Come Back Home Again (Hope Valley Book 2)

by Jessica Prince

  I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, “Good deal, baby.”

  It was only a couple days away, but already I was giddy with anticipation.

  “Sounds good.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “Yeah. I’ll let you get back to your girl. Have a good day, angel.”

  “You too, honey. Be safe and catch some bad guys.”

  The last thing I heard was the masculine rumble of his laugh before he disconnected the call.

  I put the phone back on the table and looked up at Rory. “Wanna help me pick out a dress for my date Saturday night?”

  Hayes

  “Fuck me. How’d you manage to get a reservation at The Groves only a couple days out?” Trick asked. “That place is booked out at least two months in advance.”

  I looked across our desks and leaned back in my chair as I looked to Trick. “Sometimes being the town’s golden couple pays off.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he chuckled. “You’re tellin’ me the love story of Hayes and Temperance spread from Hope Valley all the way to Hidalgo?

  “Owner grew up here,” I answered. “I dropped our names and he was just about ready to boot someone else to give us a table.”

  He shook his head good-naturedly. “So I’m guessin’ that means things between you and your girl took a serious twist in the last twenty-four hours. Gotta say, you work fast.”

  He had no idea. It might seem like it happened fast, but I’d been waiting for her for twenty-one years. As far as I was concerned, this was long overdue.

  “What can I say? We worked our shit out.”

  “I’d say so, droppin’ the kinda cake The Groves requires on your first date. I’m happy for you, man.”

  I could see he meant it, he was genuinely happy for me, but there was a dullness in his eyes, a reminder that, while things in my life might be looking up, his was currently on a downward spiral. I knew Trick almost better than anyone. He was a man of action, a fixer. If something was wrong, he felt it was his job personally to make it right again. But it was becoming more and more apparent this wasn’t something he was going to be able to fix, My gut clenched. I felt for my brother, but all I could do was hope his wife pulled her head out of her ass and realized what she had right in front of her before it was too late.

  He stood and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. “Going on a coffee run. You need anything?”

  “I’m good. When you get back, let’s head out to Cherise Henderson’s place. Her dad’s belongings have been released, and I wanna get those back to her. Maybe seein’ his stuff will shake something loose.”

  “You got it.”

  As soon as Trick left, I picked up my phone and dialed.

  “Sheppard,” Lincoln answered after the second ring.

  “Hey, brother, it’s Hayes. I got a job for you or one of your guys. You put someone on this and I’ll pay whatever you want. But I need this looked into, and I need it done fast.”

  “This have somethin’ to do with a certain brunette’s car bein’ parked outside your place all night long?”

  For fuck’s sake. “Look, you’ll have plenty of time to gimme shit about this another day, but right now I got a case that needs solving ’cause it’s already taking me away from my woman when I only just got her back last night, so I don’t have time to dick around. I need this done so I can concentrate on her and not a dead body. Can you do this for me or not?”

  Cutting to the point, he said, “Tell me what you need.”

  I shared everything Tempie had revealed to me earlier that morning about the note and what it said. “I need someone to look into her life back in Chicago.”

  “What is it you want me lookin’ for?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, rubbing my forehead in frustration. “Any connection to her life in Hope Valley.”

  There wasn’t a single ounce of humor in his voice as he asked, “You think someone planted that note to get her outta the house?”

  “I can’t be sure. All I know is Hope Valley’s only had three murders in more than two decades. The first were directly tied to her, and the last happened almost the exact same time she came back. I think it’s too much of a coincidence that she found it the same night her folks were killed. The puzzle pieces aren’t even close to linin’ up, but something’s not sitting right with me. Someone knew what went down at that party, and my gut’s telling me that they also knew Tempie was about to forgive me. I have a real bad feelin’ about what I know now. Someone played us, Linc, and I wanna know who. Those twenty-one years are a black hole of information.”

  “I’m on it,” Lincoln replied instantly, his voice like granite through the line. “And it’s not gonna cost you shit.”

  “No marker on this one,” I proclaimed. “For this, I’ll pay.”

  “The hell you will,” he returned. “And it’s not gonna cost you a marker either. If what me and my boys find leads to somethin’ as ugly as you’re suspecting, it’s gonna be all hands on deck. This one’s on me.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Besides,” he said, his tone shifting again, “you’re gonna need all the money you got. It’s been a while for you, brother, but women like nice things. That means the shithole you’ve been livin’ in has to go.”

  Dropping my head, I rubbed at the back of my neck. “You done?”

  “For now,” he shot back. “But I’m guessin’ it’s only a matter of time before word spreads to Eden and her girls, so the shit about to be piled on you hasn’t even begun to start. Brace, man. Those girls are hell on wheels when they’re together, and they’ve officially brought your woman into the fold.”

  “Fuckin’ brilliant,” I grumbled, but the truth was, if teaming up with those women gave Tempie a strong network of friends that tied her even tighter to Hope Valley, I’d write each and every one of them into my goddamn will.

  “Gotta go,” Lincoln said. “Got calls to make and contacts in Chicago to reach out to. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

  “Thanks. Talk to you later.”

  “You know it.”

