“I want to know if something happened to Caleb,” she confessed. “But I also am praying that nothing did.”
Once we were alone, I turned to Benji. “Stewart Alameda is your friend, right?”
“I knew you were going to suspect him,” he told me. “You think Stewart loaned me his car so I could drive up into the mountains to see Harold, and then he turned around and shot at me.”
“No,” I corrected him. “I think the first part is right, but I don’t think Stewart shot at you. He’s a wildlife ranger. He’s been trained to defend himself with a rifle and would have hit you if he was aiming at you. I do think he set you up, but I’d put money on it being either Pete or Chuck shooting at you that day.”
“So you think it’s Pete, whom I’ve never met, by the way, who’s been stalking me, and Chuck and Stewart are helping him.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I do. Think about it. Pete lives in Gearhart, he would know the cemetery, so when you were stranded out there that night, I bet he was the one looking for you.”
“This all sounds so creepy.”
“Because it is,” I assured him, reaching for his hand.
He took hold of mine, and I could feel him tremble.
“Suzie Belmont knows her husband is involved in Caleb’s disappearance,” I assured him. “She just doesn’t want to face it.”
“Yes. I agree.”
I studied his face.
“You’re looking at me oddly again,” he informed me.
“That’s because while she was telling us her story, you were angry one second and calm the next, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Feel about what?”
“Your ability to completely compartmentalize. It was a bit eye-opening.”
“He squeezed my hand. “In what way?”
I looked down at our clasped hands and then back up at him. “You were so cold, and I didn’t like it,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen you lock yourself down like that before. It was weird.”
“Because I’ve never been at all professional with you,” he said with a grin that lit his eyes. “I’ve been wild for you since the moment we met, which has made being anything but a hundred percent honest with you utterly impossible.”
I liked hearing that.
“My God, I told you about my accident, and I haven’t mentioned that to anyone in years.”
I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his bony knuckles.
“I never even told Justin, and he was my boyfriend, for heaven’s sake.”
“Didn’t tell the ex, huh?”
“No, I didn’t,” he murmured, putting the hand I wasn’t holding on my cheek and gently turning my face to him. “I’m crazy about you, Shaw James, and the only reason you saw my professional demeanor was that me engaging with her emotions was not helping.”
“Explain that,” I demanded, holding onto his hand with both of mine.
“As she was talking, I kept asking myself, what if you drove away from me and I never heard from you again? I would move heaven and earth to find out what happened. I would exhaust all my options. No stone would go unturned, and I would have answers. Putting myself in her shoes wasn’t helping. All I could see was everything she didn’t do for someone she supposedly loved.”
I squinted at him. “Or you would have thought I was dead like you did Caleb.”
“Caleb is, for the record, sadly,” he said, taking a quick moment of silence, “most likely dead, so technically, I was right. He is a ghost, he is not at rest, and he does, in fact, need my help!” he bellowed.
“Why’re you yelling?”
“Because you’re being an idiot!” he yelled again. “You think me not alienating Suzie Belmont by sounding judgmental while she was confessing was me somehow not caring?’
“I didn’t know what to think. It was just fuckin’ weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, weird,” I repeated, realizing how stupid I sounded. “I’ve never seen you in, what was that, shrink mode?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it was.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” I told him. “Dispassionate Benji is no good. I don’t like him.”
“For the record, I don’t like him either, which is why I stopped being him.”
Which made so much sense.
“I guarantee if I’d kept equating you and Caleb in my head, I’d only have gotten madder and madder thinking about what I would have done differently instead of listening to Mrs. Belmont without judgment. She would have broken down right there in the back seat, and that would have been it. So I listened to her in a nonconfrontational way, and she told us she does, in fact, think her husband murdered her lover.”
I let that sink in. “She’s been thinking it for a while now.”
“Yes,” he agreed, clipping the word.
I thought a moment. “I’m sorry I let that freak me out.”
“If you’ve never seen a person become a robot right in front of your eyes before, I’m sure it can be a bit unnerving.”