The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,50
if you’d been hurt out there.”
I shook my head. “I tripped. Running to your house.” I heard the flutter of tape caught in the wind. I tried to reconcile the Rick I knew with the one Detective Rigby knew. Yes, he had a key. He knew where the spare had been. His light was on when I ran to his house that night.
I gritted my teeth. This was the detective, this was how it worked—the story planted by someone else, growing into its own thing, its own mess.
And I had to get ahead of it. “Listen, Rick, did they say anything about the man’s car? Was it nearby?”
“No. They showed me his picture, that’s all. No one’s telling me anything. Not who he is, not what he was doing here. Not how he got here. Though I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard to tell, what with all the animals, to know which way he came from. Whether he came in from the front road or somewhere in the back.”
The back. Our houses backed to trees, but the property eventually sloped down to a creek. I’d been that far only once. After the creek, the land crept upward toward someone else’s property, someone else’s home.
“I’m fine, Rick,” I said. “Call if you need anything, okay? I’ll be out for a bit.”
“The man who was here last night,” he said, stepping closer. “That your boyfriend?”
“Just a friend.” I unlocked the car, not needing to get into the specifics.
“Well, he was arguing with that other girl. Out front. I could hear it all the way from my house. I was working in the yard, cleaning up the mess from the police.”
Suddenly, I pictured Rick in my backyard when Elyse was here, just beyond the tree line. How close he had been. And how he’d noticed me walking to my car just now. Detective Rigby’s words about his relationship with his own son—that his attention was stifling. There could be an element of truth in that.
I opened the car door. “They’re very different personalities,” I said. I could picture it, Bennett telling Elyse she had to get home, get some sleep. Work protocol, and he was the one in charge. “But they’re both good people. Good friends.” God, how I needed that to be true.
I KNEW, AS SOON as I pulled into the hospital lot, that I’d missed her. She always parked her white car near the lot exit when she was working—for a fast escape, she joked. This was something else I had liked about her—this feeling that maybe she was always tallying the steps to her escape as well, but she had the confidence to joke about it. I wondered if I’d ever reach that point, if I weren’t so busy trying to hide it.
After circling the lot twice to be sure, I idled in an empty spot, called her cell once more, but hung up as soon as I got her voice-mail again. Chances were, she went straight home after the night shift and fell asleep. She usually had Sunday off, and she probably needed the day to catch up. At least I hoped that was why she hadn’t gotten back to me yet.
THE G&M ON A Sunday morning looked about the same as any other morning. A scattering of cars, a vague sense of déjà vu, so I could almost picture the blue car, Sean Coleman’s forearms leaning on the hood, the rustle of the wrapper of his breakfast sandwich.
I know you.
I parked close to the entrance and walked through the automatic doors, feeling ungrounded. Inside, the same man sat behind the register, the same silent show on in the background. He was helping someone at the register.
Dr. Sydney Britton, like a repeat of Friday. “Hi, good morning,” I said as she headed toward the exit.
She stopped dead in her tracks when she noticed me. “Liv. How are you feeling? You’re not on your way in to work already, are you?”
“No, I just came for a coffee.”
“The leg?” she asked, nodding at my knee.
“Seems a lot better already.” I still held it out straight when I sat down, and I still took the stairs slowly, but I thought that was more out of caution than necessity.
“Good, that’s good. Take care, and we’ll see you for a follow-up next week, okay?” She hitched her purse on her shoulder, turning to go. The bottle in the white plastic bag clanked against something else. I could see the outline of the frozen meal.