Chapter 13: The Dark Shop

I went to the shop the next morning at ten, when the lot was full.

Ruskin Cycle had a red door and a hand-lettered sign that Dean's mother had painted.

Four men stood at the parts counter with coffee, and a boy of about twenty was wiping down a gas tank.

Dean was on a stool at the back, with a carburetor in pieces on a rag.

He looked up and saw me, and he put the wrench down carefully, the way he did everything.

"Di."

"I have a question," I said. "I'd like to ask it here."

The men at the counter stopped talking.

"We can go in the office," Dean said.

"No. Your father sat on my porch yesterday and told me the shop's loan is on my house."

Dean didn't say anything.

"Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Did you tell me that when I signed?"

"I told you it was paperwork for the lift. You said you trusted me."

"I did."

The boy with the gas tank found something interesting on the floor.

"I want my name off it," I said. "Today."

"It'll take me a few days. I'll sell the Softail and pay down the note. The man from Erie has wanted it since June."

"You love that bike."

"I loved a lot of things."

He said it flatly, without asking me for anything, and I hated how much that worked on me.

"Then there's the other thing," I said. "Vernon told me to ask you where your phone was the night Wyatt died."

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Wife Her Secret Their Regret from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.