Free Weak Flesh by Jo Robertson

voices.
    Gage ignored both of them and walked into his office, sat down, and leaned back in his chair, his head resting against the back. He needed a moment to formulate his questions for Michael Hayes.
    If the lad's actions at the Carver house indicated anything, Hayes grieved heavily for Nell Carver. Yet another of Nell Carver's many boyfriends? Gage closed his eyes and thought for several minutes before pushing away from the desk and strolling into the reception room.
    "Has he sent for anyone?" Gage asked Pruitt.
    "No sir, he's not said a word."
    Gage grunted and walked to the cell where Hayes now sat up, staring out at the stripped trees through the tiny barred window. Gage ran his fingers along the bars and Hayes swung his eyes toward him. A gray so pale they were nearly colorless suggested an eerie vagueness. A shock of brown hair fell over a high forehead and his jaw showed stubbles of reddish beard.
    "Do you want to speak with anyone, Mr. Hayes? A lawyer perhaps?"
    "No," Hayes mumbled, standing and shuffling toward the cell door like an old man instead of the twenty-some odd years Gage guessed him to be. "Do I need one? Are you charging me with a crime?"
    "A public disturbance might be a good place to start, but no, not yet." Gage unlocked the cell, beckoning for Hayes to step out. A faint sour odor clung to his rumpled clothing.
    Gage ushered him into his office and had him sit opposite the desk in the ladder-back chair. "I don't think the Carvers are going to press charges, Mr. Hayes. They understand that you're upset over what happened to Nell."
    Gage lowered his eyes to stare at the lad's long, slender fingers twined together in his lap. A surgeon's hands, he thought, or a musician's. "But I do have some questions to ask about your relationship with Miss Carver."
    When he looked up, those strange, colorless eyes were brimmed with tears. Gage had never seen a man weep, had never cried himself – even when the Chippewa woman and her baby died. The sight of Hayes' tears stirred and confused him at the same time.
    "My patrolman tells me you're a medical student."
    "Yes." Hayes dragged a handkerchief from his pants pocket and blew his nose. "At Chapel Hill."
    "The University of North Carolina?"
    "They have a very fine medical school." Hayes gave a shadow of a smile and added, "And Dr. Harris' free clinic provides practice for those of us ... less financially endowed."
    "Your parents?"
    "Gone. Both of them."
    "How did you come to know Nell Carver?" Gage asked. "I don't imagine you run in the same social circles?"
    He asked although he knew that wouldn't have mattered to Nell. After all, she'd been going out with Jim Wade, a far less likely candidate than Hayes for a romantic entanglement.
    Gage considered that matrimony didn't appear to be Ellen Carver's main concern. She'd evidently been intent on having fun with as many different men as possible. Bailey wouldn't have approved of her behavior, he mused, wondering at the uniqueness of friendship.
    He cleared his throat and asked the first question he'd formulated earlier. "What was the nature of your relationship with Miss Carver?"
    Even as he spoke the words he knew the answer. Gage read the grief and affection in the man's demeanor and believed Nell's disappearance and death deeply upset the young medical student.
    "We were in love," Hayes whispered. "We were going to be married."
    Jim Wade thought Nell loved him. Michael Hayes thought the same thing. What was the truth?
    The more Gage knew, the more he believed Nell Carver cared for no one but herself, and the more it looked like one of her suitors might have something to do with her death.
    "When was the last time you saw her?"
    Hayes hesitated a moment before admitting, "The weekend before she disappeared. We met at the gazebo on the Narrows."
    Another Narrows trysting place? Gage didn't know whether to believe him or not. Hayes could've seen Nell on the very night she disappeared for all the proof he had. "Why