“That’s a great idea,” McKenzie said. “I can check into it.”
“You’ve got enough on your plate, with the wedding and all,” Eliza said. “Why don’t you let Wyn and me organize it?”
She wanted to tell Eliza they would have to schedule it before the second week of August, when she would be moving to Boise, but now wasn’t the time for that grand announcement. She hadn’t even told her family yet and didn’t intend to until some of her plans were a little less nebulous.
“Sounds good to me. Just let me know when to be there.”
“Definitely. We’ll spread the word to everyone who might be interested,” Eliza said.
The conversation shifted, as these things did, to children and grandchildren and vacation plans.
“How are the wedding plans, anyway?” Barbara Serrano asked McKenzie a few moments later.
“Fine, I suppose. I’m not panicking yet. I have to get through Lake Haven Days and the wooden-boat festival first and then I’ll start stressing about the last-minute wedding details.”
“You know we’re all here to help,” Wynona said.
“I do. And I’ll probably use every one of you.”
She would be leaving for Boise just a few weeks after McKenzie’s wedding. Maybe by then, she wouldn’t be so conflicted about the idea.
“That was a heavy sigh,” Andie said in a low voice. “Is everything okay?”
The concern in the other woman’s voice touched her. She had been right about Andie. She was a sweet, compassionate woman with a kind heart. Wyn didn’t want to lie to her but she couldn’t confide in Andie without telling everyone and she wasn’t ready for that yet.
“Fine. Just fine,” she said with a forced smile. “How are things with you?”
“We’re starting to settle in. It’s only been a few weeks but so far I’m very happy with our decision to move here. Everyone has been so kind to include us in things and help us feel part of the community.”
“Haven Point is a nice place. I told you so.”
Andie smiled, though the light of it didn’t quite push away those lingering shadows in her gaze.
“Where are my favorite adorable little urchins?” Wyn asked.
“They were hanging out here with Jazmyn and Ty Barrett for a while, then they all got bored and begged to go to the park down the street. Letty Robles agreed to take them.”
“The woman is a superhero,” Devin said. “Talk about saving the day.”
Letty Robles was housekeeper to Cole Barrett, Devin’s fiancé, who was a single father of two very cute kids in their own right, Jazmyn and Ty.
“I’m sorry I won’t have the chance to say hello to any of my favorite children,” Wyn said with real regret. “I’m due back at the station in about twenty minutes.”
“Then let’s see how many ornaments we can finish before then,” McKenzie the bossy taskmaster ordered.
She would miss all of them, even McKenzie and her whip-cracking.
A river couldn’t stay the same, year after year, and her life couldn’t either.
* * *
WYN CHECKED HER watch as she parked her patrol vehicle and headed into the police-department offices, in back of the large, graceful city hall with its historic clock tower.
At certain moments when she pushed open the door to the office, she felt as if she had traveled back in time.
When she was a girl, she loved to ride her bike to the library next door on summer afternoons, then stop to see her father after she had checked out her books. If things were slow at the Haven Point PD, she would sit on his guest chair and chatter to him for an hour or more—about the books she had found in the stacks, about her current annoyance with Wyatt, about any trouble she might be having with friends, about her favorite television show.
He had been such a good father, always acting as if he cared, never letting on he might be bored with a discussion about her crush on one of the members of a certain boy band.
John would have been proud of her, working here in the police department he had given so much of his life to—and ultimately given his life for.
She hadn’t come to work here until after his brain injury, when she felt as if her job in Boise was just too far away for her to be a help to her mother. She wasn’t sure just how much her father understood after his injury. He hadn’t been able to talk, though she was almost certain he smiled when she would talk to him about working here.
What would he have thought about her recent decision to leave and start a new chapter of her life?
A few weeks earlier, she might have worried Charlene would feel abandoned by her departure. She supposed that wasn’t as much of a concern now, with Uncle Mike in the picture.
Mike.
Her mother and Mike Bailey were indeed dating. Twice the week after Marsh’s party, she had stopped by the house and found him there both times. Finally Sunday, Charlene had gathered her, Marsh and Katrina together to announce it rather defiantly. She had then burst into tears and run out, leaving Mike to face them all amid enough awkwardness to fill Lake Haven several times over.
Wyn still didn’t know how she felt about it. The concept still seemed so strange to her but Cade’s words returned to haunt her several times over the last few days.
He was right. Her mother had cared selflessly for her father for more than two years, putting her own life on hold to make sure John felt as happy and safe as he could with his diminished mental capacity.
She loved her mother and she had always adored her kind uncle Mike. If they had a chance for happiness together, Wyn didn’t have the right to begrudge them that.
That didn’t mean she was ready to throw a party for them yet but she was working on it.
On her own time, she reminded herself. Right now she needed to focus on work.
She headed into the station and any lingering angst about her mother and uncle flew right out of her head when she found Cade leaning a hip against her desk, his arms crossed.
