by Kris Bock
Thomas Bain moved forward, guiding Ricky along. “I want to thank you.”
Thank me? I fought back the waves of dizziness and nausea and tried to focus on the man. He looked perfectly ordinary. He was a few inches taller than Ricky, maybe five foot eight. Average build, not particularly muscular. Brown hair, brown eyes without any glimmer of evil in them, a bit of stubble as if he hadn’t shaved that morning. He looked tired.
I wouldn’t have noticed him on the street.
I still wanted to get away.
Ricky was fumbling with his phone, holding it close to his body where Bain might not notice. I hoped he was calling the police.
Bain smiled slightly. “I know what you must think of me. But I didn’t have anything to do with Bethany’s death.” He dropped his gaze and shook his head. “Poor girl. I cared about her, but she was so troubled. The drugs, the sleeping around—we couldn’t make it work.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Ricky, however, didn’t have that problem. “You’re a lot older than she was. She was, like, twenty-three when you started dating, and you were almost forty? My mom would say men go for younger women because they want someone they can control.”
Yep, that sounded like Mom. But what on earth was Ricky doing? We needed to get away, not risk making the man mad.
Bain patted Ricky’s shoulder. “I suppose some women would see it that way. You’ll understand, when you’re older.” His eyes met mine again. “If you didn’t know her, you can’t possibly understand how lovely she was, how full of life.”
My stomach twisted as I thought of Bethany as I’d seen her.
“She was young,” Bain went on, “but if you’d known her, you wouldn’t blame me.” He gave a short laugh. “Maybe it was a midlife crisis. I was lonely, feeling old. I wanted to touch something young and beautiful again.”
“So why did you stop going out with her?” Ricky asked.
Bain turned his head toward my brother. “I loved her, but she was only interested in having fun. There were other men.” His voice shifted on that sentence, but he sounded more hurt than angry. “And drugs. She had to have her drugs.” His voice dropped. “I’m afraid that’s what killed her.”
I almost felt sorry for him. He could have been telling the truth. But my body was shaking with the urge to run, and as long as he had Ricky, I couldn’t. I finally forced words out of my throat. “If she’d died of an overdose, the police wouldn’t be calling it murder.”
He gazed at me across the short space, and I thought I saw the shine of tears in his eyes. “I didn’t mean an accident. I meant the people she got involved with.”
I glanced at the phone Ricky still held at waist level. He hadn’t spoken into it. Had he called for help? If he had, how would they find us? The phone had a GPS, but tracking it might take time.
The faint murmur of voices drifted on the breeze. The band was tuning up with brief bursts of random notes. Maybe I could draw Bain out into the open, where we’d be visible by the crowd.
I took a step backward. “That’s an interesting theory. Do you know any of those people by name?” I edged back another step.
Bain said, “I told the police everything I know.” He stayed where he was, and so did Ricky.
Maybe if Ricky got the hint, he’d break away from Bain and run to me. I took another step back.
I sensed movement behind me a moment before I backed into a solid body.
I yelped and leapt forward, spinning around. My hat tipped forward over my eyes. I saw legs in faded jeans, a sliver of white T-shirt, and an arm that ended at the wrist. I pushed my hat back and gazed at Kyle Moore.
The look in his eyes made me take another step back. It was a killing look. My heart hammered, even though he hadn’t glanced at me. All his attention was on Thomas Bain.
“Kyle,” Bain said softly. “How are you doing?”
I edged closer to the building, out of the way, as Kyle stalked Thomas Bain. That’s what his movement brought to mind, a hunter stalking prey. I could believe he’d been a soldier. “What do you think?”
I glanced from Kyle to Bain like someone watching a tennis match. Bain looked perfectly calm, though he dropped his hand from Ricky’s shoulder and shifted to the side as if preparing for an attack—or to run. At least he wasn’t using my brother as a shield.
“I think you must be hurting as much as I am,” Bain said. “Bethany wouldn’t want us to be at odds.”
