Reserved. Silent. Resilient. Safe. “I never felt threatened by him.” She paused. “In fact, he seems . . . well, caring. He was concerned about the baby foxes I practically ran over.” She glanced at Agent Gallagher, the embarrassment over her careless behavior sweeping through her again. “Accidentally. And . . . he never came across as threatening. I was prepared had that not been the case,” she added, wanting to grimace at what she must have looked like to Lucas, showing up on his doorstep practically holding a rifle on him and demanding answers. “His language is . . . simple, I suppose but he’s obviously intelligent. He seems confused by certain terms . . . he gets this look on his face . . . but he doesn’t admit when he doesn’t know a word. You can literally see him working it out. It’s . . . Anyway, he’s wary, but funny sometimes. I mean, on purpose. And . . . why are you looking at me that way?”
Agent Gallagher smiled. “You like him.”
Harper laughed. “Like him? No. I mean, sure. He’s . . . interesting.” She felt her cheeks heat and wanted to bring her hands to them but resisted.
Agent Gallagher’s smile faded and a look of concern came into his eyes. Fatherly. It made Harper’s chest squeeze. “Just be cautious. We really don’t know anything about him yet. And at this point, he’s our only person of interest in this murder investigation.”
“I will. I mean, I have no reason to interact with him anymore anyway.”
“It seems serendipitous that you were called in to help on the Driscoll case, and that a person brought in to answer questions, ended up being able to help solve the mystery of where your parents’ car has been all these years.”
“I didn’t think law enforcement agents typically believed in serendipity,” she said, giving Agent Gallagher her first genuine smile since sobbing her heart out in that canyon.
Agent Gallagher chuckled. “We don’t, as a general rule. It’s our job to find explanations that go beyond fate.” His smile grew. “But in this case, it seems like it’s purely a stroke of luck.”
Stroke of luck. Hadn’t Lucas said something similar when she’d told him about being found by the lost hikers? She’d always considered herself unlucky. Perhaps one of the unluckiest people she knew. But maybe she’d been looking at it from the wrong angle. Yes, it had been a terrible tragedy that her parents had been taken from her when she’d been so young—a tragedy that had shaped her life in innumerable negative ways. But . . . but she’d also experienced incredible strokes of . . . yes, luck. And maybe she could learn to find the positive in her life now too if she looked hard enough.
“I know it’s been a long, hard few days, but can I ask a quick question about something related to the crime at the Larkspur?”
Harper rubbed at her eye, happy to turn her mind to something else for a few minutes. “Yes, of course.”
Agent Gallagher took out a photo from his notebook and handed it to her. It was a pile of books on what looked to be a bedside table. “You can see the titles on the spines. They’re all young adult books. What I’m wondering about is the stickers that were obviously peeled off. They were still sticky in some spots, as though it’d been done recently.”
Harper brought the picture closer, her gaze moving to the places on the spines that looked as though stickers had been scraped off with someone’s fingernail.
“I thought they might be from a used bookstore in town, or something like that, but there isn’t one in Helena Springs. I thought about the library, but the Helena Springs library uses white stickers for the book’s location.”
“Yes,” Harper agreed. “So does the Missoula library. But the library in Missoula also uses yellow stickers on some of their books,” Harper said. “I was there recently. That could be a portion of the yellow sticker. The bottom one tells the location of the book, and the top one tells how many days it’s available to check out.” Harper handed the picture back.
Agent Gallagher frowned. “I wonder why someone would peel stickers off books she’d borrowed.”
Harper shrugged. “Maybe she wasn’t planning on taking them back.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Thanks, Harper, that’s helpful. I’ll give you a lift home,” he said, standing. “You must be exhausted.” He turned, meeting her eyes, that same empathy she’d