Her heart rate kicked up and nerves danced through her. He was every inch the tough, dangerous lawman—but that didn’t stop her from remembering just how sweet and tender his mouth could be on hers.
“There you are.”
She blinked at the hard edge to his voice.
“I radioed in that I was taking lunch.”
“You did. More than an hour ago.”
“An hour and five minutes ago,” she pointed out. And ten minutes of that time had been spent giving a warning to the out-of-state driver of a big RV that had been parked in front of a fire hydrant, despite the red-painted lines.
Okay, she was late. Until the last few weeks, Cade had always been the best kind of boss but since she’d been back from her suspension, their interactions had been stiff, awkward, tense affairs.
Even after she had been able to make an arrest in the vandalism case that had taken up entirely too much of the department’s time, his reaction had been muted. Forget that she had worked her tail off and finally ended up searching through the garbage can of Jimmy Welch’s mother’s house, where she found empty spray-paint cans that matched the color used in the graffiti—with Jimmy’s fingerprints on them.
Cade hadn’t even smiled, though the other police officers celebrated with her, and Jesse Fisher even brought in a bowl of her favorite gelato from Carmela’s.
Another reason she knew she had made the right decision about graduate school.
“What’s going on?” she asked now.
“Carrie Anne’s babysitter called and one of her kids was throwing up so she had to take off,” he said, referring to their receptionist, a divorced single mother trying her best under difficult circumstances.
“Oh, I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“A stomach bug, as far as Carrie Anne can tell.
But I just got a call about a domestic dispute at the marina and Cody is out helping Jim Buttars round up a bunch of dairy cows that broke down a fence in his pasture and are wandering through the neighborhood. I need you to hold down the fort here.”
“I can take the domestic disturbance.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got it. I’ve been in meetings all morning and could use a little excitement. You know how to reach me.”
Did she? That was a big part of the problem. She knew his phone number by heart and how to call him on the radio in half a second flat but she had no idea how to really reach him.
He took off without another word and after a moment, she plopped down at her desk. For a summer afternoon during the busiest time of year, the phone was surprisingly quiet and she decided to use the downtime to catch up on paperwork that had piled up since her suspension. It wouldn’t hurt to clean things out in preparation for leaving.
An hour later, she finished organizing her own files but decided to clear out some of the old folders in her desk, cases dating back to before her time, when this had been Cade’s desk.
It was surreal to see her father’s handwriting on some of the paperwork, his bold, no-nonsense scrawl. Again, she had that odd sensation of walking back in time, as if she could go knock on the door to the chief’s office and find him in there puzzling over a case or talking on the phone to a witness.
She had to smile a little as she leafed through the mostly closed cases of parking violations and a few drunk and disorderlies. Hmm. Most of these should have been filed a long time ago and she felt guilty that she hadn’t gone through the drawer before this.
The majority were dated in the weeks just before and just after her father had been shot, when everything here was understandable pandemonium while the Idaho State Police investigated the officer-involved shooting and the subsequent death of the shooter, Joseph Barlow, a drifter who decided to rob the local liquor store at gunpoint for gas money to get him to the next town.
While her father had been fighting for his life, Cade had been named interim chief and probably hadn’t had time to organize some of his old paperwork.
She could have handed the work off to Carrie Anne when her kids were healthy again. But since things were slow and her own work was caught up, she decided to take on the task. It was kind of interesting anyway, encountering names of townspeople she knew on old files, and there was a definite sense of satisfaction in putting a little order to the chaos.
She reached the bottom of the pile when she found it.
At first when she saw the name Ronnie Herrera on the form, she thought it was another drunk and disorderly. Ronnie could be a great guy but he didn’t hold his liquor well. She had broken up more than one bar fight at the Mad Dog where he had been involved.
As she read further, though, her insides seemed to turn to a block of ice.
Impossible. It must be some mistake.
By the time she reached the end of the form—a witness report, actually—the ice seemed to have crackled out to fill the rest of her.
What was this, and why had it been tucked away under other incident reports in a drawer of Cade’s old desk?
She had read every single scrap of paper in the case file about her father’s shooting. The state police had investigated it thoroughly—when a police chief was shot and severely injured and the suspect in turn shot by another officer, every stone had to be turned over.
She had never read this particular witness report, though. She was sure of it. Was it possible she missed it somehow?
Her copy of the documents in her father’s case file was at home—it somehow had seemed important for her to have a record of the cataclysmal event that changed so many lives—but the original would be just a few feet away in the file cabinets.
On impulse, she made a copy of the witness report for her own duplicate of the official case file, then found the original. She was carrying both to her desk when—naturally—Carrie Anne’s phone rang.
She pushed the buttons to pick it up on her desk extension. “Haven Point Police Department. Officer Bailey speaking.”
