Temptation Trails - Page 131
“Sugar cookies, Mom. Sometimes you know the exact wrong thing to say.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing. It’s fine. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
I ended the call. I could have been mad, or at least annoyed, but for some reason, I wasn’t. I hadn’t expected her to be overjoyed about my pregnancy. And she wasn’t. That was fine. I didn’t need her to be. She’d come around, in her own way. And I’d make the best of it, like I always did.
Besides, this baby was going to have a set of grandparents here in Tilikum who loved him or her to pieces. And aunts, uncles, cousins. A big brother…
And just like that, I was crying.
“Hey, Harper. Are you okay?”
I jumped at the sound of Matt’s voice and quickly wiped beneath my eyes. “Oh yeah. I’m fine. Just… nothing.”
He was dressed in a faded gray T-shirt and basketball shorts and the poor guy really needed to learn how to trim his scraggly facial hair.
“Are you sure? You seem upset.”
“I’m really fine. Happy tears, actually.”
“Oh. That’s good. Have you ever heard of the Garcia murder?”
His abrupt changes of subject into his fascination with true crime always left me slightly off kilter. “Um, no?”
He grinned. “It was really grisly. The killer kept the victim in a shed on his property for a while before he murdered her.”
“That’s terrible.”
“They caught him, though. And he was dumb enough to have left DNA evidence. Got him for two other murders.”
“Was that recent, or did it just pop into your head for some reason?”
“I was just doing some research.”
“Oh. That’s… nice.”
“What did deputy Haven tell you about the Joyner case? Anything good?”
“He doesn’t really talk to me about details. I don’t think he’s supposed to.”
“Probably not. Do you think he’s going to solve it?”
“I hope so. One less killer on the loose would be a good thing.”
He glanced away, his eyes seemingly unfocused. “Yeah. Shame no one’s caught him yet. Who knows what else he could be up to.”
There was an odd wistfulness in his voice that sent a chill down my spine. Did he know something?
Or was it worse than that?
He couldn’t be the…
No.
He was just a guy who was a little strange and knew way too much about true crime stories.
