And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(36)

Packard said, “What was it? What did you get from Jesse?”

“Nothing bad. Just, like, study drugs?”

“Adderall?”

She nodded. “Sometimes I have so much homework to do, you know?” She sighed and rolled her eyes up. “The pills help me focus.”

“When did you start buying from Jesse?”

She shrugged. “Beginning of the school year, I guess?”

“Who did you buy from before that?”

“I don’t know. It was totally different before Jesse came along. I think he started out doing it the same way as the other guy, but he wasn’t as discreet. It didn’t take long to figure out Jesse was answering the phone number, mainly because he told everyone. He kinda started doing things his own way after a while.”

“What was the old way?”

“The old way was you had to get the phone number from someone? You’d call and hang up, and someone using some kind of app to disguise his voice would call you back to find out what you wanted. If he had it, the price was nonnegotiable. If you agreed, he’d text you a random address out of town where you would drive by and leave the money in a mailbox by the road and keep going. It was always a different address—some lake house with no one home, some lot for sale. A few minutes later, after he drove by and grabbed the money, he’d text you again and tell you to turn around and get the drugs either from the same mailbox or another one close by.”

“How’d you get the number?”

She thought for a minute. “I don’t remember,” she said. “People just knew it. It changed every once in a while and people still managed to find out.”

“Any guesses who the old guy might have been? Any rumors?”

Virginia shook her head. She reached up and twirled the gold cross at her throat. It winked from the overhead lights.

“You’re shaking your head no, but you look like you’re remembering something.”

“It’s just… I don’t know. I saw something once that stuck with me, especially once I realized Jesse had taken over for whoever was the old dealer.”

“Tell me about it.”

The tears long over, Virginia was unrepentant, matter-of-fact. “Okay, so, like, my sister is a nosy little bitch, right? She’s a sophomore this year. Last year she was snooping through my stuff and found my pills. She said she was going to tell our parents unless I told her what they were for and let her try them. It turned into this big deal between the two of us, her taking my pills, her trying to blackmail me all the time. She wanted some for herself and made me take her with me next time I was scoring. So we ran through the whole deal—drove out of town, put the money in an envelope and left it in a mailbox, and then went to the new location to pick up the stuff.

“The mailbox was on my sister’s side. She grabbed the bag and stuck it in her pocket. I started driving away but I wanted her to give me the pills. They were mine—she’d only come up with enough money for three, and there was no way I was about to let her hold the whole bag, not even just for the drive home.”

Virginia kept fiddling with her necklace. She flipped open the cover of her iPad to check the time. “I really don’t want to miss the start of my next class?”

“Finish the story; then you can go.”

She sighed. “At the next stop sign, I turned right, drove a little ways, then turned off the ignition and killed the lights. I said, ‘We’re not going any farther until you give me my dru—my pills.’ She said, ‘Fine, we’ll sit here all night.’ We sat there for five minutes in the dark, completely quiet; then I got mad and grabbed her by the hair. I got a finger through one of her earrings and threatened to rip it right out if she didn’t give me the pills.”

Packard had to keep from smiling as he remembered Gary’s comment from the other day about taking his earrings out before going over to fight Cora. Funny how you could go your whole life without hearing about women fighting and their earrings, and now he’d heard about it twice in two days.

“So she turned over the pills and her earlobe stayed intact?”

“Yes. We were still sitting there, trying to fix the tangles in our hair when a car came up to the stop sign behind us. It continued in the same direction we had been going before I turned. It was a bright-red Mustang. The classic kind.”

Something about the red Mustang was setting off alarm bells for Packard. He knew a classic red Mustang. Driven by someone not far from Jesse’s age. If he could close his eyes and think for a minute, he could come up with the name himself.

“I didn’t think much about it right then, but when we got back to town, we saw the same red Mustang at a light. I saw them clear as day under the streetlight. Jesse Crawford was in the passenger seat.”

“Who was driving, Virginia?”

Now she seemed like she didn’t want to say. “I’m not saying they sold us the drugs, right? I’m just saying a red Mustang came down the road we had been on where we made the buy. Could have been a coincidence.”

“Who was driving?” The name came to him at almost the exact moment she said it.

“Sam Gherlick.”

Of course.

The sheriff’s grandson.

***

Packard let Virginia go to her next class after a few more questions about Jesse and Jenny and where they hung out and who they hung out with. She didn’t know anything. The only time her world intersected with Jesse’s was when she needed more Adderall. Outside of that, she made a conscious effort to avoid him. She had a reputation to maintain.