“You must be Jamie Sinclair. Thank you for bringing Adam home.”
I opened my mouth to speak.
But before I could get a word in edgewise, Barrett said, “Jamie isn’t staying, Gram.”
“Oh?” The lady blinked from me to him and back again. “Why not?”
“She just stopped by on her way to Vermont.”
But that was another lie.
And Barrett’s grandma knew it.
“I see,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height and still not even reaching Barrett’s shoulder. “Well, let me tell you something, young man. I telephoned Miss Sinclair last night and invited her to visit me. She is my guest and she’ll stay as long as she likes. Is that clear to you?”
Barrett’s face registered nothing. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Then bring her things into the house.”
And to my surprise, Barrett did as he was told.
While he extracted my suitcase from the trunk of my car, Mrs. Barrett slipped an arm through mine and led me indoors. The wood-framed screen door, I noted, could be secured by nothing hardier than a pot-metal hook and eye. The proper front door was another matter, however. Solid and sturdy, its lock had been formed of heavy cast brass in an age when things were built to last. Unless Mrs. Barrett was the hospitable kind who left the doors unlocked, no one was getting into her house without an invitation.
“You must be tired,” she said, “after your long drive.”
I murmured something appropriate, followed her into an old-fashioned parlor. Well-kept furniture upholstered in an abundance of cabbage roses filled the middle of the room. An upright piano stood against one wall. A stone fireplace ranged across another. On the polished mantel, framed photographs sat atop handmade doilies. In several of the snapshots, Barrett’s sister, Elise, smiled alongside her husband and children. Barrett, as a boy, a teen, and a man, grinned from several of them himself.
There were daguerreotypes of old-timers, too, printed on silvery plates, and a jaunty fellow I took to be Barrett’s grandfather beamed from black-and-whites taken in the 1940s. Anyone who could’ve passed for Barrett’s mother, though, was conspicuously absent from this little gallery. But there was one more picture I did recognize. It was a portrait of Barrett’s father in a U.S. Army uniform.
Before his life had been cut short by that unidentified drunk driver, Barrett’s father had been a Tomb Sentinel—a soldier selected to honor our nation’s war dead by keeping watch at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But more than that, he would’ve been Miranda Barrett’s son. She’d no doubt loved him, and she’d lost him, so it was little wonder she worried over her son’s son now.
He entered the house behind us, set my suitcase in the foyer with a thud.
“Adam,” my hostess said, “show our guest upstairs.”
Barrett leveled a hard look at her. A muscle in his jaw jumped with the effort of keeping his mouth shut. But Barrett picked up my suitcase and started up the stairs.
The fourth step complained under his foot and creaked under mine, but we made it to the second floor just fine. I noted a darkened bedroom—probably belonging to the lady of the house—at the far end of the corridor and a tidy bathroom along the hall. Another bedroom, in the kind of blue-and-brown plaid that would’ve made The Brady Bunch boys feel at home, came next. Model cars, textbooks, and baseball trophies still lined the dresser and shelves. And I bet I could’ve bounced a quarter on the quilted coverlet tucked around the twin mattress.
“Was this your room?” I asked Barrett, knowing full well he and his sister had come to live with their grandparents after their father had been killed.
Barrett grunted something that sounded like an affirmative.
But the room didn’t look occupied now.
“I don’t see your duffel,” I said.
Barrett, however, didn’t respond.
He led the way into a cheerful room fresh with autumn air breezing through the open window. Yellow rosebuds decorated the wallpaper. More perked up the comforter and shams heaped on the white iron bedstead. Mrs. Barrett had even placed a skinny vase of real late-season blooms on the old-fashioned oak dresser. In bright orange and hot pink, zinnias dressed in Queen Anne’s lace greeted me much more joyfully than Barrett had.
“This was Elise’s room,” he said.
It was the first voluntary comment he’d made all morning.
“It’s lovely,” I told him.
He turned to leave.
“Barrett, the sheriff says there’s nothing wrong with Eric Wentz.”
