Rick just smiled.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
“I really didn’t come here looking for a date. I really did just want the drink.”
“I know.”
“But I wouldn’t say no. To a date. Just dinner or a picture or something. If the right guy asked.”
So, Rick asked. Her name was Helen.
Rick answered the responding officer’s questions, then sat in the armchair in the living room to wait for the detective to arrive. It took about forty-five minutes. In the meantime, officers and investigators passed in and out of the house, which seemed less and less Helen’s by the moment.
When the detective walked in, he stood to greet her. The woman was average height and build, and busy, always looking, taking in the scene. Her dark hair was tied in a short ponytail; she wore a dark suit and white shirt, nondescript. She dressed to blend in, but her air of authority made her stand out.
She saw him and frowned. “Oh hell. It’s you.”
“Detective Hardin,” he answered, amused at how unhappy she was to see him.
Jessi Hardin pointed at him. “Wait here.”
He sat back down and watched her continue on to the kitchen.
Half an hour later, coroners brought in a gurney, and Hardin returned to the living room. She pulled over a high-backed chair and set it across from him.
“I expected to see bite marks on her neck.”
“I wouldn’t have called it in if I’d done it,” he said.
“But you discovered the body?”
“Yes.”
“And what were you doing here?” She pulled a small notebook and pen from her coat pocket, just like on TV.
“Helen and I were old friends.”
The pen paused over the page. “What’s that even mean?”
He’d been thinking it would be a nice change, not having to avoid the issue, not having to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he knew what he knew, dancing around the truth that he’d known Helen almost her entire life, even though he looked only thirty years old. Hardin knew what he was. But those half-truths he’d always used to explain himself were harder to abandon than he expected.
With any other detective, he’d have said that Helen was a friend of his grandfather’s whom he checked in on from time to time and helped with repairs around the house. But Detective Hardin wouldn’t believe that.
“We met in 1947 and stayed friends.”
Hardin narrowed a thoughtful gaze. “Just so that I’m clear on this, in 1947 she was what, twenty? Twenty-five? And you were—exactly as you are now?”
“Yes.”
“And you stayed friends with her all this time.”
“You say it like you think that’s strange.”
“It’s just not what I expect from the stories.”
She was no doubt building a picture in her mind: Rick and a twenty-five-year-old Helen would have made a striking couple. But Rick and the ninety-year-old Helen?