Page 11 of Murder Road

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t. Do you?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ve got that clear. But I keep thinking back. When we picked her up. When you saw she was bleeding.”

He paused so long, I had to prompt him. “What?”

“You weren’t scared,” he said. “You weren’t even shocked. You knew exactly what to do.”

I’d been horrified when I’d seen the blood on Rhonda Jean. I’d felt grief and dread. And I had felt fear. But I’d also felt calm. Prepared, even.

“You weren’t scared, either,” I whispered.

“I’ve been in the army. I fought overseas. We got training—months of it. When you said Rhonda Jean was bleeding, my training and my experience kicked in. It was like I was back there.” He paused. “April, you work in a bowling alley. You don’t get training for that.”

His words were laid out the way you lay out plates when you’re setting the table. One after the other. Eddie noticed everything when it came to me.

I should have panicked at the time. A normal woman would have, I guessed. I should have screamed. Had I screamed? No, I didn’t think so. I hadn’t cried, either. Would a normal woman have cried? A woman who hadn’t lived through what I had?

Eddie was right. As far as Detective Quentin was concerned, I was April Delray, who would be April Carter as soon as she got the paperwork done when her honeymoon was over. I worked in a bowling alley and lived a quiet life. If there was one thing my mother had taught me, one hard lesson that had stood out among all of the others, it was that the police were never to be trusted—with anything.

I only planned to marry one man in my entire life if possible, and this man was the one. The man whose knees were crooked behind mine right this minute. I wasn’t going to let anything threaten that, and neither, I thought, was Eddie.

“Not every war is fought in Iraq,” I told him.

I heard the soft hush of his breath. “I know.”

Eddie knew me. He knew more of me than anyone else in the world ever had. But even Eddie didn’t know everything.

“We’ll come up with a plan tomorrow,” I said.

Eddie’s hand touched my hair, his big fingers letting the wisps of blond slide over them.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The two uniformed cops who came to pick us up at seven didn’t seem too concerned that we might be murderers. They also seemed pleasantly surprised that we were still here, as if they’d thought we’d make a break for it and run away. I wasn’t sure how we’d do that, since we had no car and didn’t even know exactly where we were. There had supposedly been a police car staked out outside all night. And there was no way in hell I was going to go hitchhiking on Atticus Line.

Rose let the cops in. She was wearing a nightgown that covered her from its high ruffled collar to her feet, a bathrobe, and a pinched look that said she hated all of us. Her hair stuck up on one side, and her eyes were hostile behind her glasses. She’d plunked down some coffee, two pieces of toast, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs on her kitchen table when we came out of our room, and she’d silently dared us to complain.

The kitchen was decorated just as badly as the bedroom: shelves lined with figurines, little china bowls, jars, dusty fabric flowers, wooden carvings, dangling beads. A crocheted piece of fabric in a frame on the wall told us that Home and hearth are where the heart is. A clock with a face decorated with roses ticked loudly next to it, and on the shelf below that, a china clown grasped a clutch of balloons in his hand, a sad smile on his face. Princess Diana was in here, too: a framed photo of her smiling hung above the stove, and a painted portrait of Charles and Diana hung in the living room. It looked like Rose was a Diana fanatic. She had copied Diana’s haircut, though the rest of her didn’t look like Diana at all.

We ate everything Rose gave us, even though my stomach was in knots. I stared at Princess Diana and swallowed. You have to eat, especially when things get bad. Having a full stomach gives you a better chance to think.

“Don’t look so put out, Rose,” one of the cops said as he helped himself to a cup of her coffee. “These two are your only customers.”

“Think I’ll get paid?” Rose’s voice was unpleasant, like a violin that was badly tuned.

“Sure you will,” the other cop said. “Just send a bill to Detective Quentin.”

That shut her up. It shut the other cop up, too. I looked at Eddie as I drained my coffee. The look he gave me back said, Here we go.

As we stood to leave, Eddie reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his worn leather wallet. He laid a twenty on the table. “Thank you for breakfast, ma’am,” he said.

She gaped at him as we followed the two cops from the room. I didn’t watch her do it, but I knew she took the twenty.

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