Chapter Ten
Alex
Three hours later…
I wanted to bottle up how it felt to be leaving the retirement place and going home to Evie and Cody. Sure, I didn’t have them in my home and wasn’t living with them, but I sure as shit was going home to them after this. And not just because they had my dog.
I needed to be around them. I’d realized over the last twenty-four hours that they both brought me peace in different ways.
Cody did it because he reminded me of an injured kitten relying on a human to help him get better again and putting his trust in the human to do it. He also had a personality that made it a breeze to be around him.
And Evie because she was Evie. Something about her brought out feelings and a side of me I thought had died with my wife. If I knew how to describe it all, I’d have rationalized about it with myself so that I could understand exactly what they all were, but I couldn’t even come close to it.
Usually, the only confusion I could cope with was with work when I was sorting out information for a case, but I didn’t mind this one. I just kept telling myself it’d all come out when it was meant to—which was how I’d raised DB to think.
Sometimes it wasn’t about knowing the answer to every why, it was about going with it and waiting for it to all become clear so that it settled in a way you learned from.
“I swear, I thought Mrs. Keating was going to kill Mrs. Bane,” Carter finally said.
We’d both been lost in our thoughts since we’d left the retirement home, and we were almost halfway back to the station now. Normally, I’d have been thinking about what’d just happened as well, but I had other things on my mind.
That didn’t mean I’d ever forget what we’d just witnessed, though. No one could.
“Do you think the staff there get hazard pay?” I asked, slowing down to let a rat run across the road into the field on our right.
“I hope so. Alex, we just saw two women in their eighties fighting. Like hair pulling and tackling each other to the ground type of fighting. I’ve seen them getting heated in the past, but that…” he trailed off, his eyes wide as he stared blindly out of the windshield.
“I never expected it to get that far,” I admitted. “When Mrs. Keating corrected Mrs. Bane about the ‘you’ve got another think coming’ and said she’d looked it up online, I thought Mrs. Bane was going to explode.”
It’d been hilarious to see Mrs. Bane’s face getting redder with each moment after it, but the outcome had been unreal.
“It’s hard to believe something as harmless as Mrs. Bane telling us that there’d been an ongoing dispute with their neighbor and him doing a ‘three-sixty and changing his mind completely’ about it all could have been the final pull on the grenade’s pin.”
I snickered at what Carter had said as I stopped at the light, but it was true.
Mrs. Bane had been explaining how Stan Cain had been provoking and attacking her husband for months in the lead up to his disappearance. But the day after it, he’d done a ‘three-sixty’ and had been one of the most active members of the search party for him.
Mrs. Keating had yelled that if he’d done a ‘three-sixty,’ he’d have stayed the way he’d been originally because it was a full circle, and that Mrs. Bane meant he’d done a ‘one-eighty’ and faced in the opposite direction mentally. After that, the women had ended up in a heap on the floor as they both slapped and smacked each other.
“I think it was a case of Mrs. Bane being embarrassed that for all of her correcting, she’d gotten it wrong twice.”
“Up until that point, she’d been right about the corrections she was giving the other woman, though,” Carter sighed as he checked his phone. “I don’t believe she thinks Cain did anything to her husband, though.”
“I agree. She’s either reaching to hide something, or she’s grasping desperately at straws.”
He was silent for a moment, and when I glanced over at him, he was staring intently at the screen.
“Anything on your mind, man?”
Rubbing his forehead, he mumbled, “Naomi.” Then, lifting his head, he growled, “When isn’t it about Naomi. I mean, I think about her twenty-four hours a day. Wondering if she’s okay, if her and Shanti need anything, if she’s upset or happy. I even try to pre-empt her needing help in any way, Alex. She’s stuck inside my brain, and I can’t get it to switch off.”
Seeing that we had enough time left on our journey to ask the question without the answer getting cut short if he decided to share, I slowed my speed to drag it out and bit the bullet.