“I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He sounds like an indignant father, and I feel like a teenager who got caught sneaking out to see her boyfriend again.
I sit up, rubbing the sleep from my face. “Yeah? You going to turn me in for some kind of reward?” I pull out a twig tangled in the ends of my hair.
He rolls his eyes unnecessarily.
“Yeah.” He sets a to-go carrier of coffee from Clementine’s at the top. “Because I buy coffee for all the people I send off to jail.” He pushes himself over the edge into the cave. A spider’s web catches on his head. He swats at it, almost spilling his cup.
“Okay. You wouldn’t be that kind of an asshole.” I stand, grateful for the coffee even if he forgot to bring sugar.
Davis pops the top of his Styrofoam cup and blows over the top to cool it. His eyes scan the scattered objects around the cave. He softens at the sight of it all. It’s only mine and Adaire’s old playthings. But from his point of view, it’s a welcome reminder of the woman he still loves.
“So then why are you here?” I ask, trying to loosen my words so they don’t sound so snippy.
“Well,” he says in a thoughtful way, “because Raelean told me you were an idiot and went to the cops.” He lets that sit in the air. I grit my teeth. “So I decided that, one—” he ticks of a finger “—I should check to see if you needed me to bail you out. And, two—” he ticks off another finger “—I figured if you were stupid enough to go to jail over this, then maybe you were right.”
I raise a questioning brow.
“Maybe Adaire was trying to tell you something.”
I hold back my victory, Yes! and settle for, “Okay. So now what?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“I’ve said a lot of things. I’m curious which one stuck.”
He scowls at me a half second. “There’s only so many repair shops in a fifty-mile radius that work on Firebirds,” he says, snagging my full attention. “So I made a few calls.”
“And?” I say, when he doesn’t elaborate.
His eyes dip down to my bare feet. “Get your shoes on, I’ll tell you in the truck.”
SEVENTEEN
Dead Man’s Curve
The inside of Davis’s truck smells like an oil pan mixed with vanilla air freshener. The ashtray is overflowing with orange soda bottle caps. The floorboard is cluttered with changes of clothes for one job or the other. It’s a vintage 1954 Ford truck, something he and his father rescued from the Dillards’ old barn and rebuilt.
“So you found Lorelei’s car?” I ask, after he tells me he called around to every tow truck company in the neighboring counties.
“Nope.” He cracks his window to spit out the gum he’d been chewing. “No one had a record of picking up a gold Firebird on or around the day Adaire died. So then I got to thinking...that shit is traceable. If I was covering up a hit-and-run, I’d pay them to not make note of the car’s make and model. So I called back around, asked if they picked up any cars off Highway 19 around those dates.”
“And then you found her car?” I’m needing him to get to the point.
“No. But I find it awfully curious that Gunther’s American Motorsports got pissed I called back a second time. Before the man slammed down the phone and hung up on me, he told me not to worry about cars he may or may not have towed from an accident. Thing is, I never told him the car had been in an accident.”
“Oh, damn,” I say, and I lean back against the seat. Cars get towed for all kinds of reasons, so if he said accident... “He knows something, doesn’t he?”
Davis slowly nods.
It takes us about an hour to get over to Mercer to Gunther’s American Motorsports. During our ride, Davis informs me that, once he passes his final EMT exams, he’s going to start looking for jobs down in Galveston where his grandmother lives.
“Big Mama isn’t getting any younger and Mom wants to sell the junkyard and move down there to take care of her. Makes sense to sell. I’ll be too busy working at the ambulance authority to run it. She never liked the business, anyway, just held on to it after Daddy died.” He says all this, talking to the road ahead of him and as if none of it’s any big deal. Like stepping out of my life is an easy thing to do and several hundred miles between us doesn’t matter to him. “I figured, since most of Mom’s family is down there, I should set up roots there myself.”
I want to ask him, What about Charleston? Adaire and him had had plans to move there so she could attend that fancy design institute while he worked as an EMT for a big hospital. I guess their dreams were only her dreams.
Of course, I feel shameful the second I think it. Davis loved Adaire. Still loves her. I’m happy for him, I really am. He’s following his dreams in the medical field. And Galveston has a big hospital he can work for. I imagine it would be too painful for him to live their dream without her. But the idea of leaving her behind is even worse.
“Mom got a really good offer from a junkyard company over in Alabama.” Davis’s voice brings me back to the truck cab with him. “I think she’ll make enough to retire. But you know Mom.” He turns to me, flashing a big smile. I try my best to mimic it. “She doesn’t know how to sit still for five minutes. She’ll have a part-time job somewhere, I’m sure.”
I nod, happily agreeing, doing a good enough job faking my enthusiasm because Davis doesn’t give me one of his pitying looks. Instead, he veers off the highway into Mercer and through the city streets until we finally find Gunther’s.
The paint on the building looks faded, now more a muted mauve, probably from years spent in the overbearing sun. Seems fitting that a giant cartoon rat with a long beard and sunglasses drives a souped-up hot rod across the building—we ask the first employee we see, who points out the owner, Billy Gunther, who bears the same rodent-like front teeth and red scraggly beard. Except he looks like he’s on the south end of retirement, hunched over and hobbling around.
“That’s not who I talked to,” Davis says. “The guy I spoke with had a young voice.”
We decide to go inside and talk to the woman at the front desk, with spiky long nails, teased high hairdo, and skintight T-shirt, boobs spilling out of the V-neck.
Candy, or rather Candy Kane, as her name badge reads—damn, if her parents didn’t do her wrong—manages the phones, cash register, and impatiently waits on customers all by her lonesome.
“What can I do for you, sugar?” She eyes up Davis like he’s her next dessert. He does look handsome, even if it’s just his Harvey’s Boneyard mechanic uniform—the tough growling bulldog logo oversells it, though.
Davis leans heavily on the high counter, melting her with his gorgeous brown eyes. I bite my lips to keep from laughing.
“My boss called yesterday afternoon. He’s looking for...” Davis fishes a scrap of paper from his pocket and squints to read it. “A 595-A front clamp, full wrap manufacture color code 194/200.” He politely stuffs the paper back in his pocket and throws her a smoldering look.
Well, that gets her purring. It’s Greek to me what he said, but apparently she speaks mechanic.
“That’s pretty darn specific, but I’ll see if we can order you one.” She bobs a seductive eyebrow, then pecks away on a computer a few seconds. “Turbo? Or a sedan?”
