Page 19 of Script Swap (The Last Picks #11)

The sheriff was at The Foxworthy, watching the show. She’d brought her aunt to see it.

The paramedics came.

Bobby took me to a small, dusty room that was full of old furniture.

He sat there with me until the sheriff came.

It felt like a long time. That initial, shocked numbness slowly fell apart.

I started to shake. I wanted to grab my knees, hold on to something, but my hands were still covered with blood.

The blood made my skin tight as it dried on my hands and arms, and when I opened and closed my fingers, little rust-colored specks flaked away and floated down. I tried to wipe them away.

Bobby took my wrists. “They have to document everything first.”

Which was a deputy’s way of saying: you might have done this.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

But Deputy Dahlberg came not long after that. She took photos of my hands and clothes, and she patted my arm and told me everything was going to be okay.

“Okay,” Bobby said. “We can wash up now.”

The theater was empty. The lobby abandoned. The popcorn had burned, and a theater program lay on the floor, and a bottle of water stood on the concession counter, abandoned and beaded with condensation.

The sheriff found us while I was still scrubbing around my fingernails. She leaned past Bobby, who was standing watch in the doorway, considered me, and asked, “How are you doing?”

I gave a soapy thumbs-up.

Her smile looked sad. “I’m sorry you had to go through that, Dash. I know how upsetting it is.”

“Upsetting is one word for it. Should I stop washing my hands? Am I contaminating evidence?”

“Dash, it’s protocol,” Bobby said. “And that kind of evidence can be exculpatory. That’s the reason half of police work is going back to the same materials again and again to figure out what happened.”

But the sheriff waved away Bobby’s explanation. “I’m sorry about that, Dash.”

And what was I supposed to say to that? For the first time, I took in the sheriff: no khaki uniform with the Ridge County seal, no sensible ponytail with a ball cap.

Not even a gun. Instead, her hair was loose and tumbling to her shoulders in fine curls, and she wore a red top with jeans and pumps.

It was her night off. She’d been trying to have a good night too.

“I thought you’d like to know,” the sheriff said, “that Terrence is in surgery.”

“Is he okay?”

“You know doctors. They say if he makes it through tonight, his chances are better, but I don’t know how much that’s actually saying.”

I nodded.

“I also wanted you to know—and this stays here, understand—that I arrested Milton Cook tonight.”

The hum of the theater’s HVAC filled the silence.

“What?” I said.

“He’s the custodian—”

“I know who he is,” I said. “He almost killed me by dropping a wrench on my head. Why’d you arrest him?”

The sheriff’s expression became guarded. “There was sufficient evidence.”

“What does that mean?”

The sheriff didn’t answer.

“But—” I flailed about for a better way to say it, but I ended up back at square one. “He didn’t do it.”

Other sheriffs—lesser sheriffs—would have flapped their arms and turned red and told me I was an idiot. Sheriff Acosta, though, let out a long breath (who can blame her?) and said, “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dash,” Bobby said.

“What’s his motive?”

“Among other things,” the sheriff said, “it seems Terrence hasn’t been paying his cast and crew.”

“So Milton killed him?”

“I’m not saying that’s the only reason, Dash. They’ve worked here together for a long time. They go back together. Resentments build. And Terrence wasn’t an easy man to get along with.” The sheriff must have heard her slip at the same time I did because she said, “Isn’t.”

But I was already shaking my head.

“It’s possible,” Bobby said. “Milton had access to the box office. He would have known where the key to the safe was. He had access to the dressing rooms, too. He could have swapped Kyson’s script.

If Kyson figured it out and confronted him, Milton might have panicked and killed him.

And then he realized he was running out of time, so he went directly to Terrence, they argued, and—”

Something about the story rang true. Whoever had killed Kyson had panicked; otherwise, why clonk him over the head and leave him in the bathroom?

And if it was the same killer, then it made sense their methods would have changed if the next killing had been more carefully planned and executed.

But I still found myself saying, “It’s too much. ”

“From what I understand, Milton made regular use of the catwalks,” the sheriff told me. “And they connect to the control booth.”

“But that means anybody could have gotten in there.”

“Dash, I’m not saying we have the whole case put together, but the man was covered in blood and trying to run—” The sheriff stopped herself and pushed back some of her curls. “I appreciate the points you’re raising, and we’ll take them into consideration as we continue this investigation.”