Kyle gave a harsh laugh. “Bethany would have—” He broke off and pressed his lips together for a moment. “What Bethany would have wanted doesn’t matter anymore. But Audra matters. Stay away from her.”
I stared at him, feeling a flush of warmth.
Bain said, “I don’t mean any harm. I never did. Audra.” He waited until I looked at him. “You take care of yourself.” With a little wave and a half smile, he sidled around the side of the building.
Kyle scowled after him, his fist clenched. He obviously had a leading suspect in Bethany’s death. Was there history to back him up, or was his grief causing him to latch onto the one person who’d been mentioned by name?
Ricky checked around the side of the building. “He’s gone.”
I hurried to Ricky and gave him a quick hug. He wriggled away and studied Kyle. “You’re Kyle Moore. Bethany’s brother.” He had an odd expression. I wondered if he was realizing for the first time that this case involved real people with powerful emotions, and not just pictures with names.
I glanced down at Ricky’s phone, which seemed to be running a stopwatch. “What’s that? I thought maybe you called the police.”
Ricky gave me a warning look. I stared back, baffled. He shifted his eyes to Kyle and back to me.
I sighed. “Ricky, would you please just tell me?
He made an annoyed sound and touched the screen. The timer stopped. “I was recording the conversation. I hoped Mr. Bain might say something suspicious, but I don’t think he did.”
I took a step back to better stare at him. “You were recording that? Not trying to get help? Ricky!”
He glanced at Kyle and whispered, “I thought we might get evidence.”
I realized he didn’t want Kyle to know about the recording, and in fact had still been recording after Bain left. Did he think Kyle might say something suspicious? Or did he just not want Kyle to know we were investigating?
I flashed back to the moment before Bain had stepped around the corner. Ricky and I were arguing about investigating Bethany’s murder. He must have heard us, and now he would think we were seriously trying to find a murderer. I groaned inwardly.
“Should I follow him?” Ricky whispered.
“No! You should keep away from him.”
Ricky glanced at Kyle again and nodded. “Okay. I’ll just go back and … listen to the music.” He turned so he could give me a thumbs up without Kyle seeing, and then scurried around the building.
“Ricky—” I sighed.
“That’s your brother?”
“Yeah, lucky me,” I muttered.
“Are you all right?” He stepped closer, and I felt my heart, which hadn’t yet settled down, speed up again.
“Fine.” I hunted for anything to say. “Why are you here? I would have thought—I mean, after—” My face heated. So much for not babbling like an idiot.
“I’m keeping an eye on things.”
That was vague. He stopped two feet away. I studied his chest, the lean muscles visible under the thin white T-shirt. He raised his arm toward me, and my gaze dropped to the stump at his wrist, the skin shiny and scarred over the end.
He froze, then dropped his arm.
My face heated and I stared at his chest. Did he think I would be grossed out if he came near me with his injury? He’d lost his hand fighting for our country. The last thing he should feel was shame. I tried to think of something to do or say to make the moment better, but it stretched out, awkward.
Finally he spoke. “Audra, what are you and your brother up to?”<
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I blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m not up to anything.” I risked a glance at his face. “But Ricky wants to be one of the Hardy Boys.”
Lines formed between his eyes. “Audra, you two need to keep away from Thomas Bain. He’s dangerous.”
“We didn’t do it on purpose! He found us here.”
Kyle stepped back and looked around the building, maybe trying to spot Bain again. I took the opportunity to study his face in profile. It was hard to believe he was younger than I was. But unlike Jay, who seemed to have aged through hard living, Kyle’s face held the strength that came from surviving a hard life.
The rest of his words sank in. “You think Bain did it,” I said.
He looked back at me. “Yes. I know what he did to Bethany before.”
I couldn’t look away from his gaze. “You mean he hurt her?”
