Page 15 of Again with Feeling

“Drive to the end of the street,” Bobby said again. “And park where he won’t be able to see us.”

“Wait, what—”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Let’s see.”

I drove to the end of the street, turned around, and parked at the curb. The houses here all had their curtains pulled, and while I was sure that some nosy neighbor would notice us—or had already noticed us—it wasn’t like we were running a professional stakeout. This was more of the bargain bin variety—

The front door to Arlen Lundgren’s house flew open, and Candy lurched outside. She looked like a mess—even from a distance, I could tell she was crying, and although she’d changed into jeans and some sort of sparkly top, her clothes looked like they’d been thrown on. She was carrying a purse that could have doubled as a shipping container, as well as several other plastic shopping bags that—I guessed—contained whatever she could grab close at hand. One of them appeared to hold a lamp.

Arlen appeared in the doorway a moment later, steadying himself with one hand on the jamb, and he said something. Candy whirled around and screamed back at him. She was loud enough that I might have been able to make out the words, but they were distorted by her rage. Arlen snapped something back at her, but before she could reply, he went back inside and slammed the door. Candy screamed at him again. Nobody cameout to check on them, and I had the feeling this wasn’t anything new. It had all the pathetic weariness of two people playing parts they’d played for years—parts they should have aged out of a long time ago.

Candy stumbled around the side of the house, in the direction of the garage and workshop I’d noticed when we’d been, uh, exploring. I waited, but a car didn’t appear. After a few minutes, Bobby nodded, and I started the Jeep again.

We were halfway to the Lundgren house when a truck turned onto the street ahead of us. It barreled down the street, well above the speed limit, and then turned sharply into the Lundgrens’ driveway. I waffled for a moment between stopping the Jeep or continuing, but I decided to continue. Stopping would have looked even more suspicious. We passed the truck as the driver got out, and he stopped, hand on top of the cab, and looked over at us.

He had a dark, refined complexion that was too different from the Lundgrens’ Scandinavian coloring for him to be a blood relation: dark hair that was thinning on top, and dark eyes. A pleasant-looking guy who wasn’t exactly handsome but probably didn’t give himself grief when he looked in the mirror. A bracelet with what I was fairly sure was a small saint medallion glittered on his wrist in the stark June sunlight, and I thought I remembered seeing it before. Then he threw the door shut and headed toward the garage. On the back of the truck, a bumper sticker said, WE AIN’T QUAINT.

I pulled to the curb again to watch.

“Someone called him,” Bobby said.

I nodded. “Want to bet that’s Neil Carver?”

“And he got here fast.”

“Did you see the bracelet?”

Bobby glanced over at me.

I thought about being mature. I thought about acting like an adult. Instead, in my too-cool voice, I said, “You know, little gold thing on his wrist.”

“I know what a bracelet is.”

“Oh. Okay.” I waited just long enough before adding, “Then you noticed it looks a lot like the one Richard Lundgren’s wearing in the picture Vivienne gave us.”

Bobby’s face doesn’t usually give a lot away.

But it was enough to make me grin.

Before I could follow up on that mixture of exasperation and what I wanted to call pique, movement behind us drew my attention. A woman stood on the stoop of the house next to Arlen Lundgren’s—the house where Richard Lundgren had been living when he’d been killed. She was White, and she was tall and wiry, with her long gray hair in a braid that fell almost to her waist. She was looking at the truck, taking nervous steps back and forth as though unsure of what to do.

The decision was taken out of her hands when the man I suspected was Neil Carver came down the drive again. He looked once in our direction, and there’s no way he could have missed the Jeep, but he didn’t storm down the street to confront us. Instead, he headed toward the house that had belonged to Richard Lundgren. The woman said something to Neil, and he shook his head and made a shooing gesture and followed her inside. He shut the door behind them without giving us another glance.

“What in the world is going on?” I asked.

Bobby shook his head, but his gaze stayed fixed on the house. “No clue. But if we’re still making bets, how much would you wager that woman is Richard Lundgren’s widow?”

Chapter 5

The Otter Slide was busy that night. Under the green-and-gold pendants, the booths were full, and every table had bodies crammed around it. More people packed the bar—along with pretty much every other square inch of floor space.

For the most part, those people were locals—the Otter Slide didn’t have the quaint, seaside-dollhouse aesthetic that so many tourists were looking for. But some of these people were out-of-towners, if only because the Otter Slide was the closest thing to a gay bar in Hastings Rock. Voices competed with the music (Seely, the bar’s owner, had declared tonight to be country night, and “Jolene” was playing at full volume over the bar’s speakers), and men and women laughed and shouted and called out drink orders and, in one case, screamed (a busty young lady who had gotten particularly excited over her latest round at the pinball machine). The air smelled like the nectar of the gods (marinara sauce, fried cheese, and of course, Seely’s hamburgers, which somehow the cook managed to do just perfectly, smashed thin on the griddle, with extra crispy edges), and I was enjoying a surprisingly delicious summer highball—some sort of variation with a hint of peach, courtesy of Bobby.

Bobby was also the reason we had managed to snag a booth—he’d been watching the other patrons like a hawk, which was one of his God-given talents, and as soon as a group of them got up, Bobby swooped in. It was a tight fit, with Bobby and Fox and me on one side, and Keme, Millie, and Indira on the other. But, if I was being honest, Keme didn’t look like the close quarters were bothering him too much.

“They’re DEFINITELY hiding something,” Millie announced.

I managed not to roll my eyes, but only because Keme was giving me a death ray-level warning look. “Right, of course they’re hiding something. The question is: what?”

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