And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(73)

Packard’s opinion of her was changing. He came in loaded for a spoiled rich girl who’d never given a thought to anyone other than herself. She wasn’t so much selfish as she was vulnerable. No one to look out for her and unable to look out for herself. Every relationship she’d had—with her mother, her brother, the ex—was at her expense.

Shannon stared at her hands in her lap. “And I don’t want to leave my mom. She’d be miserable without both of us.”

“You can’t let your mom hold you back. She’s got her own substance-abuse issues. You have to break the cycle. Keep going down this road and the next thing you know you’ll be pregnant and there’ll be a third generation in your family struggling with the same thing.”

The look that came over her just then, the same time he noticed her clenching her fists, made him think she was about to take a swing at him. “Who the hell are you to sit there and judge us? Tell me how to fix my life? Like you’re some kind of model of having your shit together.”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“You know what people say about you, right?”

Packard braced himself. No one wants to hear what others say about them when they’re not around. Her tone made it clear this wasn’t going to be a list of his best traits.

“It’s important you try to remember—”

“You’re the hot gay cop who lives alone and goes for an ice-cold swim in the lake every day because he’s got no one to get him off.” She made a crude gesture with a nearly closed fist. “Everyone knows you were a cop in Minneapolis—you can google that much—but no one knows what brought you here. People figure it must have been something big for you to hide out on that lake and live like you’re the last of your species. No mate. No prospects. Maybe Gary Bushwright. People think maybe one day you two will hook up.”

Packard laughed in spite of himself. “Jesus,” he said. He looked around the hospital room and at the dark night outside. Him and Gary? He thought about Cora accusing him of being the same as Gary, and about Gary’s casual chatter about bathhouses and gay porn, like these were things they had in common. Packard had assumed the liberties they took were based on a false sense of familiarity. He was out there mediating things between them every other goddamn day. But it wasn’t just Cora and Gary. The realization made him feel exposed. He turned his phone over and over in his hand nervously. He felt like someone had been looking through his windows and seen him in his most private moments. Not someone. The whole town.

Shannon wasn’t done. “When you first got here, half the single women in this town, and some of the married ones, too, would have pulled their knees up to their ears with just a look from you. Once Karen’s story got around, that pretty much stopped. Anyone who hasn’t figured you out quickly gets brought up to speed by everybody else in the room. Don’t waste your time. He doesn’t look it but he’s…” She flopped a limp wrist in his direction.

It took Packard a second to remember who Karen was and what her story might be. Karen Roth. Before she finished her nursing degree, she was another EMT, like Sean White Cloud, he would run into responding to calls. Last fall, at the Sandy Lake Labor Day carnival, she had come up to him, put her hands on his waist, and said, “Ben Packard, I would like to go out on a date with you. Would you please ask me out?”

He’d been strolling Main Street with Thielen and her husband. The two of them were riding the Ferris wheel and he was watching by himself. He was off duty, dressed in jeans and V-neck sweater, but suddenly he felt like he’d just been shot at. He wanted to duck behind something and pull his weapon. He looked over Karen’s head at the Ferris wheel slowly spinning cars full of couples and kids.

“Why don’t you let me buy you a beer?”

She’d looked at him sideways. “Instead of a date or in addition to a date?”

“Let’s start with the beer, see what happens.”

They’d had a beer, walked up and down the length of the tiny street carnival a couple of times, then he told her he had to find Thielen and her husband again since they’d all come together. She gave him her number and told him to call. He never did.

Shannon said, “So why don’t you tell me how it goes when you just move somewhere and figure it out when you get there? You have a job, obviously. You pretty much have Grandpa’s job as sheriff without the hassle of an election. And you have a whole town of people who gossip about you behind your back. But what else you got? Anything? Anyone?”

Packard stood and dropped his coffee cup in the garbage can by her bed. “You just made my point for me. I did the same thing I’m advising you to do. I didn’t say it was going to be easy. You have to decide what’s important and then do the work to make a life for yourself. I can live with gossip. I’ve got no secrets, just untold stories.”

He took out his wallet and give her a card with his numbers on it. “I’ve also got two kids I’m trying to find. If you remember a name or anything else, call me. Anything at all.”

Shannon stared at him with a nervous triumph in her eyes that collapsed in the next second. Attacking him had done nothing to change her current circumstances. It might have cost her an important ally.

Packard checked the time on his phone. It was almost 11:00 p.m.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “People don’t—”