Read What the River Knows for Free Online

place.”
    “You didn’t go with them?” Scott almost called her Mrs. Brady, after his childhood Sunday school teacher. They both made the same disapproving scowl.
    Ms. Green shot him a look that made him want to sit in the corner facing the wall. “I would never go to one of those places.”
    “We’ll ask Sandy which one it was.” A twitch of his mustache the only indication of the grin Scott knew it hid, Bates glanced at Scott. “Could you let us talk to Ms. O’Reilly and Ms. Turner?”
    “Of course.” She consulted a sheaf of pink “while you were out” notes. “But Shawna called in sick today.” She rubbed her temple. “I think she was the most upset by poor Delia’s…death.”
    Scott and Bates exchanged a look. “We’ll talk to Ms. O’Reilly then. And we’ll need Ms. Turner’s home number and address.”
    “Certainly.” She consulted an address book in a drawer and wrote briefly on a company notepad. “Here it is.”
    ****
    “Poor Delia.” Trish O’Reilly dabbed at her nose with a crumpled tissue. “She was so sweet, just getting her life back together.” She dropped her left hand, still holding the tissue, in her lap. She propped her right elbow on the conference table, gathered a strand of her caramel hair, and began to twist it in her fingers. Trish paid a lot of money for her hair to look like it was naturally that color. Rica’s caustic comments about women taught him that.
    “How do you mean, ‘getting it back together.’” Scott, sitting directly across from her, leaned forward.
    Trish glanced first at Bates, then back to Scott. “Oh, I mean after the divorce and all.” She smiled at Scott, then dropped her gaze. Deliberately, he laid his left hand across the top of the notebook as he jotted a note. Her gaze flicked to his wedding ring, but then she met his eyes and smiled again. “It’s hard to get back into circulation after a breakup, but she was making the effort.”
    “Was she seeing anyone?” Scott kept his eyes on the notepad, although he could feel her looking at him. He’d let Bates read the body language; he needed to cool the way she reacted to him, or they’d not get the information they needed.
    “Um.” She brought the tissue to her nose again. “No one steady.”
    “Do you have the names of anyone she went out with?”
    “Oh, she didn’t really go out with them.” Trish now focused on Bates, so Scott tried to observe her with his head lowered. “She just met them at a restaurant or bar, like a blind date.” She smiled. “We had a lot of laughs about how dismal they were.” Then her lips started to tremble, and her shoulders heaved. “Poor Delia.”
    Scott glanced at Bates. Getting information from Trish was going to be a slow process. They waited a few minutes until her sobs slowed. “Can you write down everything you know about anyone she went out with? When they went out, where, times, that sort of thing.”
    She nodded. “I can write down what she told me, but there usually wasn’t much.” She glanced toward the door of the room. “And then there was—” Someone walked past the door, and she stopped.
    “There was what?” Scott asked the question he knew was also on Bates’ mind.
    “Oh, nothing.” Trish’s fingers tangled in her hair again. “She just…stopped going out for a little while.”
    “Bad experience?”
    Trish shrugged. “She didn’t say much, just didn’t want to join us when we went out.”
    Bates sighed. “Can you have the list of guys she went out with for us later today?”
    “Sure.” She brought the tissue to her nose again.
    “What about the place some of you went once in a while.”
    “Oh, that.” Trish suppressed a smile. “It started out with some of us going out to the Thirsty Dragon to celebrate Shawna’s divorce, then it kind of morphed into a payday evening thing.”
    “Must have been a bad marriage if she celebrated the divorce,” Bates muttered.
    Trish focused on him. “Oh, it was