“Okay.” She didn’t trust herself to try to say anything else.
“Try not to worry. Mom’s thrilled you’re here. Dad’s on alert. There are uniformed officers patrolling the perimeter of the property. I’ll be back before you know it.”
He stared into her eyes longer than she wanted him to. Her heartbeat pulsed in her ears. One of his eyebrows ticked up, and she had to wonder if in the silence of the porch, he could hear it.
She needed to get a grip. This wasn’t high school. He wasn’t the best friend she wanted to be more. Given their history, she’d trust him to protect every part of her.
Except her heart.
He stepped back, breaking the moment. He winked and turned back to the house.
She heard him speak to his mom, then his dad.
Then…Henry?
Jason’s fondness for Henry was a surprise. He’d never been a big fan of kids, and he’d always said he’d never have any of his own. Said he wouldn’t risk being the kind of father his own birth father was.
She doubted that had changed.
He was being kind to Henry because he was a kind man, but that didn’t mean he wanted children. Just like he didn’t want to live in North Carolina.
She’d built her whole life around her home, her family, her community—and now, her son. She couldn’t let herself forget that it was the kind of life Jason didn’t want. Then, now or ever.
SIX
Jason walked around Caroline’s house. Again. This was his third pass. Each time he moved out another fifty feet. Michael joined him.
“What are we doing?” Michael asked.
“Looking.”
“Fine,” Michael said. “Let’s talk about the case while we walk.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “Start with Caroline’s work.”
Michael pulled out a small notebook. “She’s changed a few suppliers, like she said, but no one I’ve spoken to at the plant believes any of them would be angry enough to come after her. Blake agreed with that assessment when you talked to him?”
Jason nodded. “He did. He insists everything is business as usual at HPI. He said Caroline drives a hard bargain and is a great negotiator. Part of her job is to keep their expenses down, and she takes that seriously, but she treats everyone fairly and the business community respects her for it.” He stopped and looked back at the house, trying to see what an intruder would see from here. “She claims she doesn’t have a boyfriend and hasn’t had one in a while.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Michael said under his breath.
“What?”
Michael’s grin had a taunting edge to it. “She’s the most eligible bachelorette in the county. She’s gorgeous, smart and rich.”
Was Michael trying to push his buttons?
“Of course,” Michael went on, “she’s also funny, kind, has a great personality, and—”
“I get it, Michael.” Jason returned to walking. “She’s a catch.”
Michael smirked. “People assume she is, of course, but given that no one has caught her since college, she’s more like an urban myth.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Michael grabbed a branch and pushed it out of his way. “You know exactly what it means. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.”
How much could Michael possibly know about his past with Caroline? He’d been a grade behind them in school. They’d been friends, played sports together, but he had never confided anything about his feelings for Caroline to anybody.
Jason tried to keep his tone neutral when he replied. “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about, nor do I see how any of this relates to the case.”
Michael laughed. “I know a dozen guys who’ve tried to get close enough to ask her out. I know only five who succeeded in asking her, and she turned them all down.”
“Your point?”
“You’ve made more progress in twenty-four hours than anyone has. Ever. Makes a guy wonder.”
Michael was like the annoying little brother who wouldn’t stop pestering you until he’d made you mad. “The only progress I’ve made is on this case, and it isn’t much progress at all.”
That wiped the teasing look off Michael’s face. “I disagree that there’s no progress. The problem isn’t that we don’t have anything to go on, it’s that we don’t like where it’s taking us.”
Jason stopped under a pine. From here, he had a decent angle on one of the windows. Could the intruder have watched Caroline from here? The thought made his blood boil. There were a few broken branches, a piece of trash—
He knelt beside the paper. Up close it looked more like a photograph. He pulled a glove from his pocket and used it to pick up the faded page. He tried to keep his voice calm. “What can you tell me about Henry?”
“Not much. I worked the car accident when Steph died. It was…” Michael shook his head like he wanted to shake away the memories. “We went over that car thoroughly. Heidi helped. That was before she and Blake married.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Heidi is great, but she has a tendency to assume the worst. She tried to hide it from Caroline, but she was concerned about foul play.”
“Was there any?”
“Not that we could find. It was one of those senseless tragedies you hear about on the news. ‘Mother of young child fatally injured in car wreck on I-26.’ We see it all the time, but I never get used to it.”
Which was one of the reasons he’d always liked Michael. The guy could be annoying, but he had a soft heart. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we’re going to have to review that case again,” Jason said as he flipped the paper in his hand over. There was no mistaking it. The photo was of Caroline and Henry. Both of their faces were circled. He handed it to Michael.
Michael’s eyes widened.
“Caroline doesn’t have any enemies, and the only skeleton in Stephanie’s closet was her husband. Whatever reason someone has for targeting them has got to do with that man. And that means we need to figure out who the father is. Discreetly. I’ll talk to Caroline about it again tonight. Pick her brain for any details Stephanie might have let slip.” He glanced back at the house. “We won’t be able to do much over the weekend, but we need to get a fresh set of eyes on Stephanie’s accident, just to be sure. All the county offices will be closed, but let’s shoot for having a list of places to call by Monday morning.”
