End of the Line

by Emily James

  One more step and I stopped and forced my gaze onto the man’s face.

  Troy Summoner.

  Bile burned up my throat. Troy helped me find a key piece of evidence in my last case. We hadn’t been friends, but we’d been learning to work together. Seeing him like this and knowing how he’d died—

  “Nicole,” Mark said from behind me.

  I spun around. He stood near the doorway to the kitchen with two men in Fair Haven police uniforms. My brain struggled to connect names with their faces, even though both should have come easily to me.

  Quincey Dornbush came into focus first. Thank God for Quincey. Mark and I were going to need a friend.

  “She shouldn’t be here,” the other one said.

  His callous tone snapped his name into place as well—Grady Scherwin.

  I wanted to answer him, but my stomach refused to settle. I sprinted for Mark’s bathroom.

  By the time I finished losing the breakfast I’d had with Mark’s mom a couple of hours ago, Mark joined me in the bathroom. He handed me a damp washcloth and sat next to me on the bathroom floor.

  I wiped my mouth. It would be a long time before I could also wipe away the image of Troy with his neck slit from my mind. If I ever could. Some things stayed with you forever. “What’s Troy doing in your house?”

  It wasn’t exactly the right question, but it was as close as I could get to asking why Troy was dead in his house. Mark and Troy weren’t friends, either. They didn’t socialize. Troy shouldn’t have been here even alive. Especially not so early in the morning.

  “I don’t know.” Mark’s voice carried a strange, strangled note, like he knew how that sounded.

  My last client gave me a similar answer when I’d asked him what happened. He’d told me he didn’t know whether or not he’d killed his employee, and he blamed his medical condition. “You don’t have sporadic fatal insomnia, do you?”

  My own voice had a riding-a-rollercoaster-for-the-first-time panic to it.

  Mark shook his head and opened his arms. I leaned into his hug.

  “I’m glad you’re finally here,” he said.

  He’d called me because he needed me. I had to pull myself together. He already had a dead man on his couch. He didn’t need a passed-out woman on his bathroom floor. “Am I here as your fiancée or your lawyer?”

  “A little of both.”

  I could be his fiancée later. Right now, it seemed he might need a lawyer more. And I could handle this situation better in lawyer mode anyway. “Do you have an alibi for Troy’s time of death?”

  “I don’t know when he died. We’re still waiting on the medical examiner from the next county.”

  Right. That was a stupid question on multiple fronts. Obviously, he wouldn’t know the time of death. If he knew the time of death, that would mean he was here when Troy died, and he likely would have known why Troy was here.

  He wouldn’t be allowed to examine Troy’s body as the medical examiner since he’d be a person of interest in Troy’s murder. There was no way given the manner of death that this could be an accident, which was probably why so many officers had responded.

  The bathroom floor was cold, but I wasn’t ready to go back out to where Troy was—partly because seeing him there made my chest ache for him and his family and partly because I was a selfish person. Seeing him there reminded me what I had at stake here. Troy wasn’t just dead. He was dead in Mark’s house. Mark, who I loved and was supposed to marry in less than a month.

  A less selfish person wouldn’t look at Troy’s body and see the potential consequences for their own wedding and future.

  I wasn’t a less selfish person, though, and I’d wanted to be a normal bride who could focus on her wedding and her groom rather than on dead bodies and murder. Just once, I wanted to be normal.

  I shifted position to get more comfortable, my back against the sink. There was barely room for both of us to sit side by side. At least the floor was clean. I’d never been more grateful to Mark’s cleaning lady.

  I linked my hand with Mark’s so he’d see I was with him even though I wasn’t looking him in the eyes anymore. “How about you tell me what happened?”

  Mark let out a long huff of air as if he’d forgotten to breathe until that moment. “I got a call early this morning to head out to an accident right at the county boundary. When I got there, no one else was there. No accident. No people. I called in, but I was at the right place. Dispatch didn’t know what had happened, so I headed back. When I got home, I found Troy. My door was still locked and there wasn’t any sign of forced entry.”

