First Girl Gone(24)

“Anyway,” Zoe said, “that’s the real reason I’m surprised you didn’t already know. I guess I just figured you guys told each other everything sooner or later.”

Charlie’s smile faded some.

“Not everything.”

She spun her bottle in her hands and wondered at the secrets we kept. Zoe’s secrets. Allie’s secrets. Kara’s secrets.

Beside her, she heard Zoe swear under her breath.

“What?” Charlie asked.

“Leroy Gibbs just walked in,” Zoe muttered, her voice still low. “Come on, we can go somewhere else.”

She was already starting to drain her bottle, but Charlie stopped her.

“It’s fine. Really. We can stay.”

Zoe’s forehead puckered into a series of concerned lines.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Charlie watched him saunter over to one of the pool tables at the far end of the tavern, his eyes wild, his salt-and-pepper beard in its usual state of disarray, covering most everything from his cheekbones down to his shirt collar in messy tangles of hair. In all the many times she’d driven past his house over the years, she’d never seen him in the flesh. She knew what he looked like, of course. There’d been plenty of pictures of him in the paper when he was first arrested for Allie’s murder. And again when the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence.

But it was different seeing him now, in person. He was bigger, more imposing than photographs could accurately depict. Broad and burly with massive hands, fingers as thick as serpents.

She couldn’t help but imagine the strong fingers wrapping around Allie’s throat and squeezing. Constricting. Charlie’s blood ran cold at the thought.

Pinching her eyes shut, she forced herself to look away. She drank, tried to wash down the dark thoughts. She’d told Zoe it was OK if they stayed. She needed to be OK.

She opened her mouth, about to ask Zoe how her parents were, when she was jostled by someone sidling up to the bar behind her. Charlie turned, annoyed, and found Will Crawford smirking down at her.

“Charlie Winters and Zoe Wyatt. Why do I get a nervous sloshing in my stomach when I walk in and see the two of you sitting together?”

Clutching the neck of her beer bottle, Zoe pointed at him with her pinky finger.

“Probably because of that time we put a giant inflatable penis in your locker.”

Will blinked.

“That was you?”

Charlie slugged Zoe’s arm.

“Damn it, Zoe. You shouldn’t have told him.” Charlie sighed and took a drink. “We could have kept him wondering for the rest of his life.”

“I can’t believe you let all this time pass without fessing up,” Will said, shaking his head.

“That’ll teach you to rig up a system to keep your locker permanently unlocked.”

“A lesson you waited until the last week of my senior year to teach me?”

“Better late than never,” Zoe said.

The bartender set down a tumbler of Scotch in front of Will, who paid and collected his drink.

“You ladies enjoy your evening,” Will said before moving on.

Charlie watched him for a few seconds, still mystified that Will Crawford had become a Scotch-drinking, suit-wearing lawyer. When she swiveled back, Zoe had a stupid smile on her face.

“Didn’t you have a thing for Will?”

Charlie scoffed.

“No.”

“Liar. You totally did.”

“Like a teensy little crush,” Charlie admitted, rolling her eyes. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

Zoe snorted. “Uh-huh.”

Across the bar, Charlie spotted two men drinking. They bore the telltale signs of the classic Michigan-man archetype. They wore flannel shirts and baseball hats—one Lions, one Red Wings—and both sported bushy beards. She couldn’t see their feet, but they were almost definitely wearing chunky Dad shoes. They kept taking turns glancing over their shoulders at where Leroy Gibbs stood playing pool, scowling as they glared at him. Every once in a while, Charlie caught a snippet of what they were saying.

“It ain’t right, him strutting in here like that. We all know what he done,” the one in the Red Wings hat said. His voice was loud and slurred.

“Well then let’s stop talkin’ and do something about it,” said Lions hat.

Charlie’s gut tightened. She was starting to get a bad feeling. Everyone in town had an opinion on Allie’s murder, with half the population seeming to think Gibbs had been railroaded by a police force eager to close the case and the other half believing that the rushed investigation had let the murderous Gibbs walk free. The two gentlemen across the bar seemed to fall in the latter camp.

She peeked over at Zoe, but she was going on about the time an unknown perpetrator interrupted their tenth-grade history class by throwing a tube of hemorrhoid cream into the room and shouting, “Anal relief!” before running off. She hadn’t seemed to notice the two angry Michigan-men across the way.

Charlie watched Lions hat gulp down the rest of his beer. His empty mug thudded onto the bar, and then he pushed up from his stool.

“I still wonder who that was,” Zoe was saying. “By the time Mrs. Gregson got to the door, he was just gone. Like the Flash. The joke I can still appreciate on a certain level, but it’s the sheer footspeed that really stuck with me.”