Page 63 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
“Ah.” He glances toward the town and then back to me. “Look, that’s a little awkward, and if someone saw…” He exhales and swears under his breath.
“I don’t care what happens between consenting adults, Gunnar. I just want to ask you some questions about her, and as a staff member, you’re expected to give me that. In confidence. It helps me get a handle on someone before I go asking other residents.”
“I don’t know anything about Lynn. Yes, she came to my perch, but I sent her away. I don’t have a problem with married women, but it was clear she wanted to cause trouble, and I wasn’t getting in the middle of that.”
“Trouble?”
“She’s unhappy with her husband and looking to stick it to him by screwing around with me. I said no as gently as I could.”
I can tell by his expression that there’s more to it, something he’d been about to add and then changed his mind.
“And then?” I say.
He exhales. “I don’t want trouble.”
“Anything you say is in confidence.”
“Yeah, but if you confront her on this, she’ll know I told you. Lynn … she sent me letters. Like sexting, only in actual letters, since we don’t have cell phones. I asked her to cut that shit out. She did. That was weeks ago. It’s handled, and I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, but since you asked.”
“Do you have those letters?”
“Uh, no. I mean, if they were good, I’d have kept them. But they were pretty awful.”
I struggle to keep a straight face. “They were handwritten?”
“No other way to do it here.”
“If I show you samples of handwriting, can you make an ID?”
“Like a handwriting lineup? Sure.”
* * *
Gunnar has made his ID. He recognizes the handwriting on one of the three notes.
The note that had been shoved under the town hall door.
That one is done in cursive. The other two are printed. Is it one person trying to disguise the fact that they wrote all three? I don’t know. But I do know who seems to have written that one note.
I find Lynn at work in the restaurant, doing prep for dinner, and I bring her to the station.
“You wrote this,” I say, slapping it down in front of her.
She barely bothers to deny it. After all, she didn’t bother to disguise her handwriting, did she?
“You need to talk to Dana,” she says, after admitting to it. “She knows more than she’s saying.”
“Which you know because…”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” She gives me a look that borders on sympathy and lowers her voice. “Look, I understand this isn’t what you signed up for. Like me chopping vegetables. I haven’t done that since I was fifteen with my first job. Going back to it now is…” She shrugs. “Kind of humiliating, you know? But I get it. Someone has to do it. Like your case.”
“My case?”
“You’re obviously not a cop. You’re too smart for that. Look at your sister. She’s a doctor. That makes sense. You people are really good at math and science.”
I don’t ask what she means. I don’t need to.
She continues, “I don’t know what you did down south. Some kind of scientist or engineer? Maybe computers? But now you’ve come here and Eric’s a cop, and the town needed cops. So you have to play detective.”
