Page 17 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Ah.” I forcibly rerouted my brain. “Of course. Let me…yes.” They didn’tneedme for this part, but some people felt better when they were told that it was okay for them to proceed to gaze at the dead person, yes, single file, excellent, sure, lay a flower down even though I’d have to take it off again before the actual burial.

Luckily, Stuart took over at this point. He loaded Mrs. Martin into the hearse to take to the cemetery where she’d pre-bought a plot decades ago. The mourners filed out to see the deed done, grabbing cookies and fresh-cut fruit and cheese and crackers from the snack table as they went. Since my sister and dad were still AWOL, I cleaned everything up in the chapel, made sure there were no more services to prepare for, then booked it up to my room to see what I could find about Richard Leighton.

There were several Richard Leightons on Facebook, and finding Richard Sr’s page led me to Richard Jr.’s Instagram, where—there was our guy. The same face I’d seen with the woman and baby in the photos along the double wide’s hallway. He went by Rick apparently, or Ricky, and he hadn’t posted to Instagram for over a year. The very last picture was of him with his arm around the same blonde-haired woman I saw in his pictures in the hall, with a baby squished between them andlooking like it didn’t quite know what was going on and wasn’t sure whether it liked it.

#dadlife #lovethem #...They went on for a while—honestly too long, some of them were repetitions—but finally down at the end he tagged someone.@RosieRuns

@RosieRuns wasn’t a prolific poster, but she averaged around a picture a day. Most of them were of that blonde baby. I couldn’t find any posts mentioning Rick, but there were gaps in her history that made me think shemighthave had a bunch of posts featuring him before, and then deleted them. Bad breakup? Bad baby daddy breakup? BBDB? Huh, was there anything I could use that was synonymous for Daddy so I could make it BBBB? Boyfriend? No, that made it read like the baby had a boyfriend, which was just creepy.

“Dude, focus. Find Rosie.” Rosie, Rosie…who else appeared in her pictures? I started searching her tags until I found one of her wearing running gear and a racing bib pulled in close to an older man with silver hair, both of them staring at whoever was taking the picture with not-quite smiles on their faces.#Bostonmarathon

She ran the Boston Marathon two years ago! Ah-ha!Now we were getting somewhere!

Another hour jumping between Facebook and Instagram helped me track down a few more pictures of Rosie, but none were definitive until I found a picture of Rosie on the city website in a branded T-shirt working on the landscaping and figured out where she worked—Abe’s Artisanal Gardens.

Cool, I’d found so much information! Kyle was going to be impressed. I went ahead and texted him an update, asked what he’d learned too, then waited to see if he’d get back to me right away. He didn’t, so I made an effort toward cleaning up my room. Still no text. Fine. It was way past lunchtime, so I went downstairs and ate half the leftover muffins—they weretinyandpistachio, resistance was futile—then made sure all my paperwork was updated, checked in on my sister who wasn’t in her room, made a huge pot of spaghetti sauce for dinner and forgot to make spaghetti to go along with it, so I ate it gazpacho-style, and then…

Finally my phone dinged. It was from Kyle! I checked the message.

Not a goddamn thing.

Oh. Dang.

CHAPTER 6

KYLE

Because my life wasn’t already being catapulted into previously uncharted realms offucking weird, I found myself sitting across from Everett at Waffles? for the second time in twenty-four hours.

At least this time I’d arrived first, so I was sitting with my back to the wall. I didn’t need the chaos and randomness of this bizarre place sneaking up on me from behind.

On the other hand, facing the whole place was kind of distracting. It was already a challenge, listening to what Everett was saying—between how attractive he was and how much he ping-ponged between thoughts, my synapses were sizzling like the deep fryer in the diner’s kitchen. But behind him, it was like a Renaissance painting of WTF.

Three tables away from us, there was an animated discussion going on between two agitated men and one pissed-off women that seemed to center around a baby carrier on the bench beside the woman. At the long counter, a man dressed in business casual had been going on and on for like twenty minutes about multiple conspiracy theories. Every time I zeroed in on him, he’d jumped the rails to another conspiracy. Or maybe they were allconnected somehow? I wasn’t quite sure how eight-to-ten foot shadow aliens invading a Florida mall related to the Hollywood elite guzzling adrenochrome. Or how all ofthatwas at the core of why the Ukrainian government was behind MI6 paying North Korean spies to blackmail a local cop into not noticing the KGB operative who’d been brainwashed into shooting at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania while some kid took the fall for it. But maybe I just hadn’t spent enough time on Reddit lately. The waitress listening to the guy’s monologue looked like she wanted to bludgeon him with the coffeepot she’d been holding the whole time.

In the kitchen, something had again caught on fire, and someone was again being blamed for improperly trying to put it out. I was near an emergency exit, right? Because I was going to need it.

And of course, the corner booth was occupied with Goth kids drinking coffee and scowling. They weren’t the same kids as last night, either. Same aesthetic. Same booth. Different kids. Friends of the others? A rival clique? Were Goth gangs a thing? I felt like that would be an interesting turf war, and the gang signs would be?—

“Kyle?”

I shook myself and refocused on Everett. He studied me across the table, head tilted and eyebrows up. Oh. Fuck. Had I spaced out? Probably. I was running on like fourteen minutes of sleep, so my attention span wasn’t great.

Clearing my throat, I sat up. “Sorry. Sorry. Just…” I gave my head another shake. “Tired. What were you saying?”

He laughed softly. Not like he was making fun of me; more like he understood what it was like, getting so easily distracted.

He took a quick sip of coffee. “Like I was saying, I think the girlfriend—or the baby mama, I guess? I don’t think they’re together anymore—might be a good source. We should talk toher.” He furrowed his brow, and his earnestness was almost annoyingly cute. “Are we allowed to do that? I don’t know the first thing about investigating things like this.”

“I do.” I reached for my coffee cup. Still empty, just like it was a few minutes ago. And it would stay that way until QAnon McMulder stopped bending our poor waitress’s ear. Ugh. I pushed the empty cup toward the edge of the table, hoping to signal to her that it needed a refill so she could use that to escape her conversation. To Everett, I said, “We can talk to anyone we want.”

“But what if they say something incriminating?” He wrung his hands above the plate where his mac and cheese bites had been. “Don’t we have to like, read them their rights?”

I couldn’t help smiling. Everett wasn’t stupid. He just hadn’t been immersed in law enforcement his entire life, and like most people who didn’t come from a family full of cops, got most of his information from TV. And I liked that he was erring on the side of caution.

“We’re not arresting or detaining anyone,” I said. “We’re just having a conversation.Ifshe’s willing to talk to us.”

Everett’s eyebrow rose. “But what if she says something important? Or like, incriminating?”

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