Chapter Twenty-One
“I’m being cheated out of my Jo time.”
Jo listened to Mel’s complaint over a stack of colorful paper, scalloped scissors, and glitter that they were using to make name tags for the upcoming reunion.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your off time is either on the field at track meets or in the sheets with Gill.”
Instead of denying the truth, or what had been the truth for the better part of a month, Jo poured glitter over the wet glue edging the paper she was working on. It smudged everywhere.
Glitter and glue were not her thing.
“You’d deny me my hookin’ up time?”
Mel rubbed her still flat belly. “No.”
Her denial was unconvincing.
Jo made another attempt at glittering paper. “Why are we doing so many extra of these?” Yes, she was whining, no, she didn’t care.
“It’s not extra.”
“How is that possible?” The count was triple the normal graduating class.
“The kids from Waterville were bused in because of the fire, remember?”
The information rang a bell. “That’s right.” She attempted to flick glitter from her fingers, failed miserably. “Zoe would pick this week to go to New York.”
Mel took another stack of papers and lined them up to cut. “If it makes you feel any better, she’s agreed to help with the food.”
“That’s her thing. She cooks. Glitter isn’t my thing. I’m a cop, I cop.”
Mel frowned. “You’re a friend, you friend.”
Jo scowled. “You’re pushing the friend card.”
Mel blew her a kiss from across the table and nudged the glitter closer to Jo’s side.
She pushed it back. “How about I write the names on these?” Jo removed the list of names of the graduating class that would be attending the reunion.
“I’ve seen your penmanship. You should have been a doctor and not the sheriff.”
No matter how Jo spun that statement, there wasn’t a compliment to be found. She eyed the names on the list and only recognized a third of them. There had been a lot of traffic in and out of River Bend the year her father died.
“Are you going to supervise the prom?” Mel asked.
Jo cringed. “No one wants me hanging out at prom.”
“You were the shit at our prom.”
“Yeah, well, now I’m just the shit. I’m getting used to it.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Yeah, Mel. I do. I can’t look the other way when a responsible kid is doing something he shouldn’t do. Even if I don’t think it’s going to screw him up. Even if that kid is doing exactly what I did at their age.”
“Like drinking.”
“Like all of it.” Jo lifted her hand, made an invisible line in the air. “Everyone needs to be right here. Congenial, friendly . . . keep the conversation going, give everyone the opportunity to voice their thoughts, opinions. But the minute I give someone an inch . . . like Cherie and the freakin’ kennel she’s been running, look what happens.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m not blaming me. It’s just hard. I don’t want to be the hard-ass all the time. I wanted to laugh when Principal Mason dragged me into his office to discipline Drew for connecting his phone to the TV as a remote.”
Mel’s eyes lit up. “Wyatt downloaded that app. Works great.”
“See? Kid was smart, and that shit was funny.” Glitter and glue forgotten, Jo sat back from Mel’s kitchen table, which doubled as a crafting zone.
“You’re up for election next year. Maybe you should reconsider running.”
She had, more times than Jo could count. “The thing is, I don’t mind being a cop. And now that I have someone in my life occupying my thoughts, it’s even harder to do my job.”
“I would think it gave you some stress relief.”
“How so? I haven’t left town since I got here. I can’t even get my car in for the recall. This weekend is the meet in Eugene. The first time I’ll have an opportunity to see how Gill really lives.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I have to squeeze in a personal life. Even then I’ve gotten some slack from the fine churchgoing women in town asking me about my male friend.”
“Oh, no.” Mel had given up on the crafting.
“Oh, yes. Complete with enough snide comments to let me know that my father wouldn’t approve of me living in sin.”
“They didn’t use that term.”
“They did, and do. Part of the problem with my being everyone’s friend. I suppose they’d still call me out if I wasn’t. I’m not sure how my dad did it.”
“Your dad was a widower, it was different.”
“My mom died fourteen years before my dad. He’d celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday the fall before he died.” She stopped to think about that. “A forty-one-year-old widower . . .”
“I can’t even think about how that felt.”
“I remember him crying the day of my mom’s funeral. It all feels like a black-and-white still frame in my head. I remember hurting, and sleeping next to him for about a month. Then he forced me to my room.”
“Probably for the best.”
“Yeah. But still, forty-one. He never once brought a woman home.”
Mel stared at the wall across the room. “He must have really loved your mother.”
“He did. He talked about her all the time. But he was still a man.”
Mel moved her eyes to Jo. “What are you getting at?”
“I’m thirty and get turned on hearing Gill’s bike driving down the street.”
“You always were the wild one.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at. How long did you have between lovers?”
“Nathan was an ass. And I had Hope by then.”
Jo lifted her palms to the air. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t find the time to have sex at some point.”
“Yeah. But not often.”
Jo did the math in her head. “So you had Hope, were still with the ex-asshat for a while after. By the time you were back in River Bend and hooked up with Wyatt, Hope was seven, right?”
