Crooked Little Lies by Barbara Taylor Sissel

haven’t seen him for nearly a week. No one I know of has, except Cooper, and I’ve checked everywhere I can think of.”
    “When did you last see him? What day?” the sheriff asked.
    “Last Wednesday,” Annie answered. “He came here. We had tea.” She looked over at the booth nearest the door, where Bo liked to sit. So he could get away quickly? So he could see out? Annie wasn’t sure, but he always chose that spot. If it was occupied, he’d wait for it or he’d leave altogether.
    Last Wednesday when he came into the café, the booth was empty, and Annie had sat with him, watching while he sugared the already-sweetened tea and stuffed down two of the carrot-and-cinnamon muffins that were leftovers from the batch she’d made and served to that morning’s breakfast crowd. She remembered nagging him about eating so much sugar; she remembered he’d been agitated and jumpy. I could tell you something. He’d said that to her more than once. But she’d been focused on the sweets, determined to get her point across by basically venting her disgust over his diet.
    Why hadn’t she asked him what was wrong? Why hadn’t she slid in beside him and put her arms around him? She bit her lip. How many times in that single afternoon, after she’d spoken to him in her brittle, authoritarian voice, had he told her he was sorry; he would do better, he promised. But just listen, he’d said, I heard talking . . .
    She looked at Bo in her mind; he’d been wearing his earmuffs. She was certain of it, and if that was true, then at some point after leaving the café, he’d gone to JT’s and left again without them. The fact that he’d forgotten them worried her even more now. Clearly he’d been upset; his mind had been in more than its usual turmoil. I heard talking . . .
    What had he meant? Had he heard voices in his head? Real voices? Why couldn’t she have shut up for five seconds and let him tell her?
    “Bo wouldn’t go this long without touching base.” Madeleine had rejoined them and was answering some question the sheriff had posed that Annie had missed. “A couple of days is his limit, wouldn’t you say, Annie?”
    Madeleine sounded so definite that Annie agreed even as she searched her mind for an exception, and not finding one, she said, “I can’t think when he’s ever gone this long without at least calling or texting me.”
    “Something else,” Madeleine said. “I paid him last week, in cash like I always do. He showed me some other money he had then, wrapped up with a rubber band around it. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”
    Sheriff Audi looked from Madeleine to Annie.
    “It isn’t stolen, Sheriff. Bo’s not a thief,” Annie said.
    “Is he using, dealing drugs again? Because you know we’ve run him in for that.”
    “Not lately; not in a long time. He’s not on anything.” Annie crossed her arms tightly around her middle, hoping she was right, praying she was.
    “You’re sure.” Sheriff Audi wasn’t. Annie could tell by the way he sounded.
    “I’d know,” she said, flatly, although that wasn’t true. Under the weight of Cooper’s glance, she felt pushed to explain. “He hears voices in his head sometimes, and when they get really loud, when they shout—” Annie’s throat closed around the threat of tears.
    She felt Cooper cup her elbow in his palm to steady her. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and it wasn’t, but Annie was somehow reassured anyway.
    “He self-medicates,” she said. “He won’t take the doctor-prescribed meds, but he’ll take the stuff a stranger, a—a dope dealer on the street hands him—or he did. But not lately. Not in nearly a year now. I’d know,” she reiterated.
    “People have been known to take advantage of him,” Madeleine said, and Annie heard her reluctance, shades of her hovering fear.
    “Yeah,” Sheriff Audi said, and he blew out a sigh as if the thought of such cruelty depressed him.
    Annie said, “Bo was working other places