  He disconnected and Trick returned with his coffee. Five minutes later, we rolled out of the station on the way to visit Martin Henderson’s daughter.

  Cherise Henderson was in her late forties, and thanks to a lifetime of heavy smoking, hard liquor, and being bitter toward the world, she looked at least half a decade older than that. The woman’s disposition matched her father’s, meaning she was unpleasant on good days and a downright pain in the ass on bad ones. But the fact still remained, her father had been killed and she deserved some answers.

  “Detectives,” she greeted through a plume of cigarette smoke after opening the door of her run-down house in a not-so-nice area of town. “To what do I owe the honor? If you’re stoppin’ by to tell me your thumbs are planted up your asses and you still don’t know who murdered my dad, you wasted a trip. I already knew that.”

  Brushing off her snide remark, I kept my tone civil as I asked, “May we come in?”

  Rolling her eyes, she stepped to the side and waved us in with a hand that contained a tumbler of bourbon. It was barely after noon, and it was already clear by the way she smelled and her bloodshot eyes that this wasn’t her first drink of the day.

  We stopped just inside the entryway, and I placed the box I’d been carrying on the dust-covered table inside the door. “We’re sorry it’s taken so long, but your father’s personal effects were finally released and we wanted to return them to you personally.”

  Her demeanor changed as she stared at the box. Everything that had been on his person or collected as evidence and came back clean was inside.

  The hardness suddenly washed out of her expression, revealing the pain she had hidden beneath. Her face took on an unnatural pallor, and the shaking in her hands had nothing to do with the alcohol as she reached out and removed the lid.

  Trick and I remained silent as she started sifting through the b
ox’s contents, giving her the time she needed to process everything she was feeling.

  She removed Martin’s wallet a minute later and flipped it open. “This is everything?” she asked, looking up at us with wide, glassy eyes.

  “Yes,” Trick answered. “We went through the inventory to make sure it was all accounted for before bringing it to you.”

  “Something’s missing.”

  My back went straight, every instinct in me going on red alert, and I could feel the same energy radiating off Trick as well.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “There was a picture,” she stated, flipping the wallet toward us and pointing to the empty bill section. “My dad always carried a picture of him and my mother in his wallet, always.”

  “You’re certain?” I asked, taking a step closer. The wallet had been found in the jeans he was wearing, but there had been nothing inside when we looked.

  “Positive,” she cried. “It was right here.” She stabbed her finger back at the wallet.

  “Maybe whoever it was grabbed the photo when he took the money,” Trick mused, but I could tell by his tone that he wasn’t so sure.

  Cherise shook her head frantically. “He didn’t keep his money in that part. That was for the picture only. He stuffed the cash the credit card slots.”

  Fucking hell.

  “I’m tellin’ you,” she continued, growing frantic, “he never, ever took that picture out. Not since the day she died. I even got him a new wallet for his birthday one year a long time ago, you know, one that had those picture flap thingies? He tore the flap out and put the picture in the same damn bill section.”

  “Have you been inside your father’s house recently?”

  Her chin pulled back in surprise at my question. “I—no. I haven’t been back. I can’t—” Her throat bobbed on a thick swallow.

  “Do you still have a key?”

  “Well, uh, yeah,” she answered in confusion. “Why?”

  “If you’ll allow us access, we can do a sweep for that picture. Is that something you’d be okay with?”

  She pulled her hands in front of her and squeezed the wallet to her chest, hesitating for a second before nodding.

  She gave us the key, and we left a minute later with the promise to let her know right away if anything turned up.

  Later that afternoon, Trick and I, along with a couple patrolmen, combed every square inch of that house, coming up empty. The photograph Cherise had described was nowhere to be found.

  “I got a bad feelin’ about this,” Trick stated a while later as I maneuvered our department-issued car through downtown Hope Valley. “Didn’t make sense before, takin’ the money out of his wallet then putting it back in his pocket. Now this?”

  I’d felt a deep, nagging unsettlement since leaving Cherise’s place. “He took a trophy,” I muttered.

  “It’s lookin’ that way.”

  That meant how we’d gone about investigating the case so far had just been turned on its head. This was no longer a one-off. If the killer really did take a trophy with him, we’d been looking at this all wrong.

  And I had a sick feeling gnawing at my stomach, telling me things were about to get even worse.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Temperance

  The sound of twigs snapping and leaves crunching put me on red alert. He was here. Somewhere in in these woods the shadow man was lurking, waiting. My breathing became labored as my heart rate spiked, alerting me to the threat that was near.

  The cold penetrated my coat, quickly seeping through my skin down to my bones as I looked all around, trying desperately to make out the shadows dancing through the woods in the faint moonlight filtering through the trees.

  A second later, he stepped into view, the man with no face, and I turned on my heels and ran. I ran so fast my lungs burned. I ran so hard my legs felt they’d give out. I ran like my life depended on it, because I knew to my soul that it did.

  My lips parted, and I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

  And just like that, the woods surrounding me disappeared. Everything fell away in the blink of an eye, and I suddenly found myself standing on the front stoop of my house.

