Night's Landing

by Carla Neggers

  It was time to move on. Find something else to do.

  She had no idea what but pushed back any thought of the possibilities before it could explode into a full-blown obsession, as it had on the long trip home from Scotland. What would she do now? Teach full-time? Work for a foundation? A museum? Find a new project?

  Have a life?

  Sarah yanked her cinnamon stick out of her glass and licked the end of it, watching the dappled shade on the rich, green lawn. She wondered if her grandfather, who’d built the log house in order to attract a bride, had ever imagined that dams would raise the river and bring it closer to the front porch, if he’d ever pictured how beautiful the landscape would be almost a hundred years later—if he’d ever guessed that his family would become so attached to it. Sarah had never known him. He’d died an early and tragic death like so many Dunnemores before him.

  When she was a little girl, she’d believed stories that the logs for the house had come from trees cut down, blown down or otherwise destroyed when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed up the Cumberland for flood control and hydroelectric power, until she realized that the dams had been built decades after the house.

  More than most in middle Tennessee, her family had a flare for storytelling and would go to great lengths, including embellishment, to make an already good story better.

  She was convinced it was one of the reasons her father was such a natural diplomat. He didn’t necessarily believe anything anyone told him, but at the same time, he didn’t condemn them for stretching the truth, exaggerating, tweaking and otherwise making what they had to say suit their ends. To Stuart Dunnemore, that was all perfectly normal.

  Sarah had no intention of making researching her own family her next career. It was enough to have researched her Night’s Landing neighbors—especially when the last of the Poes had just been elected to the White House. She’d promised John Wesley Poe—President Poe—that he could be the first to view her documentary, which was finished, edited, done. But he couldn’t ask her to change anything. That was the deal.

  A mockingbird was singing somewhere nearby. Sarah smiled, watching a boat make its way upriver along the steep bluffs on the opposite bank, and drank more of her tea. Maybe it wasn’t too sweet, after all.

  Maybe, despite having nothing particular to do, this time she wouldn’t get herself into trouble. She’d never done well with time on her hands. She hated being bored. She liked the independence her work afforded her, being her own boss, making her natural impulsiveness a virtue rather than a liability. Some of her best work had started out as wild-goose chases. But when she had no focus, nothing to anchor her, her impulsiveness hadn’t always served her well. Once, she’d tried building her own boat and nearly drowned. Another time she’d tried her hand at frog-gigging and came up with a leg full of leeches. Then there was the time she’d ended up, on a whim, in Peru with nowhere near enough money to get by.

  No affairs, anyway. She’d learned not to be impulsive with men.

  The telephone rang, interrupting her mind-wandering. She set her glass on a rickety old table and reached for the ancient, heavy dial phone that had been wired up for use on the porch for as long as she could remember. It would never die. The phone company would have to come for it and tell them they couldn’t use it anymore.

  It was probably a solicitor. Not many people knew she was home. Her parents, but they were in Amsterdam. Rob, but he was on duty in New York—she’d promised to get up there soon to see him. Her Scottish friends.

  The president, except Wes Poe didn’t call that often.

  Virtually none of her Tennessee friends and relatives knew she was back in Night’s Landing. It had only been a week—she had only just recovered from jet lag.

  She lifted the receiver but didn’t get a chance to say hello. “Sarah.” She barely recognized her brother. “God…” His voice was weak, breathless.

  Sarah gripped the phone hard. “Rob? What’s wrong? What—”

  “I made Nate call you. I…damn.”

  “Are you in New York?” She could hear sirens in the background, people shouting, and felt panic rising in her throat. “Rob, talk to me! What’s going on? Who’s Nate?”

  A fat bumblebee landed on the rim of her glass. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, as she waited for her brother to answer.

  “I’ve been shot. I’ll be okay.”

  “Rob!” She jumped to her feet. “Rob, where are you? What can I do?”

  Another voice came on the line. “Miss Dunnemore? Nate Winter. I work with your brother. Is someone with you?”

