better than most what it was like to lose a family member, but I’d never been faced with the ongoing ache of getting that person back piece by piece over the course of several years.
By the time 8 p.m. rolled around, the last of Gracie’s lemon drop was leaving condensation on the bar, and the napkin beside her was damp with tears I’d pretended not to notice. Just as she was sliding the glass towards me—likely about to ask for another drink—the door to the bar opened once more.
A large group of people walked in. They were all wearing black, and Trick was leading the charge, the remnants of the memorial party looking for a place to continue drinking in Lexi’s honor.
“Gracie, there you are!” Trick said as he sauntered up behind the counter. He paused, taking her in and quickly realizing that she wasn’t in the mood for his lighthearted banter. “Oh, Grace, tell me this isn’t where you’ve been this whole time. You shouldn’t be grieving alone tonight.”
“Patrick Cavanaugh, I have been grieving alone for three years,” Gracie said, a scowl darkening her face.
She stood up, slamming her hand on the bar.
“While everyone else in this god-forsaken town has been pretending what happened to Lexi was some tragic accident I’ve known the truth the whole time.
My cousin was killed in the prime of her life.
I just couldn’t sit there a minute longer listening to everybody pretending like it’s fine. ”
“No one thinks it’s fine,” Trick said in a gentle voice that was in direct contrast with the fierce look he sent her way.
“And you’re not alone, either. Kenna has been looking everywhere for you.
You could have at least answered one of her calls or texted her that you were okay.
She came all the way back here just to make sure you weren’t alone. ”
“Well, maybe instead of wasting her time trying to keep me from falling apart,” Gracie said with a snarl, “she should have been doing what I hired her and her waste of a mentor to do.”
“All right,” I said as I placed a hand on Trick’s chest to keep him from stepping forward.
The bar was between the two of them, but in only a few short sentences, it looked like they were about to come to blows.
Considering I was the one who had found Lexi and kicked off this entire emotional outburst with the poor timing of my discovery, I figured it was my responsibility to calm things down as best I could.
“Trick, please call Kenna and let her know that Gracie is okay. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take the rest of the night off to make sure she gets home safe. ”
Trick and Gracie stared each other down for a long moment as I waited for him to answer and she waited for him to escalate. Thankfully, he blinked and turned to look at me instead.
“Good idea,” he said, turning his back on Gracie. “Get her out of here before I say something I’ll regret.”
“I don’t need you babysitting me,” Gracie snapped, staring at Trick’s back where he had joined the remainder of the memorial party. I simply untied my apron and set it on the shelf behind the counter before giving her a no-nonsense look.
“Listen, I’m cutting you off, because five shots in two hours is plenty,” I told her, refusing to take her tone personally.
“And that’s not even taking into consideration anything you may have had to drink before you got here.
Besides, do you really want to stick around here where everyone is living in a world you can’t go back to anymore? ”
“What do you know?” Gracie asked. “You’re not one of us, and you’re never going to be.”
I stared at her, at a loss for words.
“You can’t just shove yourself in all the places that Lexi used to be and act like you fit,” Gracie continued as she scowled at me with unfocused eyes. “You don’t belong and you know it.”
“Yeah, you’ve had enough tonight,” I said, realizing that even this wasn’t about me. I hadn’t been trying to ‘shove myself in all the places Lexi used to be’ at all, but the fresh wound of recovering her cousin’s remains had clearly twisted the facts in her alcohol-soaked mind.
“I’ve had enough of you tonight,” Gracie shot back.
I worried that with all the vitriol she would put up a fight about leaving, but she remained silent as I led her out the door and over to my car, ignoring her protests as she attempted to get in her own truck.
Once she was safely buckled into the passenger seat, I started the car and silently followed her directions as she guided me to her house.
Silence fell between us aside from the occasional “Left here,” and then I was pulling into the driveway of a single-story ranch house that had a pink scooter leaning against the wall next to the door and a two-car garage with rose bushes on either side.
I expected her to get out then, but she just sat there, staring at her garage door with a blank expression.
“It’s worse,” Gracie said as she dropped her shoulders and her guard, a look of despair in her eyes.
“The knowing. It’s worse than not knowing.
I just wish I could go back and never look for her in the first place.
I could have spent the rest of my life thinking that she’d simply run away.
Instead I have to live with the knowledge that she was drowning in that river all this time. ”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
Gracie mumbled, “I don’t mean that. I just... I just don’t understand. What kind of sick bastard does that to someone?”
“Sorry—I,” I start, but draw a blank on how to respond. “What?”
“The preliminary report,” Gracie whispered, taking my hand in hers and leaning in with the fiercest expression I’d ever seen.
“I wasn’t supposed to know, but I saw it anyway.
She died of blunt force trauma to the back of her head, but her bones had holes in them.
Drill marks in her iliac crest that were shallow but clearly man made and postmortem.
How did that happen? She was in the river.
She disappeared off the trail and she was in the river, and then somebody screwed holes in her bones? What happened to her out there?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back, shaking my head and gripping Gracie’s hand tightly. “But they have her body now. They have new evidence. I’m certain the police will figure it out.”
“The police? The ones who wasted all that time coming up empty? They tell me it was some good Samaritan who found her, not the police. The police couldn’t figure their way out of a wet paper bag,” Gracie spat, and then threw herself out the car and stormed up the stairs to her door without another word.