Page 73 of Sunset Beach
Drue had foggy memories of a diminutive redhead sitting at the kitchen table with Zee and her parents, doling spaghetti out of an enormous pot. She remembered the table littered with beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays, and the sounds of raucous laughter after she’d been put to bed and the adults started one of their marathon card games.
“I remember Frannie,” she said now. “She used to bring me these little Italian cookies with powdered sugar.”
“Wedding cookies. They were her specialty.”
Drue glanced over at Zee. “I take it you guys split up?”
“Years and years ago. I was too damn dumb to know a good thing when I had it.” He ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. “Geez, I haven’t thought about Frannie in years. Funny, I just realized, your dad and me, we’ve been together longer than any of our marriages.”
“What’s the secret?”
“To the partnership? We don’t sleep with each other.” He laughed at his own joke. “Your old man knows how to make things happen. Always has. That’s the secret to his success.”
“And what’s the secret to yours?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Always sweat the small shit. The nitpicky details. Ask the extra questions. Make that last phone call. And that’s why Brice and me work so well together. He’s the big-picture guy. Always had a vision of what success looks like. Like going to law school. He was only a beat cop for maybe five or six years, and he already knew he wanted something bigger. Then he was in a general practice with old man Coxe for a few years, until he figured out personal injury was where the big paydays were. He went looking for those cases, and eventually, when he started getting big settlements, I went ahead and retired from the force and came to work for him as an investigator. That’s been, what? Twelve years? I lose track.”
Drue studied her father’s friend’s profile. He was jowly, with ruddy skin that already showed five-o’clock shadow. “Dad said he never made detective when he was on the force. But you did, right?”
“Sure. I retired as a captain.”
“Did you ever work on the case involving that missing woman? Colleen Boardman Hicks?”
Zee’s jaws worked furiously at the gum but he kept his eyes on the road. “What makes you ask about her? You weren’t even born when all that happened.”
“When I was moving into the cottage on Sunset Beach, I found some old newspaper clippings about the case, in a box of my mom’s things,” Drue said, carefully omitting the fact that she’d actually found what looked like the official Colleen Hicks police file.
“It was a big mystery, back in the day,” Zee said. “On the news every night.”
“Dad told me he went to high school with Colleen Boardman Hicks,” Drue said. “Did you know that?”
“Yeah, now that you say it, I do remember they went to school together. But I don’t think they were really friends.”
“Since you were a detective back then, did you work on the investigation?”
“It wasn’t my case, but I did some legwork. That’s been more than forty years ago.”
“Did you have a theory back then about what happened to Colleen Hicks?”
The truck stopped at a traffic light. Zee turned in his seat and stared.
“Why do you care?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I mean, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? Colleen Hicks had dinner with a friend one evening, what—less than a mile from where we work? And then she vanished.”
The light turned green and they were moving again. “Who knows? At the time, the theory was that she was mixed up in something shady.”
“What kind of shady stuff could she have been involved with? She was a dental hygienist, right?”
“Oh, little girl, you don’t want to know what all that gal was into. There were drugs missing from that dentist’s office she worked at. Maybe she was selling them, but we never could prove it. And we talked to people who said she and the husband were into some kinky stuff. You know what I mean?”
Drue felt herself blushing. “You mean they were swingers?”
“That was the rumor going around. Back then, that kind of stuff wasn’t talked about out in the open, like it is now. You couldn’t turn on the television and watch ten different porn channels in the privacy of your own home like you can now.”
“Do you think there’s a chance she’s still alive?” Drue asked.
“Maybe. Maybe she’s living the good life in Mexico. Don’t really care, to tell you the truth.”
