It wasn’t hard, looking at the pair of them fist-bumping over the table, to imagine one or both of them being creepily interested in a girl.
Or maybe that was just Eden’s usual cynicism.
“Hello, boys,” she announced, pulling up to the booth with intentional suddenness. Both of them jumped and whipped around to stare at her. She blocked Jimmy in, and aimed her coolest smile at the friend. “I need to speak with Jimmy for a moment, if I may.”
“Uh…” He stared at her, slack-jawed.
“That means get lost, dipshit,” Axelle said, stepping into view, motioning him out of the booth.
“Dude, I…uh…” His gaze pinged between the three of them, and, then, finally, he slipped out of the booth with a muttered, “I’ll call later.”
“Excellent,” Eden said, taking his place across from Jimmy.
Axelle slid in beside him, preventing a similar escape, and his face went red with immediate anger. “You can’t just–”
“ItisJimmy, yes?” Eden asked, voice professionally cool. There was always a certain thrill that came with sliding on this persona, one she’d learn to disguise beneath cool indifference over years of practice. “Jimmy Connors? I hope I haven’t gotten the wrong young man.” She tilted her head, and allowed her brows to draw together a fraction: subtle confusion, faint worry that she’d made a mistake.
Let him think her uncertain. A useful tactic.
“No, I–” It knocked him off his guard. He glanced over at Axelle; her lanky frame angled with an elbow on the table and one leg crossed over the other, totally blocking him in. Then to Eden, her manufactured worry. He let out a breath. “Nah, I’m Jimmy. What do you want?”
Eden nodded, played at relieved, and produced a business card that she slid across the table toward him. He craned his neck to look, but didn’t touch it. “I’m Eden Adkins.”
“You’re a detective?” His brows went up into his messy hair, and she saw the first tick of something like panic in the throb of the pulse in his throat and the flicker of his lashes.
“Private investigator. Allie Henderson’s family has hired me to look into her disappearance, since the police aren’t making any headway.”
His brows climbed a little higher.
“I asked them to make me a list of all her closest friends,” she continued, which wasn’t a lie. “I’m working my way down it, and you’re the next one on it.” Whichwasa lie, because Allie hadn’t ever given this kid the time of day. Her parents hadn’t known him, beyond knowing, as most boating families did, that the Connors owned a customs shop.
“Oh.” His brows came back down a fraction; he blew out a breath and raked a hand through his tangled hair. “Shit. Yeah. The cops have been coming around school asking everybody about it – about her. If we saw anything.”
Eden glanced toward Axelle, who’d produced a small, spiral notebook from her back pocket, and a pen.
“Well,” Eden said, levering a false bit of cheer into her voice. “Not to be redundant, but I’m afraid I’m going to be asking the same sort of things. Only – well. Since I’m very much not a police officer, I don’t have to worry about warrants or the admissible sorts of questions.” She gestured vaguely.Oh, those silly admissible questions. “I can get right to the heart of it without worrying so much about channels and permissions.”
He swallowed. “Right.”
“I think Allie’s still alive, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s no body, right? Nobody found her, did they?” A bit too eager.
Axelle made a face that Eden didn’t think was an act, pen poised over the paper.
“No,” she agreed, shaking her head, trying to keep his gaze fixed on her. Axelle was proving invaluable help, but she hadn’t quite mastered the whole acting aspect of this business yet. “They haven’t. And I don’t think they will. I think she’s alive, as I said before. But it’s important to find her soon, wherever she is.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ve heard that some of your classmates hold the Lean Dogs responsible.”
His gaze flared; she watched him jump all over his pet theory with both feet.
“Yeah,” he said, “a lot of them do. Everybody around here knows the Lean Dogs are fucking trash.”
“Everybody?” she asked, frowning. “I only ask because I’m new in town – in the United States, in fact.”
He nodded. “I wondered about the accent.”
