Deadline (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Maggie K. Black

  What was she going to do about it?

  Meg took a deep breath and let it out again. Then she called Alyssa Burne.

  “I’m guessing you’ve heard everything that’s happened recently from your husband and your father-in-law,” Meg said. “I’m supposed to be coordinating Rachel and Wesley’s wedding this evening. But I can’t. I need to give myself time to heal and regroup, and dealing with this couple is killing me. Would you be willing to take it over? It’s at sunset, followed by a reception at the pavilion.”

  “Absolutely.” Alyssa’s voice was professional, sympathetic and above all reassuring. “I’m happy to take it over. No problem.”

  Thank You, God.

  “Everything is already arranged and ready to go. There’s very little to do at this point, but just be available as a contact point. You’ll have to check whether the pavilion window will be fixed, or if you’re going to have to decorate over it somehow. You might also need to talk the bride and groom into doing their wedding photos inside the pavilion rather than on the beach depending on when the storm hits.”

  “You can count on me.”

  “Good. I’ll email you all the details. I’ll call the bride and groom, and also her grandmother in the nursing home who is covering all the bills, to tell them about the change in plans and give them your number. I’ll also let all the suppliers know that you’ll be the woman on location. If I can, I’ll drop by the pavilion in a bit to check in too. Also, feel free to call me at any time today if you need anything, and I’ll come right over.”

  “Don’t worry. It will be fine. I’m sure of it.”

  Meg smiled. “Me too. Then maybe we can meet up next week and talk about how to work together in future. Honestly, there are more brides wanting to get married up here than I can handle. It would be wonderful to share some of that load.”

  She stared at the phone for a few moments after hanging up. Her shoulders felt lighter than they had in a long time.

  Well, Lord, I hope trusting her was the right decision.

  Then she called Rachel and kept it simple and short. She told the bride that she’d just gone through something traumatic, which she was sure Rachel would read about in the papers any moment now, and Alyssa was taking over the wedding.

  The bride swore. “Today is my wedding day!”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I’m sure it will be absolutely fine.”

  “I’m going to sue you into the ground, you worthless piece of garbage.”

  Meg held the phone away from her ear and prayed for fifteen seconds before letting herself respond. “I’m sorry you feel that way. But I am positive Alyssa will do an amazing job. Everything is already set up exactly as you wanted it to be. You won’t even notice the difference.”

  But Rachel was yelling so loudly Meg couldn’t even get a word in edgewise. She winced. The young bride was hurling insults and slurs down the phone line like daggers. Meg had always known, in her heart, just how selfish and self-centered this bride could be. That self-centeredness had been present when she was a preteen in Meg’s Sunday-school class and it had never gone away. It had almost been as if other people weren’t actually real to her, but chess pieces to be moved around in the creation of her perfect wedding, her ideal life, just the way she wanted. “Rachel, please, a kid’s in the hospital.”

  “Do I know him? No. I’ve never even met him. So what difference does that make? People get themselves hurt and end up in the hospital all the time! This is my wedding! My only wedding! Don’t you get that? You stupid—”

  Meg hung up.

  Oh, Lord, please help this young couple. Help them heal from the wounds of their childhoods. Help them see that real love isn’t about grabbing or clutching on to who or what you want but in caring for the needs of others.

  Meg tried Wesley, couldn’t reach him and ended up leaving a message on his cell phone. Then she finished her phone calls, sorted her emails and got showered and dressed, before gathering the courage to leave her little sanctuary and go find Jack. Their conversation last night had been intimate. The kiss in the pavilion had been thrilling. It was as if yesterday had changed everything between them and yet left her with no idea of what he wanted to happen next.

  Butterflies scurried around her heart and fluttered through her limbs. She liked him. She respected him. She was drawn to him emotionally in a way she’d never been drawn to anyone before. She didn’t know what she wanted to happen next. But something inside her couldn’t help smiling at the thought of seeing him.

  The kitchen was spotless but empty. The dishes had been done and a fresh pot of coffee had been set up ready to be switched on. There was a note on the counter.

  Hey, Sis,

  Gone in to open the shop. Don’t know what happened to Jack. He was gone when I woke up. Took his stuff with him. Call me when you get up. Love you.

  Benji.

  Gone? The butterflies in her stomach started swirling faster, until she felt them forming into a swarm. She knocked twice on the open basement door, then went downstairs and walked through the Benji’s apartment. No one was there and Jack’s stuff truly was all gone. She called Jack’s phone and got his voice mail. Then she called her brother at the store.

  “Hey!” Benji’s voice boomed. “You okay? Have you seen the news? Jack posted his story early this morning, and the internet jumped all over it.”

  She glanced through the empty living room. “No, I haven’t seen it. But it can wait. I think I want to get out of here and be with people. You okay if I come to the store and join you for lunch?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t you have a wedding on?”

  “Not anymore. I decided to use my opt-out clause in the contract and passed it onto Alyssa Burne.”

  Benji whistled. “I’m so proud of you! Yeah, come on over. We’ll eat.”

  There was a heavy knocking at the door. “Great, I’m on my way.”

