“Thanks, Rose. I’ll have someone standing guard on Weaver here at the hospital. If you notify him, it’ll be the same as notifying me.”
“I hope you catch the murdering psychopath,” Rose said.
“We will,” Quinn assured her. He moved toward the elevator, and Rose walked alongside him. At the elevator doors, they paused. Quinn smiled his surprisingly beatific smile and gave Rose’s elbow a gentle squeeze. “You did the right thing, dear.”
“I was told those very words once after extramarital sex. It was a lie then and it is now.”
53
Edmundsville, Missouri, 2006
“You almost fell on your you-know-what,” May Ann said.
Beth had stumbled during an underarm turn on the crowded dance floor. May Ann had been the last of the group to arrive, and was still playing the chaste Catholic schoolgirl all grown up. Beth knew that was going to change in a big way after a few more drinks. Already May Ann was beginning to laugh too loud and bat her eyelashes.
The place was the 66 Road House, though it wasn’t anywhere near the new or old Route 66. The music was Hank Williams. There was sawdust on the dance floor, and the garage band that played the 66 was loud and almost on the beat. Beth was dancing with her friend May Ann Plunkert. The two women’s other friends, Gloria Trish and Sami Toyner, were at the table near the Stag Beer sign, sipping bourbon and water on the rocks. That and scotch and beer were pretty much what the 66 served. A drink with a parasol would probably result in a fight.
In the time she’d worked at Arch Manufacturing, Beth had made some good friends. Lots of single women were employed there, and there were plenty of cliques and enough ways to spend time if you weren’t too tired after work. Beth had fallen in with a group of about a dozen who called themselves the Sole Sisters. They weren’t particularly wild, but they had their fun.
Beth hadn’t made any close male friends, but she’d gone out on the occasional date. Nothing worked for her romantically, or for the men passing through her life. It was difficult for her to become involved with someone. The men she’d dated who were interested in more than sex broke off the relationship after learning she had a fourteen-year-old son. Baggage. People Beth’s age had baggage, and that was the way some of these jerks saw Eddie.
Beth truly loved Eddie. Tonight he was on a camping trip with his best friend Les and Les’s father. Eddie was turning into quite the outdoorsman. He especially loved fishing.
Since she’d left Hogart, things had worked out well. She had a job, a house, a life. Most important of all, Beth had her son to raise. She had all that, and she liked her work well enough at Arch, but now and then she found herself thinking there had to be more in life.
Like Wayne Westerley. Had she been an idiot to break off her affair with Wayne? A part of her didn’t want to leave him, but she knew that if she was going to find any happiness and get Eddie away from the fallout of what had happened to her, she had to leave Hogart.
The town wasn’t much to leave, anyway, a blink-of-the eye business loop off the Interstate and a dozen tree-lined side streets featuring houses that would have been historic but for the fact they were cracker-box shacks on the day they were built.
From time to time she did miss Wayne, not only their sexual involvement but the quiet times on her front porch, the leisurely walks along Trout Lake. He’d helped her to heal, and it wasn’t his fault that the healing could never be complete.
Westerley had driven to Edmundsville to see her several times after she’d moved, but she’d stopped that, too. It was as if he brought a part of the past with him, and it was a past Beth needed to escape. Eddie was the finest and only part of her earlier life she wanted to carry into the future.
Beth spent her hours at Arch working on the line, helping to manufacture orthopedic blanks for shoe inserts. Some of the blanks would be packaged as is, in three sizes, for distribution to retail outlets. Others would be custom-shaped to the prescription orders of orthopedic doctors. Those were the jobs that took expertise, and of course they paid better. Beth looked forward to making that transition one of these days, when she’d obtained enough seniority. Of course there were the more physically demanding warehouse jobs, which paid well, but Beth saw the physical toll those took on women and wanted no part of any of them except maybe forklift operator. But that was a high seniority position and would be years away even if she had a chance at it.
She almost slipped and fell again, and heard May Ann giggle. Too much sawdust on the floor.
The music stopped, which was fine with Beth. She was winded and perspiring, and a lock of hair dangled down on her forehead and kept getting into her eye. She and May Ann started back across the dance floor toward the table, which required picking their way among two-steppers waiting for the next song and was almost a dance in itself. A guy in a white Stetson sat down on stage in front of the band and began strumming a regular acoustic guitar and singing. He sounded something like Hank Williams. Beth caught a glimpse of him and he even looked like Hank Williams.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around.
The man smiling at her also was wearing a white cowboy hat. He was average height, handsome, and built wiry like Hank Williams, and damned if he didn’t resemble Williams in the face even more than the guy onstage. The same sort of dark-eyed sweetness in his lean features. He had a slender, slightly long nose and a sharp chin with thin lips. Dark eyebrows that were sort of angled up at the bridge of his nose to give him a puppy-dog inquisitive look. Not the greatest features, she thought, but they did hang together well.
“I like that,” he said.
Beth wasn’t sure she wanted to flirt after only one drink. “And what would that be?”
“The way you’re sizing me up. Shows you’re interested.”
“I was thinking you look a little like Hank Williams.”
“I been told that. ’Fraid I can’t sing like him.” He grinned. Good teeth. “I could maybe sound better than that guy onstage, though.”
Beth smiled. “I just bet you could,” she said sarcastically. There was something about this guy. She felt comfortable with him, but maybe in a sisterly way. Of course, that could change. Maybe…
No. He’ll be just like the others.
“Now, that’s a tone of voice I don’t like,” he said, touching her arm and guiding them away from May Ann and over to the edge of the dance floor, which was getting crowded, what with all the fellas taking advantage of a slow dance. “I don’t like that little frown of yours while you’re looking at me. I ain’t that bad a singer. I cross my heart.”
He moved in close to her. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, they were dancing. Barely moving, but dancing.
“I’m Lincoln Evans,” he said. “Friends call me Link, so I’m ‘Link’ to you.”
“Beth Colson.”
“Now we know each other,” he said, and his embrace tightened.
Link wanted Beth to leave the 66 with him that night, but she explained to him that she was there with friends. She even led him over by the hand and introduced him to the others.
“We work out at the plant,” she said, a little embarrassed but also pleased by the envious glances from her friends.
He touched the brim of his hat and smiled down at them all, as if his next move would be to sit at the table and regale them with tales of the rodeo. Instead he guided Beth back onto the dance floor. He was holding her even closer now.
“You all work at some plant?” he asked.
“Arch Manufacturing. We make insoles.”
“No kidding?” Like it was the most interesting job in the world.
“Shoes,” Beth said.
“What? Did I step on yours?”
She laughed. “Insoles for shoes.”