by Paula Graves
“I don’t know. All I thought about at the time was how empty my life would be without my friend,” Isabel admitted. “I can find out—I have cousins in the Sheriff’s Department. If the evidence still exists, I should be able to find it there.”
“What do you think the key unlocks?”
“There are bus stations in Maybridge and Gossamer Ridge, train and bus stations a county over in Borland—also a regional airport there, but I don’t know if they offer locker storage.” Isabel looked down at the key. “I can check when I get home.”
As soon as the words slipped from her mouth, a sharp pain settled in the center of her solar plexus. Within twelve hours, she would be headed back to Gossamer Ridge. Scanlon would have to remain dead to her, as far as anyone outside her family knew.
There was no guarantee she’d ever see him again.
Scanlon ran his fingers down the curve of her jaw. “It’s going to be okay, Cooper. I promise.”
She shook her head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
He dropped his hand away. “What do you think you’ll find in the locker if you can locate it? Any idea?”
“I don’t know. But he gave the locket to me a little while after Annie died. He said she’d want me to have it.”
“Could the key belong to Annie?”
“Maybe.” It was a logical conclusion. Occam’s Razor—Annie’s locket, Annie’s key. “I don’t remember ever seeing her wear it, though. Or talk about it. She talked about her grandmother all the time but never mentioned the locket.”
“Would her mother know?”
“Sure. She’d know.” Isabel hadn’t talked to the Lewises since they’d left Gossamer Ridge after Annie’s death. But Mrs. Lewis’s sister still lived in Borland—surely she’d know where Mrs. Lewis was now. “I’ll track down where Mrs. Lewis is now. But I can’t help but believe Trey meant me to find whatever this key unlocks. Maybe he had proof the Swains were behind Annie’s murder. Or some other evidence to bring them down.”
“You’re going to be busier working my case than I am.”
“It won’t be as dangerous for me, though.” She touched his knee. “I wish I could check on you, make sure you’re okay.”
He looked pained. “We can’t risk regular contact.”
“Okay. But if you need me, find a way to reach me.”
“I will,” he promised.
She squeezed his knee. “What time are you supposed to be at the feed store this afternoon?”
“Around one. Addie said she wanted to give me a little orientation before she left for the barbecue.”
“Orientation?” That didn’t sound good.
“Not sure what that means, either,” he admitted. “Maybe she’ll just show me how to run the cash register or something.”
She placed the key between the wings of the locket and snapped it shut, then fastened the chain around her neck. “Did Brand tell you what time the extraction team is coming for me?”
“We’ll meet the agents at eight-thirty.”
They fell silent. Isabel didn’t know what Scanlon was thinking about, but her mind was racing through a dozen different scenarios that all seemed to end the same way: Scanlon dead and Isabel grieving him.
So many ways his investigation here could go wrong. So many places the Swains could hide his body where it might never be found. So many ways he could exit her life again, permanently, and not a damned thing she could do about it.
She’d been living the nightmare of losing Scanlon for six months already. It had felt like a bleak eternity.
How could she bear it for a lifetime?
* * *
AFTER A SHOWER, Isabel had spent her morning cleaning up the cabin, her restless energy exhausting to watch. Scanlon had tried to tell her to leave things be, but she just told him to mind his own business.
“It’s keeping me from going insane,” she’d said, moving him out of the way so she could tackle the kitchen sink.
So he backed off and let her work, while he gave some thought about just how armed he needed to be for his afternoon at Tolliver Feed and Seed.
The problem with Halloran County was that the place was run, for all intents and purposes, by the Swain family. The sheriff was a Creavey, and most of his handful of deputies were either Swain cousins or extended family members of the non-Swains who helped run the methamphetamine production and marijuana farming operations.
The town of Bolen Bluff wasn’t even incorporated, so what little government existed came by way of the Halloran County Commission, which consisted of three Swain relations and an outsider so cowed by the Swains that he usually skipped the commission meetings altogether. Might as well, since anything the Swains wanted to do would be passed, and anything they objected to would be voted down anyway.
