Chapter Five:
Like a Bad Joke
The call came in just after dawn. Something about a flipped truck at the old Quikfly station on County Route 9. Danner almost ignored it — figured it was a drunk with a rusty Dodge and no sense of balance. But the dispatcher’s voice had that curious hesitation. Like she wasn’t sure what she was reporting.
When he pulled up, the sunlight was barely cutting through the morning haze. And there it was.
A truck. Or something pretending to be one.
Upside-down, but not wrecked. No broken glass, no spilled oil. Just parked there neat as you please — wheels in the air like a dog playing dead. The damn thing even had mirrors where the hubcaps should be.
The smell hit first — scorched rubber, stale oil, and the chemical sting of something artificial. The kind of smell that stayed with you, crept into your clothes and clung to your hair. The air around the truck was oddly still, as if the world was holding its breath.
Danner blinked. Looked again.
“Jesus,” he muttered, stepping out of his cruiser. The seat creaked as he shifted, and the door groaned like it didn’t want to open.
There was a kid with a Slurpee at pump three, just staring like he’d stumbled onto a modern art piece. A woman clutched her coffee inside the store, unsure if she should come out or call the news. The clerk just kept scanning cigarettes, as if this sort of thing happened every Wednesday.
Danner walked around it slowly, boots crunching on the gravel, each step echoed like it was being measured. He ran his hand along the fender — the paint was clean. Too clean. This wasn’t an accident. This was a choice. The metal felt cool beneath his palm, smooth in a way that didn’t make sense.
“Who the hell builds a truck like this?” he asked the silence.
It didn’t answer, but his gut churned all the same. It wasn’t just the absurdity of it — it was the why. Why here. Why now. In Ashwood, nothing was ever just strange. It was a message, or a memory trying to claw its way back.
He stared at the truck’s “roof” — now smooth pavement — like it might split open and tell him something. Something about Ezra. Something about that night he still couldn’t quite remember right.
He didn’t laugh. But he wanted to. The kind of dry, cracked laugh you let out when the world stops making sense and you’re too tired to fight it.
Instead, he pulled out his notepad and wrote two words:
Not accidental.
He tapped the pen against the paper, then circled the words slowly. A gust of wind pushed through the station, flipping an empty chip bag against the pump. A crow screamed from a nearby pole, wings rasping the air as it launched off the signpost.
Dispatch crackled through the radio. “Plate came back registered to a Naomi Greer. Local. Thirty-two. Last known address on Chapel Street.”
Danner paused. He knew the name. Had seen her once during an arrest a few years back—not as a suspect, but as someone who waited outside the cellblock with a blank stare and a cigarette that burned straight down to the filter.
He remembered her face now: pale, pensive, the kind of beauty that was easy to overlook until it was staring straight through you. She had a tattoo on her arm in bold red ink that read: LOVE YOURSELF, NOT ME.
She wore that phrase like armor, like someone who’d been the breaking point in too many stories that didn’t belong to her.
Chapel Street sat heavy in the air. The sun had dipped low, casting long shadows over the cracked pavement. Danner parked across from Naomi’s building — one of those boxy brick walkups that seemed half-abandoned and always watching. He stepped out, the scent of baked concrete and faint lilac from a cracked window brushing the edge of his senses. He spotted a small bouquet of wildflowers placed neatly on the concrete ledge by the stairwell. A splash of yellow and rust-colored petals against the gray. No note. Just there. Waiting.
The scent was faint — something earthy, almost like summer’s last breath before it turned to ash.
Naomi opened the door before he could knock. Like she’d heard him breathing on the other side.
She leaned against the frame, eyes sharp, the tattoo on her arm visible and defiant. The air behind her smelled of burned incense and dry paper — faint, but enough to say this wasn’t a place where people lingered. It was a place you passed through.
“You’re early,” she said. “Or late, depending on how much sleep you’ve had.”
“Naomi Greer?”
She arched a brow. “Depends who’s asking. And how polite they plan to be.”
Danner smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Sheriff Danner. I need to ask you about a truck.”
She stepped aside, motioning him in with a tilt of her head.
