“I need to borrow some clothes,” I said. “Jeans,” I added then tacked on “Wranglers,” for further clarification. I finished with “please” to properly convey my desperation.
As a former fashion buyer with a history of overindulging in wardrobe choices to fit any social setting, I had to be desperate to be standing on the porch of the very unfashionable Detective Loncar, asking to borrow clothes.
Loncar, to his credit, didn’t respond right away. We had a complicated relationship, built over years of battling ne’er-do-wells like a modern-day Batman and Robin—my words, not his— in our hometown of Ribbon, Pennsylvania, but at the end of the day, clothes were my wheelhouse, and crime was his. I had stepped over the line too many times to pretend today’s request was anything but inevitable.
Loncar was a man of few words, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when, instead of replying, he turned around and headed back into his house. I interpreted it as an invitation to join him, so I entered, too, and closed the door behind me. He glanced over his shoulder once, grunted something, and went into his kitchen. By the time I caught up (distracted as I was by the collection of Hummel figurines that I never would have expected to find on display in his living room), he held two mugs of hot, steaming coffee. I almost forgot about the Butterscotch Krimpets that I’d brought with me to soften him up. I raised my hand to indicate the box. (I needed to borrow a week’s worth of jeans, so I knew better than to show up with just one package.) He jutted his chin toward his kitchen table, and moments later we were settled in for breakfast.
As long as I had a Butterscotch Krimpet in front of me, I didn’t care so much that he had yet to grant my request. I tore open the plastic wrapper and bit into the sweet butterscotch cake. After a few bites, I swallowed. I took a sip of my coffee and almost spit it back out. I set down my mug.
“Decaf,” Loncar said.
“Why?”
“Heart.”
“Oh. Okay.” I picked up my mug and took another sip, this time bracing myself for the tinny taste.
Loncar stood and snatched my mug out of my hand. He carried both of our mugs to the sink and dumped the contents.
“Hey! I was drinking that!”
“No, you weren’t.” He opened his fridge and pulled out two bottles of water. Water and Krimpets aren’t that solid a combination, but with Loncar’s health hanging in the balance, I was willing to make the sacrifice.
“So… do you want to talk about it?” I pointed to his chest, where I presumed his heart would be, though at the moment, he looked a little like a man who had been born without one.
“Ms. Kidd, why are you here?”
The first time I’d met the detective, he had called me Ms. Kidd, not only because it was my name but because I was a suspect in his murder investigation and that was what Emily Post deemed appropriate in such social settings. I’d told him to call me Samantha, but it didn’t stick. He’d told me to stop calling him Detective after he retired from the police force, but I didn’t listen either. I would always think of him as a homicide detective, which explained my choice of what to call him. His choice to continue treating me like a murder suspect was unsettling, to say the least.
“Like I said, I need to borrow some jeans. Back when we solved that case involving the secret society, I noticed we wear the same size.”
Loncar raised both of his eyebrows, which could have been a response to my reference that we’d worked in tandem on an investigation—probably not how he’d describe it even if it was the truth—or that our wildly different body types somehow put us both into 36x30 jeans.
“I thought clothes were your métier?”
“My met… Yes. Right. They were. They are. Yes.”
“And I thought you wrote a column for the Ribbon Times about how to dress for any occasion?”
“Yes. I do. I did. I’m on a break.”
Loncar raised his eyebrows and swallowed a few gulps of water. His Krimpet went untouched.
“Nick’s dad is thinking about buying a dude ranch in New Jersey. We’re headed there tomorrow, and I don’t have anything to wear.” The words came out in a rush. “I was going to go to Boot Barn, but then I remembered you, and I thought maybe…” Despite all of the initial gusto I’d used to explain myself, my voice trailed off. “I drove by your office the other day, and there’s a For Rent sign in the window. I called, but the number has been discontinued. I tried to reach your daughter, but the calls go directly to voicemail, and when I called Patti, she said you two haven’t, um, hooked up for a while.”
Patti was the local coroner and was also thirty years Loncar’s junior. Neither one of us mentioned that this last fact could have easily been explained by her coming to her senses.
