The Little Grave (Detective Amanda Steele)

“That’s me.”

“Detective Steele.”

“Who?” There was a smile in his voice.

“Cut it out. You know exactly who I am.”

He laughed, and she rolled her eyes and smiled. He was going to make her work for this. “I was calling to see if you’d like to join me for dinner this coming Friday night.”

“Oh, Friday, I’m not sure if—”

“All right. Well, I tried—”

“I’m just pulling your leg.” He laughed again. “Friday will work great. Where are you thinking and what time?”

“Rein back the hundred questions.” She found herself giggling and named a place and a time.

“I’ll see you there.”

“Yep.” She hung up, smiling. With all the hell of the past couple of weeks, it was as if something had jarred loose within her, a faint impression of the life she used to live coming through in cracks of light.

She got ready for bed and opened the top drawer in her nightstand. She was going in for a sleeping pill but there was something else in there. The six Xanax pills and Freddy’s card.

She’d kept her word to Palmer’s cousin and brought him justice—even at the expense of herself and her family. She took the baggie from the drawer, no longer drawn to pop one of the pills and dumped them in the toilet. Then she tore up Freddy’s card into a million tiny pieces, dropped them in too, and flushed.

When she returned to her room, there was a lightness in her steps. She closed the drawer without taking a sleeping pill, crawled into bed and fell into a deep slumber.