The Good Byline

by Jill Orr

  “She’s not actually a librarian.” Tabitha’s saccharine voice cut the air around us. “And she really needs to get back to work.” She twitched past us.

  Ajay whispered, “Tabitha?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s a real treat.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Ajay gave me a weak smile, and I thought for a fleeting moment he was going to say something else. But he didn’t.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” I said, then lowered my head because I just couldn’t bear to look at him when I said the next part. “But maybe if you’re free sometime—”

  “I’m going to get going, too,” he said, making it clear that there was no chance of him ever being free for me. Who was I kidding? Of course he’d never forgive me, let alone give me another chance. And maybe that was for the best. All I really knew about him was that he was a nice guy whose kiss made me melt into a puddle of hot goo. Surely there’d be other guys like that out there. I didn’t need to go chasing one I’d already offended ten different ways.

  So I said, “Take care,” and left it at that.

  The day had been busy with people in and out of the library. Mrs. Gradin donated her collection of gluten-free cookbooks and bought several new ones on baking. Judging by the size of Mr. Gradin’s belly, the gluten-free diet hadn’t gone over so well in their house. Mrs. Winterthorne bought Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels, numbers one through nineteen. And Betsy North invested in a complete set of the Harry Potter books for her grandson, Nick.

  I had just finished checking in Mrs. Chruner’s copy of The Alchemist, which she said she found blasphemous, when I heard a familiar voice ask, “Is it too late to make a donation?”

  “Of course not, Mr. Monroe,” Tabitha said, snapping her fingers at me. “Riley will be glad to help you with this.”

  “Hey,” I said walking over to the makeshift sales desk. I’d seen more of Mr. Monroe in the past few days than I had in the past few years.

  “Hey, yourself.” He held a pile of five or six books in his hands.

  With Tabitha looking on, I didn’t want to risk appearing too chatty, so I got right down to business. “What have you got for us today?”

  He set down the books. “Just clearing out the old book-shelves. This sale is always a good excuse to do that.”

  I picked up the books one by one and turned them over to make sure there weren’t any visible signs of wear and tear. I figured Mr. Monroe wasn’t the type to abuse his books, but you never know. People have tried to donate books with no covers, books with the spines ripped off, books that are missing the last ten pages. It’s kind of sad that they think just because we’re a library that we’ll take any old thing.

  He made small talk while I worked. “You guys been busy?”

  “Yes,” I said picking up a perfect copy of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. “How about you?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s one thing you can count on in Tuttle County. Lots of bad guys to prosecute.” He laughed. “So, how’s it going with Coltrane?”

  “Good,” I said automatically, but as soon as I did, something niggled at the back of my brain. I didn’t remember telling him Coltrane’s name. In fact, I specifically remembered that I hadn’t said his name when we met on the street. Ryan’s Dad gave me that tip. He said a dog will always let his guard down around a person who knows his name, so don’t tell anyone their name except people you trust one hundred percent. And while I’d always liked Mr. Monroe, I didn’t know him well enough to know how much I trusted him.

  “That’s good. He seems like a great dog. Real smart.”

  My mind was furiously trying to figure out how Kevin would know Coltrane’s name. I picked up the last book in the pile. I turned it over to check its condition, and I nearly stopped breathing. The Ghost of Rear Range Lighthouse: The Inside Story on Hilton’s Head’s Most Haunted Attraction.

  I felt the color drain from my face. Mr. Monroe must have noticed it, too. “Riley? What’s wrong?”

  “This book.…”

  “Yes?” He smiled. “Have you read it?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  He took one look at my face, and for a split second I saw fear in his. He quickly wiped the look off his face and replaced it with a smile so fake it looked like his mouth was being drawn up at the corners by puppet strings. “What?”

  “Where did you get this book?”

  “Hilton Head, obviously.” His laugh sounded forced, and his eyes darted toward the door.

  Something was off, and he knew it. It all started to make sense. Him knowing Coltrane’s name. Jordan’s favorite lighthouse. Hilton Head. “Kevin,” I said slowly, “how well did you know Jordan?”

  His smile faded in an instant. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He looked around and dropped his voice, “She was a former student just like you. Why are you asking?”

  “How did you know my dog’s name?”

  Before he could answer, Tabitha hawked back over to where we were standing. “Riley, I really need you in the back. You can visit with Mr. Monroe another time, okay?” Her tone was more direct order than question.

  “I’m going on break,” I said. She started to complain that she hadn’t had a break in two years, but I walked right past her. I grabbed Kevin’s sleeve and dragged him out the front doors to the library. We needed to talk.

  “You were seeing Jordan.” I launched the accusation on pure instinct.

  For a second he looked shocked. “Wha—” he started to say but then stopped himself. He paused, dropped his head, and stared at the sidewalk for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, when he lifted his eyes to look at me, they were shining. “How did you know?”

  “Coltrane, for starters. He clearly knew you.”

  Kevin blew out a big sigh. “We’d been seeing each other since last fall, but no one knew. At first we decided to keep it under wraps because it might look weird since she was my former student. I didn’t care so much, but Jordan thought her parents would have a hard time accepting it.”

