Love in the Time of Serial Killers(26)

“Making some jewelry?” I asked before I could stop myself. Alison said she tried not to comment on patrons’ reading choices in a way that could come across as judgmental, but that’s why I didn’t work at the library.

“Not exactly,” he said.

Well, that didn’t make my brain jump to more nefarious activities at all. He was back to the white button-up and khakis again, as if he were aggressively cosplaying Normal Dude. I had a brief moment where I thought maybe I shouldn’t ask him for help with my car, maybe Alison had been my best bet after all, or even Conner once he got off work. But I was tired of hanging around the library. If nothing else, I was starving.

“So,” I said. “I have a bit of a problem. My car over there”—I gestured vaguely toward my poor, incapacitated Camry—“won’t start. I think it’s probably my battery, but I don’t have any jumper cables. I was wondering if you maybe . . .”

I trailed off, as if not completing my sentence meant that I hadn’t actually made the request. If he turned me down, or said he couldn’t help, I’d left myself some wiggle room of plausible deniability. Like, calm down, psycho, I was just going to ask if you maybe agreed that it sounded like a battery problem! Obviously I can take care of it by myself!

But he only shook the hair out of his eyes and, without moving his attention from me to my car, said, “Sure.”



* * *





?THE ONLY SLIGHT wrinkle was that Sam hadn’t parked at the library. He’d had another errand to do nearby, so he offered to go get his truck from that place and bring it back to hook up to my poor dead vehicle. The idea of walking even a quarter mile in the oppressive Florida heat wasn’t appealing, but the idea of having another glimpse into whatever errand Sam might’ve been up to most definitely was, so I offered to walk back with him.

The sidewalk was narrow enough that it was hard to stay side by side without bumping each other occasionally, but I didn’t want to lead because I didn’t know where we were going, and I certainly wasn’t about to trail behind like some puppy. I tried to make myself as small as possible, but these hips weren’t going anywhere. Sam rubbed his palm on his pants before reaching up to grasp his books with both hands, as if they were so heavy he needed the extra support.

The silence between us grew as thick as the humidity, but Sam didn’t seem in any hurry to break it. I wondered, not for the first time, if Conner had somehow gotten it wrong in the game of telephone through middleman Josue. Because if Sam supposedly found me interesting, why wouldn’t he say anything?

It’s not like we hadn’t talked before. He’d strung whole sentences together about mowing the lawn. If that was such a scintillating topic, imagine how stimulating talking about car trouble could be.

“You don’t talk much,” I said finally. When in doubt, I liked to state the obvious.

“Whereas you talk to cats about serial killers,” he said. It was delivered so deadpan that I had to turn my head to catch the slight smile tugging on the corner of his mouth.

“I was on the phone with my dissertation advisor,” I said, although I believed she’d hung up by the time I was seeking a cat’s opinion on Ann Rule. But Sam didn’t need to know that. “Whose cat is that, anyway?”

“Not really anybody’s, I don’t think,” Sam said. “We have a lot of outside cats in the neighborhood, if you hadn’t noticed. The lady on the corner has a few, and they just keep having kittens.”

“This one’s been fixed,” I said. “She has the ear-tip to prove it.”

“She hangs out by Pat’s because she feeds all the animals,” Sam said. “You’re lucky it’s not springtime, because there’s this one cardinal who hangs around Pat’s bird feeder and then will launch himself at your windows, on the attack against the territorial threat of his own reflection.”

That had been possibly the longest I’d ever heard Sam speak, and it was about a cardinal. He hadn’t said anything to indicate he’d gone all Betty Draper on the bird with a rifle, so it looked like I could check cruelty to animals off the warning sign list.

Sam turned toward a parking lot, but I hadn’t been paying attention, and so his shoulder bumped mine, sending me stumbling slightly into the brush by the sidewalk. He reached out a hand to steady me.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“Not your fault.” I tried to give him a smile, because he looked truly upset that he might’ve hurt me, but I worried it came out more like Wednesday Addams’ attempt to mollify the counselors at Camp Chippewa. I was very conscious of the warmth of his hand, which was still wrapped around my upper arm.

He sighed. “I’m not normally this clumsy,” he said.

“Seriously. Not a problem. Nobody’s phone got cracked, nobody dropped any books.” Looking up, I realized that we were in front of a large building with a sign that said JOCELYN’S MUSIC, Sam’s truck parked in the far corner of the lot. “This was your errand?”

Sam removed his hand from my arm to run it through his hair, and I was surprised at how bereft it made me, to lose even that brief contact.

“I teach lessons here,” he said. “Over the summer. It’s not much—maybe four or five hours a week, depending on who’s signed up—but it’s a good side job to make a little extra money.”