Tillie licked her lips, her hand going to the pocket of her robe to pull out a pack of cigarettes. “Someone must have come into the station while I was in the storage room.”
“Who?” Wynter pressed. “You surely saw them when you heard the shots and came out to discover what had happened.”
“Go away,” Tillie snapped, stepping back.
“But—”
The door slammed in Wynter’s face. Next to her, Noah muttered a low curse, grabbing her hand to pull her back toward the truck.
“She’s lying,” Wynter said, her tone challenging him to deny the obvious truth.
Noah grimaced, glancing back at the cluttered house. “Yes. She’s lying.”
Chapter 4
Tillie lit her cigarette, taking nervous drags as she paced between the stacks of magazines and empty pizza boxes. She shouldn’t have answered the door.
It was ironic, really.
After quitting her job at the gas station twenty-five years ago, she’d gone on disability and hidden herself in this house. She’d refused every effort from her friends and family to convince her to leave unless it was the most dire circumstances. That was also when she’d lost interest in housekeeping.
She’d always been messy. She worked long hours on her feet; who could blame her if the last thing she wanted to do was mop the floors or clean toilets? But it wasn’t until after the shooting that shit really went downhill. She had all the time in the world to clean, but the thought of tackling the growing piles of trash was exhausting. Plus there was an odd sense of safety as the magazines towered higher and higher, and the bags stuffed with garbage blocked the windows. Eventually she was confined to one small spot on her couch where she could see her TV. And a narrow path that led to her bathroom.
She was hidden. Protected from the memories of what had happened that night.
And so she’d clung to her crap until the damned sheriff had arrived and pounded on her door.
It hadn’t been the old sheriff. Not the one who’d hounded her with questions about the killing. It had been a younger woman with a sour temper who threatened to have her evicted if she didn’t clean up the property.
The woman claimed the neighbors were complaining about rats and the smell of rotting garbage.
Tillie had been furious.
This was her house. She’d inherited it after her parents died. She could do what the hell she wanted with it. This was America, wasn’t it? Land of the free?
Except the sheriff had started throwing around words like “city fines” and “fire marshals” and “condemning” her home.
The thought of being forced out of her fortress and left exposed ... It horrified her.
So when the knock had come on the door a few minutes ago she’d forced herself to answer it. She couldn’t afford to piss off the authorities. Her fingers were shaking as she took a deep drag off the cigarette, filling her lungs with hot smoke and a sense of calm.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she muttered, her voice rusty as an unused hinge. She winced, taking another drag. “Just fine.”
* * *
The Stranger watched the truck pull away before slipping past the piles of junk that guarded the side door.
This hadn’t been on the agenda. Tillie Lyddon had been satisfactorily silenced years ago. But things had changed. The secrets that had been buried were stirring, the festering shadows threatening to crawl out of the grave.
How could the Stranger trust Tillie?
The denials he’d overheard just minutes ago seemed genuine, but there was fear in her voice.
With the right pressure she would crack.
A risk that had to be eliminated.
The Stranger refused to admit to the tingle of anticipation. Or the eager pleasure that banished the gray dullness.
Business was business.
* * *
The diner wasn’t retro. It was just old. And dingy.
The dining area was a long, narrow room with booths on one side and tables next to the windows. The tiled floor had faded to a weird shade of pumpkin and the walls were covered by bumper stickers that had been collected over the past fifty years: DON’T POKE THE BEAR. SMILE. BE HAPPY. MY OTHER CAR IS A FERRARI. The front register was set on top of a glass cooler filled with meringue-topped pies and lemon bars, and the kitchen smelled of grease.
Still, it was reasonably clean, Wynter grudgingly conceded, and there were several customers gathered around the tables despite the fact that it was just eleven A.M.
Seated at a table near the back window, she watched as Noah wrinkled his nose and pushed away his half-eaten hamburger.
“Inferior to the lunches you serve,” he murmured. “It’s dry as cardboard.”
She rolled her eyes, but inside she felt a smug pleasure at his words. Her restaurant was her baby. Her pride and joy.
“Not every place can be a Wynter Garden.”
“Sadly true. But they could make an effort.” He held up a french fry, shaking his head as it dangled limply from his fingers.
Wynter pushed away her own plate. The grilled cheese hadn’t been bad. But it hadn’t been good.
Serviceable. That’s what her father would call it. In his world things were functional, efficient, and adequate. For an English professor he was surprisingly pedantic. Shades of gray.
Wynter, on the other hand, saw the world in vivid greens and yellows and splashes of blue. “Why do you think she lied?”
Noah drummed his fingers on the table. He didn’t pretend he didn’t understand her abrupt question. “My first guess is that she’s scared.”
Wynter agreed. Tillie tried to act tough, but it didn’t take a genius to detect, beneath the brittle brashness, a woman who was terrified. Of what? That was the question.
“I could understand when the shooting first happened. I’d be scared too if there was a mugger out there who was randomly killing women. But after twenty-five years, why wouldn’t she tell the truth?”
“Because she might know something that is still a threat to the perp.”
“You mean that she recognized him?”
Noah shrugged. “It’s one theory.”
Wynter studied Noah’s tanned, sculpted features that had already attracted the attention of every woman in the diner. When they talked about his work it was usually about his conservation efforts, and the community outreach programs. He never discussed the law enforcement side of his job. Now she realized that he would instinctively think like an investigator.
Exactly what she needed.
“Maybe if I offered her a reward she might be willing to tell me what she knows,” Wynter suggested.
“The woman is obviously desperate for money,” Noah agreed. “But would you really trust anything she had to say?”
Wynter thought back to her brief conversation with Tillie. As a rule she tried not judge people until she had a chance to get to know them; it was all too easy to jump to wrong conclusions. But there’d been a hard, cynical glint in the older woman’s eyes. Wynter suspected she would say anything for some easy cash.
“Probably not.”
“Besides, there’s more than one possibility for why she lied. It might be because she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to.”
Wynter arched a brow. “Like what?”
“She could have had a friend watching the place so she could take a break or have a smoke.” He shrugged. “Maybe she was in the storage room having sex.”