  I could understand that. I was having a hard time accepting it. Even though there wasn’t that big of an age difference, the student/teacher relationship was a pretty big mental hurdle to get over.

  “I tried to get her to tell her family, but even after several months she said she wasn’t ready.” His eyes fixed once again on the sidewalk beneath our feet. “But we were serious—I mean, for a while it really seemed like she was the one.” His voice broke off. I wondered if he had talked about Jordan with anyone since she died. “She was smart and funny and beautiful and so passionate. We traveled together on weekends, visiting her parents’ place in Hilton Head, and we went to Dauphine Island and the Outer Banks. She was so adventurous—always up for something new.”

  But I knew Jordan had been on Click.com just a few months ago. I wondered what might have happened to this Lolita-turned-storybook-romance to send her back to online dating?

  As if he read my mind, he continued, “I guess it was late spring, I told Jordan I didn’t want to keep our relationship a secret anymore. I was thinking about asking her to move in with me, and I told her that if we were going to have a future together, she had better be able to be seen with me in public. She refused, said her dad would never accept us.”

  Mr. James had always been a bit overprotective, but Jordan was a grown woman. I had to believe that sooner or later he would have accepted her choice. It wasn’t like Kevin was that much older.

  He breathed in a shaky breath. “So I broke things off. I told her I didn’t want to sneak around anymore. Told her to call me when she was ready to go public. She begged me not to, but I just figured she would come around. I never thought—”

  “So were you two broken up when she…?”

  “Not exactly. We’d just started talking again. Trying to work things out. But on the morning of the festival, she freaked and said she wasn’t ready to tell her pare
nts yet. We had a big fight.” He wiped at the corner of his eye. “Later that night was when she.…” He took a steadying breath. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  I could feel the weight of his guilt as it crushed down upon him, his shoulders slumped with grief and remorse. “I miss her so much.” His face crumpled, and I worried he might start crying again.

  “So you think she killed herself because of…you guys?” I asked gently.

  “I ask myself that every day.”

  I thought for a moment. “And you definitely don’t think there is any chance that her death had something to do with the story she was working on about Juan Pablo Romero?” I was having a hard time letting that theory go, despite the mounting evidence against it.

  “No way.” He shook his head. “Jordan was a lot more emotionally fragile than people realized.”

  We talked for a while longer. I still wasn’t completely convinced that Jordan had committed suicide, but it was clear Kevin thought she did. I understood what he was going through—the guilt, the endless wondering what you could have done differently. He was in his own private hell, and I was probably only making it worse by complicating things. But in the back of my mind, I thought if I could just somehow prove that she hadn’t killed herself, it might give him some peace.

  CHAPTER 34

  When I got home after work, Holman was waiting in my driveway. “Where have you been?” I snapped at him. There was so much that had happened since I’d last spoken to him, I hardly knew where to begin.

  “You’ve been worried about me,” he said. “That’s sweet.”

  “I’m not worried,” I lied. “I’m angry. Why did you go dark on me for twenty-four hours?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, following me into my house. “I had to go up to DC to meet with a source. What is that?” He pointed a finger at Coltrane.

  “It’s a dog, Sherlock.”

  “Yeah, but whose dog?”

  “Mine.”

  “When did you get a dog?”

  “Yesterday.” I was irritated at him for making me worry and didn’t want to stray from the subject by explaining how Coltrane came to be here. And I was curious about what was so important that he couldn’t call or text me back. “So what was up in DC?”

  He stepped carefully around Coltrane, who was looking at him as if he were an archaeological curiosity. “I followed a hunch and it turns out, Uncle Mateo was arrested about seven years back for meth trafficking.”

  “Yeah. He’s a bad guy. We knew that.”

  “There’s more.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and smoothed it out on my ottoman. “A colleague of mine has a connection to someone who works for the DEA up there. He gave me access to some of the reports filed during their investigation of Mateo. Their case ultimately failed because of a lack of evidence. But one of the investigators who worked the case noted in the file that one of the reasons it was hard to pin charges on Mateo was that his distribution network was really diffuse. They suspected he was selling in a bunch of rural areas.”

  “Okaaaaay.…”

  “The DEA seemed to believe he was branching out from the bigger cities and taking his product to small communities. The agent said he thought Mateo was either working for the Mexican mafia distributing meth in the US, or that he launched his own operation, staying clear of the territories held tight by other organized crime syndicates. That would explain why he went outside urban areas.”

  Connections were slowly materializing in my brain. “It could also explain why he wasn’t caught,” I added. “Rural law enforcement agencies are always so understaffed.”

  “That’s right,” Holman said, looking at me over Coltrane’s head. The dog had positioned himself right in front of where Holman sat on the couch, waiting patiently to be petted. By the look on Holman’s face, he was going to be waiting a while.

  “And if Uncle Mateo wanted to sell drugs away from the cities,” he said, “it would stand to reason that he’d involve his favorite nephew who just happens to live in rural Virginia.”

  As soon as Holman said that, it hit me. “Taco trucks!” I blurted out.

