Page 49 of The Woman in the Hollow
“Geez, what’d you say to her?” Hazel asked, making her way back.
“I asked her about the guy my sister set her up with.”
By the time I finished washing up, Hazel had all the food spread out. And had my mother’s plan for an intimate meal thwarted by inviting several of the guys over to share it with us.
The bone-deep disappointment I felt at not getting to be alone with her followed me all the way home.
But as I was in bed trying to sleep, the memory of her lie drifted back to me.
I couldn’t help but think that any hopes for some sort of relationship between us were doomed from the jump if we were both being dishonest with each other.
The thing was, I knew what I was lying about and why.
And I had no idea why she was lying to me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hazel
You could say I was more than a little surprised to park in the shopping complex on the other side of the woods only to walk through and see all the destruction.
I’d needed to abandon my original plan to go searching through the woods while the center was closed but it was light enough out for me to be able to do a proper search.
Then I had to backtrack, drive down one highway, then back up the other so my story would look legitimate on the cameras.
Only to figure out that the cameras had been tampered with as well.
I didn’t even have a chance to feel disappointed that my search would likely have to be pushed back another week as I walked around and took it all in. All of my hard work in ruins. Everyone else’s too, of course, but I knew I was the only one who took it kind of personally to see it all ruined.
While I was sitting in my apartment later that night, cleaning off valuable pumpkin seeds, I couldn’t help but think that I really needed to check into the crime rate of the area.
I mean, really.
A (possible) murderanddestruction of private property within one month at the same place?
And no one seemed overly horrified by it, either. I mean no one was happy about it or anything, but it seemed like no one was as shocked as I’d been.
That had to mean that things like that just… happened a lot around here, right? What other possible explanation could there be for their blasé reaction to it all?
“What’d I get myself into here, right?” I asked, looking over toward the little shrimp crawling around their tank.
Once I finished with the last of the pumpkin seeds, laying them out on paper towel-lined baking sheets to dry out, I dumped all the cuts, washed out the bucket, and then took myself into the bathroom for a shower. There I spent the next twenty minutes trying not to imagine Dante’s hands running the loofah over my skin, sudsing me up, turning me on.
Only after that wholly unsatisfying shower did I brew myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my laptop.
I searched up the crime rate first. For Navesink Bank and the nearby towns. While some definitely had more crime than others, all of them were lower than the national average.
Feeling marginally better about that, I searched again for any missing persons reports in the area. Aside from a suspected teen runaway, there was nothing. No big guys with light brown eyes.
Closing that out, I tried again, this time looking up the name of the man who I couldn’t get out of my mind.
I found a few things about high school sports. Even a picture from some news article about the local gym. But nothing else of note. Not even a social media presence. Which was a little disappointing. Who didn’t enjoy engaging in some harmless light social stalking?
A search of the garden center yielded a lot of interesting results. Meaning a lot of amazing reviews, articles, and social media posts. But nothing about crime.
I was about to give up when one last search phrase came up.
Grassi family docks.