  “No. No, I’m here alone. Rob—”

  “He wanted you to hear the news from him. A paramedic’s with him now. We’ve got to go. I’ll call you as soon as I can with more information.”

  “Wait—don’t hang up! Where was he shot? How bad is it?”

  “He took a bullet to the left upper abdomen.” Nate Winter’s voice was professional, unemotional, but Sarah thought she heard a ripple of something else. Pain, dread. “Paramedics are coming for me. Sorry, I’ve got to go. We’ll get you more information. I promise.”

  His words sank in. “Have you been shot, too? My God—”

  The line went dead.

  Sarah’s hands shook so badly she had trouble cradling the receiver. Was Nate Winter another deputy U.S. marshal? She knew very little about her brother’s work. He knew even less about hers. Historical archaeology—he’d say he didn’t even know what it was. Traditional archaeology studies prehistoric people and cultures. Historical archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology that studies people and cultures that existed during recorded history.

  She’d given Rob that explanation dozens of times.

  He chased fugitives. Armed and dangerous fugitives. She knew that much.

  Had one just shot him?

  Her teeth were chattering, and she was pacing. Gulping for air.

  “Ma’am?”

  Ethan Brooker, her parents’ new property manager, walked slowly up the porch steps, his concern evident. He had on his habitual overalls and Tennessee Titans shirt, his dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, at least a two days’ growth of scruffy beard along his square jaw. He was tanned and muscular and had a black graphic tattoo on his huge right arm.

  “Miss Sarah, you don’t look so good.” He spoke in an easy, heavy West Texas drawl. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I need—” She took in another breath, but couldn’t seem to get any air. It was as if her entire body was trying to absorb the shock of Rob’s call. “I need to wait for a phone call. My brother…” She couldn’t finish, just kept trying to get air into her lungs.

  The old porch floor, painted a dark evergreen, creaked under Ethan’s weight. He was a year or two older than she was at thirty-two and taller. Her parents had found him down on the dock fishing when they were home for a few days. Trespassing, really, but he’d explained that he’d just moved to Nashville and was looking for work. Since they’d come home to a leaky ceiling in the living room and an overgrown yard, they offered him a job. He’d worked hard every day since Sarah had arrived in Night’s Landing a week ago. He lived in Granny Dunnemore’s old cottage down by the river, close to the woods between the Dunnemores and the Poes.

  Granny had lost a husband in a logging accident, a son in World War II. Her surviving son’s first wife had died after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. Granny had built the cottage for herself after insisting he and his very sick wife move home.

  Sarah knew the story of how her father had almost withered away here in Night’s Landing after his wife’s death, until he met her mother, twenty-two years his junior, the young and vibrant Betsy Quinlan, a woman even Granny Dunnemore had come to believe had changed the Dunnemore luck.

  Sarah could feel her heart thumping in her chest.

  Not another Dunnemore tragedy…not Rob…

  “What about your brother, Miss Sarah?”

  Ethan was invariably p
olite and deferential. She suspected he was a country-western musician looking for his big break in Nashville. She’d heard him playing acoustic guitar on the cottage porch early in the morning and late in the evening.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Rob—he’s been shot.”

  The words felt no less surreal now that she’d said them herself.

  Biting back tears, trying to breathe normally, she told Ethan about her brother’s call from New York, Nate Winter, his promise to call her as soon as possible.

  “What a shame, Miss Sarah. What a crying shame.” He shook his head and exhaled forcefully, as if it would ease his own tension. “Who’d want to shoot two people like that?”

  “Rob’s a deputy U.S. marshal. They’re called deputies. I didn’t know that when he first started. A U.S. marshal heads up each district—they’re not deputies. They’re appointed by the president. I—” She didn’t know what she was saying. “I don’t know what Rob was doing.”