“They’ve kept things how they want it by staying small,” Scanlon explained to Isabel, as he finished dressing for his afternoon at Tolliver Feed and Seed. “They don’t transport much out of this general area, at least not directly. They don’t go after outsiders as a rule, and the Alabama Bureau of Investigation has too much on its plate to worry too much about local thugs killing other local thugs.”
“Then why are they so suspicious that you could be a fed?” She held out her hand out for the comb he’d just picked up from the dresser and motioned for him to sit on the edge of the bed.
He let her comb his hair while he answered. “They’re always suspicious. If they weren’t worried I’m a fed, they’d be worried I’m from a rival operation the next county over, looking to horn in on their territory.”
“I wonder why one of them would become a bomber for hire, then,” she murmured, her expression intent as she groomed him.
“If it’s J. T. Swain setting the bombs, he may have done it in conjunction with the SSU rather than his family business.”
She stepped back to take a look at her handiwork. “Hate to admit this, Scanlon, but I think I like your hair a little longer. The scruff isn’t bad, either.”
He made a face. “It’s harder to keep the scruff neat than it is to just shave. But I don’t want to be recognized.”
“Who’d recognize you here?”
He mentally chided himself for the slipup. “Nobody. I just meant if anyone who knows me happened to pass through. Which isn’t likely to happen, since nobody just passes through Bolen Bluff. If you’re here, it’s for a purpose.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re so suspicious of you. You chose to come here when Bolen Bluff is more the kind of place a person chooses to leave.” She played with a strand of his hair in the front, trying to smooth it into place. “What story did you give them for why you came here?”
“Said I couldn’t work at the sawmill anymore with my bad hand. Couldn’t stick around Texas to be reminded that my woman had left me for another man.”
“Poor sad sack.” She stroked his face lightly. “No wonder Dahlia was all over you like glue. Women can be suckers for a fellow down on his luck.”
“Is it working on you?” he asked lightly.
She smiled. “Nah. I know you too well for that kind of stuff to work on me.”
He felt a stab of guilt in the center of his chest. There were many things about him that Isabel didn’t know at all. Like the story of his first eight years of life, how he and his parents had lived right here in Bolen Bluff. How he’d gone to school with some of these very people, people who looked at him now and didn’t remember the boy he’d been twenty-five years ago.
He’d changed a lot—he was one of those rare people who didn’t look a thing like his childhood photos. Even with his hair cropped short and his face shaved clean, he looked very little like the round-faced boy with crooked teeth and glasses who’d been the butt of every joke at Halloran County Elementary.
Strangely enough, it had been a Swain relation who’d been his only friend. Jamie had been a skinny, freckle-faced redhead who should have been the butt of a few jokes himself. Only later, when he understood
the influence of the Swains on Halloran County, had Scanlon realized just why Jamie had escaped the teasing and bullying.
Scanlon hadn’t seen his friend around Bolen Bluff since he’d been back. He hoped Jamie had escaped before this place had corrupted him completely.
“Okay, you look presentable.” Isabel set the comb on the dresser. “Do you have any idea what you’ll be doing today at the feed store?”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to snoop around a little.”
“They might have some sort of surveillance set up—”
“No,” he said firmly. “This much I know about the Swains—they eschew technology like that. Too afraid it might fall into other people’s hands and reveal their own crimes. They do their surveillance the old-fashioned way—break in while you’re not home and snoop, or else station someone nearby to watch your every move. Hopefully, they’ve come to trust me enough not to put someone there at the shop to watch me.”
Isabel frowned. “Promise you’ll be careful, Scanlon. Don’t get overconfident. This is more likely a test of your intentions than a show of faith on their part.”
“I know. Believe me.” He stood and crossed to where she leaned against the dresser. “I’ll be back here before you know it, Cooper.”
