Echo Lake

by Carla Neggers

  “I’ll need to ask Adrienne and Heather if they’ve noticed anything,” Brody said.

  Vic clearly didn’t like that idea. “Be tactful.”

  “Sure, Vic. No problem. Tact is my middle name.”

  “Tact is an unknown concept to you,” Vic muttered.

  Brody grinned and started for the mudroom. “I’ve got some work to do.”

  “I thought you were on home leave.”

  “I am. You relax and let me know if you remember anything else. Write every incident down. You can email it to me or hand me a sheet of paper.”

  Vic shook his head. “I’m not writing a damn thing. I don’t want you or anyone else using it against me if this turns out to be nothing.” He raised his wineglass. “It’s called plausible deniability. If I’m losing it, we’ll all know soon enough.”

  “I doubt you’re losing it, Vic.”

  “But you also doubt I’m in danger.”

  “Correct.”

  Vic didn’t seem offended. “How was it seeing a Sloan again?”

  “I told you I never had much to do with Heather.”

  “But she is a Sloan. She didn’t stir up old wounds?”

  “No.”

  “Then your feud with the Sloans is in the past. No hard feelings.”

  It wasn’t a feud, and it had never been a feud, but Brody wasn’t indulging Vic, especially if he was in a mood to stir up trouble as an outlet for his own problems. “Call if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Brody headed into the mudroom where Rohan reigned. It was immediately evident that the fur ball had relieved himself in the corner. Brody grabbed some newspaper to clean up the mess but felt his phone vibrate in his jacket.

  He saw he had a text from Greg Rawlings, a DSS colleague and friend recovering from a bullet to the shoulder incurred two months ago during a difficult mission.

  How’s Knights Bridge?

  Brody decided to answer.

  I’m cleaning up puppy poop.

  Auto-correct problem?

  No.

  Oh man. At least it’s not Vic’s poop. Later.

  Brody didn’t know whether to laugh or grit his teeth, but tackling the mess on the floor wasn’t optional. It had to be done, and he might as well be the one to do it.

  He noticed Vic standing in the doorway. “Thank you,” Vic said, his relief palpable. “Cleaning up after Rohan isn’t my favorite activity, and I hate to ask Adrienne to do it. I never had a dog. A cat, either. I had a goldfish once, but it disappeared. My parents told me it died and they got rid of the body before I could see it. Suspiciously, we were about to leave for a month in France.”

  “Think they flushed it?”

  “It wasn’t well...” Vic sighed. “I suppose I should take them at their word. Think our pup here misses his siblings and that’s why he’s been tearing up the place?”

  “Alpha dog, Vic.”

  Vic scowled and headed back into the kitchen. Rohan sat on Brody’s foot, looking irresistible. Brody pointed the newspaper at him. “No more messing on the floor, you hear?”

  Whether Rohan was worn-out or heard something authoritative in Brody’s voice, the puppy sat politely, as if he were the best-minding golden retriever in the world.

  “Good dog,” Brody said.

  Rohan responded by diving face-first into his water bowl and then licking Brody’s hand as he squatted down to clean up the mess. When he finished, Rohan had curled up in his bed, all innocence.

  Brody took a picture and sent it to Greg.

  Meet Rohan.

  Greg texted him back immediately.

  All hope is lost.

  Brody was surprised to find Adrienne standing in the driveway, looking at the stars. She must have gone out through the front. “I can’t resist the night sky here,” she said, crossing her arms on her chest. She had on a coat and hat but no gloves. “There isn’t much ambient light to spoil the stars. It’s freezing, though. I think this is the coldest it’s been since I’ve been here.”

  “It’s supposed to drop below zero tonight.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I was in below-zero temperatures.”

  “You sound excited.”

  She laughed. “I guess I am. Vic’s never stayed here through an entire winter. He says he likes winter, but I wonder if he’ll end up buying a condo in Florida.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Not well at all. He goes way back with my parents. I looked him up one day when we were both in New York, and we hit it off. Next thing, I’m house-sitting.”

