“No,” he said. “I have no idea.”
“How about your shoe size?”
“Well, yeah, I wear a size ten, just like my dad.”
Josie felt a small jolt but then reminded herself that it could mean nothing. Lots of men wore size ten shoes. Noah wore a size ten. “Do you know Rory’s shoe size?”
“No. We’re friends, but I don’t know that kind of stuff about him.”
“Fair enough,” said Josie.
Ahead, Denton’s quaint, historic Main Street came into view. Josie saw Komorrah’s Koffee on their right, and had a terrible craving for coffee. It would have to wait. She pulled into the municipal parking lot behind the station and parked. “Pax, how do you know about Emily? That your dad is her dad, too.”
He looked at his lap. “I see things. I hear things. I’m not an idiot. I know he thinks I am. Always telling people I’m ‘not right in the head.’” He lowered his voice in a comical impression of Reed that Josie also found sad. Then he continued, “Yeah, I didn’t finish school, but I go to the library all the time. I read a lot. Miss Lorelei said I was brilliant.”
“She was right,” Josie told him. “I mean, come on, ‘palterer’ is a great word!”
He laughed. Josie noticed his shoulder-shrugging had gone away for the moment. She wanted him relaxed, especially now that she was going to ask him to come into the police station and make an official statement about all the things he’d told her.
He said, “I saw him and Miss Lorelei back in the office once, at the market. It was right after my mom died. They were having sex. They did it a few times at the market after that, and then it just stopped.”
“Did he go visit her?” Josie asked.
“No. I don’t think it ever went anywhere. I don’t think it was more than those few times. She kept coming to the market for food, but she avoided him and he avoided her. Then, as the months went on, her stomach got bigger and bigger. It was pretty obvious what was going on. The other thing about my dad? He thinks I don’t understand anything so he has conversations with people while I’m around and thinks I don’t get what’s happening.”
“He confronted her about the pregnancy,” Josie supplied.
“Yeah. She said the baby was his—that she hadn’t been with anyone else. I’m not sure he believed her—or maybe he just didn’t want to—but then he got mad at her. He said she should have ‘gotten rid of it.’ She asked him how he could say that about his own baby. Then he said—”
Paxton broke off. His shoulder jerked up and down again. Josie reached over and touched it lightly, glad that he didn’t flinch. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat again. Then he said, in a croak, “He said, ‘I already got one broken kid, why would I want another?’”
“Oh, Pax,” Josie said. “I’m so sorry.”
He waved a hand in the air, as if to dismiss her words. Josie kept her hand lightly on his shoulder, feeling it twitch under her palm. “You know you’re not broken, right?”
He nodded, not convincingly. “Miss Lorelei took an interest in me after that. Every time she came in, she’d talk to me. When I got older and got my bike, I’d ride over to see her, and I’d visit with Emily. Hold her and stuff. Play with her. Then I got old enough to work at the market, and it wasn’t easy to get away anymore. You have to understand though, I don’t have anyone in my life but my dad. My dad’s sister, my aunt, she wanted to see me all the time after my mom passed, but he won’t let her visit. She lives far away in Georgia. I wish she was closer. I’d try to see her, too. She always treated me well.”
“I’m sorry to hear you haven’t been able to see her,” Josie said. “Pax, is it possible that your dad was… seeing Lorelei for many years before Emily was born? Is it possible that Rory and Holly were also his children?”
“I don’t think so. He was married to my mom.”
While Josie knew that to be true, she also knew it didn’t mean a damn thing. As Pax had told her himself, if there’s one thing that all adults do, it’s lie.
Twenty-Three
Josie sat in her chair, her left foot bare and resting on top of her desk. Beside it, Noah perched, holding an ice pack over her ankle and intermittently shaking his head. Josie had an urge to stand up and smooth the worry lines from his forehead. Mettner had taken Pax down to their conference room to try to get a full statement from him about the Mitchell family and his father’s relationship to them. Gretchen had gone back to Lorelei’s with several patrol units. Sheriff’s deputy Sandoval and her K-9 companion, Rini, were going to meet them there so that they could try to find Rory before nightfall. Amber had gone to Komorrah’s for coffee.
Noah said, “I should have gone with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Josie said. “I went there looking for a personal item. I didn’t expect to get my ass kicked by a fifteen-year-old boy, chase him through the woods and get shot at.”
“It just seems to me that if anyone should expect something like that to happen, it should be you.”
Josie tried to slap him from her seat, but he laughed and moved out of reach.
“By the way,” he told her. “Hummel got Buckley’s prints from your business card. They’re not in AFIS and they don’t match any of the unidentified prints in Lorelei’s house.”
“But Buckley said he was there,” Josie said.
“He said he hadn’t been there in years. Hummel says it’s entirely possible for none of his prints to remain if he hadn’t been there in years. He also lifted Pax’s prints from a water bottle he threw away at the produce market. He went there
