I plopped down on it and realized this was the steadiest chair I’d ever sat in. I peeked down at the legs and tried to wiggle; it didn’t move. I knocked on a leg. It didn’t sound hollow.
When I sat back up, I found Mr. Rhodes watching me once again. His raccoon face was back. I bet he was wondering what I was doing with his furniture.
“This is nice,” I told him. “Did you make it?”
That snapped him out of it. “No.” He scooted the chair closer, set two big hands with long, tapered fingers and short, trimmed nails on top of the table, and leveled me with a heavy, no-nonsense gaze. “You’ve got twenty-nine minutes. Ask your questions.” His eyebrows went up about a millimeter. “You said you have a million. We might get through ten or fifteen.”
Shit. I should’ve bought a recorder. I pushed my chair in closer. “I don’t really have a million. Maybe just about two hundred.” I smiled and, like I expected, didn’t get one in return. Worked for me. “Do you know a lot about fishing?”
“Enough.”
Just enough that friends and family posted about fishing stuff on his Facebook page. Okay. “What kind of fish can you catch around here?”
“Depends on the river and the lake.”
I didn’t mean to say, “Oh shit,” but I did. It depends?
His eyebrows went flat. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Nope, that’s why I’m here. Any information is better than no information.” I smoothed my hand across the blank page. I tried to give him my most charming smile. “So, uh, what kinds can you get in the rivers and lakes around here?” Time to try again.
It didn’t work. Mr. Rhodes sigh then told me he was wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. “We had a dry winter and water levels are very low, which makes fishing conditions not that ideal already. That and the tourists have probably fished out most of the rivers. Some of the lakes are stocked, so that’s most people’s best bets—”
“Which lakes?” I asked him, sucking up his information.
He rattled off the names of a handful of lakes and reservoirs in the area. “What are they stocked with?”
“Large-mouth bass, trout. You can find perch…” Mr. Rhodes named a few other different kinds of fish I’d never heard of, and I asked him how to spell them. He did, leaning back against the chair and crossing his arms over his chest, the raccoon-watching face back on his features.
I smiled, feeling a little too pleased with myself for making him wary, even though I didn’t want him to think I was some weirdo creeper. But the truth was, it was good when people didn’t know what to expect from you. They can’t creep up behind you if they don’t know what way you’re going to look.
I asked him if there was still good bass fishing and got a lengthy answer that was way more complicated than I’d anticipated. His eyeballs were lasers aimed on my face the entire time. His shade of gray was pretty incredible. The color looked almost lavender sometimes.
“How much are licenses and how can people buy them?” I asked.
I ignored the way his eyes widened like this was common sense. “Online, and it depends on if they’re out of state or residents.” He then told me the prices of the licenses… and how much the fines were if someone was caught without one.
“Do you bust a lot of people for not having licenses?”
“Do you really want to waste this time asking me about work?” he asked slowly and seriously.
It was my turn to blink. Rude. What was that? Three for four times now? “Yeah, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked,” I muttered. I really did have better things to ask but fucking attitude. Jeez.
One of those dark eyebrows rose, and he kept his response simple. “Yes” was his informative answer.
Well, this was going well. Mr. Friendly and all that.
Too bad for him I was friendly enough for both of us.
“What are the different kinds of line you use for fishing?”
He instantly shook his head. “That’s too hard to explain without showing you.”
My shoulders dropped, but I nodded. “Which of those lakes would you still recommend?”
“Depends,” he started as I jotted down all the information I could handle. He was in the middle of telling me what places he didn’t recommend when we heard, “Hey, Dad—oh.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the same time Mr. Rhodes looked in the same direction to find Amos standing halfway into the living area, holding a bag of chips in one hand.