One Frosty Night. Janice Johnson Kay
“The girl. Well, the night she died.”
“Ah. Hold on a second, will you?” Muffled voices suggested someone else had been in his office. He came back on. “Olivia? Can you take time to have lunch and talk about this?”
Oh, heavens. Had she been hoping—?
Maybe, she thought. Then she remembered that sharp spike of anger she’d felt the day before when she’d said, Would you want to open a second act with a man who’d dumped you the first time around? No—she was doing what she believed was right, that’s all.
“Sure,” she said. “I didn’t bring anything today.”
“I won’t suggest Guido’s.” There was amusement in his voice.
“Please don’t.”
“Not much privacy at the café or the Burger Barn.” He sounded thoughtful.
“No.”
They agreed on pizza. He’d pick her up.
She used the time before he came to study the loft space she was envisioning as an expanded clothing department. She tried to decide how much of a deterrent the long staircase would be. Maybe to some of the older folks. In this vast old building, installing an elevator wasn’t all that feasible, and certainly not in the foreseeable future. They could seed the downstairs, so to speak, with some of the products available upstairs. Tempt shoppers, but also make some appealing items available to people who really couldn’t climb the stairs. Of course, she’d have to hire extra help...
Ben called her mobile phone when he was a couple of blocks away, and she stepped out on the sidewalk just as his Jeep pulled up in front of the hardware store, meaning he didn’t have to find parking. He leaned over to open the door for her. Her heart did some gymnastics at the sight of his lean, handsome face. Thank God he wasn’t smiling. Given her history, she’d probably have fallen off the curb.
She was belting herself in when a horn sounded behind them.
Ben glared into his rearview mirror. “Makes me want to just sit here for about ten minutes,” he muttered but immediately started moving anyway. “Downtown parking is grossly inadequate.”
“You’re telling me?” Olivia was glad for a neutral topic. “I’ve been campaigning for angled parking. I think the street is wide enough, and it would accommodate a few more cars on every block.”
“Plus pleasing anyone who didn’t master parallel parking.”
“Right.” She couldn’t help smiling, even though they both knew he was reminding her of the driving lessons he’d given her. She had been an exceedingly timid parallel parker. Still was; living in downtown Portland, she had rarely driven.
They talked about other possibilities, including a city-owned block not far away that could be converted to parking.
The pizza parlor turned out to be mostly deserted, maybe because the usual lunch hour had passed. The couple of other groups didn’t pay any attention to their arrival. Not until she and Ben were seated in a booth and had ordered did he prompt her. “What did you hear, Olivia?”
“You know how many kids we have working for us.”
He nodded. “I’ve sent a few your father’s way.”
“Right. He said you’d persuaded him to hire Tim Allard.” A senior in high school now, Tim had shaggy hair and a sort of sullen, hulking mien. She’d blinked the first time she saw him, but he’d grown on her.
“He still working out?”
“Lloyd says Tim is his best worker. If Tim is interested, Lloyd would like to hire him full-time once he graduates.”
“Good.” Raising a questioning brow, Ben waited for her to go on.
“Anyway, I was out in the lumberyard yesterday afternoon and overheard a couple of the boys. They didn’t see me in the next row. They were talking about a kegger, how lucky they were that word hadn’t leaked out.” She wished she didn’t feel as if she was betraying a confidence.
His dark eyes were steady on her face. “What makes you think this kegger was that night? It’s been almost six weeks.”
She took a deep breath. “One of them was nervous—I could tell. The other one said, ‘If anybody had talked, the police would have been all over us, and they haven’t been.’ No, a direct quote is, ‘So far we’ve skated.’”
A nerve ticked in his cheek. “Damn,” he said. “I’ve been afraid of something like this.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “Wait. You mean...you knew?”
“KNEW?” BEN SHOOK his head. “No. I’ve just had an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. Too many conversations that fell silent when I was seen approaching. Tension. Maybe—” he had to think it out while he was talking “—a different kind of shock than I’d expect at the announcement of the girl’s death.”
Olivia crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward, her vivid hazel eyes fixed on his face. “What do you mean?”
“I held an assembly.” He waited for her nod. “A lot of the kids—freshmen and sophomores—reacted about how I’d expected. They were ghoulishly fascinated. Most likely thinking, Wow, horror movie awful, and she was, like, our age.”
Olivia smiled at his mimicry, as he’d meant her to do despite the grim subject.
“But the juniors and seniors went really quiet. Not all of them. I saw heads turning, but also a lot of people not looking at anyone else. Definitely shock.” This was the first time he’d put any of this into words. “I didn’t necessarily have the sense they’d all gone on a rampage and were now afraid I knew. But I had to wonder whether a whole lot of them either thought they knew what happened or at least suspected something.”
“You must have asked questions.”
“In a subtle kind of way. Did a lot of eavesdropping, too.”
She made a face. “Like I was doing.”
“Yeah, sometimes I think it’s a shame the architect didn’t add a secret passage that leads behind the lockers.” He waggled his eyebrows. “I could know all.”
He hadn’t heard that small choked laugh in an eon. Or seen the tiny dimple that flickered in one cheek. Mostly because he hadn’t seen a lot of amusement or happiness on her face since she’d been back in town.
Her smile faded, though. “So you haven’t learned anything.”
He lost any vestige of humor, too. “No, and that’s made me even more uneasy. High school kids aren’t good at keeping secrets, not en masse, and not for so long. A girl being sexually molested at home, she’s got it down to a fine art. But when more than one kid knows?” Ben shook his head. “After so many weeks, I’d almost convinced myself I was imagining things.”
“I could be wrong,” she offered. “I mean, it might just have been a party that got wild and didn’t have anything to do with that girl. Maybe at somebody’s house when the parents weren’t home, and damage was done.”
He shrugged acknowledgment. “You’re right. But if it was that bad, wouldn’t you expect the parents to have been bitching?” He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”
He could tell Olivia didn’t, either. From her quote, it was apparent the boys she’d overheard were scared, not just afraid someone’s dad would be pissed. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened this fall in Crescent Creek—except for the one tragic death—so there had to be some sort of connection there.
Their