Page 62 of Smoke and Roses

Through the front window I spot Lindsey behind the counter with her back to me, wrapping a dozen white roses in brown paper.

Her hair is coming down. She’s singing. I can’t hear it through the glass, but I know the way her shoulders move when she does it, and I know it’s Dolly.

My feet glue themselves and I stand on the sidewalk for a while.

Hank Simmons. She’s known him since the day she was born. In about two minutes I’m going to walk in there and take that away from her, and there’s nothing I can do to make it not hurt, except stand there.

Fucking hell.

I open the door. The bell rings over my head.

She turns around with the roses in her arms and sees my face. The song she was singing stops.

“Travis,” she says. “What is it?”

I go around the counter. I take the roses out of her arms and lay them down carefully on the paper so I can take both of her hands.

“Gabe ran the names,” I say. “Honey. It was Hank.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The sound of my blood whooshing is loud in my ears. “No,” I say. “No, Travis. Not Hank.”

He doesn’t argue. He stands behind my counter holding both of my hands.

My voice comes out raw. “Hank buys a rose every Friday. He held my hand at Grandma’s graveside because I didn’t have anybody else, and he stood in the rain with me till everybody left.”

The volume of my words is climbing. I can’t stop it. “He was here last night, Travis. In my shop. Standing right by my door. He said she was a good, brave girl, right to my face.”

“I know.”

A catch in my lungs causes me to pause before asking, “How sure is Gabe?”

“Sure.” He says it gently, but he says it. “The chain at Gary’s. There was a Kubota tractor he bought in ’08 and sold in 2010. He was off shift that night from eighteen hundred hours to zero-seven-hundred the next morning. Then he took Carol’s report.”

Cold chills race all over my body as I pull my hands out of his and put them over my mouth.

Hank Simmons told everybody in this valley she ran off to Portland. He sat across from Carol Hayes at her kitchen table with a notepad and wrote it down like it was true.

“Oh my God,” I say into my hands. “Oh, no. Oh my God.”

The bell rings out front. Heidi Stokes comes in with a package. She takes one look at my face and sets the package on the end of the counter and backs right out the door again.

As she goes, she flips my sign to CLOSED. Bless her.

My knees are wobbly. Travis catches it before I do. He steers me back through the curtain into the workroom and sits me down on my stool by the steel table and crouches in front of me, eye level, with his big hands on my knees.

“Breathe, honey.”

“I am,” I choke out, “breathing.”

“Slower.”

I breathe slower. It doesn’t help at all. Everything in my chest is shaking.

“Did he hurt her?” I whisper. “Did Hank hurt her?”

“Gabe says no. He’d stake his badge on it.” He doesn’t look away from me. “He said whatever Hank did that night, he did it for her. Not to her.”