Someone had already tried to kill Caroline and Henry twice in the past twenty-four hours. Was there any chance they could make it through the weekend without someone trying again?
He and Michael returned to the station and spent the next three hours going over everything on Stephanie’s accident. He couldn’t find any fault with the investigation or the conclusions.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jason finally said. “Want to come to the house? With Caroline there, I’m sure Mom has outdone herself for dinner.”
Michael raised his hand. “Sorry, man, I’m picking Cathy up around eight. But call me if you need me.”
“I will.”
Jason’s phone rang as he walked through the parking lot. He took one look at the number and declined the call. He slid into the seat of his Explorer, anxiety scratching its way through his mind.
He’d been back in town six months. This was the first night he’d been in a hurry to get home.
*
Caroline had a new appreciation for the way the tigers at the zoo must feel. She’d tried to sit but couldn’t keep from fidgeting, so she’d switched to helping Mama Drake in the kitchen.
Henry was having a grand time playing with a huge pot and a wooden spoon, but his joyful cacophony couldn’t drown out the terror pulsing in her heart. She stirred the green beans and kept up a light banter with Mama Drake, but even the lush aroma of pot roast and made-from-scratch biscuits couldn’t settle her nerves.
Jason would be home soon. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her or Henry. She knew that. Well, she knew he would try t
o keep them safe. Maybe even die trying. What if someone came after her here? What if everybody she loved wound up dead?
All because of her. The thought nauseated her.
Papa Drake had smiled and welcomed her in, but she could sense a level of alertness permeating the air that she’d never experienced in this house. Jason’s home had always been safe. Fun. Light.
She’d brought the heavy darkness. She should take Henry and leave, but where could she go?
The screen door clanged and Caroline’s hand jerked so hard she slopped bean juice over the side of the pan. A second later her mind overruled her nerves as she processed the voices in the other room. Jason was home.
She hurried to grab a towel to clean up the mess before she set the burner smoking.
“There you are,” Mama Drake called out as Jason entered the small kitchen. “Just in time. Biscuits will be out of the oven in three minutes. You have time to wash up.”
He pecked his mom’s cheek. “Yes, ma’am.” He threw a wink in Caroline’s direction before heading down the short hallway.
Caroline couldn’t tell if he’d learned anything or not, and she knew he wouldn’t say much at dinner. Part of her wanted answers now. Part of her didn’t want to add any more stress to the Drakes’ home. Part of her wanted to run.
A big part of her.
If it wasn’t for Henry, she might do it. Just get in her car and take off. Except she didn’t currently have a car. And even if she did, how did anyone run with a baby? How could she protect him?
A prayer bubbled in her spirit. Father, please help us. Show me what to do. Show me how to get us out of this mess.
It had been a while since she’d prayed this way. Would God even listen?
Even as she asked the question, she already knew the answer. He would hear her.
As Jason returned to the kitchen, her fear abated, but her emotions took off on a whole new tangent. He stepped behind her, his free hand resting on her waist for a second as he sampled the mashed potatoes Mama Drake had whipped to perfection.
She tried to ignore the way her body responded to his casual touch. It would have been easier if she wasn’t trying to keep her breathing steady.
“Did you make these?” He grinned at her. He clearly hadn’t forgotten some of her more impressive kitchen disasters.
“I did not, but I’ll have you know that my cooking skills have improved dramatically since high school.”
“Really.” His dry tone didn’t disguise his skepticism. “I might need proof.”
“Fine. Dinner. I choose the menu. You eat the food. No matter what.”
“It’s a date.” He spoke the words with a laugh, but the lighthearted moment faded as his eyes held hers.
Had she lost her mind? Had she asked Jason Drake on a date? No, she hadn’t. But she had invited him to dinner and he had announced it was a date. Why?
She hoped he couldn’t read the turmoil in her eyes.
Mama Drake bustled in. “Jason, honey, grab those biscuits from the oven, won’t you?”
Caroline turned back to the beans. Maybe he would assume the flush on her cheeks came from the heat of the stove.
Not likely.
*
Caroline had no idea how she survived dinner. The food, delicious as always, stuck in her throat. She didn’t want to be rude to Mama Drake, but it was requiring all the energy she had to make small talk.
What if someone was outside the house right now? She hadn’t missed Jason’s all-too-casual way of closing the blinds and pulling the curtains in the small dining room. Was he worried, too?
She looked up from her plate and found his eyes on her. One quirked eyebrow from him and she knew. She might be making a decent show for the Drakes, but Jason wasn’t fooled. He could still read her, and he knew how scared she was.