  “Ding-ding-ding-ding!” Holman smiled.

  “Mateo has been using Juan Pablo’s Tacos Los Locos trucks to run drugs from Jersey all the way down to Virginia?”

  Holman nodded. “Obviously, this is all conjecture at this point. But I think it fits.”

  “Oh my gosh, I’ll bet that’s what he wants the bookmobiles for, too.”

  “I thought of that, but what would a bookmobile get him that he isn’t already getting with his taco trucks?”

  “Bookmobiles go to only the least populous areas—areas where a taco truck would look out of place. So it could reach the really rural areas without drawing suspicion. And since the library is privately owned, there’d be no oversight except from Dr. H. I’m guessing that’s what those visits from the library thugs were all about. To get Dr. H on board through either bribery or intimidation.”

  Holman was quiet as he thought. “I’ll bet this is what Jordan found out—at least in part,” he said. “Whatever it was, it was big enough to kill for. And protecting millions in drug money would certainly be big enough.”

  “I’ll bet you’re right.”

  “I just wish she would have come to me.”

  I pictured Jordan alone at the office, heartbroken from her fight with Kevin—maybe feeling hopeless and alone—and then opening that letter with the tip big enough to blow the roof off the entire town. The Jordan I knew would never have called for backup. She’d want to be the star, the lead, the girl with the golden pen. That was Jordan. She aimed high, believed in herself to the fullest extent, was tenacious and bold. And she didn’t look back. She didn’t think things to death. I always admired her for that. But there is a thin line between confidence and recklessness.

  “How do we prove it?” I asked, snapping my fingers for Coltrane to stop staring at poor Holman.

  “I’m going to start by retracing Jordan’s steps the night she died and do a recon mission to the taco truck at Little Juan Park.”

  “You mean we are going to do recon.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “What do you mean ‘mmmm’? I’m your partner on this.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “C’mon.” I softened my tone, trying to catch the fly with honey. “We’re a team! Sherlock and Obit Girl, remember?” I smiled big and batted my eyelashes at him.

  “Your sexuality won’t work on me,” Holman said flatly. “As symmetrical as you are, I have laser-like focus when I’m at work. Even Princess Leia couldn’t cause me to compromise my ideals.”

  “Princess Leia?”

  He shrugged. “I have a thing for strong women. Whatever. The point is that even she—in her little gold bikini, kicking ass and taking names—could not convince me to go against my gut when I’m working.” He pointed at Coltrane. “I’m kind of like your friend there. I might look all dopey and cute, but when I’m on the job, I’m a killer.”

  I stared at Holman, slack jawed. There was so much in what he just said I wanted to comment on, I didn’t even know where to begin. Little gold bikini? Dopey and cute? A killer? But it would have to wait.

  “What am I, a china doll?” I stood up and put my hands on my hips. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going and so is he.” I pointed at Coltrane. “And that is final.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what my big news was? I texted you like a million times,” I said once we were in the car on the way down to LJP.

  “Right,” he said. “What did you find?”

  I told him all about Ajay coming over, the 911 call, and how Ajay had been furious with me for suggesting he had ties to Romero. Then I told him that Ajay was never Jordan’s mystery man, it was Kevin Monroe.

  “Jordan Blaise, of course,” Holman said. “She said she was going to use that name once she got her own byline.”

  “You
could have mentioned that,” I snapped.

  “I didn’t think it was relevant. Besides, how was I to know she’d use an alias for online dating?”

  He had a point. “Anyway. Can you believe all that?”

  He nodded, not looking nearly as shocked as I thought he should be. “Interesting. I guess it makes sense that she’d want to keep that secret from her parents. It can be hard for only children to allow their parents to see them as grown adults.”

  “Interesting? That’s all you have to say about it?”

  He paused. “I said the thing about her parents, too.”

  “I mean, aren’t you going to say anything about how wrong you were that Ajay was involved? You were sure he was involved with Romero, remember?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were! In fact, you got me convinced he was in league with Romero and had something to do with Jordan’s death.”

  He shook his head. “No, if you recall, I said it was clear he was involved somehow. Now we know he casually dated Jordan a couple of times and consulted on Romero’s park project. So really, if you think about it, I wasn’t wrong at all. Ajay was involved, just not in a bad way.”

  I wanted to throttle him. A few days ago, Holman was ready to get Ajay charged with Jordan’s murder, and now he was acting like I had made it all up. “Because of you, Ajay is really mad at me.”

  “I’d be mad too if a girl I was seeing thought I was involved in criminal activity and tried to entrap me.” Since Holman didn’t do sarcasm, I knew he was being completely serious.

  “But you said you thought he was involved!”

  “He was involved. Riley, we just went through this.”

  I hit his shoulder as hard as I could. How could he feel no remorse for filling my head with all these suspicions when they were so obviously unfounded? “You ruined what could have been a promising relationship, you know.”

  “Ow. And no, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did! He liked me, Holman. He wanted to date me. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent man to date in this town?” My voice was bordering on shrill. Coltrane whined and nosed the side of my cheek.