No One Will Miss Her(77)

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry.”

She was blotting the spilled beer from her shirt, and lifted her eyes only briefly to meet his.

“Hi, Detective Bird,” she said. The corners of her mouth tugged down; she wasn’t happy to see him.

“Hi, Mrs. Richards,” he said, and she hurriedly shook her head, eyes darting around the bar. Fearful of attracting attention.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s Swan, now, anyway. My name.”

Bird looked around, too; her nervousness was palpable enough to be contagious, but all the other patrons had their eyes on either the television or their drinks. He lowered his voice anyway.

“You changed your name?”

“Changed it back. Adrienne Richards just had a lot of . . . baggage,” she said, and he laughed in spite of himself.

“Adrienne Swan,” he said, trying it out. “Sure, makes sense. It sounds nice. Swan. Pretty birds, too.”

“They murder a dozen people per year,” she said.

“You’re making that up,” Bird replied, but in fact, he couldn’t tell, and that bothered him. When he’d questioned this woman six months ago, he’d been able to read her easily; he still remembered the confident moment when she’d lost control, said a little too much, and he was sure he’d gotten the truth. Now, he stared at her face and had no idea if she was joking or not. She gazed back at him, expressionless—and then the corners of her mouth twitched, and she shrugged.

“Look it up if you don’t believe me.” She took a long sip of beer, then turned to face him, frowning. “God, I’m sorry. Is this even . . . allowed? Me talking to you, you talking to me? It’s weird.”

Bird winced. “Look, I’m sorry. Really. I shouldn’t have come over. I was about to leave, actually, but I wasn’t even sure it was you at first. You look . . . different.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been that kind of year,” she said. “This shit puts lines on your face that no amount of Botox can fix.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, but she just shrugged again. “Anyway, sorry I startled you. Really. I’ll leave you to it.” He turned to go, and her voice floated over his shoulder.

“Weren’t you sitting down?”

“I can always go somewhere else.”

“No,” she said, and hesitated as he turned back to look at her. She chewed her lip, considering her next move, then abruptly nodded at the chair next to her. “Look, I came here because nobody knows me. The odds of us running into each other—it’s just too weird. It feels like, I don’t know, some kind of test. The universe, or something. So sit down if you want to, and I’ll buy you a drink. If you want to. Unless you’re on duty.”

Bird hesitated. Even if he’d expected to see Adrienne Richards, no, Swan, here, he would not have expected an invitation to sit and drink with her. He hadn’t exactly been nice to her when they’d last seen each other, and he hadn’t exactly been sorry about it, either. The case was closed, but if he thought about it—and he did think about it, every so often—he thought that she might have always known a little more than she was telling. He thought she might have gotten away with something.

But he also thought, back then, that she was a real pill. An entitled bitch, even. Eminently dislikable.

Now he didn’t know what to think.

“All right, thanks. Sounds fun,” he said, and realized, incredibly, that it kind of did.

Adrienne signaled the bartender and kept her eyes on the game while Bird ordered.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” he said, and watched with amusement as the bartender said, “Sure,” and plopped a longneck down in front of him without so much as glancing at the minor celebrity sitting in the next seat over. Not a glimmer of recognition. He took a pull from the bottle and looked over to find Adrienne watching him.

“You think it’s weird that he doesn’t recognize me,” she said.

“A little,” Bird replied, and she smiled.

“People see what they expect to see,” she said. “And if they don’t know what to expect, they see whatever you show them. It took me a little while to figure it out. Back when everything happened, reporters were always trying to follow me around, and I used to put on this outfit to avoid the cameras. Big sunglasses, big hat, this big woolly wrap thing, you know, like a sweater made out of a blanket. The ‘incognito’ look.” She mimed the quotes with her fingers. “And for some reason, I thought this would work.”

Bird chuckled, and so did she.

“It was ridiculous,” she said, laying the back of her hand against her face and lifting her chin like a model. “‘Oh no! Please, no photographs! I’m famous! Don’t look at me!’”

“Funny how that works,” Bird said.

“It’s like a secret code. What to wear when you want to be photographed looking like you didn’t want to be photographed.”

“Seems like you worked it out.”

“Seems like it,” she said. “For the time being, anyway. I have this feeling that in six months, there won’t be any attention left for me to dodge.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Bird joked, and she shook her head.