“More than once. She wouldn’t keep away from him. I couldn’t do anything from overseas. Not that she ever listened to her kid brother. She replied to my e-mails sometimes, and she sounded all right. But it’s easy to lie in e-mail. I heard the truth from other people.” He put his hand over his eyes. “By the time I got back, she’d stopped seeing him. I’d like to think she could’ve gotten clean. She deserved the chance. I would have helped her.” He sighed. “Maybe if I’d been here all along, I could have.”
I took a step closer. I remembered the way I’d left Ricky behind when I went to college, and I thought I understood some of the things he wasn’t saying. “Sometimes you have to get out. For your own survival. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about the people you leave behind.”
He looked into my eyes for a long time. I couldn’t remember ever holding a man’s gaze like that. I could feel the slow thud of my heart. I caught his scent, something unusual but strangely familiar and comfortable. I wanted to get even closer but my body held back.
He dropped his gaze first.”Get out there and keep an eye on your brother. You’d better go first. You don’t want to be seen with me.”
Why not?
I think I do.
The words drifted through my head, but I couldn’t speak them aloud. I pulled my gaze away from his face. As I passed by him, I recognized part of his smell—eucalyptus, like the ointment athletes sometimes use for sore muscles. Did he have hidden injuries as well?
I felt him watching me as I walked away.
Chapter 17
I made sure Ricky was back under the trees. I’d need to have a stern talk with him, but first I wanted to sort out everything in my own mind. Eslinda was on stage introducing the band. I saw Nascha with another girl from the resort, one who worked the reception desk. I searched for her name … Jenny? No, Gina. I joined them with a smile that felt stiff.
“There you are!” Nascha said. “Is everything all right?”
I nodded. I really wanted to talk to her privately, but I didn’t know how to get rid of Gina. I blurted out, “I saw Kyle Moore.”
Nascha looked interested. Gina gasped. She was a few years older than I was, maybe close to Bethany’s age. I wasn’t sure if she’d grown up in town or moved here for the job. Could she have known Bethany and her family?
“He’s not here for the festival.” I didn’t want people to think Kyle wasn’t properly mourning his sister. “He was only passing by.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Gina asked, “Are you … friends?”
I shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“Why?” Nascha demanded of Gina.
Gina glanced around, looking uneasy. “It’s nothing, really.”
But it was obviously something. I wanted to walk away and refuse to hear what she had to say. I also needed to know. I waited as the band started up with a cheerful fiddle tune.
Gina bit her lip and looked from Nascha to me. “It probably doesn’t matter. Unless you’re thinking of getting involved with him.”
I waited for her to explain, but she didn’t. I wanted to shake her. I couldn’t claim I was planning to get involved with Kyle, but if I didn’t learn the big secret, my own imagination would take over. Had he lost his hand not in heroically fighting for his country, but in something that had resulted in a dishonorable discharge? Had he joined the military because of some trouble in town? Was there something nasty in his past, something to do with Bethany? I had enough trouble making conversation without those kinds of questions rushing through my head. “You’d better tell me.”
Nascha gave me a quick look. Did she think I was planning to get involved with Kyle? I felt my face heat but kept my gaze on Gina.
She glanced around again and finally leaned close and lowered her voice. “It’s just he has a drug problem. I feel sorry for him, and you can hardly blame him after everything he’s been through. But you don’t want to get involved with someone like that.” She grimaced. “Trust me, it’s not worth it. You can’t save them.”
Kyle, a drug addict? It seemed unlikely, after his attitude toward Bethany’s problem. But then addiction did tend to run in families, didn’t it? A genetic predisposition of some kind. Maybe his comments about Bethany getting clean had been some kind of cover-up, or he’d been wishing she’d been able to do something he couldn’t. I tried to shift the puzzle pieces into some order that might fit, but I was missing too many pieces.
“What did he say to you?” Nascha asked.
“What?” I shook myself out of my ponderings. “Oh! Thomas Bain found me first.”
This time Gina and Nascha both gasped. “What did he want?” Nascha asked while Gina looked around wildly as if he might be lurking behind her.
“He … he thanked me.”
