“What was his voice like, this other man?”
“Just…a regular voice.” She frowned. “The weird thing about him was that he hadn’t dressed for that kind of work. I think he might have had on good slacks and a white shirt and dress shoes. He took off the white shirt, too. He had on an undershirt, you know, just white. It was filthy, too, by the time I got there.” She felt dreamy, only idly curious the way a ten-year-old could be. Why had those two men dug such a humongous hole? And how come they were filling it now? Maybe there’d been, like, a pipe leaking or something. She really wanted to know what the boards were for, built like a frame only lying flat on the ground.
“His hair…” She had to hesitate. “I think it was brown. Kind of a medium brown. But he was awfully sweaty, too, so it might have been dark blond. He was…not as big as Jerry. Maybe as tall, but not as wide. More lean. And he wasn’t tan like Jerry, so he must not have spent much time outside. His arms were really pale. Like my dad was when he took his shirt off. A lot of the time he had his back to me. I only remember him facing me directly once—” She stiffened, in an echo of her momentary fear that day. “I kind of squirmed and knocked my bike over. It didn’t make a lot of noise because it fell on grass, but he swung around and stared. I almost took off.”
It chilled her now, knowing what would have happened if he had come looking.
“Can you see his face, Cait?” Jane asked patiently.
“Yes,” she breathed. “But…I don’t know, there wasn’t anything special about it. He was kind of ordinary-looking. The one thing I remember is that Jerry seemed to be afraid of him.” Opening her eyes, she thought that over. “Afraid isn’t the right word. I think the other guy was in charge. Used to being in charge. He expected Jerry to take orders.”
“That’s interesting,” the lieutenant said. “So he was dressed as if he’d expected to go into the office that day, even though it was a weekend.”
“Yes.”
“As dirty as he’d gotten, he’d have had to go home and change.”
Cait nodded. “I remember wondering why, if he was going to help his friend, he hadn’t dressed in his working-in-the-yard clothes.”
“Because this wasn’t planned,” Jane said thoughtfully. “Looking back, how do you read what you saw as tension?”
“They were upset.” She couldn’t be sure how she knew with such certainty, but she did. “Really upset. It came out as urgency and an air of violence, but mostly…” She hesitated. “I think they were probably horrified. Freaked. Maybe they’d never killed a man before.”
This shudder made her glance down and see that her arms were crossed and squeezed tight.
“My father was angry a lot,” she said after a minute, with some difficulty. “I didn’t know many other men very well. I’d never had a male teacher, and my parents weren’t churchgoers. I guess I expected men to be angry. I saw what I expected.”
“But you’d liked Mr. Hegland, when you and your mother spent time with him.”
“He was nice to me,” she corrected. “He bought me some treats. I was a kid—of course I liked that. But I was wary of him.” Yes, that was how she’d describe her caution that had verged on suspicion.
The same way she’d continued to approach men, she thought with shock.
Too bad she’d relaxed her caution where Blake was concerned.
And—why was she letting herself trust Noah? He sometimes radiated anger and menace that should have her quailing but didn’t. Because he’d never turned it on her.
That didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Blake had hidden his propensity for violence, too. No, she thought. The thing with Noah was he didn’t. She knew what kind of man he was. Which allowed her to—mostly—trust him.
And that makes no sense, she finally concluded.
She realized Jane was studying her, as if speculating on what was going through her head. Cait was embarrassed to realize she’d probably been staring into space for several minutes.
“Would you recognize this man?” Jane asked bluntly.