Barrett halted in the doorway, but he didn’t turn to face me. “Go home, Jamie.”
And just like that, he was gone, striding down the hall and jogging down the stairs.
I hustled after him, stuck to his trail as he cut through the house and into the kitchen.
Mrs. Barrett turned from puttering in the sink—and pretending she wasn’t listening for any snatch of conversation between her grandson and me.
“Adam, Kayley and I have to open the shop soon, but—”
Barrett blew past her and out the back door.
I followed him, and behind the house, I found a brief deck and a deep yard. Flowers for cutting were dying at the edge of a small vegetable garden. I could just spy the edge of the driveway where it curved before arcing toward the big red barn. An outbuilding, painted the same sunny yellow as the house, sat at the apex of the curve. At one time, it might’ve been a carriage house. From the look of its double-wide door, I’d have said it had been converted into a garage during the last century, however.
A wooden staircase clung to the side of the structure. It led to a landing on the second story. Barrett jogged up the steps, bumped his way through a whitewashed door up there.
Without waiting for an invitation, I did the same.
For all intents and purposes, the space above the garage appeared to be a one-room apartment. On the floor, braided-rag rugs in every color under the sun mapped out where different domestic activities should take place. On an enormous oval rug, an armchair and mismatched loveseat kept close company in a kind of sitting area. A small runner ran the length of a tiny kitchenette. And in an alcove of its own, a wide bed with cannonball posts boasted rag rugs on each side.
The place would’ve been endearing, really. Except Barrett had made a mess of it in the few days he’d stayed here. Discarded clothes and crushed beer cans littered nearly every horizontal surface. Dirty dishes grew crusts in the kitchenette’s sink. On the bed, a Lone Star quilt lay in twists as if Barrett had tossed and turned in his sleep before spending last night in the jug.
“Barrett,” I said, “what’s going on?”
Without acknowledging me, Barrett began to strip off his clothes. He hauled his filthy sweatshirt over his head, dropped it on the floor. He kicked his boots to the corner and discarded his socks.
And then he shucked his trousers.
If I’d ever wondered whether Barrett preferred briefs or the mystery of boxers, here was the answer. Boxers, charcoal gray knit and riding low on his hips, didn’t do a thing to hide the multitude of scars along his side. They were crazy crescents, souvenirs of his time in a war zone when shrapnel had torn into him like so many shark’s teeth.
And his body bore evidence of his recent surgery, too. His left leg was thin, the musculature atrophied from weeks in his cast. But most noticeably, a new scar, thick and red, four inches long and as fat as a night crawler, wiggled its way along the outside of his thigh where army surgeons had put his bone back together.
A spiral fracture, the doctors called it. Because the heavy bone had been twisted like a madman twists the neck of a chicken. It had splintered as a result. Worst of all, this had happened because of me. Because Barrett had had my back when plenty of other folks would’ve been happy to see me dead.
As a result, I owed him—whether his grandmother had asked me to check up on him or not.
Not that Barrett was
giving me much of a chance to pay him back.
Like I wasn’t even there, he plowed past me and into an adjacent bathroom. Flicking on the light, he slammed the door in my face. I grabbed the knob, turned it. It didn’t budge. Because Barrett had locked it.
I heard the shower snap on. And I tried not to imagine Barrett—with his amazing muscular body—naked under the spray. Instead, I told myself to get busy snooping through his things.
I searched Barrett’s duffel bag and the dresser’s drawers, inspected the loveseat’s cushions and the kitchenette’s nooks and crannies. I checked every crevice in the armchair and even shifted the mattress from its box spring. To my relief, I didn’t find what I was looking for.
And what was that?
Drug paraphernalia.
Vance McCabe, I was certain, had a drug problem. And during the course of the morning, I’d begun to worry that Barrett, too, had developed a problem in the weeks he’d stayed with me. Because when he broke his leg, his army docs had prescribed plenty of prescription-strength painkillers. As medically necessary as they may be, pills like Percocet and Vicodin can be addictive. Maybe he’d turned to Vance to acquire some self-medication.
