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once, he’d said nothing at all.
    This hit my sensors and I sat up, alert. “What name did he say?”
    “Lizzie. Why?”
    “Because he said that name when he was kicking the shit out of me!”
    At that point, everyone just stared at me like I was a lunatic. Deciding to switch subjects, I asked Coop what had been going on at work while I was gone. He told me he’d started the Samantha Johnston case for me, but nothing had really come of it.
    “I got a hold of the last guy to supposedly see her, and he gave me a ridiculous story about her involvement with some corrupt hick sheriff’s department in Deliverance, West Virginia.” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “It was fucking absurd, but I typed it up for you anyway and put it on your desk.”
    Then we started talking about vacations, and about how some people like to go up into the mountains for the wilderness on their vacations, and how weird we all thought that was, since to all of us natives of Ohio, a real vacation meant an ocean and a beach. We talked about various vacations, past and anticipated, for the rest of the night and had a really good time, but my mind stayed on work and the information Coop gave me about Delphy. For the past week, I’d been trying to put together in my mind the memory of something that Delphy had said during the fight. It had bothered me mightily, but my memory had only been able to dance around it until Coop had started talking.
    After Coop and his family had gone and the girls were in bed, I went into my home office to find the Samantha Johnston file. It was on top of my desk, where Eric had told me he’d put it. Lizzie?
Did Delphy say Lizzy Johnson or Johnston?,
I thought to myself. Hell, he’d been so drunk it would’ve been impossible to tell the difference. Did he say he did not kill her? It was hard for me to remember. I grabbed the file, opened it, and there it was on the first page: Samantha Elizabeth Johnston, also known as, Lizzie.
    This wasn’t good. How in the hell was Bobby Delphy connected to this missing girl? The horrible part about this was that I was going to have to go talk to Bobby Delphy face to face, and I was distinctly unhappy about it. The thought of having to see him again made my skin literally crawl. Also, from what Coop had said, Delphy wasn’t saying much, if anything at all, anyway. I’d be back at work on Monday, so I put the file back on my desk, deciding to deal with it then. Getting worked up before then wasn’t going to do anything but send me right over the edge.
    When Monday eventually rolled around, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of going back to work, either. I’d enjoyed my time off; it had helped to heal me physically and emotionally, but I certainly could’ve used another week at home. My face looked human again, but I still had two black eyes and several fading bruises.
    I arrived at work to the usual jokes: “Ay, Yo Rocky!”, “What’s the other guy look like?”, and “Hey Rocky, where’s your raccoon?” just to recall a few.
    I took it all in stride and kept my sense of humor. When I finally was able to get to my office, I wasn’t really surprised to find my desk completely covered with paperwork. Being a detective and being gone for a week is like being gone for a month in the real world. I had sticky notes and phone messages, prosecutor request forms, and every possible other form, all requiring my signature, in piles so thick I couldn’t even find my phone. I wanted to cry. I’d expected no more than half of what lay out in front of me, but knew that’d been wishful thinking. This was definitely not what I’d wanted, or needed, to come back to. A sticky note telling me to see the sheriff immediately upon my return caught my eye. Obviously, that would have to come first if I liked being employed.
    Most people get nervous when they have to see the sheriff, but I don’t. Sheriff Stephens has been a friend of my family’s for years, and I anticipated