  The knocking grew louder. She tucked her hair behind her ears, slid her bag over her shoulder and reached for the door handle.

  A bright light flashed. A camera clicked. A giant microphone was thrust into her face.

  “Impact News from Toronto. Meg Duff, how do you respond to the charge you helped perpetrate a serial-killer fraud on the public?”

  “Excuse me?” A fraud? What on earth was he on about? She shoved the microphone out of her face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The so-called reporter was a freckled kid barely in his twenties. The photographer’s face was totally hidden by the giant lens. Meg slammed the door and pushed past them. A black rental car was parked in the driveway behind her hatchback. “And get out of my driveway before I call the police.”

  The photographer kept snapping. The reporter smirked. “You are the same Meg Duff that was interviewed by Jack Brooks of Torchlight News?”

  She didn’t turn. She’d been a pro at ignoring tabloid reporters before this kid had even figured out how to hold a microphone. Had she been naive not to expect them to descend on her now? She yanked her car keys from her pocket. “I have no comment. I suggest you direct your questions to the police.”

  “Did you know that Toronto’s chief of police has repeatedly denounced Brooks as an attention seeker and a liar?”

  The words hit her back like bullets. No, she didn’t. But she wasn’t about to tell some tabloid reporter that.

  “Did you know the chief of police in Toronto called Brooks’s story about the so-called Raincoat Killer nothing but a piece of imaginative fiction?”

  The keys rattled in her hand.

  “Did you help Brooks perpetrate that fiction with a series of stunts on Manitoulin Island?” The reporter’s questions flew like machine-gun fire. “Did you try to convince the police that an old man’s suicide was really murder? Did you trick a kid into dressing up like the so-called Raincoat Killer
and attacking you on security camera?”

  The camera kept flashing. Meg shoved the keys into the door so hard they nearly broke. “I will say this one last time. Get off my property or I’ll call the police.” She yanked the driver’s door open.

  The reporter grabbed the doorframe. “Did Brooks pay you to lie for him? Did he cook up the story about you being attacked on the ferry as a desperate attempt to save his career? Or are you just another victim of his hoax?”

  The car door slammed inches away from his fingers. She pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed nine-one-one.

  The reporter signaled at the photographer to fall back. “No need to call the police. One last question, Ms. Duff, and we’ll be gone.” He leaned toward the window. “How much do you really trust Jack Brooks?”

  * * *

  The marina was busier than she’d seen it all season. Families crowded the beach. The water teemed with sailboats, Windsurfers and personal watercraft, despite the hint of dark clouds on the distant horizon. The radio said a major thunderstorm was coming, one of those bad summer tempests that pelted the ground and churned the water’s surface like a pot on rolling boil.

  Which wasn’t a bad way to describe the emotional mess teeming inside her heart. The Impact reporters had jumped in their car and peeled away before nine-one-one dispatch had even put her through to the local police. She’d spoken to someone at the local police station, who’d then put her through to Detective Ravine. Ravine had offered to have a car swing by her house if the reporters came back. If? She’d gritted her teeth and asked the detective if he knew why a tabloid reporter would accuse Jack of perpetrating a hoax. He’d told her to ask Jack.

  Which she would have done, if he hadn’t left while she was sleeping.

  She parked the car behind Benji’s store. A familiar figure was sitting hunched at a picnic bench by the water, typing in a laptop while talking on the phone. Was Jack waiting for her? For Benji? Or had he just been looking for a place to sit and kill time? She took a deep breath and walked down the boardwalk toward him. His laptop snapped shut as she drew closer and his phone call ended. But even then, his head didn’t turn toward her until she spoke his name.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  He nodded, slowly, with just the glimmer of a smile on his lips that was far more sad than happy. “We need to talk.”

  “You bet we do. You moved out of my home in the middle of the night without even leaving a note. Then a tabloid reporter showed up banging on my door.”

  His elbows rested on the top of the picnic table. His shoulders sagged like those of a man twice his age. “It wasn’t the middle of the night. It was quarter to six in the morning. I’d gotten through to my editor, Vince. My interview with you was about to go live on the website, and he made it pretty clear to me that considering the risk he was taking in running it, he wasn’t about to also risk upsetting the publishers when they figured out I was staying with you. So I told him I’d move out immediately, before the article went live. You and your brother were still asleep. I figured I’d go find a coffee shop to sit in for a while, sort things out and explain it to you later. I’m sorry I didn’t leave a note—it honestly didn’t occur to me until you said it just now. Maybe I got into the habit of acting first and explaining later at work. Or I’m just too used to being on my own. Anyway, it was a snap decision, and I didn’t know exactly where I was going.”

  A snap decision. Of course. From a man who was still all gut reactions and impulses.

  Her arms snapped across her chest. “Your editor didn’t have a problem with you bunking with my brother yesterday?”

  “Yesterday, Vince was still hoping I’d somehow manage to wrangle an interview out of you.”