That would certainly explain his erratic and aggressive behavior.
But just because I didn’t find any drugs didn’t mean I was done searching for explanations.
A rotary telephone predating the Vietnam War squatted on the desk against the far wall. Under it lay the Fallowfield phone book. The directory was as skinny as a cheap magazine and a far cry from the fat tome that contained Washington, D.C.’s phone numbers.
I snatched it up, flipped to the M section—and found at least two dozen McCabes listed in its pages. None of them sported the first name of Vance or even the first initial V. Still, I scanned each notation, but the street addresses and county roads meant nothing to an out-of-towner like me.
Before I could hunt up the name of Eric Wentz, the shower cut off. The bathroom door banged open and Barrett emerged—in jeans this time—with a damp towel looped around his neck. His shaggy blond hair was dark with wet and it curled at his nape and at his ears. He bypassed me, began digging in the duffel I’d heaved onto the bed. He found a tatty flannel shirt in the bottom of it, shoved an arm in the sleeve.
“Look,” I told him. “Your grandmother’s worried about you. Tell me what’s going on between you, Vance, and Eric Wentz, and I’ll soften it up for her.”
Barrett tossed his damp towel at the bathroom doorknob. It missed by a mile, landed on the floor. He didn’t pick it up.
“I’m worried about you, too,” I said, and could feel my face heat with the admission. “If you’re in trouble, I don’t want to leave you here in the middle of it.”
Outside, a horn honked twice. Barrett barreled through the door. I followed, froze on the landing. A pickup truck that had seen better days idled in front of the garage. It might’ve been a bright butterscotch color at one time. Now its paint job had faded to the shade of a butternut squash and its body was patchy with rust. Through its windshield, I spied Vance McCabe at the wheel.
Barrett climbed into the truck’s passenger side. Away they went, tires spitting gravel as Vance stomped on the accelerator. And across the lawn, I saw Miranda Barrett hovering on the threshold of the house’s back door.
I shambled down the stairs, crossed the yard to meet her.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “He won’t talk to me. But he’s out of jail now and the sheriff isn’t charging him—”
She seized my hand with both of hers.
I tried to ignore the fact she was trembling.
“So,” I said, forcing a cheerfulness into my tone that I certainly didn’t feel, “it looks like my work here is done. I’ll grab my suitcase and be on my way—”
“Please, Miss Sinclair. Don’t go.”
“It was nice to’ve met you.” I swallowed hard, choked back my own frustration. “But I don’t think there’s anything I can—”
“Stand by him.”
Her words pricked my conscience.
Because since the day I’d met him, Barrett had stood by me time and again.
Still, I shook my head. “I’d like to help, but—”
“Then do,” Miranda Barrett insisted. “It’s as simple as that. Will you help him, Miss Sinclair? Will you stand by him?”
Hesitating there, on the doorstep of Barrett’s boyhood home, with his elderly granny clinging to my hand and blinking at me with her cornflower eyes, I knew I wouldn’t respect myself in the morning if I walked away now.
That left me with only one thing to say.
“I think you’d better start calling me Jamie.”
Chapter 5
I left Miranda Barrett with every assurance I’d stand by her grandson. Of course, to do that, I’d have to catch up with him first. So I retrieved my Beretta from the trunk of my car, tucked it beneath my jacket where it belonged, and drove into Fallowfield, bent on finding out more about who Barrett became when he came home—and what Vance McCabe and Eric Wentz might have to do with it. If I’d had any sense, however, I wouldn’t have stopped. I’d have kept going. Back to the highway. Back to D.C.
Back to the rest of my life.
Instead, I ended up cruising through the heart of Barrett’s hometown as the autumn sun soared high in the sky.
Fallowfield’s Main Street turned out to be a wide boulevard running right through the middle of the little burg. The avenues jutting from it on both sides were as regular as the lines on a grid until they crowded up against a rushing stream on one side of town and a jumble of railroad tracks on the other. The streets were named for the nation’s Founding Fathers—and for fruit trees.