But I had a sneaking suspicion that meant something like: we’ll find extra nails to make sure we hammer this thing down tight.

“It wasn’t Milton,” I said again. “He’s a weird guy.

And he might be involved somehow—I mean, I still don’t know if he was trying to hurt me the other day or if it was genuinely an accident.

But this doesn’t add up. Why rob the box office, but then point a finger and make everyone suspicious by swapping the scripts and programming the lights to turn off?

Why swap the scripts at all? It freaked Terrence out, I can tell you that much, but we have no idea why.

What were those pictures of Terrence doing on Kyson’s iPad? And where’s Tinny?”

“Miss Fowler is at the hospital,” the sheriff said, and the subtext was: we’re done here.

I nodded. The sheriff murmured to Bobby, “Get home safely,” and Bobby thanked her, and the sheriff left.

But it came to me on the drive home, under the dripping Sitka spruce, with the Pilot’s headlights so bright that the fog glowed like it was on fire: it was too dramatic. The whole thing. It was too showy. Too stagey.

Hemlock House was waiting for us: polished wainscoting, damask wallpaper, thick rugs, crystal chandeliers. The smell of the cinnamon babka Indira had baked that morning, and the restlessness of the wind in the hemlocks and the shattering waves.

Keme and Millie came out of the billiard room, and I had about zero-point-five seconds before Millie crashed into me like a cruise missile.

“Are you OKAY? What happened? Fox called Indira and said THEIR DAD GOT HURT!”

Here’s the thing: Millie’s hugs are world class, but as a human being, I also have this strange need to breathe sometimes. Plus she was, uh, emoting right in my ear.

“Indira went to the hospital,” Keme told Bobby.

Bobby nodded. “Terrence is in surgery.”

And that was it. Because they were boys.

Millie, on the other hand, was still emoting. “We were so SCARED. Were YOU scared? EVEN KEME WAS SCARED.”

Keme gave a vigorous shake of his head to the contrary.

“Did you CRY? Do you want to cry NOW? OH MY GOD, YOU’RE STILL SHAKING!”

I mean, I was shaking, but it was mostly because of the sonic waves.

Bobby gave a boy nod to Keme, and Keme disentangled Millie and me.

(Somehow, in the process, Millie’s earrings got caught on my hair, and then Millie’s hair got caught on the zipper of my jacket, and you should have seen that feral wolf-boy’s blood pressure literally rising by the second as he tried to separate us.)

“Let us know if you hear anything,” Bobby said, hand to the small of my back and already steering me toward the stairs.

Keme nodded, hugging Millie to him as she pressed her face into his shoulder.

When we got into the bedroom, Bobby took off my jacket and turned me out of my T-shirt in one quick movement.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Not what you’re thinking,” he said dryly. And then, like some sort of—I want to say commandant—he barked, “Pants.”

So, I dropped my pants.

I was still yanking off my socks as he propelled me into the bathroom and started the water.

The shower was hot, and I spent a long time in there. Yeah, I wanted to make sure I got all the blood off me. But also because it was like this empty white space of the right amount of stimulus—the warmth, the water needling my skin, the sound filling the small room—to let my brain disengage.

Someone had tried to murder Terrence.

And no matter what the sheriff said, I didn’t think it was Milton. At least, not by himself.

I dried off, padded out to the bedroom, and started fishing for something to sleep in.

I was trying to decide between a sensible, responsible, mature pair of trunks (plain black, ugh) and a cuter pair that had the Kool-Aid Man on them.

(But then I remember one time that Bobby said it felt like the Kool-Aid Man’s eyes were following him.) Bobby came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me.

He was solid. (He’s, like, all muscle, and he never has cheat days where he’s allowed to eat an entire bag of Cheetos because cheese is a good source of protein.) He smelled like the clean, sporty scent of his deodorant and a hint of the day’s sweat.

He drew me against him, my back to his chest. And then he kissed the side of my neck.

Okay, I’m not big on talking about tingles and flutters or goose bumps, but boy howdy, that man knows how to kiss a neck.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that tonight.”

“It’s okay. I was upset; I wasn’t thinking clearly. You were right that it’s important to document everything.”

His pause only lasted a second. “I meant with Terrence.”

“Oh.”

He nuzzled into me, the words brushing my skin. “I hate when this happens to you. I hate that you have to see this kind of thing. I wish I could keep it away from you. The only thing I want is to keep you safe, and I can’t ever seem to do it right.”