Page 15 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

“Uh huh,” Bobby said as he put the phone to his ear again.

“She’s definitely hiding something.”

Bobby nodded and held up a finger.

“I mean, when someone says, ‘everything had gone wrong,’ it kind of gives the impression of nefariousness and general villainy, right? Bobby?”

“I’m on the phone,” he said. “Yes, do you carry lotus flowers? Can you order them? Okay. Okay, thank you.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

Bobby said something you can’t say in a public restaurant. (I mean, you can, but they definitely frown on it.) And then he went back to his phone.

“You need lotus flowers?” I asked.

He tapped something on his screen, pushed a hand through his hair, and held the phone to his ear again.

I opened my mouth to ask one of those questions upon which strong relationships are built—in this case: Did you hear me?

Before I could, though, a raised voice cut through the dining room’s chatter.

“Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t you dare talk to me like that!”

At the bar, Sparkie Sanchez was sitting stiffly on her stool, glaring at Larry Lizard.

Sparkie was dressed more casually today—although still expensively—in a blouse and slacks combo and enough makeup to choke a horse.

(That has to be an expression.) Larry, for his part, looked worse in the daylight; his skin was even sallower, if that was possible, and his shoulders stooped; only that thick, bristly hair was unchanged.

The bartender was watching them, but for that matter, everyone was watching them.

Larry glanced around, and in a low voice that nevertheless carried, he said, “I’m trying to explain—”

“I don’t need an explanation, thank you very much.

” Sparkie, for her part, made no effort to moderate her volume.

She swiveled on her stool to face the mirror hanging behind the bar.

She took out a small tin, opened it, and, considering herself in the glass, began to rub a salve across a chapped lips. “This conversation is over.”

After another wary look around the dining room, Larry slid off his stool and headed out of the restaurant.

I wasn’t sure exactly what had just happened, but I knew one thing: Oscar Ratcliff was going to be dining out on these stories for a month.

“Who does have it then?” Bobby asked next to me. “I’m asking you because it’s your job to know. That’s your job, isn’t it? To sell flowers?”

“Whoa,” I said. “Bobby—”

He let out a wordless sound of frustration and slammed his phone down on the table. The empty glasses jumped. Silverware rattled.

Another of those prickly flushes ran through me. I forced myself to take a deep breath. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on,” Bobby said without looking at me, “is nobody in this whole state has lotus flowers. They’re sold out. Or they don’t carry them. Or they want to ask me why I want them, which is none of their business.”

His volume slipped its leash at the end, and several diners turned in our direction.

He wasn’t angry at me; I knew that. He was stressed and exhausted and hurting. Still, a high-pitched whine started in my head. I planted my feet and drew air deep into my belly and breathed it out again. “Okay,” I said. “That sounds really frustrating. Let me help you—”

“I don’t need anyone to help me!”

More heads turned.

I put my hands on the table and pressed down lightly.

Bobby’s phone buzzed.

“What about an online delivery?” I asked through that high-pitched noise in my head.

His phone buzzed again, and he snatched it up. He gave me a shamefaced glance and mumbled, “I’ve got to deal with this.”

I nodded, and Bobby slipped away from the table.

On the other side of the windows, big, white-capped waves continued to roll in.

The light reflecting off the water was so bright that I had to squint, and it was easier to turn my gaze away.

Around me, the rest of the world seemed to be continuing along just fine.

A woman in a coat that looked like it was made out of wet felt was cutting a single scallop into smaller and smaller slices.

A man in an outrageously bad toupee was demonstrating something with a butter knife—it looked like a fencing move.

Two girls who had to have been sisters and were both under the age of nine were looking at an iPad, laughing at whatever they were watching.

The kitchen doors swung open, and Nalini emerged carrying a tray of food. She hurried past me, obviously flustered; it wasn’t until she was crossing the dining room that I noticed the hamburger and the fish and chips.

“Nalini,” I called after her.

But not too loud. Because, you know, crowded restaurant.

She carried the food to the bar, had a quick conversation with the bartender, and set the fish and chips down in front of Sparkie.

Sparkie said something, and the bartender said something, and Nalini said something.

Nobody seemed to know what to do about the hamburger because—as I could have told them—the hamburger was for Bobby, and the fish and chips were for me (not for Sparkie).

