Page 9 of Again with Feeling

“Yeah, well.” Bobby ran his hand along the seat belt, pulling it away from his chest and letting it fall back into place.

“I forgot.”

He nodded.

“Next time,” I said, “just remind me. We could have gone tomorrow.”

A smile tilted across his face. “Really? You would have waited until I got off work tomorrow evening?”

“Uh…yes?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Okay, I’m not sorry anymore because that was super rude. I take back my sorry. If anything, I’m reverse sorry.”

“What does that mean?” Bobby asked drily. “You’re glad you ruined my date?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

Wouldyesbe such a terrible thing to say?

Instead, though, I gave Bobby a sheepish smile. And he smiled back. And we were both smiling. I think maybe we even laughed a little. Like we both knew it was a joke. Like we both knew we were supposed to pretend it was a joke.

Remember how earlier I had that stroke of genius about driving into a utility pole?

I should have stuck with the plan.

Maybe Bobby was trying to come up with a similar plan to get out of this mess because his voice took on its usual business-like briskness, and he said, “So, how does an amateur sleuth solve a thirty-year-old mystery?”

“That question feels like a trap.” But Bobby only looked at me, and after a moment, I said, “You mean in a book?”

The rumble of the Jeep’s engine filled the silence between us.

“Well,” I said, “in abook, a cold case—which I guess is what this is—usually isn’t all too different from a regular investigation. Unless you’re writing a police procedural or about a forensic scientist, your protagonist probably won’t have access to approaches that involve DNA evidence or gas chromatography-mass spectrometry or carbon dating. Or, heck, even an autopsy.”

“So, what do they do?”

“Well, they talk to people. They ask questions.”

“This is starting to sound familiar.”

“I told you it was pretty much the same,” I said with a grin. “Usually, the detective is trying to find something that was overlooked or concealed when the mystery was first investigated. They’re looking for new information, or lies, or a mistaken assumption—anything that will help establish means, motive, and opportunity.”

“That seems incredibly unrealistic. Wouldn’t people have forgotten the details after all those years? Or told the police in the first place?”

“Sure. But people also lie for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes, later on, the reasons for those lies become less important. Or they feel pressured to finally tell the truth. Or someone the police never talked to turns up. I mean, we’re talking about books, Bobby. Something convenient always happens. And if it’s not talking to people, the detective might do archival research or read someone’s journal. There’s even a whole branch of mystery novels about people who solve murders with genealogy.”

Bobby said somethingveryun-Bobby-like under his breath.

I burst out laughing.

“If this involves you getting an Ancestry.com subscription,” Bobby said, “I’ll buy you dinner.”

“It’s a date.”

That did it again. The good humor that had been defrosting the ice between us vanished, and we drove the rest of the distance in an uncomfortable silence.

Fortunately, it wasn’t long before the GPS announced that our destination was on the left. The address belonging to Richard Lundgren—or, better said, where Richard had been living when he’d disappeared—was a little square house that could only by the loosest stretch of the imagination be called a bungalow. Like the rest of the neighborhood, it fell into the category of tract housing that had clearly been designed for working-class families. The Lundgren home looked clean and well-maintained, with that severe attention to detail that suggested high standards but without any sense of adornment. A couple of generations ago, when these houses had been going up, the men and women who lived here would have worked in Astoria’s timber and fishing industries. Those industries hadshrunk over the years, though. Some of the people here might still work the line at a fishery, or they might crew a fishing boat, but for the rest, hard times had come to stay.

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