“Right.”
“And in between there was one, two lovers?”
“About.”
The details didn’t matter . . . the math did. “Even I managed a few as sheriff over the years, now Gill.”
“What are you getting at?”
“What is the likelihood that my dad didn’t have one single hookup in fourteen years?”
Mel leaned forward on her elbows. “You think he had a lover?”
“My dad was kinda hot.” Jo cringed when she said it, but Mel knew it was true.
“He was.”
He didn’t have tattoos, but he had been a big man who wasn’t afraid of hard work and building muscle. “If he had a lover, someone had to have known about it. It makes sense that he had someone. Even if it was casual.”
“Your dad didn’t strike me as a ‘casual’ guy.”
“Then finding his lover that was less than casual shouldn’t be that hard,” Jo said.
Mel made a whistling noise. “Finding a lover of a decade past, one who didn’t come out of hiding when he died, isn’t going to be easy.”
“It’s a small town. People talk. Gossip is a pastime best spent with a cold beer or cheap wine. Someone has to know something.” And if not, why was it such a secret? And if her father could keep it hush-hush, then there might be a link to how he died. It was the only new thing itching in her head in ten years, and Jo needed to follow the lead.
Mel stood and crossed the room to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer as if Jo was making a suggestion. Though Jo had to admit, a beer while talking about her dead father’s sex life was a fabulous idea.
“Why would he keep it secret?” Mel opened a bottle of sparkling flavored water for herself while Jo popped the top of her beverage.
“That’s easy to answer.” She took a drink. “This town is full of conservative individuals that feel as sheriff I shouldn’t be keeping the company of men.”
Mel’s look of astonishment should have been recorded. “I’m having a hard time with that.”
“Yeah.” Jo went on to give Mel names of the neighbors who’d approached her and those who said nothing with their mouths but everything with their eyes. “It’s only a matter of time before their respect of me drops in the toilet.”
“People can’t expect you to be Virgin Mary.”
“They want it hidden. Even Josie told me that when I stopped by R&B’s yesterday.”
“Josie thought you needed to hide your relationship with Gill?”
“No,” Jo corrected Mel. “She said in her years as a single woman in this town, she’d been told more than once that she shouldn’t be seen keeping men overnight. And she runs a freakin’ bar.” Jo pointed to her own chest. “I’m the sheriff. Next to Minister Imman’s family, I’m up there for censure.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Might be stupid, but it is what it is. I doubt it was any better ten years ago when my dad was alive.”
“It was probably worse. Your dad was a single father raising a daughter.”
“I didn’t think about it that way. I bet he had a lot of women telling him how to parent.”
Mel leaned back, placed her feet on an opposite chair. “Maybe one of these moms from Waterville who was in River Bend shuffling their kids was the lover?”
Jo glanced at the list again. “How many of these kids had single moms?”
“Or unhappily married moms?”
Jo shook her head. “An affair? That wasn’t my dad.”
Mel stared her down. “I wouldn’t close my eyes to that if I were you. If there was a lover, she didn’t come forward when he died. Why would a woman stay hidden?”
“Maybe she didn’t want people judging her.”
“Okay . . . or?”
Jo did not like the fact that Mel had a point. “I still think someone had to have known about a romantic relationship, if my father was having one.”
“What about Karl?”
Jo swallowed some of her beer. “Even if he did, the man wouldn’t tell me. Especially this month.”
“Would Glynis know?” Mel asked.
“Glynis can’t keep a secret. If she knew something, I’d know something.”
Mel’s foot did this nervous twitch thing when she was thinking. “Josie? Everyone talks to the bartender.”
“Maybe.”
“I always talk to my hairdresser. Did your dad go to Russell’s barbershop?”
“Back when Russell Senior cut hair.”
“Worth a shot to ask around.”
Jo had to admit that Mel had some great ideas of places to start the search for the woman her father had some kind of involvement with.
“We could be wrong. Your dad might have just sworn off women,” Mel said.
“I’m craving Gill and it’s only been a week.”
Mel smiled. “Wait until you’re pregnant. Everything funnels right down here.” She made hand gestures to her groin and squirmed in her seat. “Pregnant women shouldn’t be this horny.”
“I bet that makes Wyatt a very happy man.”
“As long as he leaves my boobs alone, we’re golden. My girls hurt.”
They talked about the changes in Mel’s body and the liberation of married sex. Later, with a list of the graduating class of a decade past in her hand, Jo walked the few short blocks to her house in thought.
Her father hiding a woman in his home wouldn’t have happened. Wherever he might have gotten his engine started, it had to have been somewhere else. And since he didn’t leave town often . . .
Jo looked at the houses surrounding hers with renewed interest.
Someone had to have seen something.
But who . . . and who in River Bend could keep a secret?
When her eyes swept the neighborhood a third time, Jo paused.
“Miss Gina,” she whispered to herself. Miss Gina could carry a secret to the grave.