  Someone had set him up. They’d drawn him away on a fake call, so they could bring Troy to his house and murder him, effectively framing Mark. Dispatch would be able to confirm that they’d called Mark, but if I were the prosecution, I’d argue Mark set up the fake call himself to provide an alibi.

  “Did you stop anywhere along the way? Did anyone see you?”

  Mark shook his head.

  With no witnesses and no one at the location he’d gone to, he had no way of proving he’d actually gone.

  Thankfully for us, whoever worked Dispatch last night would be able to tell us who called in the accident. The person trying to frame Mark wouldn’t have been stupid enough to use their own name or officer number when they called it in. Hopefully, though, they wouldn’t have thought to disguise their voice. If the dispatcher could identify them by their voice, we’d have a solid lead for who was behind this.

  Until then, I had to do everything possible to protect Mark from whoever set him up. “Were you questioned?”

  Mark nodded.

  “What did you tell them?”

  The look he gave me said isn’t it obvious? “The truth. What I told you.”

  To him it would seem obvious. He was innocent, so he answered whatever they asked. When the police considered someone a potential suspect in a murder, though, it was never that simple. Unless we could prove he hadn’t been involved, the police would dig into his life with the intent of finding guilt.

  Mark probably wouldn’t believe that if I told him, though. He was used to being allied with the police.

  Quincey would believe Mark and wouldn’t try to trick him, but their friendship meant Quincey would quickly be replaced. Even Chief McTavish might not be allowed to conduct this investigation. At least I was here now to monitor the rest of the questions.

  I climbed to my feet, dropped the washcloth into his sink, and moved for the door. “Then what we need to do is figure out why someone would want to frame you for Troy’s murder.”

  Mark clambered to his feet too fast to be graceful and shifted to the side so he was in front of the bathroom door. He placed a hand over the knob.

  At first I thought he planned to open it for me. But his hand stayed in place and the door stayed closed, preventing me from leaving. His Adam’s apple struggled up and down in his throat.

  Like he had something to hide. Like there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  3

  My throat felt blocked, as if I’d tried to swallow something much too big. For a second, it was like I wasn’t standing in front of Mark anymore. I was standing in front of my dad, who controlled when a conversation started and when it ended. Who controlled how much I knew about any situation we were involved with—including hiding from me that he’d known all along my boyfriend was guilty of murdering his wife.

  Or like I was standing in front of Peter, listening to him lie to me, telling me he hadn’t killed his wife. And I’d believed him—not because he was the world’s greatest liar, but because I wanted to believe him.

  Mark hadn’t been in a situation like this before, but I had. If he turned out to be guilty too, it would destroy something in me that I was sure could never be fixed. Not everything broken could be repaired, and not everything was stronger after you repaired it. My faith in humanity and my own judgment certainly weren’t stronger after Peter broke them.

  I rubbed
a hand around my throat. “What’s going on?”

  He cupped my face in his hand and ran his thumb across my cheek bone. “I know I called you here, but you can’t investigate this.”

  That sounded awfully guilty. What reason could he possibly have for not wanting me to search for the truth unless he knew the truth and didn’t want it coming out?

  “Don’t you think we should do everything we can to prove you didn’t do this?”

  “Chief McTavish will be here any minute. He’ll believe me, and he’ll find the real killer. But you can’t be involved.”

  McTavish and I hadn’t always agreed on who the guilty party was in a murder investigation, but he had proven that he cared about finding the truth, and he was a good police officer. He wouldn’t charge someone with a crime simply to have an elevated closure rate or to satisfy the press.

  That said, my parents had taught me not to leave something important to anyone else. You delegated the tasks where mistakes could be fixed or wouldn’t matter in the long run. You delegated tasks when you could hire someone with a higher degree of skill. You didn’t delegate the things that really mattered when you were the one who could best complete the task.