  “The marshals must have an office in Nashville. They’ll send someone out here. You just sit tight.” Ethan spoke with confidence as he withdrew a faded red bandanna from his back pocket and wiped away the dirt and grease stuck between his fingers and under his fingernails. “You’re your brother’s closest kin in the country, aren’t you? The marshals will take good care of you.”

  Sarah’s stomach twisted. “My parents. They’re in Amsterdam. Oh, God. Who’s going to tell them?”

  “Let the marshals do it. You don’t have enough information yet. If you try calling now, you’ll just scare them, maybe unnecessarily.”

  Ethan’s steady manner helped her to regain her composure. She felt as if someone were standing on her chest—she couldn’t get air—and made herself breathe from the diaphragm, counting to four as she inhaled through her nose, then to eight as she exhaled through her mouth.

  “Rob was able to talk,” she said. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Why don’t you go inside and throw some cold water on your face? That always helps me when I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me.”

  Cold water. She wondered if she looked as if she was going to pass out.

  “Go on,” Ethan said calmly. “I’ll go down to the cottage and get cleaned up, then come back here and stay with you until the marshals get here or this deputy you talked to calls back.”

  “You don’t think he will, do you?”

  “Not if he was shot, too, ma’am. Doctors and FBI will have him sewn up. Now, go on. One step at a time, okay?”

  Sarah nodded. “Thank you. Rob and I are twins. Did you know that?”

  “I think your mother told me that, yes, ma’am.”

  “She almost died when she had us.”

  Supposedly. It could have been another in a long string of Dunnemore enhancements. Although not a blood Dunnemore, Betsy Quinlan had fallen right in line with that particular Dunnemore tradition. Even letters and diaries from the nineteenth century that Sarah had uncovered in her Poe research had mentioned the Dunnemores and their zest for drama and adventure. They’d made so many bad, romantic, impractical decisions that had led to disaster—which was exactly how their father had viewed Rob’s decision to become a marshal. A bad decision that would lead to disaster.

  But Sarah didn’t know why she’d mentioned that their mother had almost died in childbirth—why she’d even thought of it.

  Ethan didn’t comment and walked back down the porch steps with the same deliberateness as he’d mounted them. He paused, glancing up at Sarah as if to make sure she hadn’t fallen apart in the few seconds he’d had his back turned. She couldn’t smile. She couldn’t do anything to reassure him.

  “A splash of cold water, Miss Sarah,” he repeated. “It’ll help. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She managed to pull open the screen door and step into the front room with its walls of squared logs and thick, white caulking, with its old furnishings and frayed knitted afghans, its threadbare rugs, its wall of framed photographs. Her gaze landed on an oval portrait of Granny Dunnemore at eighty, in her pink sweater and cameo pin, a woman who’d endured so much sorrow and tragedy, who’d nonetheless stayed strong and kept her spirit, her faith.

  Sarah ran back to the kitchen and turned on the faucet in the old sink.

  “I’ve been shot. I’ll be okay.”

  Crying, she splashed her face with cold water and prayed those wouldn’t be her brother’s last words to her.

  An hour after Sarah’s brother took a bullet in Central Park, two deputy marshals arrived at the Dunnemore house in a black government car. They came all the way around to the front porch, which afforded Ethan Brooker the opportunity to wish her luck, ask her to give her brother his best and slip out the back door.

  He didn’t need to be introducing himself to a couple of feds.

  As pretty as she was, Sarah looked like hell. Pale, frightened, splotchy-faced from shock and tears. The other fed shot with her brother—Nate Winter—hadn’t called her back. Understandable. The cable news channels reported that both he and Rob Dunnemore were in surgery. Winter was stable. Rob Dunnemore was critical and unstable.

  If the reporters got it right. There was a lot of confusion, and the feds weren’t releasing much information.

  Ethan had talked Sarah into shutting off the television. CNN, MSNBC and FOX were all carrying the story live, with helicopter shots of Central Park and the manhunt for the sniper. They’d brought in experts to talk about what kind of person would do such a thing and explain what the U.S. Marshals Service was.