  “When was this meeting in New York?”

  “November.” She shot him a quick look. “Easy, there. It was just lunch. Vic didn’t pass me any state secrets.”

  Brody smiled. “That’s good.”

  “We got to talking about wine, and he mentioned he’d like to know more about wine now that he was retiring to his country house in Knights Bridge. I’d never heard of Knights Bridge.” She stuffed her bare hands under her arms, presumably to keep them warm. “Vic says you’re like a son to him. He’s relaxed since you got here, even with Rohan’s escape this afternoon. He’s been keyed up. He won’t tell me why.”

  Brody buttoned his jacket, trying to appear casual. He wanted to get a read on Adrienne without alarming her. “Vic’s had an intense job for a lot of years.”

  “You’d know more about that than I would. He doesn’t talk about his past with me, or with Heather, that I’ve been able to see.” There was no trace of criticism in her tone. “He’s been great to me, though. I’m not broke or desperate or anything, but I’m between apartments.”

  “Your work doesn’t tie you to an office,” Brody said.

  “Exactly. I have a freedom of lifestyle that I’m taking advantage of in a variety of ways. Fortunately, I have friends all over the place who let me stay with them. I help with things like wine tastings and stocking wine cellars.” She gave an easy smile. “I always bring a few bottles of my favorite wines.”

  Brody looked up at the spray of stars in the black sky. “It’s quiet here. Do you like the quiet?”

  “Right now I do. Vic’s excited about renovations, but I think retirement has taken him by surprise. It’s one thing to have it figured out intellectually. It’s another to experience it. He’s used to a fair amount of drama. There’s not much drama around here.”

  “Small towns often seem sleepier than they are.”

  “Well, there might be local dramas. People are people, after all. I doubt international diplomacy is ever at stake.”

  Brody shrugged without answering. He pointed to the dark sky. “Nightfall comes early this time of year. Plans for the evening?”

  “Vic and I were going to make dinner together, but the hors d’oeuvres filled us up. An early night with a book sounds good to me. The comforter on my bed is to die for. Fluffy goose down. I snuggle under it and read until my eyes can’t stay open. It’s a luxury, that kind of night.” She shivered. “It’s almost always colder than I expect when I come outside. You’re welcome to help yourself to any food you want, of course. I stocked the pantry.”

  “Thanks. I’m not hungry, either.”

  “Do you cook?”

  “Not well, but I can chop, slice and clean.”

  Adrienne turned to him, the light from the back door catching her dark eyes. “I will keep that in mind.”

  “I can set a table, too. I even know my wineglasses.”

  “Vic makes it easy. He only has one kind.”

  “You’ll be correcting that?”

  She laughed. “Absolutely.” She hunched her shoulders. “I’ll say good-night. I’m freezing.”

  Brody waited as she dashed up the back steps and went inside.
It was damn cold, but it felt good to him. He didn’t have a good sense of Adrienne Portale and her reasons for house-sitting in Knights Bridge, but he hadn’t found anything suspicious, never mind alarming, in their conversation about Vic, wine and dinner.

  He took the shoveled walk to the guesthouse but didn’t go inside, instead heading through the snow down to the lake. The stars were out in full force now, penetrating the darkness and creating shadows in the woods and on the lake. He could see Heather’s footprints from her Rohan rescue. He pictured her climbing up from the brook with the puppy in her arms, her pant leg soaked, her scarf dangling, one glove. She’d been focused and determined, and she hadn’t needed his help.

  He ducked past white pines to the lakeshore. A breeze whistled in the clear night air. He remembered standing in this spot as a boy, waiting for the stars to come out, imagining being on a different planet—in a different place. He hadn’t hated Knights Bridge then. He’d wanted to go places, see things, do things, get out in the world.

