The Forgotten Man: A Q.C. Davis Mystery by Lisa M. Lilly

Author:Lisa M. Lilly [Lilly, Lisa M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spiny Woman Press
Published: 2023-04-26T23:00:00+00:00

39

WHAT HE SAID

The music store is on Main Street between a bakery and an old-time theater converted to an event space. The box office, which is bright red, still stands in front of the theater.

As soon as I stepped into the store, I smelled the familiar mix of steel strings, old wood, and oil soap. Rows of acoustic guitars hung on the far wall, banjos, fiddles, and other stringed instruments on the one near me. Reed and wind instruments filled the center aisle. My dad sat on a stool playing bass runs on a large-bodied Gibson guitar. A skinny customer with a bandana around his head watched my dad’s fingers fly.

Dad saw me and handed the Gibson to the customer. “Try it.” Then he joined me near the sheet music. “Rev told you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Take a walk?”

Neither of us spoke until we crossed the cracked asphalt parking lot, cut through the alley, and emerged onto a quiet tree-lined street.

“I never wanted you or Kendra to know,” my dad said.

“What about the police? You didn’t think it mattered?” I knew I should study my dad’s face and body language. But I kept my eyes on the sidewalk instead. If I looked at him, I’d think too much about how much he’d disappointed me and not enough about the investigation.

“It ended a year and a half before Q.C. disappeared. But the police were looking for reasons to target us.”

I doubted the task force, had they known, would have seen an affair that ended only eighteen months before as unimportant.

“Target you, you mean.” I wound long strands of my hair around my fingers.

“Your mother, too. If they thought she knew about the affair, they’d paint her as the angry, jealous wife. Willing to hurt our daughter to spite me. Or acting out of rage.”

It fit the revenge-against-spouse motive for killing a child. Except that from all I’d learned, Dad didn’t spend much time with my sisters. My mother would have been hurting herself more than him.

“But Mom was at the party. She couldn’t have taken Q.C., not alone.”

“She could if she made it a game. Told Q.C. to go somewhere and hide and wait for her.”

“You, I — you think Mom might have done that?”

First Eva suggested Kendra did it, now my father suggested my mother. Both theories never crossed my mind. Either I was too close to this case to think clearly or other people were grasping at straws.

“I was afraid that’s what the police would think.”

“You had to think of it yourself to worry about it.”

I’d never seen that theory about my mother in print. And Chief Highbottom never mentioned it.

“Rev pointed that out. To convince me we needed a criminal defense lawyer.”

I was glad someone convinced them. They ought to have gotten one right away, not weeks into the investigation. My parents, before Q.C., trusted authorities. All the same, Rev was way more involved in my parents’ lives than felt normal.

“Why was he so full of advice?”

“He counseled people before who dealt with police,” my dad said.

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