Hot Rocks

It’s such an awful thing to happen.”
    “I can tell you, we got four different witness statements. All of them have the guy running straight out into the street, dead in front of that car. Like he was spooked or something. He seem spooked to you, Laine?”
    “I wasn’t paying enough attention. The fact is, Vince, I basically brushed him off when I realized he wasn’t here to shop. I had customers.” She shook her head when her voice broke. “It seems so callous now.”
    The hand Vince laid over hers in comfort made her feel foul. “You didn’t know what was coming. You were the first to get to him.”
    “He was right outside.” She had to take a deep gulp of coffee to wash the grief out of her throat. “Almost on the doorstep.”
    “He spoke to you.”
    “Yes.” She reached for her coffee again. “Nothing that made much sense. He said he was sorry, a couple of times. I don’t think he knew who I was or what happened. I think he was delirious. The paramedics came and . . . and he died. What will you do now? I mean, he’s not from around here. The phone number’s New York. I wonder, I guess I wonder if he was just driving through, where he was going, where he was from.”
    “We’ll be looking into all that so we can notify his next of kin.” Rising, Vince laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you to put it out of your mind, Laine. You won’t be able to, not for a while. I’m going to tell you that you did all you could. Can’t do more than all you could.”
    “Thanks. I’m going to close up for the day. I want to go home.”
    “Good idea. Want a ride?”
    “No. Thanks.” It was guilt as much as affection that had her rising on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “Tell Jenny I’ll see her tomorrow.”
     
     
     
    His name, at least the name she’d known, was Willy Young. Probably William, Laine thought as she drove up the pitted gravel lane. He hadn’t been her real uncle—as far as she knew—but an honorary one. One who’d always had red licorice in his pocket for a little girl.
    She hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years, and his hair had been brown then, his face a bit rounder. There’d always been a spring in his step.
    Small wonder she hadn’t recognized him in the bowed and nervy little man who’d come into her shop.
    How had he found her? Why had he?
    Since he’d been, to her knowledge, her father’s closest friend, she assumed he was—as was her father—a thief, a scam artist, a small-time grifter. Not the sort of connections a respectable businesswoman wanted to acknowledge.
    And why the hell should that make her feel small and guilty?
    She slapped on the brakes and sat, brooding through the steady whoosh of her wipers at the pretty house on the pretty rise.
    She loved this place. Hers. Home. The two-story frame house was, strictly speaking, too large for a woman on her own. But she loved being able to ramble around in it. She’d loved every minute she’d spent meticulously decorating each room to suit herself. And only herself.
    Knowing, as she did, she’d never, ever have to pack up all her belongings at a moment’s notice to the tune of “Bye Bye Blackbird” and run.
    She loved being able to putter around the yard, planting gardens, pruning bushes, mowing the grass, yanking the weeds. Ordinary things. Simple, normal things for a woman who’d spent the first half of her life doing little that was normal.
    She was entitled to this, wasn’t she? To being Laine Tavish and all that meant? The business, the town, the house, the friends, the life . She was entitled to the woman she’d made herself into.
    It wouldn’t have helped Willy for her to have told Vince the truth. Nothing would have changed for him, and everything might have changed for her. Vince would find out, soon enough, that the man in the county morgue wasn’t Jasper R. Peterson but William Young, and however many aka’s that went with it.
    There’d be a criminal record. She knew Willy had done at least one stint alongside her father. “Brothers in arms,” her father had called them, and she could still hear his big, booming laugh.
    Because it infuriated her, she slammed out of the car. She made the house in a dash, fumbled out her keys.
    She calmed, almost immediately, when the door was closed at her back and the house surrounded her. Just the quiet of it, the scents of lemon oil rubbed into wood by her own hand, the subtle sweetness of spring flowers brought in