Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [17]
“It’s like living in a frat house,” she mumbled.
“I wish,” Paul replied.
“You seen Terry Jakes?” the sheriff asked.
Lacey was hearing about Terry Jakes all the time, but she had to pause to remember the last time she’d actually seen him.
“He came into the café a week ago maybe.”
“How about you, Paul?”
“I talked to him on the phone Monday night.”
“How’d he sound?” the sheriff asked.
“You’ve talked to Terry before,” Paul replied. “You know what he sounds like.”
Paul’s habit of occasionally taking questions too literally was yet another trait that Lacey loathed. She shot her brother a glance loaded with both embarrassment and hostility and clarified the question in the most condescending manner.
“He means, did he sound normal? Was anything strange about your conversation?”
“You could be a detective, Lacey,” the sheriff replied.
“Don’t encourage her,” Paul replied.
“Do you recall what you and Terry talked about?”
“He was working on his Survivor application. He wanted to know if I’d shoot the video for him again.”
Ed and Lacey sighed in unison.
“I wish he’d give up on that,” Ed commented, looking to the ceiling as if that wish were just as hopeless as Terry’s dreams of fame.
“They always have one redneck per season. Terry doesn’t see why it can’t be him,” Paul said.
“Why are you asking about Terry?” Lacey inquired.
“He’s been missing forty-eight hours. His ex-wife called and asked if I’d locked him up for the usual and then we had a talk. I made a few phone calls. He might have taken a vacation. You know Terry. He’s unreliable on a good day. But still, let me know if you hear from him.”
With that, Sheriff Wickfield departed. Lacey double-bolted the doors and joined her brother on the couch. The silence between them was as unnerving as a jackhammer right outside your bedroom window. Paul turned on the television and ramped up the volume. He didn’t want Lacey to ask the question she was going to ask.
“Do you think—”
“No,” Paul replied with the speed of a man drawing his gun.
“They’re about the same size,” Lacey mumbled.
Paul turned up the volume even higher. Lacey shot up from the couch and manually turned off the television, although it took her a minute to find the button, not having done that in years.
“Have you heard anything about Hart lately?” she asked, sitting back down on the couch. They looked like two spies meeting on a park bench, avoiding eye contact and speaking under their breath.
“Why are you asking about Hart?”
“No reason,” Lacey replied.
“There has to be a reason,” Paul said, and you could tell he was curious about that reason since he didn’t turn the television back on.
“I haven’t heard from him in a few months. Wondered if anybody else had.”
If Lacey told Paul the truth, that she had Hart’s ring in her back pocket, they might have reverted to their childhood selves and gotten into a wrestling match right then and there. It was unfair, Lacey thought, that a man whose primary forms of exercise were fetching beer from the fridge and hopping into his truck could outfight her. But it was one of those hard facts women live with.
Paul looked at his sister askance; his brain played with just a few pieces of a puzzle.
“Did Hart steal your shoes?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Out of the blue you start asking questions about Hart. And your shoes have mysteriously disappeared and you won’t talk about it. I’m just trying to make the facts add up.”
“Listen, Sherlock, that’s probably the worst example of deductive reasoning I’ve ever heard.”
“Then enlighten me.”
“There’s trouble brewing, so it’s only natural that Hart comes to mind,” Lacey said. While it was true that trouble seemed to follow Hart around, when they were a couple, she couldn’t see it until the very end. Hart let you see only what he wanted you to see. Eventually Lacey accepted that he was a skilled con