by Dana Marton
Instead of walking out, he grabbed the plastic chair by the door and carried it over. He dropped that chair just outside her cell, lowered himself into it, and stretched out his long legs in front of him, settling in.
Did he expect her to bust out somehow in what remained of the night? She cut off the song and shot him an incredulous look. “What are you doing?”
“Not worth driving home just to have to get up early to come in first thing in the morning.”
She didn’t believe a word. “I don’t need to be on suicide watch.”
He closed his eyes. “You’re not.”
And then another possibility hit her, a hard punch in the stomach. She drew back two steps, and before she could stop herself, she blurted, “Are you going to kill me?”
His eyes popped open, the look in them stunned, then exasperated. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re framing me for murder.” There. She’d said it.
“God, Allie.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “For one, rules say I can’t leave anyone alone in a cell overnight. I can’t just go home. What if there was a fire here?”
“Oh.” She walked to the sleeping bench at the back of the small cell and sat, folding her hands on her lap.
He watched her.
She watched him, the fight going out of her. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Make that a double.”
Her throat burned. Not going to cry in front of Harper Flipping Finnegan. Not going to cry. Not going to cry.
“Where have you been all these years? Where do you live now?” He sounded less of a hard-ass outside the interrogation room.
If that was supposed to be an olive branch… Well, he could wrap it in barbed wire and shove it up his ass. “You shouldn’t question me without my lawyer present.”
“Don’t say anything incriminating. Friendly conversation.”
She scoffed. They were no longer friends, clearly, and hadn’t been in a long time. “I live on the road.”
“No home?”
“Cheaper this way. If I can find a motel room on $79.99 special for the night, every night for a whole year, it works out to be around twenty-nine grand.”
“Still a lot of money.”
“Sometimes they run third-night-free specials. Or offer other coupons. Sometimes, when I’m in a town working at their Founders’ Day parade or other festival, the tourist board will comp the room for me.” She shrugged. “Last place I rented was fifteen hundred a month. Another two hundred for utilities. Cable and internet some more money. Renter’s insurance. And I spent more on gas because I had to keep going back to home base. Then, at the end, the landlord kicked me out so he could upgrade the apartment and raise the rent. I didn’t bother looking for another place after that.”
He watched her thoughtfully for a while before he said, “I didn’t realize a person could make a living from historical reenactment.”
“As long as I manage to book two gigs per week. It’s nice to be my own boss. I like not having to depend on anybody.”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Harper crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’m sorry about Tony’s death. I’m sure it hit you hard when he died. He wasn’t a saint. But he raised you.”
“To a point.”
“What do you mean?”
“He left on my eighteenth birthday.” Allie closed her eyes for a second. Breathed. There, she wasn’t going to cry. “When he got real drunk and mean, he used to tell me he never wanted me in the first place. Hooked up with some woman one night at a bar, and she dropped a kid on his doorstep nine months later. The first and only time he got played.”
She was only talking because the alternative was silence and contemplating the fact that she was in jail. She needed distraction. Even if it was conversation with a man she hated.
“You told me some of that before,” Harper said, “but I was just a stupid kid. I didn’t realize what it all meant for you. How it must have made you feel. I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter. I didn’t want anyone’s pity. I already had people’s disapproval.” She dropped her gaze to the stupid rubber flip-flops. “He used to say he kept me for the food stamps and because the power company would work with you on payments if you have a kid. And because judges would release him without bail sometimes, since he was the sole caregiver.”
She fought to keep her tone emotionless so Harper wouldn’t guess how much the memory of those conversations hurt her still. She wasn’t going to give him ammunition that he could use to manipulate her later.
Harper frowned. “He just lit out and left you?”
“With thousands of dollars’ worth of unpaid rent. And a landlord who tried to collect that rent in kind, like he tried before.” She pulled her legs up onto the bench and hugged her knees. “Anyway, water under the bridge.”
“Dicky Poole?” The lines around Harper’s mouth deepened. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“You called me, remember? You left a message.”
“How do you know about that? I went by your place a few days after I called. My message was still blinking on the machine. I didn’t think you got it.”
“When you called, I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring through the window, watching my father’s brand-new pickup disappear down the street. I didn’t pick up because I was crying too hard to speak. You said on the machine that you couldn’t come over that night, or any other night. You told me we shouldn’t see each other anymore. You broke up with me.”
Harper pushed to his feet. “Fuck.” He faced the cell, feet apart, battle stance. “Are you telling me you didn’t skip town with your father?”
“I left alone a couple of hours later. After the landlord came by for the rent, saw the situation, then shoved me against the wall and groped me while he told me in detail what I would have to do to be able to stay. Once I pushed him out and he left, I packed up and drove my piece-of-junk car as far as the gas in the tank could take me. I ran out of fuel in State College.”
“Then what?”