  The front door was partially open, the light from inside streaming out onto the porch in a long, straight line, like a path that would lead me to something terrible. My stomach dropped and my hand shook uncontrollably as I slowly reach out to push the door the rest of the way open. Everything about this was wrong. It was the dead of night. The door shouldn’t be open, the lights shouldn’t be on. When I left more than an hour ago, my parents had both been asleep. Had they woken up and discovered me gone? Were they frantic with worry? What was going on?

  “Mom?” That one word came out broken, in a barely-there whisper. “Dad?”

  I stepped over the threshold into the foyer. Every molecule, every cell in my body screamed for me not to go inside, but I had to find my parents.

  “Mom? Are you awake?”

  The floorboards creaked ominously beneath my feet as I slowly made my way deeper into the house.

  I saw the first pool of blood just outside the family room, and when I reached the entry and turned to look inside, my lungs completely deflated and I had to brace against the frame as my knees almost gave out.

  Blood coated the family room floor, so much blood it nearly covered every inch of the large rug. The walls were streaked with it, bloody handprints were smeared along the coffee table.

  My parents stood near the far wall with their backs to me, but I could see bloodstains all over their night clothes. “Mom? Dad?” My voice trembled as I watched them both turn in my direction. It was as if I just stepped into a scene from a horror movie. My parents were ghostly white, their eyes vacant and completely blank. Ghastly knife wounds riddled both their bodies everywhere, yet they were still standing.

  “Where were you?” my mother asked in a voice that I barely recognized. “Where were you Tempie?”

  “You could have saved us,” my father spoke. “You could have saved us, but you weren’t here. You left us.”

  “No,” I breathed, my eyes going wide and filling with tears. They took a step toward me and I automatically moved back. “Daddy, please.”

  My mother’s cold, terrifying voice sent a chill down my spine. “You left us and look what happened.”

  “Mommy.” I began to cry as my body went cold. “I’m so sorry.”

  “This is all your fault,” Dad continued as they kept coming closer.

  “All your fault,” Mom repeated.

  “All your fault.”

  Then she shrieked so loud my eardrums nearly burst. “All your fault!”

  I shot up in bed, sucking in a painfully sharp gasp. My cheeks were soaked with tears, my body with sweat as I pulled in one breath after another, trying to get my lungs to function properly.

  Pulling my knees to my chest, I wrapped my arms around my legs and curled into a tight ball, trembling and rocking back and forth and the dream left me and reality slowly crept back in. “It was just a dream.” I said in a shaky voice. “It was just a dream. Just a dream.”

  The minutes ticked by one after another before I was finally able to release my legs and sit up straight. That was the absolute worst of my recurring nightmares, and usually it stayed with me all day long after, making it nearly impossible for me to function at all. But that wasn’t an option today. I wasn’t going to allow it. These had been some of the best days I’d had in longer than I cared to admit. Everything had changed once Hayes and I found our way back to each other.

  He was busy with his case, but that didn’t mean he didn’t text and call with regularity, and every time my phone chimed, my body ignited with excitement.

  I refused to allow a nightmare to ruin that for me.

  Not anymore. Not now that I finally remembered what it was like to feel happy again.

  Climbing from my bed, I took a second to make sure my knees were steady before m
oving into the bathroom and turning on the shower, and as I waited for the water to heat, I looked at my pale reflection in the mirror and proceeded with my pep talk. “You can get past this, Tempie. It was just a nightmare. It wasn’t real. You’re going to be okay.”

  And as I climbed into the shower and tried my hardest to scrub those horrid images from my mind, I told myself that everything was going to be okay.

  Hopefully I’d come to believe it.

  I wound my way through the headstones, mindful of where I stepped as I made my way to where my family laid. This marked my third visit to this cemetery, the only other two being when I put my loved ones to rest.

  “Hey, Aunt Reenie,” I spoke softly, crouching down to place my fingers on the cold granite marker. “I know I haven’t come to visit you, and I’m sorry about that.” I sniffled and rubbed my glove-covered hand beneath my nose. “You probably already know this, but I’ve decided to stay. I’m home again, Reenie, and this time I’m not leaving.” A little smile tugged at my lips, and I gave my head a shake as I recalled all the times she needled me about needing to come back home. “I’m sure you’re happy. At least I hope you are.” I pulled in a deep breath before adding, “I’m taking real good care of Stargazer and Cat for you. I’m sure Cat would disagree if she could talk, but she gets her food every day, so I don’t know what she’s always complaining about. She’s a pain in the ass, but I think I’m actually starting to like her.”

  Lifting my hand, I placed a kiss to the tips of my fingers before pressing them to the stone once again. “I miss you so much, but I know you’re better off now. And you’re with Mom and Dad. I hope you guys are having fun.”

  I had no doubt they were. I could still remember how often the three of them laughed and joked around together. Mom and Reenie were as close as two sisters could possibly be, and I knew they were happy to finally be together again.

  Standing from my crouch, I moved to the single marker a few feet away that was for both my parents, and lowered to sit on the cold, hard ground. This one was going to be much harder, and no matter how I tried to psyche myself up for this, I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel completely ready to put a voice to the pain I’d been feeling for so long.