High Noon

honey.”
    She stared a moment, then shook her head. “A few minutes ago something that should’ve made me laugh just couldn’t. Now this just strikes me as funny. Or maybe it’s just ridiculous.”
    She reached forward, flipped back the side of his jacket to find the label. “I was right about the designer. Never test the mother of a mini-fashionista.”
    “Points for you.”
    “No, for you.” Irritable and let down, she thought. Yes, she knew the signs. “Thanks for coming to go with me. I was keeping the mad on the front burner so I wouldn’t feel too much of the sad. And I neglected to remember one thing.”
    “Which one thing?”
    “This isn’t about me.” She stepped down. “So, you’ve got a shiny black sedan. Sort of dignified.”
    “I thought about bringing the pickup, but that seemed wrong. And the SUV’s just too big.” He shrugged as he opened the car door. “I’m a guy. I have cars. It’s what we do.”
    “As I have a car that is well on its way to becoming a heap, I appreciate being able to go in one of your manly fleet.” She put a hand on his over the door handle. “I’m used to going alone, and I suppose that leads me to think I should. But I don’t always want to, and I also appreciate you figuring that out before I did.”
    Because she looked as if she needed it, Duncan leaned down to touch his lips to hers. “I’m making a study of figuring you out.”
     
    The funeral home was small, the parking lot already crowded with cars and people. Phoebe saw reporters on the edge of the property. Some were doing interviews, others trying to hunt them up.
    “Probably another way in,” Duncan commented.
    Avoiding the press was priority one, so she’d already prepared for it. “There’s a side door, I checked. I thought I’d slip in and out that way. Five minutes. There’ll be representatives from the department here. That’s SOP on a homicide—and in this case, it’s image, too. I’m not officially here.”
    “Got it.” He found a place on the street, then glanced down at her heels. “Can you hike a block in those?”
    “I’m a girl. It’s what we do.”
    When they were on the sidewalk and he took her hand, she looked up at him. And for the second time since she’d met him, Phoebe thought, Oh, well. Damn.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. Nothing.” She looked away again.
    Hell of a time for her heart to start thumping, she decided, hell of a time for it to trip and fall. They were on their way to pay their respects to the mother of a dead boy. And she stumbled face-first into love.
    It made no sense at all.
    “Sure you want to do this?”
    She knew she didn’t. If she couldn’t face the idea of training a puppy, how the hell was she supposed to deal with falling in love? But, of course, since he couldn’t read her mind, he wasn’t speaking of the big, long drop she’d just taken.
    “I want to do it, for Charlie and his mother. And I guess part is about me. I need the ritual of it. I don’t do well when I’m mad and sad, and I’m having a hard time putting either, or both, of those feelings away for very long.”
    Slipping into the side door was simple enough. But before Phoebe could congratulate herself on avoiding the gauntlet out front, she found herself faced with another inside.
    A group of people clustered in and around a small parlor to the side of the main viewing room. The squeak of the door had heads turning. Conversations stopped instantly.
    They weren’t the only white faces, Phoebe noted. A few were scattered in. But her face had been on television. She saw recognition in some of the stares aimed her way, and resentment in others.
    The crowd parted for a tall man, or maybe it parted for the anger pumping off him. “You got no place here. You get the hell out before—”
    “You don’t speak for me.” Opal pushed forward. She looked a decade older than she had in the diner, with her eyes sunken dark in her face as if they’d never find light again. “You don’t speak for my boy or for me.”
    “This here’s for family. It’s for neighborhood.”
    “You going to speak to me of family now, my brother? Where was my family when I needed them? You were up in Charlotte. You weren’t here in the neighborhood. You don’t speak for me.” She drew herself up. “Lieutenant Mac Namara.”
    “Mrs. Johnson, I’m sorry to intrude. I wanted to pay my respects to you and Charlie. I won’t stay.”
    “Lieutenant Mac Namara.” Opal stepped