“Got a job as a waitress. Eventually, I started taking classes. Since I was broke beyond broke, I qualified for financial aid. I studied—”
“History,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Jordan used to be your favorite teacher.”
She almost smiled. God, she’d loved Mrs. Jordan. Idolized her. The kindest woman Allie had ever known, one of the few people who’d never once judged Allie by her father. One of the few people who’d made living in Broslin bearable.
“How is she?”
Harper’s voice softened as he said, “Died last year.”
That, at last, had the power to push tears into Allie’s eyes.
Harper watched her. “How come you’re not teaching?”
“Difficult to get a job without experience, and I couldn’t just move back to my parents’ basement until I found a school district that would take a chance on me, like a lot of people do after graduation. I kept waitressing, then I picked up some extra hours by applying at a Halloween pop-up store. When we were packing up on November first, the manager handed me a box of costumes to take out back, to the garbage. Martha Washington, wig and all, was on top. Gave me an idea. I asked the guy if I could have it.”
“And the rest is history?”
Allie didn’t smile at the pun.
Harper sat back down and stretched out again, resting his head on the back of the chair, eyes to the ceiling.
She lay down on the bench. She couldn’t sleep, but she could rest. Her brain was mush. She was loopy from exhaustion. She had to be, for asking what she asked next.
“Why did you break up with me?”
As he turned his head toward her, his eyes regained their previous intensity. “You know that new pickup your father skipped town in?” He waited, as if unsure whether or not he wanted to finish. Then he did. “He had me steal it for him.”
She sat up. “What?”
“When I was on the phone with you, I had Captain Bing standing on one side of me and my mother on the other.” Harper groaned. “Someone saw me take the truck. The captain came to question me. With my parents glaring at me, I told him everything. The guy I stole from turned out to be a friend of my father’s. He didn’t press charges. They made me a deal. I’d never go around to your house again, work off the price of the truck in one of the mushroom houses the guy owned, and I wouldn’t go to jail. I mean, no pressure. Captain Bing had the cuffs out, in his hand.”
Allie couldn’t string enough coherent thoughts together to form a sentence. She pictured Harper, his parents, the police captain. Not at all how she’d imagined the other end of the line back then.
“I hated you for that phone call. I hated you for a long time.”
“I don’t blame you.” Harper closed his eyes for a second before his gaze unerringly snapped back to her again. “I was going to explain everything, but they were all watching me. Took me three days before I could sneak over to see you. The house was empty.”
She pictured that too, him driving up, knocking on the door. She’d been halfway across the state by then.
“You straightened yourself out.” She tried to process the idea of this heavily revised past.
“I went to college too. I didn’t want to stay the same delinquent asshole anymore.”
“So, you’re a legit policeman now. Believe in the law and all that. No bullshit?”
“None.”
“You’re not framing me.”
“Nothing would make me happier than if you were cleared.”
A heavy silence settled between them, and then it stretched and stretched.
Allie lay back down and stared at the ceiling. She wished they hadn’t had this talk. She didn’t want to not hate him. He’d arrested her. She wished she’d never come back to Broslin. Wished that at least she could sleep so she wouldn’t be in a coma at the bail hearing later.
“I’m not going to be able to post bail.” She thought out loud. “Not for a murder charge.” That had to run to tens of thousands of dollars.
Her father’s bail usually hadn’t amounted to much—mostly, he was a petty criminal. His drinking buddies would pool resources and set up something with one of the bail bond places in Philly.
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Harper said. “I’ll take care of it.”
She turned her head to stare at him. “Why would you?”
“We used to be friends.”
“A long time ago.”
“I didn’t forget.” The corners of his lips tipped up. “You asked me to teach you how to kiss.”
She had. Allie winced. She’d been fifteen, a freshman at the high school. He’d been a sophomore. She got a job at Finnegan’s bussing tables. He worked in the back, washing dishes.
She’d fallen in love with him the first time they went on break together—those blue eyes, his cocky teen-boy smile, his rebellious spirit. At first, she couldn’t believe that a boy like him would even talk to her. Then they became friends. He used to walk her home after work. Which was how her father had gotten his hooks into him.
They’d talked about music and cars. Well, mostly, he’d talked about cars. While she’d pretended to be interested in the topic, for his sake.
And, yes, she had begged him to teach her how to kiss. For months.
He gave in on her sixteenth birthday.
The two years that followed had been as close to happy as she’d ever been. Before everything fell apart.
None of that mattered now. She had turned her life around since. She’d put herself through college. She created a business. She was her own person. She wasn’t dependent on anybody for anything, the best way to ensure that she wouldn’t be let down again. She refused to trust someone just so they could abandon her—like her mother had done, and her father, and Harper too, when it had counted.
He was staring at her like he wanted to see inside her.
“What?” she asked.
“Our past notwithstanding, if I find out that you had something to do with Lamm’s murder, I will make sure justice is served.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “Our past notwithstanding, if you frame me… When I get out, I’ll track you down and strangle you in your sleep.”
