Off You Go by Benjamin Blackmore

Author:Benjamin Blackmore [Blackmore, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandy Run Press
Published: 2019-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

Dewey drove back over to Gina’s. Candice was sitting on the porch just like last time, her legs kicked up on the table, her eyes on her book.

“Still hooked?” Dewey asked.

“Hey, there. Yes, I’m hooked badly.”

Dewey kept walking to Gina’s door, trying to indicate he was in a hurry. “No one came by?”

“Not that I’ve seen. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks. I’m in a rush.”

“What a shame,” she said with disappointment.

Was she hitting on him? He dropped the key twice before finally getting it into the lock. Why hadn’t they done that when he was young and single?

Making it inside unscathed, Dewey went straight to the trash can in the kitchen. He’d seen something that had stood out in his mind the last time. Trying not to inhale too much of the odors, he began digging. Finally, after several dry heaves, he pulled out a receipt from Common Ground, a coffee shop in Beaufort, South Carolina. It was time stamped at 11:32 a.m. the Thursday before, not too long after Gina had left the gym in Charleston. The day before she jumped. What most interested Dewey was that she’d bought two coffees.

He was building a theory in his head and her going to Beaufort fit into it nicely. Judging by the secretive nature of the relationship, it looked like she was sleeping with someone she shouldn’t have been seeing. Was he married? Was he older? Was he high-profile? She hadn’t even told her best friend about him. What else could it be? So they were having some kind of discreet affair and they were meeting out-of-town. Beaufort made a lot of sense. It was a sleepy, romantic little town that was what Charleston was fifty years ago. The kind of place you might have a nice sultry affair—as long as you were careful not to run into any other visitors from Charleston that you might know.

Dewey looked at his phone. Faye had sent Gina’s financial statements. He ran through them, having to squint to see the numbers. What he found got him fired up, in a geeky, Sherlock kind of way. Two months earlier, Gina had bought something at a gift shop in Beaufort. Three weeks ago, she’d filled up at a gas station in Beaufort. Something special was down there. Dewey had no doubt that she’d rendezvoused with a lover there—most likely the Hippo—but was this where they’d met the last time?

Dewey went with it. They had to have met Thursday morning somewhere in between her leaving the gym and the coffee shop in Beaufort. They would have spent the evening together—an easy assumption after reading their racy correspondence—and then gone their separate ways Friday, where she went on to kill herself. This is where the guesswork came in. If they’d met in Charleston before the drive down, Dewey had no hope of finding out where by 11 a.m. He didn’t even have a clue. They wouldn’t have met at her house, he concluded. Hopefully, they wouldn’t have risked leaving a car somewhere, and they had decided to drive separately.

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