What She Saw

Buck could live with that. He just hoped he hadn’t tipped his hand to the wrong people. Given the way these cops seemed to know about every little thing around here, he had to wonder how they could be unaware of whatever was happening at the truck stop.

It didn’t leave him feeling easy at all as he walked back to the motel.

Haley didn’t exactly feel nervous when she got home. Buck hadn’t tried to follow her, and she was still torn between believing him and thinking he was some kind of nut. What he said made a certain sense, and in her heart of hearts she found it hard to believe that Ray had rolled his truck on that stretch of road unless something major had happened. Then there was that shadowy exchange in the parking lot, which might or might not be weird. What did she know about the trucking business, after all? Maybe it had been a delivery for some place near here. That struck her as far more likely than that someone was doing something wrong.

But then there was Buck’s story of mixed-up shipments. That sounded even stranger, but she had to admit it had an element of plausibility to it. The things he’d said about money…

She sighed after she finished brushing her teeth, then climbed into sweats for sleeping. Summer nights sometimes turned cool around here, and this one was cooling a lot. She didn’t want to turn on the heat because she needed to save money.

Padding around in slipper socks, she went to get her nightly glass of milk. She didn’t care for it warm, so despite the night’s chill she drank it cold.

Well, if she had anything to be grateful for, it was that Buck hadn’t dumped his story on her earlier in the day. At least she had finished studying for the exam tomorrow morning. She looked at her nutrition books, piled on her cheap little desk beside a lamp, and decided enough was enough. She needed to get some sleep, needed to calm her mind down.

She paused to look at a framed photo of her mother, one taken before illness had robbed her beauty, and found herself thinking about the costs of funerals. How had the Listons afforded all of that? Even if the entire county had chipped in a dollar per family, it wouldn’t have covered that coffin.

There she went again, pondering matters that had no answers. It occurred to her to be sorry she had ever talked to Buck Devlin at all. Before he had entered her life, things had seemed so generally uncomplicated. At least since her mother’s passing. She needed some calm and stability after those long years of riding the cancer roller coaster with her mother. She wanted her life to be calm and even dull. For a while.

She knew life had been bound to knock her out of her quiet little pond at some point. She might be young in some respects, but she figured she was pretty old in others. Old enough to know that smooth sailing was the exception rather than the rule.

Sitting in her mother’s old armchair, she sipped her milk and tried to absorb all her conflicting feelings about Buck Devlin. At some point, she realized she wanted to believe him, but was afraid to.

Interesting. She wanted to believe there was some illegal activity going on in the parking lot at Hasty’s and that Buck was seriously investigating it? That she might be in danger because she had glimpsed something she could barely make out through a window that had acted more like a mirror?

That Ray had been murdered?

That wasn’t a world she wanted to live in. But much of her life had been a world she hadn’t wanted, and that was probably true for most people.

She sighed, finished her milk and headed to the kitchen to rinse the glass, wondering if her attraction to Buck Devlin wasn’t screwing up her thinking. Claire’s warning drifted back to her. Yeah, he was a rolling stone, here today and gone tomorrow. That alone should make her wary.

Then the phone rang. It startled her because she wasn’t used to having late-night calls. There’d been a time when such calls meant that her mother had taken a bad turn in the hospital.

It was over now, but the dread of late-night phone calls remained. Her heart started hammering as she reached for the receiver as if it were a poisonous snake.

“Hello?”

“Haley, this is Gage Dalton.”

That made her stomach lurch. Immediately her mind started scrambling for ideas of what might have gone wrong to make the sheriff call her at such an hour.

“I just wanted you to know,” he said, “we had a complaint tonight that a truck driver, Buck Devlin, was harassing you at the funeral home.”

Haley felt her stomach sink. She hadn’t wanted this, no matter what. He might be what he said he was, or he might be a nut, but he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t even scared her enough to get the police involved. “Not really,” she managed to say.

“I’m not saying he did. I’m just letting you know we had a report so we checked into him.”

She caught her breath. “And?”

“He’s exactly what he says he is and is doing exactly what he told you he’s doing. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether to get involved with him. But I don’t think you need to fear him.”

That slight emphasis on him left her wondering if Gage thought she had something else to fear, but if he had, wouldn’t he have said so?

All of a sudden she didn’t want to be alone. All of a sudden, despite the milk, she felt wide awake. Great. That was going to help on her test in the morning.

Regardless, she pulled on a bra under her sweat suit, tugged on her jogging shoes, grabbed her purse and headed for the truck stop.

She needed bright light, the swirl of people around her and some carbs to calm her down. At that moment nothing sounded better than a piece of Hasty’s cobbler and a bit of sensible talk with Claire.

As it happened, the place was pretty busy when she arrived. Claire and another waitress, Meg, were busy enough they could have used some help. Haley considered clocking in and digging a spare uniform out of her locker, but Hasty stopped her.

“You’re supposed to be resting, what with that test tomorrow and the play the next two nights. What in the world are you doing here?”

“I was called by your cobbler.”

He unleashed one of his rolling laughs and promptly dished her up a serving big enough for two. “Coffee?”

“Milk, please.”

She would have settled at the counter except that a table near the window emptied. She headed straight for it and closed her eyes for a few moments as she savored the first mouthful of peach perfection.

She opened her eyes again and studied the lot. The window really did act almost like a mirror. She could choose either to see what was going on around her in the restaurant, or to pick out the shadowy movements in the lot. And they were