“...hardware,” Laurel finished for him. “Poor Phyllis. She tried to interest Bonnie in the grocery side of the business, but all Bonnie wanted to do was play with screws and see what you could do with tools.”
“You sound like you spent a lot of time at the Coopers’ place,” Scott said. He hadn’t known that about her.
“I did. Almost every afternoon after school my freshman year. And part of my sophomore year, too. Until I started hanging out at...” She broke off.
“At our place,” Scott finished for her.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve still got the house.”
“You live there alone?”
Scott nodded.
“How come you never married?” she asked quietly, staring out the front windshield. “As I recall you always had about four girls going at a time.”
Scott shrugged. How did he tell her that he had nothing left to offer on a full-time basis without also telling her why?
“Guess I just never met the woman I wanted to sign on with for fifty years or more.”
He had, of course. She was sitting right next to him. And that was why he’d never married.
Instead he had his work. He would be the best damn cop he could be. Contribute something to the world in the hopes that when his time came to face the final judgment, he’d have done enough good deeds to be offered some token of forgiveness for the things he’d done so horribly wrong.
Scott turned the corner, taking a shortcut to the library, and immediately wished he could turn b
ack. Straight ahead of them, shining bright in the sun, was the pristine white church that was to have been the site of Laurel’s wedding. Instead, it had been the scene of what had to have been the worst moment of her life.
Right there, in that corner of the parking lot, he’d told her that Paul was not going to make it to their wedding. Still dazed and in shock himself, he’d tried to take her in his arms, and had fought off her blows instead as she railed against him for telling her something so completely unbearable.
Scott could still feel those blows. Every single one of them.
He glanced surreptitiously sideways, wondering if he should acknowledge the building just ahead, or pretend it wasn’t there. Just as they’d been pretending that Paul’s death wasn’t there between them, occupying both of their minds. That the pain wasn’t still as fresh as it had been in that churchyard three and a half years before.
Laurel was looking out her side window, her head turned at an unnatural angle, as though she was trying to cut the church out of even her peripheral vision.
She apparently wasn’t ready to talk about that day.
Scott was relieved as hell.
He wasn’t ready, either.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAUREL WAS SURPRISED to get a phone call at Twin Oaks later that evening. Still dressed in the clothes she’d had on all day, she’d just finished summarizing her observations on the little handheld tape recorder that was her constant companion, and was lying in the dark on the big four-poster bed, staring out the window, trying to make sense of something.
Of anything.
Byrd’s disappearance. Her feeling of homecoming in the Coopers’ arms that afternoon. Scott.
And Paul. Always Paul.
Clint’s son, Keegan, knocked on her door to tell her she had a call. She could take it in the office, he said.
Not sure who’d be calling her or why—except maybe the Coopers to confirm a dinner date—Laurel reluctantly left her cocoon of darkness.
Was there any point in furthering her relationship with the Coopers? It wasn’t likely that she’d ever be back to Cooper’s Corner again after Byrd was found.