But Sparkie said something, and the bartender laughed and set about mixing a drink for her, and Nalini returned the hamburger to the tray and hurried back toward the kitchen.

As she passed me, I tried again. “Uh, Nalini, I think that hamburger—”

But she oh-so-purposefully didn’t notice me and practically sprinted through the swinging doors.

Yeah. That wasn’t obvious at all.

I wondered how well she’d be able to avoid me once we got back to Hemlock House. Even if Nalini didn’t want to tell me the truth, I had no doubt that Indira could get it out of her.

Of course, that was assuming Indira didn’t end up in jail.

I’d all but given up on my Coke and fish and chips—and, for that matter, on getting Bobby to eat something—when Talmage emerged from the kitchen.

Whatever anger had fueled her before, it seemed to have burned itself off; now she looked tired more than anything. Wisps of her honey-blond hair curled at her temples. She had a towel over one shoulder, and she dabbed at her forehead with it as she took one of the chairs.

“Where’s your friend?” she asked.

“He had to make a call.” That was about as far as that conversational opening was going to go, so I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She waved the words away.

The ambient noise settled between us. At the bar, a red-faced man was talking too loudly about his love for grouper.

“Business seems good,” I said, “for a restaurant that hasn’t officially opened.”

Talmage made a face. “Ghouls. They all want to be able to say that they ate at the same restaurant where that man got gunned down.”

It didn’t seem a particularly fair accusation, especially since there was nothing in the restaurant to indicate any sort of grief at Mal’s passing—I wasn’t sure what that might look like in a restaurant, but the vibe seemed to be business as usual.

“I don’t know. Hastings Rock has a lot of good people, actually. And it’s only human to be curious.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, “I grew up here.”

“What?”

“You know the Archers?”

I did know the Archers. The best word for the sprawling conglomeration of aunts and uncles and cousins was clan . The week before, in the Keel Haul, I’d gotten caught in the crossfire of two little Archer hellions, who had been throwing grapefruits at each other.

The look on my face must have communicated some of that because Talmage laughed. “I lived in Seattle for a long time.”

“That’s why you’re opening your restaurant here,” I said. “I thought you were just trying to take advantage of the tourism.”

“I am. But I wanted to be closer to my mom too.”

A thought that should have occurred to me earlier now popped its head up. “What about Mal?”

Talmage raised two fine blond eyebrows.

“Aren’t most of his businesses in Seattle? Was he going to move here with you?”

She sat back in her chair and looked away. When her gaze came back to me, she seemed to have decided something. “It’s not exactly a secret. Mal and I were having problems.” More of that pink came into her cheeks. “I didn’t kill him.”

I raised my hands in surrender.

“We met when my dad was sick.” She reached out and took one of the glasses by the stem and turned it slowly.

The sea-light cast its prismatic spray along the rim.

“I needed someone. Or I thought I did. And Mal—” She stopped turning the glass.

“Mal always needed someone. And then my dad passed, and…”

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “He was in pain. And he had been for a long time.” She released the glass and sat back again. Now she ran the towel along the back of her neck. “Mal didn’t understand.”

“It sounds like he was a difficult person.”

But she only sat there, gazing warily at me.

Sometimes, people like to talk. Sometimes, people can’t wait to tell you every bad thing they know about another person.

(I’m sure you’ve met people like that—it’s exhausting, unless you’re sleuthing, and then it’s incredibly helpful.) But some people are less, um, communicative.

If you read enough police training manuals (one of those quaint little hobbies my parents introduced me to at a tender age), you learn that an interview is only over if the other person stops talking. So, the key is to keep them talking.

“What’s the deal with Sparkie and Larry?” I asked.

Talmage shifted in her seat at the question, and she glanced over automatically to the bar, where Sparkie was eating my fish and chips.

“She’s a narcissist, and he’s a deeply unhappy man who has channeled his own failings into a career picking away at other people’s success—like most critics. Is that what you mean?”

I burst out laughing.

Talmage’s eyebrows went up again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t expect—I’m a writer, and you have no idea how often I’ve had some version of that thought.”

Some of the tension seemed to go out of her. “Right?”

“At least you don’t have to deal with agents.”