Gretchen’s grain to deliberately put herself off-the-grid—to imagine herself being on the wrong side of the law—but she knew as well as he did that they had to accept that that might be the case, at least for now.
“Well, I can still pay you in cash.”
“Save it,” Ford advised. “You should always keep some cash on you anyways. People today don’t value cash the way they should. And I don’t need your money—it doesn’t take more than a bird’s worth of feed to keep me alive these days. And you two are the most interesting thing to happen here in years.”
That got Gretchen to break into her first real smile since their call with Martin had ended, and Cooper was grateful for that.
He decided to return the favor and give Ford a kick, too. Everyone liked hearing good, exciting gossip.
He leaned forward.
In for a penny, in for a pound, right? If Ford wants to screw us over, he already has more than enough material.
Don’t turn into a griffin, though. The last thing you want is to give the guy a heart attack—that doesn’t make for a good thank-you at all.
He said, “I was framed for murder. We think we just figured out who did it.”
Ford looked like all his Christmases had come at once. “Just like in The Fugitive.”
“You do kind of look like a young Harrison Ford,” Gretchen said to Cooper. “Mostly your jawline. You’ve got prettier eyes, though.”
Cooper touched his jaw, trying to figure out if she was right about that.
Ford didn’t seem interested in the respective merits of Cooper’s eyes vs. Harrison Ford’s. He said, “Now that you’ve found this fellow, you think it’ll clear your name?”
“I hope so. But even if it doesn’t, we have to try. Whoever framed me hurt other people, too, not just me.”
“We can’t just sit back and let them get away with it,” Gretchen said. “And I’m going to clear Cooper’s name if it kills me.”
“I like a good love story,” Ford said. He looked a little shamefaced about it. “My wife used to get those pirate romances with Fabio on the cover, and I always read them after she did. Some of them were damn good yarns.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his gnarled hands, twisting the wedding ring that Cooper was guessing he hadn’t taken off since he’d first put it on. “Those always had a happy ending. I hope you two get one too.”
“And you, sir,” Cooper said quietly. “Thank you for everything.”
Ford cleared his throat again. “Well, you two had better be hitting the road. Innocence won’t prove itself, you know.”
Tell me about it.
16
Hitting the road was a lot more easily said than done. Sitting in a nice, central-heated motel room, it was easy to forget that they’d left their only transportation stranded miles back in a snowbank off the shoulder of the road.
But Ford had offered them his car. Gretchen hadn’t wanted to take it—the absolute last thing she wanted was to drag this kind, gruff old man into trouble with the law—but Ford had insisted, and Cooper had finally pointed out that they could always claim they’d stolen it. Then Ford had objected on the grounds that he didn’t want to have to tell any cop that he was such a damn fool he’d left his keys in his car. Luckily, he’d caved on that point before Gretchen had needed to figure out if hotwiring a car was as easy in real life as it always looked in the movies.
So she and Cooper were on the road again, this time in Ford’s Ford, which was an old beast that still had a tape-deck. Ford had left a Patsy Cline tape in it that they were enjoying.
Cooper was wearing some of Ford’s freshly-laundered clothes, so at least he wouldn’t look like a prisoner—just a young man with an old man’s fashion sense. (Although Gretchen kind of liked that baggy forest-green cardigan on him.)
They had clean clothes, a car, and a good breakfast, and they knew more or less what they were doing and who they were after.
But they didn’t know where they were going, which made the road trip part a little complicated. And Coop had been quiet ever since they’d worked out the truth about Monroe and (probably) Roger. Gretchen could feel him simmering over there in the driver’s seat; he was like a bundle of tension and anger and self-reproach.
“How could I not have seen it,” he said under his breath.