Twenty-Four
PINE STREET brEW is mostly empty in the late afternoon, so we have no problem scoring our favorite table by the window.
Taylor McCarter Webb is dressed as simply as always: navy sweater accented by a white shirt collar, jeans, old-fashioned black Converse sneakers.
I’ve never come out and said this to her, but I’ve always thought she was beautiful, even before she actually was, when she was still a skinny tomboy, back when you could still call a girl that and not have somebody put the cuffs on you for it.
“Okay, what were you doing there?” I ask when we have iced coffees in front of us.
She waggles a finger at me. “You first.”
“How come you always get to make the rules?”
“I’m the girl,” she says. “So how’d you happen to end up at school today?”
“It all pretty much happened the way I told Nash Hader,” I say. “I was out driving around, maybe even hoping I’d see you on the road, and then decided to head over to the stadium.”
“First of all, Silas Tucker,” she says, “you don’t have to hope to run into me. All you have to do is call. Or return a call, as the case may be.”
“I meant to call you back after EJ gave me the message, I really did. Then I just up and forgot.”
She slaps her forehead and gives me one of her better smiles. She has a lot of them. “Wow, you forgetting to return a phone call,” she says. “Did not see that coming.”
“You always did say I lack a few basic social skills.”
“A few?” Taylor says. “I swear, the only place you’ve ever been truly organized is in a huddle.”
Then she tells me she’d just finished a camp run, had parked her bus in the middle school lot, and was driving past the high school when she spotted my truck.
“I saw what I saw, Tay,” I tell her. “And that punk was right about one thing: I did lose it, but not because he hurt my feelings.”
She smiles again. “I frankly couldn’t tell who got the worst of it, those boys or that hoopty truck of theirs.”
“I didn’t even tell the sheriff that there were a couple of high school girls in that truck before he showed up to the party,” I say, “before I told them to scoot.” I look out the window and then back at her.
“And all of a sudden, I was thinking about those missing girls and the drugs that are killing kids around here… and then it all just ganged up on me before I ganged up on them.”
“One against three,” she says. “Not much of a fair fight when the one is you.”
“That’s apparently the way Sheriff Hader saw it,” I say. “Even though he didn’t actually see a damn thing.”
“Burt hates that man,” Taylor says. “There’s this ongoing turf war between county and local in this town, and most of the time Nash Hader would rather be tougher on my husband than he is on somebody like Briar Crockett.”
“How’s Burt doing with all that’s going on?”
“The best way to say it is that what killed you this afternoon has been killing him for a lot longer,” she says.
“When he came home the other night after Molly Brendle had disappeared, he said he was the one who’d been driving around, trying to calm himself down, that’s how much he wanted to hit somebody. ”
I smile at her now. “Know the feeling.”
She pauses and says, “By the way? Pretty sure I recognized the boys in that truck.”
“You got names on them?” I ask. “Because I’d like to have names on them.”
She shakes her head. “I saw them hanging around the field, or outside the gym, is all, after some games last year. They should have been carrying signs about what they were trying to do. Burt even tried to light them up one time after a football game, but when he did his stop-and-frisk thing, they were all clean. Said they were from Old Mill and were just there for the game.”
“So they’re from around here.”
“Isn’t everybody, Silas?”
I tell her then about Leamon Ridenour’s visit to the farm, all the hurt he’d brought with him.
“I heard he was there,” she says.
“You’ve got better intel than EJ. Do you think it might do some good if I went to talk to Briar?”
She takes a long time before she answers, her face serious. Almost solemn. One thing has never changed with her, at least from where I’m sitting. I can almost hear her thinking, same as she used to tell me she could hear me growing.
Finally, she says, “My husband isn’t just a good man, Silas. He’s a great cop, even having to work around a jerk like Nash Hader. But if Burt can’t get anywhere with all the bad things happening around here, what makes you think you can?”
A couple of high school girls come through the door, giggling. They don’t look any older than the girls from the truck. Or much older than Holly Ridenour was when she was taken out of her own house that night.
“This isn’t football, Silas,” she says. “Nobody knows better than me what a natural-born leader you always were, from high school on, and why quarterback was the only position you ever could have played, not just because of your arm but because of your need to be in charge of things. But this isn’t something where you can play hero ball. ”
“I’m trying hard to tell myself the same thing.”
Another smile. “Try harder,” she says again. “You have to know that if you get sideways with a man like Briar Crockett, he will run you over for real. And then back up and do it again just for the fun of it.” She leans forward and uses both of her hands to cover one of mine.
“Worrying about my husband is already a full-time job,” Taylor says. “I’ll need more bandwidth to worry about you, too.”
Neither one of us speaks, until I say, “How are you doing, Tay?”
“You mean, enough about you?”
“You know me better than that.”
“Sometimes better than you know yourself.”
I say, “Not just sometimes.”
I hear her phone buzz. She takes it out, looks at it, says, “Burt wants to know if we can have an early dinner tonight.”
“Selfish bastard.”
We both laugh, and then I pay our check and walk her to her car. She hugs me before I hug her.
“To be continued.”
“Absolutely.”
“We need to get you over for dinner,” she says.
I tell her I’d like that. She gets into the Jeep and drives back up Pine Street. When she’s out of sight, I get into my truck and do the same, having no idea that I’m being watched.