ask how everyone could claim to love and know Baby so well when none of them seemed to understand the most fundamental issue that surrounded his life.
“Nothing,” she finally said. “Forget it. Are you charging me, Sheriff?”
Gavin leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “No. This is technically Sheriff Nelson’s case. I’m sure he’s going to have questions for you when he discovers the fingerprints are yours. I wanted to see if we could possibly clear this up before he became involved.”
She stood and nodded at him. “You were trying to provide me with a way out. I appreciate it, although I’m sure it was more for Riley’s sake than mine.”
Gavin shrugged. “And Baby’s. He really is quite enthralled with you.”
“Then I guess you’re trying to be a good friend.” She shook her head. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t vandalize my house or my office back in Cambridge. If my fingerprints are on a spray can, then there is some other explanation. Maybe it was part of some junk I cleaned out when I first moved in. I don’t remember it, but it’s possible.”
Gavin studied her. “Okay. I’ll make sure that’s noted when we look deeper.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant deeper into her or deeper into other circumstances—probably both.
She turned toward the door but glanced at him over her shoulder. “Why were you so interested in whether I knew Lexi before I moved to town? What does she have to do with any of this?”
“I’ll tell you that if you tell me why you got upset when I started talking to you about knowing Baby well. Do I not know him as well as I thought?”
It wasn’t her secret to tell. “Have a good night, Sheriff Zimmerman.”
She headed out the door. Her questions about Lexi would have to wait for another day. She had more than enough questions about Baby.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Baby stood inside his garage under Kelly O’Michael’s minivan up on the lift. He rarely worked this late, but he knew being down here was better than being upset upstairs alone in his apartment.
The garage had always been a safe place. Pop Owens had made sure of that since Baby was fourteen years old and had wandered in from skipping school. Pop had put him to work, maybe recognizing a kindred spirit. Put him to work and taught him the basics, then turned him loose to figure stuff out on his own. It had been the best possible thing that could’ve happened to him.
Baby had never expected Pop to leave him the garage. The most Baby had hoped for was to still be able to work for whoever took over after Pop was gone. And he’d had no idea that Pop would be gone so soon, or that he would take Baby’s pipedream and try to force him to make it a reality.
To this day, he still didn’t know if Pop had known he couldn’t read. Pop had certainly known that he couldn’t hand Baby an instruction manual and expect anything to come of it. But then again, Pop hadn’t been a big reader, either.
Baby heard the door click open behind him. He almost turned, but when he heard heels tapping on the floor, he knew right away it was Quinn.
He’d known Quinn would come for him. He wasn’t sure exactly what they would say to each other, but he’d known the little professor wouldn’t be able to leave this alone.
“Blake.”
He smiled and put down the wrench he’d been holding, grabbed the cloth out of habit and wiped his hands even though he hadn’t done anything that would get them dirty. He’d basically just been wandering.
He turned and gave her a half smile. “I was in third grade before I truly understood that my real name wasn’t Baby. It was for a standardized test, and we had to bubble in our names, and I bubbled in Baby. Mrs. Forster had to explain to me that it was a nickname. Everyone had called me that since I was born, so I assumed it was my name.”
“You know they’ll call you Blake if you want them to.”
She looked so beautiful standing there studying him with her big brown eyes. She was worried. Unsure of what to say or how to make this better.
But she wanted to. She wanted to understand.
How had someone who’d known him such a short amount of time gotten to the truth when the people who’d known him for years had overlooked it?