Page 47 of Blink of an Eye
"Miss? I think you dropped your music box."
I put my head in my hands and groaned.
"Um, miss?"
Jack held out a hand. "I'll take it."
He put the box down in the middle of the table. "That reminds me, I need to reach out to a Fae friend and see if he can get in touch with na Garanwyn."
I gave the box a stern look. "Why can't you just stay where I put you?"
The box started playing Roy Orbison:
"Only the Lonely."
"If Jack takes you with him to Orlando, do you promise to stop showing up in inconvenient places? Also, I can't believe I'm interrogating a wooden box."
"Crusin'"
Jack finished his last bite of lunch and then blew out a breath. "Can't hate a box that likes Roy Orbison and Smokey Robinson."
The music box played a Smokey Robinson marathon while Jack ate his cake. After a while, Monica brought our check and told us Beau would like to talk to us in the kitchen.
Jack handed her money for the bill and a generous tip, and we threaded our way through the tables back to the kitchen.
Beau looked exhausted. His entire body drooped, and the dark circles under his eyes were shocking. He pointed at Jack and started growling at us almost before the door to the dining room closed behind us. "It's about time. You two have got to figure this out. What really happened? I need to know—for sure—so we can figure out a way to cover it up."
Jack held up a hand in a STOP gesture. "Hold on, Beau. I never agreed to that."
Beau, five feet ten inches of angry bald man, started waving his spatula around. "I hired you! Do what I say!"
"That's not how it works." Jack's voice got that scary quiet tone that meant nothing good, so I stepped between them and held up my own hands.
"Enough, you two. Beau, Jack's not about to do anything underhanded. But you can relax, because Lorraine didn't kill Earl."
They both snapped their gazes to me.
"How do you know, I mean, why would you say that?"
He looked different…
"Oh! You shaved the beard. Looks good," I said. "And it's obvious, isn't it? You've been in love with Lorraine forever. The only good reason you'd have for lying about Earl leaving and hiding his body in the swamp is if you thought she killed him."
They both gaped at me and I shrugged. "Call it feminine intuition. Jack says he believes you didn't kill him, so there was only one other plausible reason you'd do such a crazy thing."
"If they try to pin it on Lorraine, I'll tell them I did it. I'll go to jail before I'll let her take the fall for killing that jerk." The top of his head turned bright red in the bright kitchen lights and his body shook with the force of his anger. "It's my fault for not killing him before he had the chance to beat her up that last day, anyway."
"Let's back up," I said. "Pre-killing somebody isn't the right choice, either. What I want to know is why did you never tell Lorraine? She was afraid for years that he'd come back and hurt her again."
His shoulders slumped, and he tossed the spatula on a counter. "I know. I mean, now I know it, now that you told me she didn't kill him. But I thought maybe she thought he was just wounded, and I didn't want to be the one to tell her she was actually a murderer."
Jack stared at him. "What? That doesn’t even make sense. If she'd killed him, she'd have known he was dead, not gone off on a bus. So she'd be worried all those years that whoever took his body was going to come blackmail her any minute."
"Yeah, I know. Hell, it made sense at the time. And then I just left town. Signed the restaurant over to her and got out of her life. I only came back now because… well, because it's been fifty years and I missed home."
"You signed the restaurant over to her? Beau's is actually Lorraine's?"
This just felt like one revelation too many.