  I couldn’t navigate unless I had a GPS telling me where to go, and my cooking wouldn’t be winning any competitions, but as Liam Neeson’s character said in the movie Taken, I did have a very particular set of skills. When it came to proving Mark’s innocence, I trusted my skill set over Chief McTavish’s. I knew my strengths.

  But Mark knew my strengths, too. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t come right out and ask him why he was arguing with me on this. The only two reasons I could come up with were that he didn’t believe in me as much as he said he did, or I couldn’t believe in him when he said he didn’t do this.

  Had he actually said he hadn’t done this? Crap. I couldn’t remember, and I couldn’t ask if he’d already told me without letting him know I had doubts. But hadn’t he only said he’d found Troy? He hadn’t said he’d found Troy dead. That could be implied or intentionally left out.

  Focus, Nic. Don’t give ground. The truth is too important. “I’d feel better if I was investigating this as well.”

  Mark’s hands slid down to my shoulders, and he squeezed almost too tightly. The panic sensors in my brain flashed on.

  He loosened his grip. He glanced back over his shoulder even though the door was closed, and last I knew, he didn’t have x-ray vision to see through the wall to what was going on beyond it.

  He turned back and held my gaze more tightly than he’d held my shoulders a moment before. “Troy’s dead in my living room.”

  The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes had deepened into something else—fear lines.

  Sometimes my desire to investigate a puzzling case overcame my common sense. This wasn’t about Mark wanting to hide anything from me. It was about Mark wanting to protect me from a dangerous situation I’d been trying to run straight into. I should have seen that sooner. I might have if history hadn’t come back in to crush me under its massive weight.

  Troy, a man we both knew and worked with, was dead in his home. Unlike most people in Fair Haven, Mark locked his door, a remnant of his time living in New York City. To get in, they’d have either had to pick his lock or have stolen his key and made a copy of it without his noticing.

  A shiver ran over my body like I’d jammed both hands into a bucket of snow.

  Whoever had done this was skilled. He was deadly. And he was targeting Mark.

  If I went after the killer, it’d put a bigger target on me than I’d ever had before.

  I was willing to take that risk for Mark.

  “Promise me you’ll stay out of this,” Mark said. “Please, Nicole.”

  The use of my full first name cut off every argument I’d been planning to make. I didn’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the number of times Mark had called me Nicole since learning I preferred Nikki.

  However we dealt with the situation, it had to be as a team. Investigating it against his wishes would only pit us against each other at a time when we most needed to stay united. And I wouldn’t truly be helping him if fear for my safety destroyed all his peace.

  “I don’t like it, but I promise.”

  4

  I spent the evening on the Internet studying lock picking just in case Mark changed his mind and I got a look at his doors. We’d need to figure out how someone had gotten in.

  Working around Sugarwood the next day and then going to my meeting with our cupcake designer rather than investigating Troy’s death left me feeling like I was showing up to an appointment on the wrong day. On the drive here, I’d come up with a list of reasons why Mark couldn’t have been serious about asking me to stay out of the case and why I should ignore him even if he had been. With every turn, I talked myself into and then out of investigating anyway.

  But every time I decided to secretly investigate, I remembered the look on his face, and I knew how I’d feel if I asked him not to do something and he did it anyway—willfully, despite knowing how important my request was to me.

  It’d feel like a betrayal, and I couldn’t let Mark down that way. I might not agree with him, but I had to respect his wishes in the same way I expected him to respect mine.

  I parked my car beside Isabel Addington’s cupcake food truck, How Sweet It Is, in the Lakeside Park parking lot.

  Isabel and How Sweet It Is showed up in Fair Haven just as the summer tourist season came to an end. She’d only been passing through, planning to stay a couple weeks at most, but I’d begged her to stay long enough to create a cupcake display for my wedding. I hadn’t been able to find anyone around who could make the maple syrup cupcake I’d been imagining. The first bite of Isabel’s cupcakes had assured me she could do it.