  She sucked in a breath.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” He dropped his head into his hands. “Look, I had no choice. The paper has a very strict policy about a reporter interviewing anyone he or she is in a personal relationship with. The only way around it would have been if I’d declared it as a potential conflict of interest right there on the page, and also gone through the necessary steps to clear it with the publishers first. There’s an internal review process I would’ve had to go through, and it’s not the kind of thing I could do without a lot of sober thought—not to mention, a lot of time to work things out.” He shrugged. “It just seemed simpler to publish the story first and sort us out later.”

  She leaned her hands on the picnic table until her face was level with his. “What kind of personal relationship do we have, Jack?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. I honestly don’t. All I know is that I can’t have this conversation right this second. Not after everything that happened yesterday. I need some time to figure everything out with work, talk to some friends and pray. Then I’ll get back to you, and we’ll see where we stand.” He ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Otherwise I’ll end up just impulsively blurting out the first thing I’m thinking, without taking the time to be sure. I’m sure you can appreciate that taking some breathing space makes sense right now.”

  Unbelievable. “So now you’ve decided it’s time to start thinking things through? Now that I’ve got the tabloids banging down my door, my life has been threatened more times than I can count and an angry bride is threatening to sue me and ruin my business? This is when you decide to walk away?”

  His jaw rolled slowly, as if his mouth were struggling to form words. “I told you the last time I tried to mix personal feelings for someone with an article I was working on, I nearly lost everything. I’m sorry that everything has changed since yesterday, but it has. Stuart’s still unconscious in the hospital. You’re now on the cover of my newspaper. There’s a chance Ravine can talk the Toronto chief into reopening the murder cases on Krista, Eliza and Shelly. And yes, if my editor thinks it’s going to be a whole lot easier to get the story taken seriously if I move out of your brother’s basement apartment, it’s worth it to help make sure a serial killer doesn’t keep getting away with murder. Do you honestly think I wanted to have to choose between doing my job and spending time with you?”

  “Don’t you dare put that on me.” Her voice rose. “I never asked you to push your way into my life, and I never asked you to choose between me and your job. And how secure is that job anyway? Why did some paparazzi tell me you’re nothing but a disgraced reporter who’s in trouble with the police for inventing a serial killer? He said the Raincoat Killer was denounced as a hoax. Is that true?”

  His face fell. “I thought you trusted me.”

  “I thought I did too.” Her head shook. “But you said yourself that a whole lot has changed since yesterday.”

  “The truth,” Jack said, “is that three women died in Toronto, at the hands of what I believe to be the same killer. The truth is that while individual police whispered and gossiped off the record about there being a serial killer on the loose, the chief of police was unwilling to confirm that to the press or tell the public that. I thought lives were in danger. I wrote what I knew to be true. My editor made the call to run it and plastered it on the front page of our paper. Because when the police won’t act, the press does. That’s our job, to keep the police accountable and the public informed. The chief of police was publicly humiliated, and rather than admitting his detectives’ conclusions might in fact be wrong he threw me under the bus to save his career, denouncing me in a press conference. The publisher wanted me fired. The editor suggested I take a few days off. I’m not the type of man who likes sitting around doing nothing, so because I thought there could be a Manitoulin Island connection to the killer I hopped on a bus and came up here. Then I met you, and everything changed.”

  His eyes fixed back on hers. Piercing. Unflinching. Burning with an intensity that made her suddenly gasp for breath. “I have never once lied to you, Meg, and I never will. Do you honestly not know what I think about you? How I fee
l about you? You are the most beautiful, brave, extraordinary person I’ve ever met in my life, and when I’m around you, I want to do everything in my power to take care of you and protect you.”

  A long breath left her body. “I don’t believe you ever knowingly lied to me. I still want to trust you. But ever since you walked into my life, my world has fallen apart. You say you want to protect me? What if you’re the only reason my life is now in danger?”

  EIGHTEEN

  He watched in disbelief as a cold, determined glint of gray moved through the blue of her eyes. What was she saying? That everything she’d been through was somehow his fault?

  He leaned forward. “Look, I don’t know what that tabloid reporter told you, but all I have done since meeting you is try to keep you safe. You’ve got to know that.”

  She sighed. Resignation seemed to ripple through her body. Then she sat down opposite him. “I know that’s what you believe, Jack. But what if you’re wrong? What if you’re the one the killer has been after all this time, not me? You’re the one who baited him with a big cover story. You think the Raincoat Killer came up here, after me, because of some flyers you saw at the crime scenes. But what if the killer saw your story and followed you up here? What if the killer attacked me on the ferry because he saw you talking to me? What if the Raincoat Killer has been after you all this time and I’m just a stranger that got caught in the cross fire? What if your determination to get that interview from me was the only thing that has put my life in danger?”

  He blinked. She couldn’t be serious. How could she turn everything around in her head like this? Reject him as her hero and recast him as an unwitting villain? “That’s not what my gut instinct is telling me.”

  “All your ‘gut instinct’ has done so far is hurt me.”

  He felt the color drain from his face. “Meg. You can’t mean that.” But even as he said it, he could see from the tears threatening her eyes that she meant every word. Oh Lord, just how much hurt have I caused her?