“Well, if you do find something, good luck. And, if you find anything pertinent to the case, let me know.”
“Will do.”
And, with that, the detective headed back to the main house.
She waited until Ansel was out of earshot. “So will you tell me what’s really going on?”
He looked at her in surprise.
She shook her head. “Oh no, you don’t,” she said. “I get it. I saw the change in your stance when you saw something. I just don’t know what it was that you saw.”
He smiled, looked at her, and said, “Are you sure I saw something?”
“I thought so, yes,” she said. “But you’re a tricky dude. So I might have misread the cues.”
“Nope, you didn’t,” he said. “I forgot how observant you were.”
“I wouldn’t have said I am at all,” she noted. “So what did you find?”
“I saw lots of hair as we moved about the property,” he said, “but I need to look closer to see exactly what’s happening here. Also a leash is hanging on the back veranda.”
“So, they had a dog. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Yeah, except the leash was snapped,” he said, “and it’d take a mighty strong dog to do that.”
“I didn’t even notice the leash,” she said. “So much for being observant.”
He shook his head. “It’s what I do. Remember that.”
“Are you happy doing it?”
“Yes,” he said immediately. “It’s been a good job for me.”
“Good,” she said, “you always were the kind who wanted to help somebody.”
“Yep,” he said, “and that’s pretty well what I do.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Are you going back into the navy? Because it hasn’t escaped my notice that what you’re doing currently is hardly what you were doing.”
He sighed. “No, that’s quite true. And it wasn’t even that as much as,” he said, “up until the accident, I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterward. But I won’t go back. I don’t think I want to do the military thing.”
“Can you still do that job?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s something I have to look into.”
“At one time,” she said, “you wanted to be a police officer.”
“Maybe,” he said, “and maybe that’s not a done deal either.”
“I guess it depends on your injuries.”
“I’m on my feet now,” he said, “so I’m better, but I can’t do a ton of physical work. And I probably wouldn’t pass the physical for a cop.”
“Maybe. That makes sense,” she said, “but it’s kind of sad.”
“It is, but, considering everybody else in my unit died,” he said, “I’ll take what I’ve got.”
“Oh my. I didn’t know. So sorry to hear that.”
Caleb shrugged.
But he also turned from her. Hiding his reaction, his emotions.
“It is what it is.”
Yeah. He was like that. She switched gears. “And that’s another thing about you,” she said with a bright smile. “You always had that positive attitude.”
“I did, but the divorce changed a lot of that for me. The two years of our marriage, all we did was fight. I’m struggling with the idea of even seeing her.”
“Is that because you still care?”
“No,” he said, “not in the way you think. Care in the sense that I want to rescue my brother from her clutches, yes. She cheated on me, then let me think it was my baby, and that’s hard to forgive.”
“Got it,” she said. “I just wondered if you … still loved her.”
“Hell no,” he said, “not in any way, shape, or form.”
Laysha smiled because such conviction was in his tone that she actually believed him. “Anybody else in your life?”
“No time, no interest,” he said. “I’ve only barely recovered from all the surgeries,” he said. “Maybe, at some point in time, I’ll get back into the relationship thing, but I haven’t been in too much of a rush.”
“Still because of her?” she asked curiously.
“To a certain extent, yes,” he said. He turned, looked at her, and asked, “Why all the questions?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a teasing voice. “Maybe I’m checking out all the girlfriends in my head to see who’d suit.”
He rolled his eyes at that. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not gonna be set up again.”
“Ah,” she said with a smile. “Well, maybe it’ll just be the two of us then.”
“You know what? I’m damn fine with just the two of us,” he said. “Because, when you think about it, in many ways, it’s only ever been the two of us. Everybody else seemed to go off and do their own thing.”
“So did we,” she reminded him. “They just all seemed to do a better job of it.”
He laughed at that. “I hate to say it, but you’re quite right.” He paused. “We’ll go home,” he said, “and I’ll come back early in the morning and see what I can find.”
“Good enough.” As she led the way back, they detoured around the cops until they got to the vehicle. She loaded up the dogs, and, once inside, she said, “It’s kind of sad that somebody lay here dead, and nobody knew, nobody cared.”
“Well, the people who cared probably don’t know he’s dead,” he said quietly. “Leave it to the police. I’m sure they can figure it out.”
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s hard to walk away though. I want to know who he is and what he was doing here and if he had any family to mourn his death.”
“Well, that’s fine. We can stay in touch with the detective. He might tell us something.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Just think about it. It’ll be one of those cases of ‘read it in the news.’”
“Maybe.” He looked at her and said, “You have good skills hunting down information,” he said, “just because of your job. So don’t let anybody stop you from doing what you want to do.”
She smiled. “I hear you.”
“I’m still surprised you’re at the law firm,” he mentioned, as they drove back home again.
“The paycheck’s decent,” she said. “Not as much as if I were a lawyer. But I get to walk away at the end of the day and come home and work on the house.”
“Right,” he said with a smile. “I forget the house is your current love.”
“Yep, likely to be my only one too,” she admitted.
“Nobody in your world?”
“Nope, not since the divorce.”
He gave a laugh. “We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”
“Yep, like always,” she said with a smile. “We’re a great match.” And she left it at that.
Laysha’s words had a prophetic meaning to them because he had wondered, at one point in time, why the hell the two of them weren’t together. Instead they’d both gone off in different directions. There was absolutely everything to love about her. And he figured he’d been half in love with her since he was even a teenager. But then, somehow, he got hooked up with Sarah, his ex-wife, and Laysha had hooked up with Paul. It’s almost as if they were busy being busy in order to avoid what they were really feeling. He wondered if that was even true or whether that was just more made-up bullshit in his head.