Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Any sense of boredom I’d felt in the car was completely gone the moment Rich and I started to trail Melody from a safe distance. My heart was beating a mile a minute, and my thoughts were going even faster. I had anticipated we would keep an eye on her from the car; I hadn’t thought this would become an on-foot mission.
Maybe I should have worn my black turtleneck.
Though that might have made me stand out even more, considering just how nice out it was. The oppressive humidity of the morning was gone and had been replaced by a pleasant warmth that made it the perfect evening to be outside and enjoying the weather and festive gaiety.
That seemed to be precisely what Melody had in mind. Despite the hood covering her head and the fast-paced walk that implied she was in a hurry, we discovered very quickly as we trailed behind her that she was on her way to Main Street.
She made a brief stop at Lansing Grocery, but Rich and I held back at the edge of the parking lot. Just when I began to get antsy with worry that she might have snuck out a back door or slipped away when other customers were leaving, she reemerged. Whatever she’d purchased—if anything—was small enough she didn’t have it in a bag.
Continuing down Main Street, she slipped in and out of the crowd. Her dark hoodie made her hard to see, but Rich was locked onto her like a homing missile. I, on the other hand, was not accustomed to trailing people and kept getting distracted by the sights and sounds around me.
The band was back at it again, singing Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen.” They had brought up a female singer to do the song. The voice had a familiar quality to it, and when I squinted up toward the stage, still several blocks away, I realized why.
Daphne. My sweet little Daphne was up on the stage with the band. She had tossed on a flowy, sheer robe over her Americana ensemble and had let her blonde curls hang loose around her shoulders. I couldn’t believe the maturity in her voice as she sang the classic rock tune. She had the same raspy siren sound to her singing that Stevie did, just a little younger and a little less world-weary.
I’d had no idea Daphne even sang.
A hand clamped around mine, and I almost jerked it away out of habit until I realized it was Rich. “Come on, gumshoe, she’s getting away.”
We weaved through the crowd, and while I was no longer dawdling behind, Rich still kept my hand in his. It was nice, and familiar, even if I’d never held his hand before. This was the kind of human connection I’d been without since leaving Blaine, and it surprised me sometimes how much the simplest touch could scratch an itch for intimacy I hadn’t known I’d missed so badly.
There must have been hundreds of people on Main Street. Some I recognized and waved to out of habit. I was sure Rich would have told me not to draw attention to us, but I thought it would have been weirder if I’d pretended not to see Charlie Bravebird from the pet store or the Tanakas who owned the plant shop next to mine.
I spotted Dierdre Miller’s bright-red hair at one point but did not make an effort to get her attention or wave to her.
The air was filled with aromas that reminded me of a carnival. One booth was making kettle corn, which smelled sweet and salty and buttery all at once and made my mouth water. People passed by with cut-open bags of tortilla chips bedecked with a variety of nacho toppings like sour cream, salsa, jalape?o, and ground beef.
In the parking lot, where the summer garden center had stationed itself, a few games had been set up, including a dunk tank, where the town mayor—already sopping wet—was shouting fake insults at kids waiting in line with balls to throw at the target.
Melody didn’t stop for any of this. She dipped past a tween girl waving a sparkler and skirted around a man wearing a flag-printed cowboy hat. When she was almost to the stage, I assumed she would have to stop, but she didn’t. She took a hard left into a narrow alley between two stores, and for the first time, Rich paused.
“Son of a . . . ,” he grumbled. He gave my hand a squeeze and then led us up to the alley entrance. There was no sign of her. We started to follow anyway but had made it only a few steps into the alley entrance when the sound of sneakers on pavement announced someone coming back our direction.
I panicked, thinking we should run, but Rich held my hand firmly, and instead of running, he pulled me up close to him. One moment we were trailing a potential murderer; the next, my back was up against a brick wall, our clasped hands still crushed between our bodies, and before I could get out the what that was on my lips, Rich kissed me.
