Page 67 of Fresh Old Bounties

I drank my diet soda, welcoming the fresh bubbles running down my throat. “This is the part in thrillers where you yell at the characters for not making the obvious connection.” My sister’s books had taught me as much.

“This is real life. Coincidences happen.”

“It’s also the part in movies where you yell at the blonde for going down into the basement alone.”

“I can see why that would worry you. Have you thought about dying your hair?”

“I tried full green once,” I admitted. “But it was a bit too much.”

“Have photos?” He sounded strangely interested.

“Maybe. What are you willing to pay for them?”

“What about a trade?”

I sat at an angle to study him better. He was still looking up, a small smile playing with his lips. This was a rare relaxed side of Ian I hadn’t seen before, not even during our first real date, and it warmed my insides that he was choosing to show it to me here in the murder house, surrounded by strange ghosts while eating pizza after a hard day’s work of interrogating bad guys and searching hotel rooms.

“What kind of trade?” I asked.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

My cheeks immediately burst into flames. “I see.”

He turned his head to arch his eyebrows at me. “Hair-wise.”

I tried to look very prim and proper. “Of course.”

He huffed a laugh.

“Wait, do you mean you dyed your hair green?” I scooted the chair closer, nearly upending the box we’d brought out to use as a table. “Show me!”

“I’ve never dyed my hair.”

“What then?” I studied his dark-brown wavy hair gathered at the back of his neck. “Oh! You used to keep it short?”

“Yes.”

“Show me!”

“You first.”

I dug out my phone and browsed through my old pictures on the cloud. It took me a few minutes, but I finally found them. I’d been twenty, about the same time I’d gotten the small koi tattoo on my back. My hair had been longer then, falling past my shoulders.

Ian took the phone from my hand and studied the photo intently. It was a silly selfie done right outside the hair salon with me grinning widely at the camera. He swept sideways, and another selfie appeared, this one with me winking exaggeratedly. The next one was a photo of me and Nicole taken at the marina on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I remembered the moment clearly—I had joined my sister for a family outing, and her husband was the one taking the photo, my crying niece in his free arm.

I snatched the phone from Ian before I got all weepy. “Your turn.”

He made no move to take out his phone.

“Did you just con me?” I asked with mock outrage.

He drank more beer, his smile obvious now. “I don’t have them with me.”

“Unfair!”

“We didn’t agree on a time frame.”

Oldest trick in the book. That’d teach me.

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