“Hello, Officer Bailey. This is Detective Warren from the Portland Police Department. How are things in your little corner of Idaho this fine afternoon?”
Maybe it was the result of her lingering turmoil from Ronnie Herrera’s confusing witness statement, but she took an immediate dislike to the detective’s smarmy, falsely jovial, brothers-in-arms tone. She checked the caller ID to verify it did have a Portland area code.
“Fine. Quite busy today. How can I help you, Detective Warren?”
Some of her curtness must have trickled through the phone line. The detective paused for a moment then spoke in a tone that was markedly cooler. “I’m doing an ATL on a person of interest in a case I’m working and got a tip this week that she might be in your area. I’m wondering if you can point me in the right direction.”
Typically, the Haven Point PD tried to cooperate with other jurisdictions but something about the detective set her on edge. She didn’t want to assist with his attempt to locate but since she was the only one in the office, she didn’t know how she could avoid it.
“Haven Point has nearly six thousand residents. I’m afraid we can’t know every single person in the city limits but I’ll help you if I can. Do you have a name on this person of interest?”
“Yeah. She’s a pretty redhead by the name of Andrea Montgomery. She might also go by her maiden name. Andrea Packer.”
Wyn froze, suddenly on alert.
Oh Andie. What kind of trouble are you in?
“Hmm. Montgomery or Packer, you said?” She did her best to stall for time while she tried to figure out how to play this.
“Yeah. There’s a chance she could be using another alias entirely. She would be new to the area, probably within the last month or so. She’s also traveling with two children, a boy who’s four but small for his age and a girl who is six.”
Who the hell was this detective and why was he looking for Andrea? Was this man part of the reason her friend had been so jumpy?
“Whatever name she’s going by,” the man went on, “she’s about five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds, with red hair and green eyes. No tattoos, but she does have a small scar at the corner of her mouth, left-hand side, maybe half an inch long.”
How would this detective know Andrea didn’t have any tattoos? Wyn wondered, all alarms now firing wildly.
“I’m sorry but I’m afraid I can’t help you. That doesn’t ring any bells for me,” she lied. “Like I said, we can’t know every single person in town. What makes you think she might be in our jurisdiction? Does she have family here? If so, I can check with them to see if they have any clues to her whereabouts.”
“No. No family there. She has a...business connection, but it’s tenuous.” Frustration crackled through the phone line.
“If you want to send us her mug shot and jacket, I’ll let the police chief know. We can certainly keep an eye out for her.” She tried to keep her voice calm and even, hoping he couldn’t hear the hard suspicion in it.
“She doesn’t have a mug and she’s never been arrested before, so she doesn’t have a rap sheet.”
She did her best to play along. “A slippery one. I get you.”
“I do have a snapshot I can shoot you. Do you have an email address?”
“Yes. But first, let me jot down your particulars. What was your name, precinct, phone number and badge ID, just so I can pass it along to my chief? He’s a bit of a hard-ass about that kind of procedure.”
She had no problem throwing Cade under the bus in this situation, even though her words weren’t strictly true. Cade ran a tight house but not to the point of obsession—except when the rule violation involved her disobeying direct orders or the chief of police engaging in ex
tracurricular activities with one of his officers, anyway.
Again, he hesitated slightly and she had the distinct impression Detective Warren would prefer not to divulge all that information but couldn’t avoid a direct question.
He recited his necessary identification, which she wrote down carefully.
“Got it. Go ahead and send me what you have and I’ll pass it along to my chief and the rest of the department so we can be on the alert.”
She gave him a department email address she knew Cade didn’t monitor. Until she had a chance to talk to Andrea, it might be better to keep this information to herself.
“You should have it within the hour.”
“Great. We’ll be sure to get back to you if anything pops.”
“Thanks.”
“You mind telling me why you’re looking for her?” she asked, trying to weave her question ever so casually into the conversation. “If we’ve got some kind of a dangerous criminal mastermind in our midst, we would really like to know so our department can be on alert.”
Again, he hesitated almost imperceptibly. When he spoke, that smarmy, ingratiating note had returned. “I’m afraid I can’t talk about it. You understand. It’s an ongoing investigation and I’m not ready to reveal my hand just yet.”
Which both of them knew was cop code meaning he didn’t have diddly—if there even was an investigation.
“Anyway, it’s only speculation at this point,” Warren went on. “I’m just looking to have a conversation with the woman. But I have to find her first.”
Wyn really needed to have that conversation first. The only way she could help Andie was if she knew what was going on.
“You go ahead and send me that photograph. Meanwhile, I’ll pass this information along to my chief and let him take it from here.”
“Chief Hard-Ass,” he said, in that jovial tone that grated down her spine like a room full of fingernails scraping down blackboards.
“That’s the one. You’ll hear from me, either way.”
“Thank you for your help, ma’am. I’d like to get down to your neck of the woods someday. I hear it’s beautiful.”
Riverbend Road Page 20