  He’d done that in spades, and now here he was again, on the shore of Echo Lake. He hadn’t lied. He had dreamed about Echo Lake in the days before Vic’s call. He’d just returned to the US to begin an extended home leave, and it had struck him that he had no real home, except for his land in Knights Bridge—and it wasn’t home. He’d picked up his car and considered dividing his time between visits with his mother in Orlando and his father in Key West.

  He felt the cold sting his face and ears. He gritted his teeth. Damn. He was a tough federal agent. He’d endured all sorts of extreme conditions. He could handle a southern New England January evening.

  He turned away from the lake and walked up to the guesthouse. He’d had a rough few months on the job, and being back in Knights Bridge—running into Heather, even if she wasn’t one of the Sloan brothers—was messing with his head. He didn’t like digging into his emotions. Didn’t want to go there. Thinking about the past wouldn’t help him size up what was going on with Vic. So far, it seemed as though he was in the throes of adjusting to retirement and making mountains out of molehills. Brody wasn’t even sure there were any molehills, never mind mountains.

  He went into the guesthouse through the side door. The two-bedroom cottage was solid and only about forty years old, a late addition to the original 1912 estate. It needed work, but not as desperately as the main house. He didn’t care one way or the other. It suited his purposes. He liked keeping some distance between him and Vic, and time alone, even here, with the past so near, worked for him right now. He hadn’t been back in the US in months, and his mind was still thousands of miles away in North Africa and his unfinished business there.

  He filled the wood box and started a fire in the woodstove. Its crackling was the only sound in the place. He stood at the windows and looked out at the night sky. His mother loved stars and had pointed out various constellations to him when he was a kid. It wasn’t until he was in middle school that he’d realized her names were all of her own creation and not the actual names. Eric Sloan had told him. “Dude, that’s not Camel Head. That’s Orion. There is no Camel Head constellation.”

  Brody had felt like a dumbass. At first he’d blamed his mother for lying to him, but she hadn’t lied. She’d made up her own names because she didn’t know the real ones—couldn’t sort herself out enough to go to the library and find out—and needed something to grab on to for herself, and maybe for her only son, too. She’d been restless and depressed, hating her life, hating Knights Bridge, and by his fourteenth birthday, Mary Hancock had left him and his father.

  Brody hadn’t told Eric he’d gotten Camel Head from his mother. He’d covered for her.

  That was what he was good at—watching people’s backs.

  She’d loved Echo Lake itself, though. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived, Brody. I can’t imagine any place prettier than right here, even if it’s not for me.”

  She was happy as a clam these days in Orlando, where she’d moved his senior year in high school. His father had been right behind her, beelining to South Florida twenty-four hours after Brody had turned eighteen, two weeks after his graduation.

  He smiled, thinking of his parents. A couple of flakes. He wondered if they’d have stayed together if they’d moved to Florida instead of to Knights Bridge. He needed to go see them while he was on home leave.

  He felt the heat of the woodstove. He was surprised at how tight his throat was, but he knew it wasn’t just being here. Being back “home.” That was an aggravating factor, but it was also the weight of the past few months, the tension and the uncertainties of what came next for him.

  The fire popped and hissed, the sounds launching him back to a mission in November to secure a small consulate that had been shut down the year before. He remembered the heat, the dust, the eerie stillness. He and Greg Rawlings had looked at each other, sensing—knowing—something was off. They hadn’t exchanged a word. They’d had a split second to react before gunfire erupted, but it was that split second that had saved their lives.

  Brody had emerged uninjured. Greg hadn’t been so lucky. He had taken a bullet to his shoulder that he and Brody both had believed would end Greg’s seventeen-year career as a DSS agent. Blood seeping through his fingers as he applied pressure to his own wound, Greg had looked at Brody with pain-racked eyes. “Now what, Brody? Hell. I don’t have a life to go back to.”

  “You do, Greg,” Brody had said. “Think of those kids of yours.”

  “I’ve never been there for them. What, start now?”