  It’d taken the promise of a big bonus and calling in a few favors to have other friends ask her to also cater their events, but she’d finally agreed. We’d been meeting semi-regularly in the past six weeks as she worked on perfecting the recipe she was designing specifically for me.

  I stepped out of my car, and the cold sliced straight through my coat and gloves as if I wasn’t wearing any. Hopefully Isabel had cranked the heat in her truck. If she hadn’t, I’d subtly drop the hint that we should meet at her home next time. There was no reason for her to bring her truck all the way out here. Even the winter tourists weren’t going to the beach in this weather.

  The food truck’s door popped open before I could knock, as if she’d been watching for me.

  I stepped in, and she locked the door behind me.

  My shoulders tensed as if someone had suddenly turned my veins to iron. Locking that door felt like it was meant to keep me in than to keep others out. There wasn’t anyone else out there.

  The hyper-logical lawyer part of my brain could hear how irrational that sounded, but the half that was still reeling from Troy’s death didn’t want to listen.

  “Do you have many people walk in on you as if you’re a normal store?” I tried to keep my voice light, as if I wasn’t sure how a food truck worked rather than that I thought she might be about to kidnap me.

  Something flitted across her face that I couldn’t interpret. She tugged the door. “Not yet, but I guess that’d be another good reason to lock up. It’s an older truck. If I don’t keep it locked, it lets in a draft.”

  My metal-stiff shoulders eased. That made more sense than the crazy conclusions my brain wanted to jump to. Isabel might have met Troy—I’d gotten most of the police department hooked on her cupcakes—but I couldn’t think up an obvious reason she’d want to kill him. A romantic affair seemed unlikely. She looked to be in her late thirties, almost old enough to be his mother.

  Besides, her answer seemed reasonable. The air inside the truck was so warm it was almost too thick to breathe. Definitely not drafty with the door locked. I slid off my jacket and set it aside.

  Isabel still wore her puffy silver jacket with the hood up.
The hood squished her black hair around her face, and her lips and cheeks were red from the cold, making her look a little like the painted face of a Russian nesting doll.

  She rubbed her gloved hands together. “Is it always this cold in Michigan in the winter?”

  I held back a snort. If it was, I might have to reconsider my choice of home. This was only my second northern winter. It was already colder than the first, and we weren’t even into January yet. “They keep promising me these temperatures are record-breaking. I’m not sure yet whether they’re lying to me or not.”

  “I’m going to hope whoever told you that wouldn’t lie to you,” she said with a smile.

  Isabel’s smile was like a firecracker. When she wasn’t smiling, I would have described her as average-looking, but when she smiled, it was a bit like those gossip pages where they showed pictures of celebrities with and without their makeup side by side. I might not have recognized her.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I snatched for it, praying it wasn’t bad news from Mark. The display showed Russ’ name.

  Technically I didn’t need to answer it, but if he’d heard about Troy’s murder, not answering would panic him. He’d assume something had happened to me.

  “Go ahead and answer,” Isabel said. “It’ll take me a minute to set the cupcakes out.”

  I slid my finger across the screen and answered.

  “You’re not working Mark’s case.” Russ’ tone made me imagine him pounding his meaty fist into a table. “I forbid it.”

  I guess there wasn’t an if involved. He’d heard about Troy’s murder. Thank you so much, Fair Haven gossip chain.

  The first response that jumped to my lips was to tell him he couldn’t forbid me from doing anything. Even at Sugarwood, we were co-owners, and I had the controlling share. It wasn’t like I was a child and he was my dad.

  I swallowed all those responses down. Russ had been going to grief support group meetings with Stacey and me, and had been making progress. Before the cold hit, he’d even started walking with Mandy and my dogs to lose some weight. He still tended to be blind to his personal triggers, though. The main one seemed to be fear he’d lose another person he loved. When baby Noah came down with a cold, he’d forced Stacey to go sit in the ER for hours, only to have the doctor tell her to give him some Tylenol to bring down his fever before sending them home.