  They repeated footage from the news conference that had preceded the shooting and showed Nate Winter and Rob Dunnemore standing behind the mayor, the U.S. marshal from their district, the chief deputy marshal, the assistant director in charge of the FBI, the NYPD commissioner—an impressive gathering of state, federal and local law enforcement types.

  Winter was tall, rangy and all business.

  Dunnemore looked like a frat boy.

  Every time she saw the footage of her brother, Sarah went a little paler.

  A joint FBI, NYPD and U.S. Marshal’s Service news conference was scheduled for later that night and would, Ethan suspected, tell people nothing. The feds would be playing it close to the vest when two of their own had just been picked off in Central Park in broad daylight.

  The all-news networks promised to carry, live, any briefings from the hospital where the two deputies were being treated.

  As he made his way down to his cottage, Ethan stayed out of sight of the porch and any windows that could offer the feds a view of him. The breeze had strengthened into a stiff wind, damp and earthy smelling.

  He entered through the back door, not making a sound. The cottage was made of the same rough logs as the main house and had an old-lady feel to it. Hand-crocheted afghans in bright, wear-ever yarns, doilies on the end tables, pink tile in the bathroom. When she’d shown him the place, Betsy Dunnemore had explained that her mother-in-law had built the cottage for herself after insisting her son live in the main house when he returned to Night’s Landing with his dying first wife. Even after her daughter-in-law died, Granny Dunnemore, as she was known by everyone, had stayed on in the cottage until her own death fifteen years ago.

  The place had a small kitchen, two tiny bedrooms and a front room and small porch that looked out at the river.

  It could have been a tent for all Ethan cared.

  A fishing boat with two old men talking loudly at each other puttered upstream, and Ethan had to fight an urge to find a boat and get the hell away from Night’s Landing.

  Charlene would want him to. Get on with your life. You can’t change what happened.

  She wouldn’t be fooled into believing it was justice he was after.

  It was revenge. Absolution for his own guilt.

  He pulled himself away from the front window. Charlene would have loved it here. She’d never been a grasper—she’d talk about quitting the milita
ry and getting a little place in the country, having a couple of kids. He was the one who wasn’t ready to stand down. A couple more years, Char. A couple more.

  She hadn’t had years the last time she’d brought up the subject.

  She hadn’t had months.

  Only days.

  And he wasn’t with her when she died.

  When she was murdered.

  Ethan grabbed the pair of clippers he’d tossed onto the kitchen counter earlier and headed back outside. He didn’t know as much about gardening as he’d claimed to Stuart and Betsy Dunnemore, but they’d never bothered to test his knowledge of flowers, trees and shrubs or even check his phony references. He’d made sure he so looked the part of a disarming, hardworking good ol’ boy that they’d let it go.

  He was from West Texas, but the rest was pure fiction.

  Concealed behind a cedar tree, he watched the two marshals leave via the back door, one of them carrying a small suitcase, presumably Sarah’s. But instead of following them, she came out onto the porch and trotted down the steps and across the yard to the cottage. “Ethan?” Her voice sounded tight but more composed. “Ethan, I’m going to New York to see Rob. Where—”

  He ducked out from his hiding place. “That’s good, ma’am.”

  She almost smiled. “You were right about the marshals looking after me. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. A few days, at least, I would think.”

  “You just go on and don’t worry about a thing here.”

  She seemed relieved, as if she’d expected him to evaporate on her. “I left my cell phone number on the refrigerator in case you need to reach me. You were right about the marshals getting in touch with my parents, too. They just called. They’re waiting to get more information after Rob gets out of surgery before they decide what to do.”

  How much information did they need? Their son had been shot. He was in surgery. As far as Ethan was concerned, they should get their butts on a plane.

  But Stuart Dunnemore did important work. He was in Amsterdam negotiating world peace or some damn thing. And he was old. A lot older than his wife—eighty or close to it. It couldn’t be easy at that age to drop everything and fly across the Atlantic, even in an emergency.