This Secret Thing, стр. 54
“Your mom hates me now,” he’d said in her room before he left.
“She wasn’t a huge fan before,” Casey had quipped, making Eli look more mournful.
A cop approached the group, looking tentative and apologetic. He held his hands up. “We’re gonna have to ask you guys to move along,” he said, his voice shaking from nerves. He was a rookie; he looked to be around her age.
Casey studied him, recognition niggling at her. He looked back at her, recognition dawning in his eyes, too. She knew him from somewhere, but where? He hadn’t gone to her high school. He wasn’t a neighbor. She could see that he was trying to place her as well. They smiled at each other, and she felt something else, too. Something surprising. Attraction. A stirring inside of her in a place she thought that Russell Aldridge had snuffed out. It was one thing to want Eli. To want him was to want to get back to herself, before, back to the comfort of someone who knew her then. But to want someone strange and new? She found it unexpected, and welcome. She was not dead inside as she had feared. She’d felt it partially with Eli, but that had felt like going backward, regressing. This felt like going forward, daring to hope.
She stepped closer to him, waited for him to finish addressing the crowd. “You look familiar,” she said.
He nodded and motioned for her to move over to the side of the crowd. Together they took a few steps, creating enough distance that no one could eavesdrop. Satisfied that they were out of earshot, he spoke. “You do, too.” He looked at her like she was the only person there. The crowd made no move to obey his dictate, but he didn’t turn back to them. He’d forgotten his duty. “Have you been here all afternoon?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, I just walked over.” She hoped that would make her seem less nosy. “From my neighborhood.” She hitched her thumb in the direction from which she’d come. “I like to walk,” she said, the word walk triggering a memory. “Wait. I know where I’ve seen you before. You were at my neighbor’s.”
He squinted, thinking. “Who’s your neighbor?”
“Norah Ramsey. She got arrested?” She didn’t say what she had been arrested for; it was too embarrassing.
“Oh yeah,” he said, smiling widely. He had dimples. “You walked by. You were concerned someone had been murdered.”
“And now someone has,” she said, her eyes straying to the lake.
“Now, we don’t know that,” he said, caution in his voice. He’d been instructed to do damage control, keep the peace as much as possible. “Could easily have been an accident.”
She crossed her arms. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I believe that the medical examiner—and the evidence—will determine the truth. In the meantime we shouldn’t try to guess. It can only lead to rumors and fear.”
She laughed. “They told you to say that.”
He laughed in spite of himself. “Maybe.”
“Dixon,” a warning voice intoned from several yards away. In response, his eyes strayed to the crowd, still gathered. He was falling down on the job.
“I gotta go,” he said apologetically and walked back to the front of the crowd.
She watched him go, feeling interrupted, as though, if given more time, something would’ve happened, something significant. She wondered if this was what adult life was going to be: a string of moments that leave you wondering what might’ve been. He repeated his admonishment to the crowd, this time more forcefully, making up for his screwup in front of his superior. She stood for a moment longer to look at him, then turned and walked away.
She had almost reached the woods when she heard the swift footfalls of someone running up behind her. It scared her and she froze, which was the worst thing she could do. She should’ve broken into a run, but her instincts seemed to be working against her lately. She couldn’t trust herself to do the right thing. She turned around, ready to scream as loudly as possible in hopes that someone back at the scene would hear her.
But it wasn’t a criminal chasing her into the woods; it was the opposite. The cop stood there, breathing heavily from his sprint to catch her. He held his hands up, indicating he meant her no harm.
“You left.” He panted out the words.
“You told us to,” she teased. She felt that flicker of attraction again, the thrill of wondering if this person could be something more.
He made a face. “I kinda had to.”
She shrugged. “I need to get home anyway.”
“Yeah, I need to get back there,” he said. “We’re packing it in soon. It’s gonna get too dark to do much more.” He shrugged. “And there’s not really any more to do anyway.”
She nodded, studying him as he talked. If he had already graduated from the police academy, that meant he had to be older than her, though by how much she couldn’t guess. He had a baby face, the kind of handsomeness that bordered on pretty. She thought about Eli’s wider masculine features compared to this guy’s aquiline nose and prominent cheekbones. He also had a thinner frame, but toned from police training, she guessed. Eli had been a football player and was broader, bulkier. Not fat, but not exactly built.
When she pictured a future with Eli, she could already envision the beer gut he would likely develop as some men do. She’d told herself his broadness made her feel safe, comforted and comfortable at the same time. But this guy made her feel something else, something daring and new. She felt instantly guilty for comparing the two of them like that, for