Page 26 of Long Gone

“But the good news is that it’s better than Harper’s, so there you go.”

“Ouch,” I said with a laugh, picking up my burger.

Louise squirted ketchup into her basket. “Yet it’s the truth.”

She was right, but she and Nate had lived in the area longer than I had. And I wasn’t much interested in a social life.

“So tell us about your week, Louise,” Nate said. “Anything weird or wacky in the world of Lone County’s law and order?”

She laughed. “As a matter of fact…” She took a bite of her chicken sandwich and pointed to her mouth to mime that she couldn’t tell us yet.

I shook my head with a grin. When I’d met Louise, she’d been uber serious, but then again, police cover-ups tended to make a person act that way. She was a different woman here—lighter, freer, happier. It gave me hope that the same thing could happen for me someday.

Once she swallowed, she told us about a traffic stop she’d had the day before when she pulled over an older woman in a 1970’s Volkswagen bug for speeding.

Nate snorted. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“Hold up, Judgy McJudgy Pants,” she said, waving a fry at him. “I’m not done.” She paused for dramatic effect, then said, “The backseat was stuffed with bags of marshmallows.”

“When you say stuffed…” Nate prodded. “Are you saying she had several bags on the backseat?”

“Obviously you don’t know the meaning of the word stuffed,” Louise said, giving him a piercing look. “Which I could make a very dirty comment about, but for some inexplicable reason, I’ll refrain.”

I burst into laughter, which made all of us start laughing.

It felt good to laugh. I hadn’t had much laughter even before the shooting incident last October. Hanging out with Louise and Nate made that all too clear.

When we settled down, Louise continued, “I’m talking she had bags of marshmallows crammed into the back from the seat to the ceiling. She couldn’t see out the back window. There must have been hundreds of bags of marshmallows in her car.”

“Why?” I asked. “What was she going to do with them?”

“I tried to find out, of course,” she said. “Only I didn’t come right out and ask. I asked if she was on her way to a bonfire to make s’mores, although if she was making s’mores, she had enough marshmallows to give s’mores to the entire county.”

“But she didn’t have the graham crackers and chocolate,” Nate said, “so she must have been doing something else.”

“They could have been in her trunk,” I suggested to play devil’s advocate.

“There’s no way enough graham crackers would fit in the trunk, let alone the chocolate bars.”

Louise shot him a grin. “She didn’t confirm one way or the other. She just chuckled nervously and asked if she was free to go.”

“Weren’t you suspicious?” I asked.

“Of course. I had no idea what she planned to do with all those marshmallows, but try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a devious reason for her having them. So I gave her the speeding ticket and sent her on her way.”

“And now we’ll never know,” Nate said with a sigh, then turned to me. “What about you, Harper? Anything interesting?”

“Well, other than getting a case to investigate, not really. Unless you call Becky losing her shit in front of the entire office interesting.”

They wanted details, of course, and I was sure that Nate would use this story as gossip currency. He was a huge gossip, not that I usually minded. He’d provided me with helpful information during my investigation of Ava’s disappearance, both about her father and how the tide of public attitude had changed about me since I’d moved back to Jackson Creek. Plenty of people in the office had witnessed her meltdown, so the stories wouldn’t necessarily be tracked back to me. Not that I cared if they were.

After we finished eating, we headed over to the pool tables to play a round of pool. While we played, I asked Louise if she knew anything about Detective Jones, and she said she hadn’t had much interaction with him, but everyone seemed to like him.

We finished our game close to ten, and Louise said she needed to head out so she could get up for work the next day.

“I should head out too,” I said. “I’m hoping to get more research done before my meeting with Colter in the morning.”

“Keep me updated on how that goes,” she said as we headed over to the table so she could get her coat and purse. She cast a glance to the bar. “You sure you don’t want me to help with the bill?”

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