Past Tense by William G. Tapply Read Free Book Online Page B

friends for almost a year and lovers for several months. One of the things I’d learned about her was that she was absolutely direct. If she didn’t want to talk about something, she said so. If she did talk about it, she said exactly what she felt. There had been many times in the year I’d known her when the easiest, kindest thing for her to do would have been to lie, and she never did.
    On the other hand there were many things she refused to talk about, including virtually her entire life up to the time we’d met. If I asked her casual questions about her childhood or her family or her old lovers or previous jobs, she’d accuse me of idle curiosity, as if that was unworthy of me. She always said her past life was irrelevant, that now was what counted, and up until a week ago, I’d pretty much agreed with her. I didn’t talk about my past much, either, and Evie had expressed no idle curiosity about it whatsoever.
    I loved the Evie I knew, not the Evie who’d existed before that. Whatever had happened before I met her was relevant only insofar as it had made her the person she had become.
    Now it seemed Larry Scott had contributed mightily to the person she’d become, and it made me understand that we are all a sum of our experiences, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.
    Maybe she had lied to me. Maybe she had expected to encounter Scott there in our driveway that morning. Maybe she
had taken a knife from the kitchen. If she had, and if she’d killed him with it, it would give state police detective Neil Vanderweigh a good argument for malice aforethought. Intent and premeditation. Not just murder, but murder in the first degree.
    How well did I really know Evie?
    That was the question.
    I figured Vanderweigh planned to try some misdirection on me. A pleasant lunch, some casual conversation. He’d already shown me his inquisitor side. Now he’d probably try to show me what a nice guy he was.
    I assumed he still suspected both of us, either as alternate suspects or as a team.
    Objectively, we were both damn good suspects.
    Well, it didn’t matter. Vanderweigh could think whatever he wanted, and he could pick my brain to his heart’s content. I wasn’t hiding anything, so telling the truth would be easy.
    I arrived at the Ford place in Brewster a few minutes before noon, and just about the time they finished checking the Taurus for dents and scratches and verified that I’d topped off the gas tank, my green BMW pulled into the lot and Detective Neil Vanderweigh got out. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and without his bald head showing, I didn’t recognize him at first. He came inside, saw me signing papers with the salesman, lifted his hand and nodded, and went back outside.
    I joined him a minute later. We shook hands and got into my car. I waved my hand around the inside. “So what’d you find?”
    He smiled. “If we found anything incriminating, I wouldn’t tell you. On the other hand, if we found anything incriminating, I probably wouldn’t be returning it to you. Feel like some lunch?”
    â€œSure. Where to?”

    He directed me back to Dennis, then down a side street to a low-slung shingled place on the water. It was called the Lighthouse Tavern. Poetic license. I knew of no lighthouse on the bay side of the Cape.
    I found a slot at the far end of the jammed parking lot, and we went inside. The place featured dim, indirect lighting and soft music and dark woodwork, fishing nets with cork floats draped on the walls, fake portholes, and a solid glass back wall overlooking still another Cape Cod tidal creek. The lobby was crammed with middle-aged men in baggy shorts and tanned women in capri pants and whiny children in foul tempers, but when Vanderweigh took off his cap to reveal his bald head, the hostess looked up, smiled at him, and waved us over.
    We shouldered our way through the crowd, and when we got to the