Page 64 of Hometown Girl

“Observant.”

“I am now. Wish I had been that day.”

Me too.He watched her poke dots of paint onto her canvas haphazardly, like a child in art class.

“They said you were the key to finding whoever it was that did this. They said you saw the guy.” Birdie plopped the paintbrush into a mason jar of cloudy water and looked at him.

Drew didn’t respond. He didn’t remember. Sometimes he thought there was a face in his dream, but maybe his mind had just filled in the blanks where there were no real memories. Maybe he was using the face of a newscaster or the checkout clerk from the grocery store or the last person to serve him coffee. Anything to give him the illusion of an answer that could help.

When he woke up, his mind was always blank. No faces ever stayed with him. There’d been a time he was thankful for that.

“You were so young. No one should ever have to witness something like that.” She held her brush in midair and watched him for too many seconds.

He scooted up in the sofa and stood. “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t tell anyone about me, and I won’t tell anyone about you.”

She tilted her head and regarded him where he stood. “What are you hiding from, little Drew?”

Even a rhetorical question could elicit unwanted answers in a person’s mind. He forced himself to focus on Birdie. “Do we have a deal?”

“Fine,” she agreed. “I’ll keep sneaking around until you’re ready to admit to everyone, including that pretty blonde, who you really are.”

“I’m serious. If anyone finds out I was there that day, you’ll have to find a new way to get away from your husband.”

“Oh, he’s long gone. It’s just me now. But I take your point. I like my natural light.”

“Good.”

“I’ve got about another hour of daylight, so I’m going to use it. You can stay if you want to.”

“No, I should get back.”

“Suit yourself.”

She didn’t say goodbye or show him to the door. But when he got out into the yard and turned back to look at the windows, he saw her up there, watching him go.

What if he wasn’t the only person who might have information about what had happened to Jess?

She disappeared from the window, and he turned around, an uneasy feeling settling on his shoulders.

As he and Roxie headed through the trees and into the yard, he caught a glimpse of Beth up near the house. Birdie was right: she never stopped moving. And while he’d never considered it before, he began to wonder if he wasn’t the only one trying to make amends by keeping his head down and breathing new life into an old farm.

Chapter Eighteen

It had been a week and a half since Beth and Molly hired Drew, and he’d been working with a skeleton crew of volunteers who showed up when they could. Still, he’d made considerable progress on the main barn and inside the farmhouse.

Every morning when she arrived with coffee and Danishes, Beth knocked on the side door and he let her in. She set up a makeshift office in the kitchen, giving her a somewhat obstructed view of the yard, where she could watch him work.

He never stopped.

Even when the volunteers stopped, he kept going. He hardly even took a lunch break. As an employer, she was thrilled. As a person, she was concerned.

She’d start on paperwork, but she almost always ended up in the yard, though she often felt a little useless out there.

Now, she sat in the kitchen with papers spread out across the table. Numbers stared back at her, daring her to calculate them again, as if they might give her a different answer this time.

She’d taken Drew’s estimates and run them by Ben, surprised and thankful he’d found better prices than she had.

That said something about him.

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