“Right,” he teased, “so let’s just completely ignore all the years of learning how to do something in favor of what?” he asked. “Just a slapdash attitude and go and do whatever you want?” She frowned at him. He just grinned back.
She sighed. “You’re making fun of me again.”
“What do you mean, again?” he protested. “Besides, sometimes you just leave yourself completely open for that stuff.”
“Maybe,” she admitted, “but I am good at rooting out information.”
“That you are,” he agreed. “You’re also very good at getting people to talk to you, probably because you’re not a cop,” he noted, “so maybe just keep this as a hobby. And you’ll do lots of good work that way.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, noting with surprise the wistfulness in her own voice.
“Does it bother you to not have some job title or a label involved in this work that you do?”
“I don’t know that it bothers me,” she replied quietly. “For years I was just a wife.” She punctuated the word with a wave of her hand. “And not even a wife who contributed anything.”
“You mean, a trophy wife?”
She winced at that. “And yet, how can I get mad at you for saying what I’m sure everybody else said.”
“Well, what they said before versus what they’re saying now,” he explained, “reveals you are a very different person today.”
“I am. And I’m very happy to hear that. It’s like I have to atone for all those wasted years,” she shared quietly.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he disagreed. “I don’t even think that’s a healthy way to look at it. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But I didn’t do anything right either,” she murmured, sending him a sideways look. She stretched her legs out, kicking up some sand in front of her. “It’s almost as if there was that life and this life, and I’m still trying to figure out what this one’s all about.”
“You can, but there’s no rush. Take your time, figure it out, do what you want to do. Enjoy life for a change,” he added. “You’ll never convince me that you enjoyed your life before, not with that jerk around.” He finished with an eye roll.
She grinned at him. “You’re still upset that I was even married to him.”
He stopped, looked at her, and asked, “You figured that out, huh?”
“Every once in a while, it sounds like you’re jealous.”
“Yeah, every once in a while, I probably am jealous,” he admitted quietly. “That guy had a lot of prime years with you,” he noted. “And I don’t think he appreciated any of them.”
She smiled. “I think that’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me.”
“Well, that husband of yours kept you as a pet. A trophy wife, sure, but definitely you didn’t have any freedom to be who you wanted to be. So right now is all about what’s good for you.” He continued. “And it’s a gift. You have the gift of time. Sure, I get it. You’re broke for the moment, but you are getting through. You’ve got money coming in on the horizon from multiple sources. Not very many people can say that. Plus, you have done pretty well for somebody who didn’t have anything to begin with.”
“Yeah, well, without Nan, I don’t know that I would have done all that well. Mugs and I would be homeless.” She shuddered at the thought. “And that’s without me counting the number of times you fed me.”
He grinned. “And then there’s the number of times that you’ve helped me out on cases or brought cases to our attention and closed them that I really haven’t wanted to bring up too often,” he acknowledged. “So why don’t we just call it even.”
“Is that instead of saying thank you?” He just eye-rolled her at that statement. She burst out laughing. “I admit, now that I’ve been here in Kelowna for several months, I am still not all that sure that I belong here, that I’m accepted here, and certainly having the ex show up hasn’t been terribly comforting either. But I’m getting there.” She looked up at Mack. “On all fronts.”
“Good.” He settled into the bench. “And now how about we go back to all that information that you seem to have dredged up that you haven’t told me about.”
She sighed, but then she explained about Milford, who led her to the older guy she also met at the beach.
“So you think he had the poison stolen from his garage and then what? Somebody threw it away at the beach?”
Doreen shrugged.
“It’s possible, and, of course, an old guy like that? They often don’t like calling the cops, and he probably would not want somebody to question his memory or to even accuse him of not handling the rat poison in a safe manner, possibly charging him for having left the poison lying around like that. We see it time and time again. Some of these oldsters, old-timers, they’re fairly protective about their way of doing things versus us young whippersnappers,” he teased in a mocking voice.
She laughed. “Yeah, that would be him too. And I did follow him home,” she murmured, with a sideways look at Mack’s face, seeing it darken. She refocused her gaze to stare forward. “Anyway,” she added, “it’s nothing solid to go on. Yet that rat poison, isn’t exactly something I’m terribly happy to know was out in a public park.”
“And yet, if anybody was up to something more than a prank,” he replied, “I highly doubt they would have just tossed the box.”
“Maybe not. I don’t know if you can track poison from box to box, like they do on the TV shows,” she noted. “They seem to have this magical little set of tools that make everything work.”
Mack laughed at that. “We should be so lucky,” he replied bluntly, “but real life isn’t like that.”
“So there’s no way to know if that box had anything to do with your guy who died in Rutland?”
He stopped, gave her a puzzled look, and asked, “How do you know he lived in Rutland?”
She gave him a wide-eyed innocent look that didn’t fool him for an instant. She shrugged. “I got that far. I was just looking to see if it was related to the box of poison.”
He frowned at her. She frowned right back. “What did you find out?”
She hesitated. However, realizing his frown meant a whole lot more than just curiosity, she took his question to be more of a direct order to fess up or else. She sighed. “I really don’t like that look on your face.”
“Why not?” he asked, his gaze narrowing.
“Because it makes me feel like I’m in trouble.”
“And is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked, looking at her. This time there was more curiosity in his gaze.
“It’s neither,” she noted, “but I can’t imagine anything like that’s ever good.”
“Doesn’t have to be bad either.”
She nodded, but she wrapped her arms around her chest, as if feeling a chill.
“Did he ever beat you?”
“We’ve been over this,” she snapped bluntly. “And there’s an awful lot of things that people can do to you that has nothing to do with feeling their hand against your face.”