He stared down at the floor, his wet hair tucked to one side so his face was in full profile. "I don't want to fight, Anita. I really don't."
"Could have fooled me," I said.
He looked up, and his chocolate brown eyes were dark with more than just color. "If I'd wanted a fight, I could have just given in to Lucy. Let you find us in the bed together."
"You're not mine, anymore, Richard. Why should it bother me what the hell you do?"
"That is the question, isn't it?" He stood and started walking towards me.
"Why did they frame you?" I asked. "Why did they want you in jail?"
"That's you, Anita. All business."
"And you let yourself get distracted, Richard. You don't keep your eye on the ball." Geez, a sports metaphor. Maybe it was contagious.
"Fine," he said, and that one word was so angry that it almost hurt. "The troll band that we're studying has broken into two bands. Their birth rate is so low that they don't do that very often. It's the first recorded offshoot for a North American troll troop in this century."
"This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with anything?"
"Just shut up and listen," he said.
I did. That was a first.
"The second smaller troop moved out of the park. They've been on private land for a little over a year. The farmer who owned the land was okay with that. In fact, he was sort of pleased. Carrie brought him up to see the first troll baby born on his land, and he carried the picture in his wallet."
I looked at him. "Sounds great."
"The farmer, Ivan Greene, died about six months ago. His son was not a nature lover."
"Ah," I said.
"But trolls are a severely endangered species. And they're not like the snail darter, or the velvet-back toad. They're a big, showy animal. The son tried to sell the land, and we got it stopped legally."
"But the son wasn't happy with that," I said.
Richard smiled. "Not hardly."
"So he took you to court," I said.
"Not exactly," Richard said. "We expected him to do that. In fact, we should have known something was wrong when he didn't keep us tied up in court."
"What did he do?" I asked.
The anger was leaking away as Richard talked. He always had to work really hard to stay angry. Me, it was one of my best things. He retrieved the towel from the bed and started drying his hair while he talked.
"Goats started disappearing from a local farmer."
"Goats?" I said.
Richard peered at me through a curtain of wet hair. "Goats."
"Somebody's been reading too much 'Billy Goat Gruff,' " I said.
Richard wrapped the towel more firmly around his head and sat down on the bed. "Exactly," he said. "No one who really knew anything about trolls would have taken goats. Even the European Lesser Trolls that do hunt will take your dog before they'll take your goat."
"So it was a setup," I said.
"Yeah, but the newspapers got hold of it. We were still okay until the dogs and cats started disappearing."