The town wouldn’t be mistaken for an epicenter of financial prosperity, but it seemed to be doing all right with its credit union, hardware store, and secondhand shops. On the corner of Main and Pear, I even spotted a diner. But it wasn’t just any diner. The chrome lines framing its picture window were straight out of the Art Deco era. And the painted letters on the glass spelled out THE APPLE BLOSSOM CAFÉ—exactly as they had on Sheriff Rittenhaus’s travel mug.
I slipped into a parking space across from the place, locked up the Jag, and pushed my way through the diner’s swinging door. The scent of strong coffee met me on the threshold and the fragrance of frying bacon drew me on. Along a lunch counter that had probably stood there since the Hoover administration, old men in canvas barn coats and John Deere caps chowed down on soup and sandwiches while they chewed the fat with one another. In a deep Naugahyde booth off to the side, a group of young mothers gossiped over chef’s salads while their infant offspring enjoyed applesauce. And at a chrome-edged table, two travelers with backpacks and well-worn hiking boots slurped spaghetti from plates piled high with the stuff. Everyone in the place took turns sending the strangers surreptitious glances. And the second I set foot on the linoleum, every head swiveled my way.
I felt the locals take my temperature as I moved to the lunch counter, slid onto a stool. Not far from a pair of big Bunn coffeemakers, a pedestal cake plate held a deep round of chocolate cake aloft. The sight nearly gave me goosebumps.
I righted the thick stoneware mug sitting in front of me on a paper placemat and freed my flatware from its tightly rolled napkin. A woman with plenty of coppery curls spilling from the clip on the back of her head and a crisp, clean barbeque apron that hinted at curves cuter than mine materialized across from me. She poured me a steaming cup of coffee, scooted a tiny pitcher within my reach. The cream inside looked like the real deal, but it had been too long since I’d seen the good stuff. I added a drop of it to my mug anyway and tasted it.
It was heavenly.
“What can I get you?” the woman asked.
“A slice of that chocolate cake,” I said, though my waistline wouldn’t thank me for it. “And a little information.”
In some small towns, this request could be the kiss of death. The citizenry of tight-knit communities might g
abble about one another—but they’d clam up the moment a stranger tried to join the conversation. And in this diner, without a hat on my head advertising farm equipment or a baby in tow, I definitely stood out as a stranger.
My waitress’s scowl confirmed this. “Well, you can have the cake, at any rate.”
She moved down the counter, cut me a thick wedge. Her hands were fast and efficient and I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of the long knife she wielded.
When she slid the slice in front of me, I said, “My name’s Jamie. I’m in Fallowfield because a friend of mine is pretty worried about Eric Wentz.”
“Does this friend of yours have a name, too?”
“Yep.” But I’d offered all the information I intended to hand out for free. “Do you?”
“I’m Charlotte Mead,” she replied. “I own the Apple Blossom Café.”
We shook hands over the Formica.
And then she said, “This friend of yours wouldn’t be Adam Barrett, would it?”
Caution flared within me. “Do you know him?”
Charlotte laughed. Her good humor crinkled around her olivine eyes, set something in them alight. And I suspected I’d made a friend.
She said, “Everybody knows Adam. Half the girls at our high school were crazy about him.”
This should’ve come as no surprise. From the moment we’d met, I’d seen the way women reacted to Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett. A New Jersey waitress had hurried to touch up her lipstick when Barrett had joined my table unexpectedly. And in a down-and-out town called Webster’s Trench, an overblown gas station cashier had actually drawn him a map to her place while I’d stood at his side. Barrett hadn’t paid these attentions any mind, but at the time, they sure stuck in my craw—and were my first hint I had feelings for him myself.
“So,” Charlotte said, “you’re the one who finally caught him, huh?”
My face flamed. “I wouldn’t say that. I’m just here to help him out.”
The Kill Box Page 4
