“Did you talk to her cousin?”
“Ginger? Yeah. And I even went to Greener Pastures to talk to her nana, which is where I got the photo.” I pointed to the picture on the screen and explained what I’d learned about Shane Jones, holding back that I’d seen him today at the garage.
“So he was stalking her?”
“I think he thinks she knows something about Lula.”
She stared at me in disbelief. “Like what?”
I knew police usually held back information, and it didn’t seem like a good time to tell her about Lula’s packages. “I don’t know, but he’s looking for something.”
Frowning, she looked at the photo again. “I think I may have seen him a few months ago, but his name wasn’t Shane. It was Charlie. I don’t know his last name. He came in with Dwight Henderson.”
I gasped. That was the link I needed.
Dwight Henderson had been part of Carson Purdy’s gang.
We got busy again after that and stayed that way until well after midnight. We closed at one, and I realized Max still hadn’t returned.
“Should we be worried?” I asked.
“Normally, I’d say no,” Ruth said. “But in this instance, I don’t know. Tiny said he left with Wyatt. He’s never done that before. Why don’t you call Wyatt and ask him?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. We broke up.”
Her mouth dropped open. “For real?”
I nodded.
Worry creased the corners of her eyes. “Does this mean you’re leavin’ Drum?”
“I’m not just here for Wyatt. I like living with Hank. And I like working here with you and Tiny and Max. If I still have a job.” A lump filled my throat. “I want to make things right with Max. I hate being at odds with him.”
She put her hand on my arm. “Don’t you worry. We’ll make it right.” She gave me a little squeeze, then said, “Now, what happened with you and Wyatt?”
I’d kept so much from her, I wanted to be as honest as I could about this without giving too much away. “Wyatt keeps his past locked up tighter than the gold at Fort Knox. He won’t tell me hardly anything. Nothing about his past girlfriends. His family. Not even why he’s at odds with his father and Max.”
She started to say something, but I sighed and held up my hand. “Before you tell me that we’ve only been together a month, I’d like to point out that I’ve shared very deep, intimate things about myself, and he hasn’t even come close to reciprocating.”
She tilted her head and gave me an are you finished look. “I was tryin’ to say that the very same thing was part of what broke us up. He’d gone out with Heather for years. They broke up, and about a month later we started seein’ each other. We were together for only about three months, but he never told me why they’d broken up, or anything about anything. It was like he was dropped onto Planet Earth without a past. It’s hard to get close to someone who won’t share his life. And then I found him kissing Heather in the back room.” A wry grin twisted her lips. “And that was the other part of what broke us up.”
My mouth parted as her words sunk in. His reticence to share his past hadn’t come out of some need to protect me, and this had all gone down before his time in jail, so it wasn’t just that his incarceration had changed him. This was a pattern.
“That’s part of my beef with Lula,” she continued. “I don’t dislike her, really. It’s more that I don’t trust her. I can’t help but think Wyatt never opened up to me because I was the filler until he got back with Heather. Why waste his time and make himself vulnerable? Right or wrong, between her runnin’ off and keepin’ her business to herself, I can’t help thinkin’ it would be a waste of my time to get to know Lula better.”
While I understood why she felt that way, I wondered how deeply Wyatt had hurt her for her to still be so affected.
She pushed out a sigh of exhaustion. “Go home and get some rest. Since we’re runnin’ with just three of us, we’ll open at four tomorrow. Enjoy your partial day off.”
We walked out to the parking lot together, and Ruth followed me home until I turned off at Hank’s. While we’d never discussed that I might be in danger, it was like she was making