“I don’t know, but at this point, I would buy a pair in every color. I wish fall would hurry up.”
“You and me both.” She set the boot back on the display and looked around the store. “They’ve got a lot of fall shoes and boots in already.”
I nodded as she picked up a pair of suede tennis shoes in pink.
“That’s cute,” I said, coming to stand beside her.
“I don’t have money to spend on shoes. Honestly, I need to pay rent and all those obnoxious things called bills. What am I going to do?” She glanced around at the shoes on display again.
“We might need to get a part-time job so we can buy all the shoes we want,” I suggested.
“I know, right?”
The woman Joey was waiting on left the shop, and he turned in our direction and smiled, then came over to greet us.
“Hello, ladies. Is there something I can help you with?”
“We’re just looking at all your new fall shoes and boots,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of really cute things in.”
He nodded. “We just got a shipment in last week. They sent us a lot of nice fall shoes, and we’re starting to get our boots in too, as you can see. We’ll get another big shipment in next week, too.”
I glanced at him. Joey was tall, slightly over six feet I’d guess, and had a thin build. His blonde hair was a little on the long side. He wore a thin tie and a white button-down shirt and black pants.
“I can hardly wait,” I said. “I love shoes, and don’t get me started on the boots. I need at least one more pair of boots this fall. One of my old pairs wore out last year.”
He nodded. “A girl can’t have too many pairs of boots.” He chuckled, but it sounded awkward.
“How have you been, Joey?” Christy asked him. “Haven’t seen you around the candy store lately.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking about stopping in to get some pumpkin spice fudge before it’s gone again.”
“You better hurry,” I advised. “Joey, I heard your girlfriend, Hailey Strong died. We just wanted to stop by and tell you how sorry we were.”
He frowned. “Thank you. I appreciate you thinking about me. I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
Christy nodded. “I can’t imagine how shocking that must have been when you were told. Do you have any idea what happened to her?”
He folded his arms in front of himself and his brow furrowed. “One day you’re planning your next date and the next, she’s gone. It’s crazy and I can’t get used to the idea of her being gone.” He shook his head slowly. “I really don’t know what happened to her. But to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me that she ended up dead.”
Her death might not have surprised him, but hearing him say that did surprise me. “What do you mean? I would imagine hearing that your girlfriend had been murdered would surprise a person.”
He shook his head. “We’ve been together since the end of our junior year in high school. I thought I’d be with her forever, if you want to know the truth. But, for the last six or eight months, Hailey was running around with some different people. I didn’t like it at all.”
“What do you mean, different people?” I asked, picking up a smooth leather penny loafer. It was a reddish-brown and was as cute as anything else in the store.
“There were just some weird people that she like to hang around with is all. Ever since she started college last fall, it seemed like she changed. She wanted me to go to college too, and at first I thought I was going to, but then when I was offered a full-time position here at the shoe store, I decided that making money was more important than going to a junior college where all I’ll ever be able to earn is an Associates Degree. What would I do with that?”
“You could’ve used it to go on to earn a bachelor’s degree,” Christy suggested. “A lot of people go to a junior college for the first two years and then transfer to a four-year school later. It saves a lot of money.”
Joey half-rolled his eyes at the suggestion, but then caught himself. “Sure, I guess I could have done that. But I thought I would take a little time off from school and try to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. But Hailey, she was determined she was going to start school right after high school.”
“I think that’s a pretty logical step,” I said, trying not to sound like I was inferring anything about what he had just said. Some people aren’t cut out for college, and that was fine. There was nothing wrong with getting a job and working hard. But it sounded like Joey may have been a little jealous of Hailey moving on with her life.
He nodded. “Sure, I guess so. But then she started hanging out with these college people. She started drinking and going to parties. And there was one person in particular that I didn’t like at all. Her professor, Frank Gillespie.”
Her professor? “Frank Gillespie? What does he teach?” I asked.
“Literature. Can you believe it? He was reading her Shakespearean poetry.” Now he did roll his eyes and smirked at the idea. “She thought it was so romantic.”
“What do you mean by romantic? Was he making a pass at her?” I asked him.
His jaw twitched. “She wouldn’t admit to anything, but she would sit around whining about how much she loved poetry and how much she enjoyed Gillespie’s classes. I told her poetry was boring and that old guy sounded boring, too. I couldn’t imagine