Rich Lofting was kissing me.
My ears were suddenly on fire, and my head felt as light as if it were a whole bushel of helium balloons. A tingling sensation spread from my fingers and toes all the way to the roots of my hair.
The kiss was chaste on the kiss-o-meter scale, but try to tell that to my pounding heart and Jell-O knees. The moment someone brushed past us going back in the direction of the street party, Rich backed away.
He looked as flustered as I felt.
“Sorry about that.”
Raising my hand to my mouth, I gently touched my lips as if trying to determine if I had imagined the whole thing. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about what my first kiss with Rich would be like, and in absolutely no version of those daydreams had it been like this.
Yet somehow this was better.
“Don’t you dare be sorry about that, or I’m going to be furious,” I said. “Now let’s go after her.”
Rich stared at me in dumbfounded silence for a moment before seeming to regain his composure. “Y-yeah. Yes. The person we were following, right.”
I was more than a little pleased that even a spur-of-the-moment, pretend-we’re-not-tailing-you kiss could melt my bones and turn Rich’s brain to mush. It indicated that when we did it again under different circumstances, the chemistry would probably be off the charts.
We headed to the end of the alley opposite where Melody had gone. Whoever had come back through, Rich was pretty certain it hadn’t been her, so we continued on our way. We were now slightly behind, but that didn’t seem to matter; she was clearly heading west, which was the way she’d been going down Main, so unless that was just to throw us off her scent and she was doubling back, she was still going west. At no point had Melody turned around while we’d been on her tail, and I was pretty sure we were either far enough behind or well concealed by simply being locals at a street fair. She had no reason to believe she was being followed and didn’t know who Rich was. We had plenty going in our favor on that front.
As we continued west down Beech Street, the din of the crowd diminished, even though we were only a block from Main and the party. The band was still playing, and though it felt like we had been at this for hours, Daphne was just finishing the final bars of her song. They kept her up for one more, and once the Stevie Nicks cover ended, she started to sing Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” It did not escape my awareness that Daphne hadn’t even been alive when these songs were released, but she sang them as if they were radio standards.
Not only was it quieter on Beech, it was also darker. As we continued westward away from the party, we entered a more residential area. Here the smell of barbecue wafted toward us from back patios, and despite the lateness of the hour, kids ran around on the street, glow sticks waving. The fireworks were slated to start around eleven, and folks were already sitting on lawn chairs in their front yards, ready for a convenient and comfortable view of the light show that would be launched from the safety of the city hall parking lot a few blocks away from Main.
Rich lightly touched my arm and pointed up ahead, where a figure was moving at a steady pace down the sidewalk. The way she walked and the black blob of her hooded head told me that we’d caught up to Melody again, but Rich slowed his step, and I instinctively understood why. There was no easy way to blend in here, no crowd to hide within. If Melody looked back, we needed to look like we were just out for a casual evening stroll.
I was grateful there were so many people still outside bustling around, because it lent some credence to our projected cover story. Lots of people were out for walks or going back and forth across the street to check in with neighbors. We didn’t look out of place.
We trailed behind Melody for another three blocks. The residential lots steadily got wider, and finally it was pretty clear we were almost on the edge of town. The street ended, turning back toward Main, and Melody kept going, even where the sidewalk became a sandy dirt trail headed into the woods.
Here we drew to a stop, because there was simply no way we could keep going after her into the trees and not make it very obvious we were following her.
“Where the heck is she even going?” I asked, almost as much to myself as to Rich.
He glanced around the area as if asking himself the same question, then his gaze locked on something just off the road, and he nudged me in that direction.
The sign had seen better days, with peeling paint around the letters and an overall sun-bleached fade that forced me to squint at it. It didn’t help that it was surrounded by a thick swath of vines. But once I made out the words, one mystery was solved, only to be replaced by a brand-new one.
Melody had gone into the Bullock Memorial Bird and Wildlife Conservation Area.
The new mystery was—why?