Page 15 of You Can Leave Your Hat On

“It won’t. He doesn’t love me anymore, so if you think this will get him here, you’re wrong! Please! Please don’t! I…”

“Tell me where he is!”

“I told you, I don’t know where he is!”

“I can’t take a chance on you telling him I’m here and looking for him.”

“I’m not going to tell him anything! I don’t know where he is! Just let me go. I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are or where you’re from.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t! I’m no threat to you! If you’ll just?”

“One last chance. Where is he?”

“I told you, I don’t know! I… No! Please! Please don’t! Please…”

“You could’ve been more helpful, Hazel.” The sensation of falling started, then ended abruptly. That was a curiosity.

A voice cut through the haze. “Maisey? You with me?”

“Uh, yeah.” Maisey sat there, stunned. Why did the falling sensation stop so fast? Was she really on a bridge? Then she remembered the very last thing the man had said. “Oh, fuck.”

“What?”

Maisey jerked upright and spun to look at Aaron. “Her name. It was Hazel.”

Aaron gripped her upper arms and grinned. “Thatta girl! That did it! We have a name! And with a name, we can find her.”

“Where do we start?”

“We start with the sheriff’s department to see if there were any missing persons reports filed or bodies recovered with that name. And we go from there.”

“Sounds good.” As excited as Maisey was at the prospect, she was scared too. Every time they found a victim, they found a suspect.

And the suspect always found her.

The next day yielded nothing. That was what Aaron found?nothing. Not a whiff of anybody who was missing. No one suspected to have been a victim of foul play. “I don’t understand. Somebody has to have missed her,” Maisey said quietly, thinking about how sad it was that no one seemed to.

Aaron shrugged. “I’ve got two more aces in the hole, and those are the ones I’ll play in the morning.”

“What are they?”

“Checking in Laurel and McCreary counties. Might be something in one of those. If she went over the side of the bridge where we were today, her body might’ve drifted down there.”

“That’s a long way, and a lot of twists and turns,” Maisey pointed out.

“One thing we’ve learned is that the time of year and temperatures play a role in things like that. We have no idea exactly when this took place or what conditions were at the time.”

“Okay, yeah, right. That’s true.” A little spark of hope kicked up in Maisey’s brain. Maybe that would yield something. Maybe not, but maybe.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand. The hat. How did it wind up in somebody else’s hands if it went into the river with her?”

“Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it fell off. I mean, I never experienced her actually hitting the water, just falling, and then suddenly, it was over.”

“Okay. So on the way down it fell off,” Aaron said.

“Or the wind blew it off before she went down and it landed on the bridge,” Maisey offered.

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