“I know you hate coming to this part of the county. All this concrete,” Naomi said, almost like an afterthought.
Danner didn’t say anything. Just continued to take in her apartment. It didn’t match the girl he remembered, but it most certainly complemented the woman standing before him. The apartment smelled like sage and rust — windows cracked just enough to let the city breathe in and out. He’d been in a thousand homes over the years, most of them loud with clutter or silence. But Naomi’s space held something else: a kind of alert stillness. Like a room that expected betrayal.
“You here to scare me, or just sniff around for something that isn’t yours?” she asked, folding her arms.
Danner took in the room. Sparse. Clean. Books stacked in corners. A record player humming low in the background. The floor creaked beneath his boots, and somewhere beyond the kitchen wall, a faucet dripped slowly, steady as a metronome.
“Truck parked upside-down at a gas station. Registered to you.”
Naomi didn’t blink. “Then it’s a damn good thing I don’t drive.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I don’t rattle easy, Danner. You should know that by now.”
She stepped closer, and for a moment, he forgot what the hell he came for. She was more beautiful than he remembered — not just in the way she looked, but in the way she didn’t flinch. Like she’d already faced the worst of what people could do and came out the other side sharper for it. There was something deeply unsettling about her composure, like it had been forged in fire he hadn’t been invited to witness.
“You Greers always this calm under fire?”
She laughed — low and unkind. “I’m the youngest, not the softest. You wanna talk trucks, fine. But if you’re looking for guilt, you’ll have to dig deeper than my driveway.”
Danner didn’t answer right away. He just studied her, the flowers still fresh in his peripheral vision outside the window. Someone had left them for her. Or she had left them for someone else. Either way, it felt like a ritual he didn’t understand. Another page in a book he’d never been allowed to read.
Naomi tilted her head slightly, that same sly spark flickering behind her eyes. “You still married?” she asked, like she was ordering a cheeseburger.
Danner didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, but something flickered under the surface. A muscle behind his jaw tightened. The question landed like a thumb pressed against an old bruise. He answered by not answering, turning instead to the shelf behind her. A book caught his eye — cracked spine, pages slightly yellowed. The Brothers Karamazov. A title he recognized, but had never actually read.
“You read this?” he asked, pulling it gently halfway from the shelf. The paper felt dry under his fingers, and the faint scent of dust and old glue rose from its spine.
Naomi walked over, her gaze following his hand. “Twice. It’s better the second time — once you stop expecting it to hand you answers. Like most things worth knowing.”
She plucked the book from his hands, flipped it shut, and pressed it to his chest.
“Take it. You’re not getting anything else today, but you might learn something.”
Before he could argue, she was already opening the door, her expression unreadable. Ushered out like a guest who’d overstayed.
Back in his truck, Danner sat for a moment with the book resting in his lap. The vinyl seat had absorbed the day’s heat and now pressed warm through his jeans. The street was quiet. The flowers on the ledge had started to droop in the dusk. He stared at them longer than he meant to, wondering who they were meant to soften — her, or him.
He opened the book. Inside the front cover, tucked just beyond the first page, was a slip of paper. Not old. Not new.
On it, one word scrawled in the same pen as the note he’d circled at the gas station:
Not accidental.
His grip tightened. The clue wasn’t just a message.
It was a trail.
From the window above, Naomi watched Danner sit with the book like it might bite him. Her arms folded across her chest, the shadows pooling just behind her. She didn’t flinch when he opened the book, didn’t move when she saw the way his posture changed.
He’d found it.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. She just leaned her shoulder against the frame and let the night wrap around her.
The flowers on the ledge below were hers — left that morning before she knew for certain he’d come. A small kindness in a brutal town. A memory in color.
Ashwood didn’t give you many chances to be soft. And softness, in her family, was usually punished.
She whispered, to no one in particular: “Let’s see if you’re still a detective, or just another tired man with a badge.”
And she wondered — not for the first time — when Danner would remember the person he was before the badge started doing the talking.
The city lights blinked on behind her.
And Naomi Greer didn’t blink back.
Keep Following the Trail
Ashwood County doesn’t forget. Neither should you.
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