The Girl in the Water. A Grayson J

mood to talk, and smiling generally encourages Chloe to speak. Even here, in my quiet corner where I’m so often left in peace.

      ‘Noticed I didn’t hear none of your usual flirting with Mitch today,’ she says, proving my point. There is egging in her voice, together with that stupid drawl. She fancies herself a detective, with all the time she spends nose-deep in the books, but with Chloe it’s mostly guesses and innuendos. She wags her head towards our boss’s office door in an appropriation of subtle suggestion. Little stints of investigative splendour like this would be flaunted in my direction more often if Chloe’s normal post wasn’t on the till near the front door, too far away to pass sly comments with any degree of subterfuge.

      ‘Haven’t seen him since I got in,’ I answer. ‘I assume he’s down in the warehouse.’ Curt. Short. ‘And I never flirt.’

      ‘Come on now, we all flirt! You don’t have to hide nothin’ from—’

      I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand another syllable of it. I’m upset with David, with myself. I’m confused about the odd emotions I seem to harbour about the story of the woman in the river, frustrated that I can’t find more details on it, and I’m not prepared for such an exchange. Not today, and not with this throbbing in my ears.

      ‘Noth-ing,’ I answer, cutting her off and staring straight up at her. ‘I don’t have to hide noth-ing.’ I catch myself. Shit. ‘Any-thing. Christ sakes, quit pretending you’re Agatha Christie meets queen of the bayou. You work in a bookshop!’

      That’s a good snap, for me. I usually don’t react like this.

      Chloe is silent for longer than I’ve ever known her to manage the feat. The miracle spans a solid ten seconds.

      ‘Bitch,’ she finally says, flatly. Her accent is now wholly Californian. ‘Just trying to be friendly. And I can talk however I want. It’s my life.’ Then a pause, and then for what I assume to be the good measure of ensuring it sunk in: ‘Bitch’.

      I feel bad. Chloe may not yet be thirty, but she’s already a single, twice-divorced mother of a seven-year-old boy whose stated goal in life is to grow up to be ‘a more bad-ass fucker than dem shits from Oakie’ and whose usual terms of endearment for his own mother alternate between ‘wench’ and ‘yo, lady’ She deserves a break, and certainly more than my attitude.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ I offer. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

      ‘No, to hell with you,’ she cuts me off. ‘I don’t want to hear about your long morning or your tired body or your worn-out temper, or your great throbbing bastard of a headache.’ Chloe is almost prescient in her huff. ‘You just sit there and tend to your pile of newspapers and dross, I’ll mind my till, and we’ll both pretend you’re not the pompous self-centred cow we both know you are.’

      She’s disappeared among the rows of shelves again. Despite the impressive array of insults having just been flung my way, I’m not willing to become too apocalyptic about the exchange. I re-open my computer. Chloe and I have tragic, earth-ending disintegrations of our friendship on more or less a weekly cycle, so I know this will pass.

      Though not, perhaps, quite as quickly as it actually does.

      ‘You’d think you’d be grateful for a little help with your snooping, since the art of the search clearly isn’t your forte.’ I hear her voice, soft and back-in-black, from somewhere behind a row of rarely visited classics. A strange comment. My ears are suddenly a degree more alert. My face comes up from my monitor and Sadie’s fuzzy underbelly is facing me from the photo on the wall.

      I’m entirely uncertain what sort of ‘help’ Chloe could be in a position to offer me – there’s a solid 50/50 shot it’s advice on hairstyles or improving my sex life, or just an all-out ploy to get me to do some menial activity she doesn’t want to do herself – but her reference to snooping jostles my attention. She hasn’t said it with the tones that normally go with jokes, and the word itself sounds foreign in my ears.

      ‘My snooping?’ I finally ask. I don’t get up.

      And I can’t explain it, but there’s that tingling in my spine again.

      ‘Yeah, help, woman,’ Chloe answers. Power is coming back into her voice, and after a strong intake of breath, she launches into a long collection of words she’s clearly been storing up since she first said hello.

      But I only hear the first three.

      ‘It’s about Emma.’

      And she keeps talking, but I suddenly can’t breathe.

       15

       Amber

      I am positively, spectacularly certain that I’ve never spoken with Chloe about my private, quiet little obsession with learning all I can about the murder of the woman in the river. It’s been entirely my own, tucked away in my corner and in the secret folds of my thoughts. Besides, a conversation like that would have been torturous, and while many of my emotions over the past twenty-four hours have been unusual, I’m not that out of it.

      But Chloe didn’t just mention the subject of my sudden interest. She mentioned a name. The name.

      ‘What do you mean, “It’s about Emma”?’

      I can barely form the last word. The name that came to me on the road, the one that stopped David mid-thrust and sent yesterday spiralling out of normalcy into disarray. The name I’m all but positive I didn’t even know before I left the shop yesterday.

      Yesterday. That word, again.

      ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’ Chloe’s been talking non-stop for several seconds, her voice a background murmur behind my thoughts, but she halts at my interruption, genuinely puzzled. ‘Haven’t you been listening to I word I just said?’

      I shake my head, too anxious to be embarrassed. ‘Start again.’

      ‘I said,’ she draws out the word, emphasizing the condescension implied in her willingness to repeat herself, ‘that you being so interested in random bits of the week’s news seems to have paid off, in terms of curiosity value. The murder you’re so bent up on, up in the Russian River. Story’s got more involved overnight.’

      It’s solid now. She knows concrete details. Like she’s been in my head.

      ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I demand, fire in my voice. I’m not normally this assertive, and the strength in my breath is doubly out of place in the quiet of the shop.

      Chloe’s left eyebrow rises so high it looks like it might go into orbit. ‘The hell am I? What … Calm down, girl. I’m trying to share the juicy details I dug up for you.’ She looks like she might spit at me if I don’t change my tone, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

      I didn’t ask Chloe to do anything for me, dig up anything. I’m mishearing. My palms are growing sweaty, sticking to the newsprint of the paper on which I’ve laid them.

      ‘That woman you’ve gone all Hercule Poirot over.’ Chloe’s voice stomps through my thoughts, instantly proving me wrong. ‘You’re not the only one who can play detective, you know. Come on, you’re talking to the queen. Try to name a detective novel published in the last five years that I haven’t read. Come on. I dare you.’

      I don’t. She rolls her eyes.

      ‘Anyway, I scoped out everything I could find on that woman last night,’ Chloe continues. ‘Web’s a fantastic place for the curious. Turns out she’s single, never married and no children. One site said she was gainfully employed, but didn’t say where. No ongoing relationships. No history of major drugs. No criminal background.’ Chloe lists off the facts in a way that stresses,