Chapter Nine
Allie woke and stared at the bars, confusion muddying her brain. Then reality hit, and the walls closed in on her, the ceiling dropping onto her chest, or it felt like it had. She couldn’t breathe. She was in Broslin, in jail, arrested for murder.
This can’t be happening.
She scrambled to sit.
Harper slept sprawled in his chair, his neck at an uncomfortable angle. She hoped he walked around lopsided for the rest of the week. In that moment, coming awake to a nightmare, she hated him more than ever, more than back when he’d deserted her.
Her father being a dick, sure, nothing new. The landlord being a lecher was nothing she hadn’t known before, hadn’t learned to skirt. But when Harper, the boy she’d loved with all her heart and given all her hopes to, threw her away in a careless phone call…
The abrupt rejection had broken something inside her that never got glued back together.
So, fine, there’d been extenuating circumstances.
He’d been forced to break up with her. If he hadn’t, he would have gone to jail. He had made the right choice for his life, dammit, she got that. But she’d been devastated at the time—barely eighteen and all alone in the world. There’d been a time when she hadn’t had enough to eat. The first few years had been a bloody struggle, and not only because she had to work multiple part-time jobs to stay afloat.
She’d been convinced that she was no good, that nobody wanted her, that there was something wrong with her.
So, screw Harper and his grand revelation.
And screw him double for arresting her, for so easily believing that she was just like her father, or worse.
For ten years, she hadn’t come back because she didn’t want to see him. She’d been right, she thought as she watched Broslin’s Top Detective, wondering if she had enough time to use the toilet before he woke up. Humiliation burned through her gut, rose in her throat like acid. She fought it back. She had no time to waste on embarrassment.
He’d arrested her. For murder. She needed to focus on that.
She buried her face in her hands.
How did the gold get into the trunk? It hadn’t been there when she’d left Maryland. Someone had to have put it in her car. Harper was the most obvious choice.
Most obvious, but not only. Allie’s mind was clearer now that the original shock had worn off and she’d had a little sleep.
Her car had sat abandoned out there during the time Harper had driven her to town, then driven back out. Her lawyer had said the lock on the trunk had been damaged. She hadn’t even realized that she’d knocked against the telephone pole behind her when she’d been rocking the car back and forth with the gas pedal, trying to dislodge it from the snowbank.
She knew only one thing for sure: someone was setting her up. Why? What had she ever done to anyone?
Harper’s sleep-heavy “Hey,” made her look up.
He was blinking awake, no confusion about where he was, no chagrin, no panic. Easy for him. He was on the other side of the bars.
He pushed to his feet, stretched, rolled his neck. “Did you sleep?”
“A little.” She reached up to run her fingers through her hair. Then she busied herself with the drab blanket so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
“How about I bring you some coffee and breakfast?” he asked even as he yawned, and then he walked away on stiff legs.
While he was gone, she quickly slipped from her bed and took advantage of the privacy to use the in-cell toilet.
She needn’t have hurried. Over an hour passed before Harper returned—hair damp from a shower, clothes clean—carrying a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, a plastic plate of
eggs, bacon, and toast in the other. He slid them onto the little metal shelf that had been built into the bars for just that purpose. “I stopped by Mom’s.”
Allie stood awkwardly where she was. No table in the cell. “So, probably poisoned?”
A smile ghosted over his lips. “She doesn’t hate you.”
“Right. We’re besties,” she said as she backed away with her food so she could set the plate on the bed. “She’ll probably stop by later so we can braid each other’s hair. And then we’ll swap recipes.”
Harper’s smile grew a notch closer to real. As Allie swallowed her first mouthful of hot coffee, he reached into his back pocket and produced a plastic bag like a magician pulling a white rabbit from a hat. He passed the bag and its contents through, into her cell. “Comb, toothbrush, and toothpaste. Dollar Store stuff, so don’t get too excited.”
The small act of unexpected kindness made Allie’s eyes burn.
“Thank you,” she said, hating that she was grateful to the man who’d put her in this position in the first place. She was not going to forgive him for arresting her. Ever.
He gave a small nod. “Your bail hearing is set for two p.m. I’ll be taking you. Right now, I have to get to work.”
And then he left her all alone again.
* * *
That he had to leave Allie in a cell just about killed Harper, but he grabbed the keys to Lamm’s place and drove over. He wanted to walk through the house one more time, without Chase and Mike being there.
He called Suntown Elementary on his way and confirmed that Allie had been there on the day of the murder, the time she’d left. Everything was as she’d said.
When he reached Lamm’s rancher, instinct drew him to the basement, so he spent most of his time there: walking through, mentally cataloguing, and then just standing in the middle.
The open safe kept drawing his eyes.
Ephemeral half thoughts floated on the stale air like dust motes, swirling around him. When he finally managed to solidify them into a question, he called Chase.