“And then it’ll be time to say goodbye.” She looked so sad it made his own gut tighten with pain.
“It’s better this way. You know it is. And you can follow up on that key. Maybe you’ll find a way to connect the Swains to the bombing that killed your friend. It could bring their whole operation crashing down on top of them.”
“And send you back to D.C. to the FBI.”
He stroked her hair, quelling the fierce urge to kiss her. “The FBI will take you back. You know they will. It could be just like before.”
She shook her head. “It can’t go back to the way it was before. Not after last night.” She looked up at him, as if trying to read his thoughts. He kept his expression guardedly neutral, not ready to commit to anything outside of the emotional status quo he’d maintained for so long.
He had never let himself get involved in long-term relationships while working for the FBI. He’d told himself it was because he didn’t have the time or energy to devote to someone outside of his job. But how much of his reluctance came from his desire to devote every available second to his quest to find his father’s murderers?
And how much of it, asked a quiet voice in his head, was that those other women you dated weren’t Isabel Cooper?
He had to leave the cabin at twelve-thirty in order to be early for his one o’clock appointment with Addie Tolliver. Isabel walked him to the front door of the cabin and rose to her tiptoes, stopping him from opening the door. “Remember what’s waiting here for you if you manage to come back safe and sound,” she whispered before kissing him so thoroughly his whole body hummed like a tuning fork.
He made it to the cab of the truck and belted himself in, glancing toward the front of the cabin. He couldn’t see her in the reflective windowpanes, but he felt certain she was standing just inside, watching him leave through the narrow space between the curtains.
He felt the pull of her as surely as he could feel his own heart pounding a cadence of regret in his chest.
* * *
IF IT HADN’T MEANT SAYING GOODBYE to Scanlon for God only knew how long, Isabel would have been eager to get out of this cabin and back into the world. She felt stifled by the forced inactivity, the limited confines of the cabin’s walls and, for the most part, Scanlon’s bedroom.
There were too many memories in this particular room, she thought, her gaze drifting helplessly to the bed where she and Scanlon had made love the night before.
It had been everything she’d imagined it would be—passionate, thrilling, joyous and even sweet at times. Thinking about how often they’d denied themselves that pleasure in the past made her want to throw things. Breakable things.
When the clock clicked past one—the time when Scanlon’s shift at the feed store started—she realized she had to find some way to occupy her restless mind or she’d go mad. She’d been reading the files in the portfolio Scanlon had put together until the lines seemed to run together, but outside of the locket revelation that had come from finding Trey Pritchard’s name in the files, she’d learned nothing new.
Scanlon hadn’t said she couldn’t use the laptop computer while he was gone, had he? Maybe she could ping one of her siblings and see what was happening in Chickasaw County.
She moved aside the loose floorboard in the closet and retrieved the laptop and the smartphone. But as she was pulling them out of the small opening, the smartphone bumped the floorboard and skittered out of her hand, sliding deeper into the hiding spot.
“Damn it!” She set the laptop on the floor beside her and leaned down to reach farther into the cubbyhole. Her fingers brushed against something hard inside, but when she wrapped her fingers around the object, it was larger and heavier than a phone. She tugged it out of the hole and discovered she was holding a clear flat plastic storage box about the size of a thick notebook. Inside lay a thick stack of papers.
She unsnapped the fastener that held the box closed and looked through the papers inside, her brow furrowing as she saw that most of the pages were photocopies of newspaper articles from twenty-five years ago, from a variety of different Alabama newspapers. But they all detailed the same story: a sheriff named Bennett Allen had been gunned down in his own driveway in the tiny Alabama town of Bolen Bluff.
Bennett Allen, Isabel remembered. That had been the name of the sheriff who’d taken a barrage of bullets not long after he’d put Jasper Swain behind bars.