  Before Brody could respond, Greg had drifted into semiconsciousness. Two months later, he was making a full recovery. He could go back to work if he wanted to. His call. He didn’t have to take on another dangerous assignment. He had married young and had a couple of teenagers, if also a wife who didn’t want to “indulge” him anymore. Laura Rawlings didn’t care if he was good at his job, if it made him happy—she was done. Even before he was shot, Greg had expressed his doubts that a nonhazardous post where she could join him wouldn’t make any difference.

  But as in need of TLC as Greg’s home life was, at least he had one to come back to. Brody didn’t. He didn’t have a family, a pet or even an apartment.

  The wind howled out in the dark January night then settled down again. It had been a long time since he’d experienced such quiet. He turned from the stove and sat on the sectional sofa. He’d slept here last night. He’d grabbed a pillow and a blanket from one of the bedrooms. The front room was warmer with the woodstove, and it had a view of the lake. He’d wanted to wake up to the sunrise over Echo Lake. He didn’t know why.

  Maybe he didn’t want to know why.

  He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the crackle of the fire and trying not to think, not to remember and especially not to feel now that he was back in Knights Bridge.

  Four

  Heather woke up to no truck and no food in the house—not so much as a slice of bread for toast or a drop of milk for coffee. Fortunately, Smith’s, the only restaurant in the village center, was open and within easy walking distance, one of the perks of living on Thistle Lane. Smith’s was popular with loads of people she knew, including her brothers. Someone would be willing to loan her a set of jumper cables and give her a ride up to Vic’s.

  Phoebe’s sole bathroom had its original claw-foot tub, with a brand-new shower curtain she’d added when Heather moved in. She’d found a kids’ one decorated with little hammers, saws and wrenches. “I thought that would be fun for you,” she’d told Heather. “Make you smile when you jump in the shower. I was tempted by the one with puppies, but I went with the tools.”

  It probably hadn’t occurred to Phoebe that Heather could have a guy over and the shower curtain might not convey the sexiest image of her.

  Then again, it was just a shower curtain, and it was clean and did the
job. Heather was nothing if not practical.

  And it did make her smile.

  She took the time—for a change—to blow-dry her hair since she didn’t want to go out into the cold morning with it partially wet. It’d turn into icicles. She dressed in warm layers and added a hat, proper gloves and her L.L. Bean boots. If Rohan escaped today, she’d be ready to chase him across Echo Lake if need be.

  The sting of the early-morning cold chased away any lingering fuzziness from her late-night delving into the United States Foreign Service and its elite corps of security personnel, the Diplomatic Security Service. She hadn’t been overstating yesterday when she’d concluded Brody was extremely fit. He had to be, given the work he did. Ten to one he took on the most dangerous posts.

  He wasn’t the Brody Hancock she had known as a teenager.

  Heather walked the short distance up Thistle Lane to South Main Street. The town library was on the east corner, a quirky nineteenth-century brick-and-stone building that occupied a large lot dotted with old shade trees and evergreens.

  Had Brody ever so much as stepped foot in his town library?

  Heather shook off the question. Why even think about such things?

  She crossed South Main to the town common. The air was still and very cold as the gray early morning gave way to a lavender sunrise, glowing on the snow and the classic houses that surrounded the large, oval-shaped common. The seasonal skating rink on the eastern end of the common was quiet now, but it was a favorite gathering place during these short winter days.

  Staying on a shoveled, sanded walk, Heather walked past the Civil War and World War monuments, bare-limbed oaks and sugar maples and empty benches. She scooted across Main Street and ducked down the side street where Smith’s was located in a converted house with white clapboards and black shutters. In warm-weather months, the porch would be decorated with hanging flower baskets and white-painted wicker furniture. Now the furniture was in storage, replaced by a stack of wood, a bucket of sand and a shovel. A grapevine wreath decorated for Valentine’s Day—still a couple weeks off—was hung on the glossy green-painted door.