Page 2 of Highball Rush
“But Gibson—”
I slammed my hand on the table. “I never touched her. Not once. This town might think I’m a piece of shit, but I would never have crossed that line with her. We were friends. That was all.”
Sheriff Tucker crossed his arms. “Gibs, I’ve known you your whole life. I know you ain’t a piece of shit. But you seem to have been carrying around photos of you and Callie all these years and damn it all if no one in Bootleg knew the two of you were ever together. So I need to know how it is you were friends with her without the whole town knowing. And why you never said a word about it, even after she disappeared.”
I took a deep breath. “She liked music.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Callie liked music. So did I. Sometimes we’d go off and meet in the woods. I’d bring my guitar and she’d sing along while I played. We liked all the same bands, the same songs. She had a little notebook where she’d write song lyrics and I’d help her put melodies to them.”
“That was all?”
“Yeah, that was all.”Andshe didn’t look at me like everyone else did. The son of the town drunk. A piece of crap going nowhere.
“So you’re saying your relationship with her was entirely innocent.”
“Yes.”
“Then why hide it?” he asked. “Why didn’t anyone know?”
I met his eyes. “I’m Gibson Bodine, Sheriff. How do you think her daddy would have felt about his sixteen-year-old daughter spending time with the worst of ‘those Bodine boys’? Do you think he’d have believed us if we said we weren’t doing anything wrong? Do you think anyone would have believed that?”
He cleared his throat. “Tell me about the photos.”
“There was a band we both liked playing out in Perrinville. It was a big outdoor thing, festival style. We met in secret and I took her out there to see them play. Afterward, we saw a photo booth, so we jumped in and took these.”
“And that was the day before she disappeared?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Gibson, you need to level with me here,” he said. “Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?”
I met his eyes again. “No.”
“Where were you when she disappeared?”
“I was at home. I didn’t even see her that day, I had to work. She was with all the high school kids down at the lake. Plus, she was worried about getting caught after leaving with me the day before, so I kept my distance.”
“I’m still tryin’ to wrap my head around no one knowing,” Sheriff said, more to himself than me.
I shrugged. “The town doesn’t know everything. Hell, an entire person disappeared and no one knew what happened. Or at least, no one who knew anything spoke up.”
My damn father. I didn’t know what to think about Jenny Leland’s story—that my dad had helped Callie get out of town. The asshole had taken that secret to his grave. He’d let me believe all those years that she was dead. Of course, I’d kept a secret about her, too.
Jenny swore she was alive. She had postcards with her handwriting. I remembered it from her song journals. She’d even said she’d met Callie in person—a year ago, in Seattle. She swore up and down that Callie was alive.
I believed her. Maybe it was just because I wanted to believe her so badly. But I did.
“Do you have any idea what might have happened to her?” he asked. “Why she was hurt? Why she was trying to get away from home?”
Clenching my teeth, my nostrils flaring, I fought back the surge of anger. Someone—signs seemed to be pointing to her father—had hurt her. Badly. Enough that she’d begged my dad for help on the side of the road, and he’d apparently helped sneak her out of town. There was no kind of Bootleg Justice good enough for a man who’d hurt his own daughter. Made me furious.
I cleared my throat. “No. She never said anything about her parents or what things were like at home. I wish she would have.”
I would have dealt with that asshole.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, Gibs? You had to have known this could come out someday. It’s suspicious.”
