‘Tell me what happened.’
He told her about crashing into the guy because he was concentrating on her and the two men fighting, how the man he’d collided with had dropped the knife. And how he’d been coming towards him with it when everybody else’s attention was on the fight. He saw the dots joining themselves in her mind as he talked. A few beers, a bang on the head, eyes out of focus, an imagined knife. But she didn’t come out and say it, nodding thoughtfully to herself instead.
‘There was something wrong about that fight. Like they weren’t really trying to hit each other. The only real punch was the one that hit me. Thanks to you.’
He kept the you’re welcome to himself, stated the obvious conclusion.
‘It was a diversion to cover for the guy with the knife.’
‘If there was a knife.’ She held up her hand to stop him from objecting. ‘Who was he after if there was?’
He pictured the scene in his mind. Bella sitting where Guillory was now at the end of the bar, nobody beyond her. There was nobody else it could’ve been. He told her about Bella and their conversation, what he’d noticed.
‘She kept looking in the mirror. As if she was afraid someone was coming after her.’
‘Looks like they were—if you’re right about the knife.’ There was a lot of emphasis on the if. ‘Thank God for clumsy idiots like you or Kieran would have blood all over his floor.’
Kieran was passing at that moment. He heard the words knife and blood, saw the look in her eye as she massaged her cheek again.
‘Take him outside first, Kate. I don’t need any more mess in here.’ Then to Evan, ‘Did you get your new girlfriend’s phone number? The two of you were getting along pretty well.’
Evan thought he was just having some fun at his expense, trying to incite Guillory to violence against him. He was wrong. Kieran was waiting for an answer.
‘No. Why?’
‘She was in such a hurry to get out, she left her wallet on the bar.’
He reached under the counter, came up with a battered brown leather bifold wallet, laid it on the bar. Evan picked it up. It was more like a man’s wallet. That fit with his overall impression of her. A no-nonsense sort of woman who could hold her own in any situation.
‘Did you look in it for a phone number?’
Kieran shook his head.
‘I haven’t had time. I don’t suppose she’ll be in a hurry to come back either.’
Evan and Guillory exchanged a look, didn’t say anything. Evan waited until Kieran had gone to serve somebody else, then looked inside. He let out a low whistle.
‘There must be a thousand bucks in here.’
He took out a fifty, placed it in front of Guillory. ‘One for you . . .’ Took out another one, put it on the bar next to his own drink. ‘One for me . . .’
She snatched the wallet out of his hand, scooped up the two bills, stuffed them back inside with all of the others. Then she looked through the other sections of the wallet.
‘There’s only cash. No credit cards. Hang on . . . here’s her driver’s license.’
He watched her pull out a Massachusetts license, recognized a younger Bella from the quick glimpse he caught of the photograph. She snorted as she read it.
‘It expired in 1992.’ Then she read the name out loud.
‘Arabella Carlson.’
The first name sounded right—Arabella shortened to Bella. But the last name was wrong.
‘She told me her last name was Carling, not Carlson.’
Guillory smiled and he knew he was going to be on the wrong end of something.
‘Can you blame her? I wouldn’t give you my real name. In fact, sometimes I wish I never had. Besides, it’s so loud in here, it’d be easy to mishear something that similar.’
That wasn’t the case. He knew what he’d heard. Especially after she made a point of telling him her full name and asking if that earned her two beers instead of only one. And it made sense that the sort of person who ended up being the target of a premeditated knife attack lived in a world where you give strangers a false name as a matter of course. He didn’t pursue it with Ms Skeptical.
‘Anything else in there?’
‘What? Some naked selfies, you mean?’
He pictured the woman who’d sat beside him. Far too old for him. But the facetious remark was closer than Guillory intended. She fished out an old photograph folded in two. It showed a much younger version of Bella in her mid-twenties standing beside another woman a few years younger. You couldn’t miss the fact that they were sisters. And he’d been right about Bella. She’d been a good-looking woman when she was younger, even if she’d been eclipsed by her little sister. Both women wore shorts and sleeveless white blouses, standing up to their knees in the sea. Whoever had taken the photograph had been further out, taking the shot looking back towards the shore, sand dunes and a big house in the background behind the two women. They looked exactly like what they were—two young women with their whole lives ahead of them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he was looking at the home that Bella had toasted, the one she was going back to.
What had just happened made him wonder if she’d ever make it.
He took the photo from Guillory while she finished looking through the wallet. Bella was now in her early-to-mid fifties. That made the photograph thirty years old, circa 1990. There wasn’t anything written on the back to prove or disprove it. But there was a phone number.
‘That’s all there is,’ Guillory said, putting the wallet on the bar.
‘There’s a phone
