off.
Evan reached for the ketchup. “Did you know the woman who was killed?”
“Not well. She was principal at the elementary school. My daughter and son both go there, but Agnes and I didn’t cross paths much.”
“Murder makes it different, though.”
I paused, a forkful of coleslaw halfway to my mouth. “That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“Just an overactive imagination. My ex-wife always told me it would get me into trouble someday.”
I wasn’t going to ask, but out it came. “How long have you been divorced?”
Dorrie returned and did the leaning thing again. “Dessert?” When the answer was no, she slid the bill on the table and winked at Evan. “Have a nice day.”
Over my protests, Evan placed his big hand over the bill and put it in his shirt pocket. “Five years divorced,” he said. “I waited to leave Chicago until my girls got out of high school. The younger one’s a freshman at Wisconsin.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Madison. “The older one is in the army, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.”
That made the army daughter at least ten years ahead of my Jenna. Maybe he was older than he looked.
“I married my high school sweetheart a month after graduation,” he said. “I’d say it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but I ended up with two top-notch daughters, so I don’t regret a minute of it.”
What I needed was a mood-breaking topic. “What did you do in Chicago?” Perfect. No one could talk about their jobs without being boring.
“Corporate. Talk about boring.” He made a face. “Want the last of these fries?”
“No, thanks. So you just chucked the whole rat race and came up here?”
“Pretty much,” he said cheerfully.
Ah-ha. I
“My dad ran a men’s clothing store up in Green Bay,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but I have some ideas that might make it work.”
I wanted so badly to dislike this man, and he wasn’t making it easy. Clearly, I was going to have to try harder.
Up at the cash register, Ruthie greeted us. “How was everything?” Her thin face was a map of wrinkles—one for each year she’d run the restaurant, she always said.
“Excellent.” Evan laid down an unusual credit card that, after a moment, I recognized. No plebeian applications could get you a card like that. For that card you had to receive an invitation from the credit card company. “Best burger I’ve had in a long time,” he said.
Ruthie lowered her voice and leaned toward us. Our three heads drew together in a conspiratorial huddle. “Sorry about Dorrie,” she said. “Did you hear about Jim? I think it’s really over this time. He left Dorrie for Viv Reilly’s youngest.”
“Nicole?” I gasped. “You can’t be serious. She’s barely out of high school.”
Ruthie’s lips firmed, and she shut the cash register drawer with a slam. “Young and pretty and not a brain in her head. Not that Dorrie is going to win a MacArthur Fellowship anytime soon, but she doesn’t deserve that.”
Poor Dorrie. I instantly felt guilty for my uncharitable thoughts. At least she was fighting back for her self- esteem instead of crawling into a dark closet and crying. Since I had no cleavage to speak of, if something like that happened to me, I was a candidate for the closet.
Ruthie stood straight, breaking us out of whisper mode. “I assume you heard about Agnes?”
“Gus says the investigation is proceeding,” I said.
She made a rude noise in the back of her throat. “Gus Eiseley is a nice man, but running a murder investigation?” Shaking her head she said, “Agnes had a lot of enemies in this town. Did you know her?” She shot a look up at Evan.
“No. She sounds . . . as if she must have been an interesting woman.”
Ruthie chuckled. “The man has tact.”
“Just taking the lessons of my kindergarten teacher to heart,” he said. “Mrs. Pelton-Banes always said, ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say—’” He broke off as he noted the expression on my face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Mrs.—Mrs. Pelton-Banes?” I stuttered.
“I don’t think she had a first name.”
“Mrs. Pelton-Banes, the kindergarten teacher at Alice A. Black Elementary School? In Illinois? In
He frowned. “How did you know that?”
“You’re not Evan Garrett. You’re Evan Hill!”
Chapter 6
Evan stared at me, his face slack with surprise.
“You’re Evan Hill,” I repeated. “You made fun of me for reading instead of playing tag. You said I wasn’t old enough to read and to quit acting big.” The ancient insult came back fresh. “Even when I read the book out loud, you didn’t believe me.”
Evan’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t look like a movie god any longer; he looked like a bigmouthed bass. “Beth Emmerling. You’re Beth Emmerling.” He repeated my name over and over and might have gone on for hours except Ruthie started braying with laughter.
“You two look like Moses just came down from the mountain. Kindergarten pals, eh? This is a small-world story to beat the band.”
Evan looked at Ruthie. “I think she’s still angry.”
They considered me. My hands were on my hips, and my chin was jutting forward.
“Sure looks like it,” Ruthie said. “You’d think the statute of limitations on things that happened in kindergarten would have expired by now.”
“Do you think an apology would help?”
Ruthie pursed her lips, making tiny lines radiate around her mouth. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“How about if I tell her I just wanted to play with the prettiest girl in class?”
“Probably not a good idea,” Ruthie said. “She’s not big on flattery.”
“Stop talking as if I weren’t here.” I took a deep breath, willing away the flashback to a childhood pain. “I was never the prettiest girl in any class, anywhere.”
“To me you were,” Evan said softly. My gaze met his bright blue one, and the electricity that had connected us over lunch sprang back to life. He took hold of my elbow and ushered me toward the front door. “Come on. There’s a park bench down the street that’s waiting for us. Let’s go talk.”
Lois glanced up as I paused in the retelling of my luncheon events. “So how’d he end up Evan Garrett if his name was Evan Hill? He’s not hiding from the law, is he?”
I smiled, but she was serious. “Evan’s birth father abandoned his mother when Evan was four.”
“Oh, the poor woman.” Lois clutched a stack of graphic novels to her chest. “That poor little boy.”
“She waited a year, then ran out of money and moved back to her parents’ up in Green Bay. She married Ed Garrett two years later.”
“And Evan’s birth father let Garrett adopt him,” Lois said.
“Not such a mystery, after all.” As a first grader, I’d wondered why Evan wasn’t in school. The day after kindergarten let out, his mother had packed up the station wagon and driven north to Green Bay, but I hadn’t known that until fifteen minutes ago.
“Hmm.” Lois shelved the graphic novels. Bendis, Dini, Eisner, Yang. “Seems like fate might be taking a hand in someone’s romantic life.”
