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“Here you go,” I said as I handed her the bowl. “No nuts.” Settling in next to her, I asked, “Baltimore?”
She sucked on a spoonful of ice cream before answering. “Is no big deal.” The tears welling in her eyes betrayed her. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “I’m not supposed to say. Nobody in town can know.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re talking to me, because I’m just a drifter passing through. When I’m gone, nobody in town will know.”
“He’s not really my boyfriend,” she blurted.
The spoon stopped in midair on its way to my mouth. This was exactly the opposite of what Callie had told me. “I thought—”
“That’s what everybody was supposed to think.” She sniffled. “I mean, he was a friend all right, but not like that. Maybe we mighta…we coulda become…”
I put my bowl down on the coffee table and patted her on the knee. “Go as slow as you need.”
She wiped her nose again and put down the ice cream. “It started out that I was helping him.”
I moved closer and took her hand. “How? How were you helping him?”
She sniffled once more. “He made me promise to not tell. Dangerous, he said.”
“Dangerous for who?” I asked, although if he was dead now, how much more dangerous could it get?
“He needed to get away to do some research,” she said, wiping under her eyes.
“How did you help?”
“It worked perfectly.” She giggled. “I mean a Benson and a Pollock dating? Our families hated the idea, so it made sense that we spent our time out of town to get away from them.”
I squeezed her hand, waiting and trying to understand how much of her story was confused by the alcohol.
“Every Saturday I dropped him az the Petersville library for a few hours. I’d add a few pine needles and stuff to my hair on the way back. Everybody thought we were…” She smiled for the first time tonight. “You know, just nookie in the woods and stuff.”
“But there was nothing going on between you two?”
“Naw. He wasn’t as bad as the others, but heez still a stupid Pollock, for God sake,” she said. “But later… But later, well, I was sort of hoping when he finished his project….”
“Hoping it could turn into more?” I finished for her.
She sniffled and nodded. “We didn’t get that chance. He was on a mission, all serious an stuff.”
I returned to my ice cream. “Okay, so I get that you were helping him get out of town so he could go to the library. What was so important about that?”
She sighed, her sniffles gone for now. “He worried about me.” After another spoonful from her bowl she added, “Said it was too dangerous to talk about.” She licked her spoon, then pointed it at me. “Youz probably don’t get how stupid and sweet that is.” She pointed the spoon back at herself. “I’m a Benson and a kick-’em-in-the-balls kinda woman.” She laughed. “And here is this skinny Pollock dude, and he’s wanting to protect me from this secret shit. Me?”
“Do you think this secret was why he…?” I didn’t know the right word to use.
“Got hisself killed?” she asked.
“I was going to say left town.”
She looked up to the ceiling a moment. “Do ya think that spider’s listenin’ to us?”
I shook my head. “Doubt it.”
“Lee said he found as much as he was going find here and he needed to go out of town. He didn’t tell me why, only that it would take a while, and I couldn’t let on anything about why he left.” I nodded. Maybe it was the ice cream, or just the passage of time, but she seemed more sober. “I was supposed to be as surprised as anyone. So, that’s what I did.”
“I still don’t get what was dangerous.”
She shrugged. “He never said, like it was too secret to even talk about in the car.” She heaved in a breath. “Stupid guy said it was to keep me safe. Can you believe that shit?”
