I grip his arm. “He was your friend, a co-worker. You had no reason not to trust him. It’s not my place to say you should have double checked, that will have to be for you to come to terms with on your own. Thank you for this,” I say, lifting the paper. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Be careful, Devyn.”
“I will.”
Talia stops on the porch, though Mack is waiting for us in the cold, standing outside the truck and watching Tony’s house. “Why would Neil Simpson let himself be blackmailed or bribed? He was friends with Rick and Beau too, wasn’t he? He couldn’t have gone to them for help?”
I sigh, my breath coming out in a white puff. I hate this. I really, really hate this. “What would you have done for Sweet, Talia, when you were on it?”
Her sad green eyes meet mine and they sparkle in the twinkle lights hanging over us. “Anything.”
“I think Neil was the same. We just have to find out who knew and used it against him. I don’t know the rehab’s visiting hours, and I don’t know if he’ll see us, but we have to try. Come on.”
I give Mack the address to the rehab center, and Talia curls in on herself. I let her be. I wish she wasn’t at odds with Beau right now—she could use the extra support. I squeeze her hand.
The rehab center is a sprawling, one story building located on a grassy corner near a quiet residential neighborhood. The parking lot’s cement is cracked, and withered from the cold, weeds fight to live, much like, I imagine, many of the clients here. The front lobby doors face the road, and Mack parks in the lot on the west side of the building.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” I say to Talia. Her face is white, the parking lot’s weak security lights drifting through the windshield. “Stay here with Mack. If Neil’s willing to see me, it won’t take long to find out what I want to know.”
She cowers against the door. “I can’t go in there. I can’t see what I’ve been trying for years to get away from.”
“I understand. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I don’t need help,” I tell Mack before he can climb out of the truck and open the door for me. Over his objections, I scoot out and shut the door, the noise echoing through the air.
The lobby’s already decorated for Christmas, though we still have weeks until Thanksgiving. A receptionist is sitting behind a high counter, and I paste a smile onto my face.
“Good evening,” she says. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. I was hoping to speak with Neil Simpson if he’s accepting visitors right now.”
The receptionist, too, is in the holiday spirit and earring shaped like tree ornaments dangle from her ears. “Let me find out for you.” Swiveling in her chair, facing her back to me, she mumbles into a walkie-talkie. After a moment, she turns around. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Devyn Scott.” There’s no point in lying. Either Neil will know who I am and refuse to see me because he’ll know what I’m here for, or he won’t know and talk to me out of curiosity.
“He said he’ll see you, but visitor’s hours end in half an hour. He’s sitting in the TV room. Lorraine can show you the way.”
A young woman dressed in light blue scrubs gestures for me to follow her down the dark green carpeted hallway, and I trail behind her, sweating in my jacket. The scent of beef permeating the air is not as appetizing as what Tony is going to eat for dinner tonight, and my stomach lurches queasily in the sticky heat.
Lorraine directs me to a room much like where I would visit Talia the few times she allowed me to see her. We weren’t close when she went through rehab, and many times when I tried to visit, she wouldn’t see me. After they released her, she said she was embarrassed and didn’t want to be a burden.
“He’s there in the corner,” she says, nodding to a middle-aged man not much older than Rick, slumped in a chair at a small brown table. A TV mounted to the wall plays Wheel of Fortune, but Neil isn’t watching it, isn’t trying to guess the phrase. A few other tables are occupied, a girl who could have been Talia sitting on a couch reading a Bible.
I slide my coat off on the way to Neil’s table, hang it on the back of the chair sitting across from him, and drop my purse onto the floor. It’s so hot in here, and I push the sleeves of my sweater up. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Simpson.”
He meets my eyes, and they reflect as much fatigue and hopelessness as Talia’s do when she’s having a bad day. “Not much to lose,” he says, his hand limp in mine, barely turning the touch into a handshake.
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re the reporter, and I know what you’re here for.”
“Then why don’t you tell me?” I ask, wanting to hear it in his own words. What I took for him being downtrodden is really bitterness he needs to be here at all.
“You don’t give up, do you? Stevie ran you out of town, but you still come back for more. You should have learned when she let you off easy the first time.”
I lean back in my chair and twist my fingers on the tabletop. That isn’t what I expected. “This isn’t about Stevie Johansson.”
He leans forward, eating up the space I put between us. “You’re shitting me. You can’t be that naïve. What do you think you’re here for?”
“I’m looking into the accident at Rickard Mercer’s site two years ago. The accident that put him in the hospital for six months and killed two ironworkers. I have it on good authority that you willfully gave the wrong information to an individual and that it caused the crane to tip over. That’s what I’m here about,” I whisper furiously, all my interviewing etiquette going out the window in my need to pin this asshole to the wall for what he did.