Page 127 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

They haven’t located Rusk, and no one has established whether he has an actual connection to a motorcycle club.

Wes ends the call and returns to the table.

“Physical location?” I ask.

“Tom is preparing the request for the rental records and yard footage. BESTF is checking the address against the regional transport cases.”

“So the next stop in my increasingly glamorous life is a repair yard.”

Roman writes Beetle Collection beneath the current box number. “You say that as though grease stains can’t be romantic.”

“They can, but only when applied with artistic intent.”

Wes slides another container toward me. “We’ll keep that in mind.” There is dry amusement in his voice, but his fingers brush mine before he lets go.

The third box contains seed packets, two journals swollen from humidity, and a bundle of field cards tied with faded blue ribbon. The first cards document water levels near the marina. The next record is swamp lily bloom times.

Roman sits across from me, the inventory sheet angled beneath his left hand.

I work through several cards before I notice his pencil is no longer moving in straight lines. His gaze flicks from my face to the small sheet near his wrist. The pencil travels in a quick curve, pauses, then shades the fall of hair over one shoulder. He is drawing me.

I lower the card in my hand. “That is not an evidence log.”

Roman’s pencil stops.

Beside the list of box numbers, on the back of an unused label, he has sketched me leaning over the table. My hair hides part of my face. One foot hooks around the stool rung, and my fingers hover over a pressed leaf as though it might answer if I wait long enough. At the edge of the drawing, Wes’s hand rests near mine.

Roman makes no attempt to cover it. “I draw when I want to remember how a moment felt.”

I hold out my hand. “May I?”

He passes me the sketch.

The woman on the paper looks absorbed rather than braced. Her mouth is soft. Her shoulders are lowered. She belongs in the room.

“You made me look peaceful.”

“You were peaceful.”

I glance at him.

His humor has receded, leaving the open expression he rarely shows anyone but Wes and now me. “You change when you trust a place,” he says. “You stop measuring how quickly you could leave it.”

The sketch trembles once between my fingers.

I place it beside the flowers where I can keep seeing it. “Draw me again sometime.”

Roman’s eyes darken. “I was planning to.”

Wes returns from checking the far stack and sets a flat cedar box on the table. “This one?”

The brass latch is shaped like a cypress leaf.

My shoulders draw in slightly. I remember the box when it was on the highest shelf of my grandmother’s wardrobe. Once, when I was nine, she slapped my hand away from it. She apologized by teaching me to press marigolds between sheets of blotting paper, which was her preferred method of admitting she had overreacted without saying the words.

“I forgot this was up here.”

I open it and find vellum sheets lying between layers of tissue. The first holds a hand-drawn map of the cypress glade. The public festival path is marked in red pencil. A second line, faded brown, breaks away near the old post office and curves south toward undeveloped land. Across the bottom, my grandmother wrote: Protection path is not release path. Compare before using either.