When the dishes were done, the Drakes retired to their room. She could hear them talking, heard the TV announce the beginning of a two-hour special for a reality show, heard Papa Drake laugh low. The sound seemed alien to her with the weight of so much death and dying and loss wrapped around her. Bowed down under it, she sank into the sofa, Henry asleep on her shoulder.
Jason joined her and told her about the photo he’d found at her house.
“What happens now?” She kept her voice down. “I can’t stay here, Jason, but where do I go?”
“You most certainly can stay here. For tonight at least. Hopefully those FBI agents your sister-in-law is sending will check everything out and you’ll be able to go home tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t fix anything. Someone is trying to kill us and we have no idea why.” Jason didn’t argue with her. “What did you go to the office for this afternoon?”
“I wanted to look through everything we had on Stephanie’s accident.”
“Find anything?”
“Nope. Just a tragic accident. Senseless and without a scrap of evidence of foul play.”
“I could have told you that.”
Jason smiled. “I needed to see it for myself. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can pick up on something others missed.”
“So is this about me or Henry?”
“I don’t know. I’m not ruling out the possibility that you are the primary target, but so far I can’t find any motive for killing you because of your own actions or relationships. Blake insists there’s no drama at the plant. No one can find any threat against your family. I’m going back through the files we have on the attack at the plant last year to see if maybe you’re being targeted by the same people, but the general theory is that if they wanted to take you out, they wouldn’t have bothered with carbon monoxide. And that if they had sent someone to shoot you, he would have finished the job before running off. No way he would have been scared off by the sirens.”
He propped his feet on the coffee table. “Heidi’s work has been almost exclusively undercover, but she’s doing some checking to see if any of her enemies might be out to get to her through you. But it seems unlikely. Whatever this is about, it seems more likely that it’s tied to Henry.”
Caroline rested her head on Henry’s soft hair. “I can’t think of anyone who would want to kill me, and I have no idea why they would want to harm Henry. He’s no threat to anyone. We don’t even know who his dad is, and honestly, I don’t care.”
“I think you may need to start caring.”
She had no reply to that, so for a moment they sat without speaking, the sound from the TV in his parents’ room the only noise. She heard singing and cheering, and then a commercial break, before he spoke.
“If someone is trying to kill Henry, then the birth father is the only lead we have. Stephanie’s been dead almost a year. Her family has no wealth or connections. She has no siblings, and there’s no reason we can find that anyone affiliated with her would have any reason to harm Henry. That leaves us with the father. We have to find him. Get DNA. Confirm he’s dead. Find out who he knew. Who his family is. I’m not going to lie to you—I have no idea how we’re going to figure it out. But we have to try.”
“He’s dead. Steph said—”
“Do you have a name? A death certificate? An arrest record? Anything to corroborate what she told you?”
Caroline could taste bile as her body reacted faster than her mind. She forced herself to swallow. “You think she lied to me? To her parents?”
“I’m not saying that,” Jason said. “She might have told you what she believed to be true, but we don’t know where she was getting her information. So we need to find out. Even if everything she told you was true, there’s still the question of what he did to wind up in jail and what he did to wind up dead.”
“But whatever he did, why would that cause people to come after us?” Henry started at her outburst, and she patted his back and took a deep breath as he resettled, his little mouth falling open in sleep. “It’s not like Henry’s a threat. He’s just a baby.”
“I agree he’s just a baby, but I can’t agree he’s not a threat.”
How could Henry be a threat to anyone? “I don’t understand.”
“Caroline,” Jason said. “There are people out there who kill for no apparent reason, but they are the exception.”
She could hear it in his tone, the way he was trying to explain without angering her. Or terrifying her. Or both.
“In almost every case, there’s a motive. And given that Henry is young, never knew his father, barely knew his mother and will have no true memories of either of them, then that leaves us with only one possibility.”
“What?”
“That Henry is a threat simply by being alive. Not because of what he knows or remembers, but because of who he is. And if that’s the case, then we have to find out who he is.”
Caroline shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening. Not now. Not when I’m so close to finalizing everything. I haven’t cared one bit about finding Henry’s father’s family because it was the one thing that was clear in Stephanie’s will. The birth father’s family was to have nothing to do with him. Ever. Which makes me feel certain that Steph was protecting Henry from them.”
“Stephanie left you a message in the will?”
“It’s not really a will. It’s a trust document. More private than a will. It said that it was her request that Henry never know his father’s family. I’ve tried to honor her request.”
Jason’s face paled. “Caroline, please tell me all the adoption proceedings have included looking into the situation with the father.”
“Of course they have.” She heard the frustration in her tone. “We’ve done everything we were supposed to do. The courts have put out notices looking for him. But with no name to go on, his parental rights were revoked in absentia. It’s not that uncommon.” She did not like the way Jason was looking at her. “Jason?”
He shook his head. “Something about this doesn’t make sense. Either he is not dead and is coming after his own child, or he is dead and someone else wants to be sure no part of him lives on.”
Hidden Legacy Page 5