They both stared. I could hardly believe it either, especially when I remembered how scared I’d been, but if I thought back to what he actually said, that was the truth. “For finding Bethany’s body. He said he cared about her and didn’t have anything to do with her death.”
Nascha grimaced. “He’d hardly tell you otherwise.”
“No.” But when I really thought about it, he hadn’t done anything wrong or threatening. If anything, Kyle was the one who’d looked dangerous. I couldn’t blame him under the circumstances, and my instinct was to trust Kyle and avoid Thomas Bain.
But could I trust my instincts? How much were they influenced by expectations? Between the fear of men instilled by Mom, and my own shyness, I hadn’t spent a lot of time with men, even as friends. My instincts hadn’t been tested much. Jay hadn’t set off the alarm bells as quickly as he should have. Maybe I couldn’t rely on my instincts at all.
A headache throbbed behind my eyes. I fished in my shoulder bag for sunglasses. Nascha and Gina were talking about the murder, but I’d had enough. “I’m going to get that coffee now. I could use the caffeine.”
Nascha touched my arm lightly. “Try to stay out of trouble. No wonder you looked so odd when you walked up.”
I suspected that had more to do with my confused feelings about Kyle than with Thomas Bain, but I let it go. I joined a long line of people waiting for coffee. I inhaled the scent of it, dark and earthy but soothing in its familiarity. The world hadn’t changed that much. Whatever else happened, people still waited for their morning coffee fix. It wasn’t much to hold onto, but even a cup of coffee was better than nothing.
I tried to sort through everything that had happened in the last few days. It felt more like weeks or months. There were too many pieces all jumbled together. Thomas Bain, Kyle, drug addiction, Jay and his father—wait, Jay smoked pot. Was that a connection to Bethany?
The line shuffled forward. I frowned at the back of the man in front of me and tried to tune out the chatter nearby. I didn’t associate marijuana with violence. Usually it was meth that turned people crazy. But if Jay smoked pot, maybe he did other drugs, too. Anyway, it was a possible link.
And a link to Kyle? I hoped not. I liked him. Maybe some of that was pity, or respect because he’d been injured in service of his country, or flattery because he remembered me from high school. For whatev
er reason, I wanted to think the best of him.
Someone cleared their throat behind me and I realized the line had moved forward again. I closed the gap. Maybe I should follow Ricky’s lead and make some lists or charts or something, like a real investigator. Possible suspects, pros and cons for each, links between people and so forth. I might not solve the case, but at least I could sort through some of the jumble in my head.
I finally got my coffee and wandered away from the booth. I checked on Ricky again—still settled under the tree, now chatting with another boy his age. I hoped they were talking about normal boy things like video games and how much they hated their teacher—or even about girls—and that Ricky wasn’t letting the whole world know that he was tracking a murderer.
The band had picked up the pace in a toe-tapping folk tune. Eslinda was with the sound technician. I walked past some food booths and wrinkled my nose at the smell of hamburgers and dill pickles. It was only ten AM. I looked around for Nascha and Gina, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to join them again yet.
And then I saw Jay. He was standing with a slim, dark-haired girl who was shaking her head. Another of his amorous attempts? Surely he wouldn’t try to get her off into the woods. Even he couldn’t think that would sound romantic anymore.
I edged closer, staying out of Jay’s line of vision. The girl was pretty, but young. Maybe still in high school even. She was looking up at Jay intently as he bent over her. Should I warn her somehow? Jay hated me so much already that I could hardly make it worse. But what could I do? Just walk up and tell her Jay was a jerk?
I didn’t think I could get up the nerve for that. Possibilities floated through my mind, things I’d seen on TV or in movies. Playing the part of an offended girlfriend. Accusing him of giving me some sexually transmitted disease.
I giggled at the thought, but I didn’t think I could manage that either. Besides, it would look like evidence that I really was jealous and stalking Jay.
I edged closer, pretending to watch the band, my back to Jay. If I could hear what they were saying, I might know if the girl was in trouble. And if she wasn’t in immediate trouble, maybe I could speak to her privately before she did something stupid, like I had.
