Especially Leese. I scribbled on the notepad I’d brought along, testing the pen and trying to push those staring blue eyes out of my memory. “Do you know how long Dale had been a builder?”
“Let’s see.” She leaned back and tented her fingers. “From what I remember people saying, he started working for a landscaper after high school. Then he got his builder’s license and worked for a contractor for a few years before going out on his own. So I’d say Lacombe Construction had been in business for at least thirty-five years.”
Longer than I’d been alive. “If he was in business for that long, he must have had a good reputation.”
At first, Bianca didn’t say anything, then she abruptly pushed herself back from her desk. “I need coffee. Want some?”
In short order, we were standing next to her Keurig coffeemaker, watching first one, then two, mugs fill with the piping hot staff of life. “How much do you really want to know about Dale?” Bianca asked.
A loaded question if I’d ever heard one, and I considered my answer carefully. “The truth,” I said.
Bianca offered me sugar, which I declined, and creamer, which I accepted. “Dale Lacombe,” she said, “built cheap houses and charged a lot for them.”
“Ah.” A number of things suddenly started making sense. Rafe’s reluctance to discuss Lacombe. The relationship that Leese, my by-the-rules friend, had had with her father.
“How he found so many suckers,” Bianca went on, “I don’t know, but he made a good living taking money from people who knew nothing about having a house built. He was always low bid, and you know what? You get what you pay for.”
Her cheeks were starting to turn pink and I looked at her with a new interest. The two of us had met a small handful of times, but they’d mostly been chance encounters, and I now realized I’d never talked to her one-on-one. “You didn’t care for him, did you?”
“Certainly not for his business practices,” she said. “But there’s a lot of overlap between how you conduct your business and how you conduct yourself. I mean, if a guy owns a company that regularly builds houses with leaky roofs because he can’t be bothered to lay down the subroofing properly, it’s easy to believe he’s not going to visit his mother after she’s admitted to a nursing home.”
“He really didn’t visit his mom?”
She grinned. “No idea. But I wouldn’t have put it past him. I got so tired of problems with his houses that these days I stay away from listing or selling them.”
“He was married before,” I said. “To Leese’s mother.”
“Sure.” Bianca nodded. “I know Bev. She still says she divorced Dale because the windows in the house he built for her parents leaked whenever there was a strong west wind.”
I frowned. “The winds around here are almost always westerly.”
“Exactly.”
As Bianca continued with story after horrific story about the houses that Dale built, I started getting the feeling that the suspect pool for Dale’s murder was a lot larger than I had imagined.
• • •
Just before sunrise the next morning, I looked at the bicycle Ash had pulled out of the back of his SUV. “So this is why they call them fat tires,” I said.
“Hard to call them anything else.” He held the bike upright and nodded at it. “I already put the seat to your height. Go ahead, get on.”
I looked at the thing askance. “Why am I suddenly reminded of the first bike I had that wasn’t a tricycle?”
Ash grinned. “Because you’re a kid at heart. Get on.”
He’d just come off his night shift and I was still amazed that he had the energy to go biking. “We can do this some other day,” I said. “You must be tired. And I have to be at the library in a couple of hours, so we don’t have much time.”
“Keep talking like that and I’ll think you’re chicken.” He made rooster noises.
“Peer pressure?” I asked, taking the odd-looking bike out of his hands. “That’s what you think is going to get me on this thing?”
“Whatever works.” He pulled a second fat tire bike from his vehicle. “I borrowed these bikes from . . . well, let’s just say I borrowed them.”
I gave him a sidelong look because I had a good idea where the bikes had come from. For various reasons, every year the garage of the sheriff’s office ended up with a tremendous number of items, things ranging from power saws to filing cabinets to sporting goods. “Ash . . .”
“Don’t be such a worry wart,” he said. “I talked to the sheriff, told her that I wanted to try out these bikes. We might want to keep a couple of them for off-season access to some of the trails around here.”
I’d never heard of fat tire biking until late last spring, when I’d started noticing them on the bike racks of visiting vehicles. I’d been standing on the sidewalk, giving one a quizzical look, when the owner noticed my expression. He’d immediately launched into an enthusiastic explanation, telling me that the four-inch-wide tires were ideal for spring, fall, and even winter bike riding, that the ultra-wide tires gave great traction in mud and snow, and that riding one was more fun than humans should be allowed to have.
I might have believed him if he hadn’t been wearing white socks with his sandals, which to me indicated a complete lack of judgment. After all, if he felt free to wear that in public, could I really trust his opinion on bicycling? On anything?
“We can go up the hill to the cemetery,” Ash now said. “Then take the trail that heads to the state forest. We’ll be back in forty-five minutes if you get moving.”
“That hill is so steep I can barely walk up it.”
“I’ve told you a million times to stop exaggerating. Honest, it’ll be easy on these things.”
“Trust,” I mused, climbing onto the bike. “So hard to win, so easy to lose.”
“Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“Not yet,” I said darkly. “But there’s always a first time.”
“Not today.” He climbed astride his bike and put a foot on one of the pedals. “So are you coming or—hey!”
I whirled past him. “Last one to the corner pays for the next breakfast,” I called over my shoulder.
“Cheater!” he yelled, but I didn’t consider it cheating; I thought of it more as evening the odds. After all, he was bigger, stronger, and fitter than I was. Any physical race that we started at the same time would be won by Ash unless the contest was evened up a little.
We reached the corner, me winning by the slightest hair, and we headed up the hill.
“This isn’t so bad,” I panted when we were halfway up.
“Told you,” he said, not out of breath at all.
“I hate it—when you—do that,” I managed to get out.
“Do what?”
I shook my head, not wanting to expend any unnecessary breath on talking. There would be time to abuse him when we got to the cemetery and I got my wind back.
But by the time we reached the cemetery, we’d begun talking about the college courses he was taking that semester and then we stopped at Alonzo Tillotson’s headstone, the place I’d first met Eddie, for a view of Janay Lake and beyond to Lake Michigan.
“Nice,” Ash said, leaning on his handlebars.
“Sure is.”
We stood there, side by side, drinking in the scene. The sun had just pulled itself up over the horizon and was bathing the waters with the bright golden-red of morning. It could have been a romantic scene, maybe even should have been, but it . . . just wasn’t. I didn’t feel a spark of anything resembling passion for the man standing next to me. Didn’t feel any sense of overwhelming love. Didn’t feel anything except a sense of friendly companionship and the well-being that came from exercise.
Then, without a warning, Ash leaped onto his bike and sped off. “First one to the trailhead gets to pick the next breakfast place!” he called over his shoulder.
“Cheater!” I shouted, fumbling for my pedals.