She’d come across Allen’s story while trying to connect the recent bombings to Jasper Swain through the bomb signatures, but she hadn’t dug much deeper. Bennett Allen had died by gunfire, not a bomb. He had been a footnote in her research, not a focus.
But apparently to Scanlon, Bennett Allen had become more than a focus, she realized as she flipped through the papers and discovered they all had something to do with Bennett Allen’s murder. His death was apparently an obsession.
There were old autopsy reports, ballistics, evidence lists, crime scene notes—everything a detective might have pulled together if he were attempting to solve a cold case.
Was Scanlon trying to find Bennett Allen’s murderer? Was that the real reason he’d agreed to go undercover in the midst of the Swains?
She set the plastic box aside just long enough to retrieve the fallen cell phone, then grabbed the box, the phone and the laptop and carried them all into Scanlon’s bedroom. Setting up in the center of the bed, she powered up the laptop and typed Bennett Allen’s name into the web search engine.
She kept narrowing her search until she found just a handful of mentions, mostly posthumous. One of the more informative of the bunch came from a website run by Appalachi-Watch, a nonprofit, self-styled anticrime watchdog focused on aggregating stories of drug smuggling among the poor and insular mountain clans who still lived in parts of the Appalachian Mountains.
Even their mention of Bennett Allen was mostly cursory—a rather overwrought obituary to the man’s bravery in bringing down the head of the Swain crime family. The account included the heartbreaking detail that Allen was murdered in front of his eight-year-old son, Bennett Allen Jr.
The hair on the back of Isabel’s neck prickled. Bennett Allen Jr. Ben Allen Scanlon was Scanlon’s full name. With the “Allen” spelled just like that.
Son of a—
She went back through the newspaper accounts, looking for details. One of them, an article from the Fort Payne Times Journal, included a photograph taken at the sheriff’s funeral. The shot was focused on a young boy of eight, with dark, buzz-cut hair and light-colored eyes gazing seriously at the camera through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. If he had been in the photograph alone, Isabel didn’t know if she’d have recognized her partner.
But the woman standing next to him,
holding his hand and weeping, was definitely Scanlon’s mother, Reva. She had aged well over the twenty-five years since her first husband’s murder. She hadn’t looked much different the last time Isabel had seen her, standing at the graveside while they said goodbye to whatever pile of dust SAC Adam Brand had arrange to be buried in Scanlon’s place.
Isabel closed her eyes, overwhelmed by a contradiction of emotions. Sadness for her partner, who’d lost his father in a horrible way, right in front of his eyes. Anger that he had been her partner—her best friend—for seven years and never once let on that the man he called Dad was his stepfather.
And fear. Perhaps fear most of all. Because if Scanlon hadn’t told her this one most vital of details about his life, what else had he been keeping from her? Was everything she thought she knew about him a lie as well?
Chapter Fifteen
The sounds of the barbecue filtered through the open door of Tolliver Feed and Seed, drawing Scanlon’s attention toward the street, where bright daylight washed out Main Street until it looked like a skeleton bleaching in the sun. Addie Tolliver had been lucky; the day of Leamon’s birthday party had turned out to be sunny and warm, with temperatures rising into the low eighties by early afternoon. Most of the townsfolk who drifted past the feed store were dressed in shirtsleeves and shorts, even some of the men.
There would be a few folks in town who refused to make an appearance, but they were outsiders in Bolen Bluff now, no matter how long their families might have lived here. The Swain family owned the town, like it or not.
Addie hadn’t given him many instructions before she headed out to the party, perhaps because she knew that anyone who might have wanted to shop today would be at the party. He didn’t know whether or not her invitation to fill in this afternoon was an overture, as he’d hoped, or just a sign that Addie knew any warm body holding down the fort would do.
Davy had said a bluegrass family was coming in to town to play for the event, and sure enough, Scanlon could hear the sound of banjos, fiddles and mandolins wafting in on the warm breeze, pounding out a lively reel.
