sedona files - books one to three

by Christine Pope

  “Sorry, Kara,” he said, and he found he genuinely was. It was times like these when he wished he could kick his scruples aside and take her in his arms and hold her the way he’d dreamed of a thousand times. But he wouldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t do that to her. “I’d feel better if I came along.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug. “Just no cracks that the tourists can overhear, okay?”

  “Is it all right if I think them real loudly?”

  Her only response was a roll of the eyes, but he thought he caught a glimpse of a smile ghosting its way around her full lips. Which meant it was okay.

  So why did he feel as if things were decidely not okay?

  * * *

  After she hung the “Closed” sign on the door at exactly six o’clock, Kara took a detour down to the Gap Outlet in Oak Creek to pick up a few odds and ends for Grayson. She had no idea how long he was going to be around, but she did know that he deserved better than high-water pants and the loudest Hawaiian shirts this side of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It seemed reasonable to pick up a few pairs of jeans, a jacket, some flip-flops. T-shirts weren’t a problem; she had stacks of those back at the house. She’d have to take him somewhere in town to get some real shoes, but that could wait. Right now she wasn’t sure how she was even going to handle parading around town with the guy. Practically everyone knew her, and someone was bound to ask questions.

  She also stopped at New Frontiers to get some organic food to heat up for dinner — veggie quiche, their amazing spinach turnovers — before finally pointing her Prius toward home. By then it was almost seven, and she hoped Grayson wasn’t too worried about what had happened to her. Besides, she knew Gort would be jonesing for a walk.

  All seemed quiet enough as Kara pulled into the garage and parked on the left side. The right side of the garage was sacred to her grandfather’s beloved Indian motorcycle, which hadn’t run in more than fifteen years but which she steadfastly refused to sell. She grabbed the bags of clothes and food and headed on inside, wondering what sight was going to greet her this time.

  The kitchen was still spotless, of course, but otherwise she didn’t see any real evidence of Grayson’s presence. More notably, Gort hadn’t come running to see her, which was even stranger. Normally the dog would be waiting at the garage door, tail wagging in anticipation of his evening walk, which he loved even more than a full bowl of kibble.

  She put the takeout from New Frontiers in the refrigerator and left the bags of clothes sitting on the counter — it wasn’t as if the jeans were going to spoil. It was as she turned away from the kitchen and toward the sliding glass door which opened onto the patio that she realized where Grayson had gone.

  During most of her youth the backyard had been planted with grass that her grandfather stubbornly refused to plow under, even though the hardiest of Bermuda wilted under Sedona’s scorching summer sun. After she inherited the house, Kara had the whole thing rototilled and planted with drought-resistant trees and shrubs, with tasteful groupings of native rock, and a few years ago Michael had come over and spent several weekends constructing a medicine wheel in the far corner of the lot. While she did her best to maintain the yard, during the summer she had a tendency to let things go, and weeds had sprouted here and there. Not anymore. A healthy pile of bindweed and other unsightly scrub was stacked off to one side, and the spots where some of the rocks in the medicine wheel had shifted out of place were now correctly filled in.

  She didn’t have to look far to locate the architect of all this orderliness — Grayson stood off to one side, Hawaiian shirt knotted around his waist. His torso and arms were paler than his face and neck, but he was still pretty stare-able despite that, stomach flat and rock-hard, biceps knotted with muscle.

  He seemed to notice her then, and quickly untied the shirt and pulled it back on. The slanting shadows in the backyard made the light chancy, but she could have sworn he blushed. For the first time she noticed Gort sitting at attention a few feet away from Grayson.

  “Housekeeper and gardener?” she asked, trying to force back some of the heat that had risen in the pit of her stomach at the sight of him half-naked. “Pretty soon I’ll have to start paying you a salary.”

  “Room and board is enough for now,” he said, coming toward her. His posture seemed a little more relaxed now; maybe he was glad she hadn’t done or said anything to give undue attention to his previously half-clad state. “Sorry about the weeds — I didn’t know where I should put them.”

  “It’s all right. There’s a bin around the side of the house I use for composting. But you can leave them for now. Hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come inside.”

  She went back in, both Gort and Grayson trailing behind. The dog pushed past both of them and went to his bowl, which he nudged with a metallic clank when he realized it was still empty.

  “Getting to that, Gort,” she told him, and poured out his cup of kibble. He immediately set to, and she turned to the oven and got it preheating.

  “I’ll have to walk him after he’s done eating,” she said to Grayson, who had been watching from the other side of the counter. “But I’ll start things heating up before that so we don’t have to wait too much longer for dinner.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “Go?” she repeated, and then realized he was asking if she wanted him to tag along on the dog walk. As much as she would have liked that, she knew it would be opening a real can of worms if she went sauntering down the street with Grayson in tow. Sooner or later people would find out she was shacked up with a man who had wandered in out of nowhere, but she preferred to put off that day for a while longer if possible. “Oh, no, that’s okay — I thought you’d probably want to relax after working out in that hot sun all day. Maybe take a quick shower?”

  “Are you saying I stink?”

  His mouth quirked a bit as he asked the question, so Kara guessed he was teasing her. “Not as much as you did when you showed up here last night!”

  She’d thought he’d smile for real at her comment, but instead his expression sobered abruptly. “I hope not.” He ran a hand through his hair, as if trying to gauge its level of greasiness, and shrugged. “I get it. You don’t want to have to explain me.”

  Once again she wondered if she’d stumbled on yet another psychic. Or maybe she just wasn’t used to a guy so capable of picking up on subtext. “Maybe not tonight. It’s been a long day.” Those green eyes suddenly seemed a little too probing, and she looked away from him. Recalling the bag on the counter, she picked it up and handed it over. “Thought you might like some clothes that actually fit.”

  He took the bag from her almost without thinking, but then actually looked into it. Something in his face seemed to brighten, as if that one simple act had helped to reassure him that she didn’t mean to kick him out anytime soon. “Well, I definitely need to take a shower now. Don’t want to put clean new clothes on top of this sweat.”

  “Good idea,” she said, relieved that he wasn’t going to discuss the dog walk any further.

  He flashed a grin at her and headed down the hall toward the bathroom, carrying the clothing with him. Gort let out a little questioning whine, and Kara smiled, too. “Yes, you silly mutt. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  After that, the evening passed normally enough — or at least as normally as it could, considering that Kara still knew nothing about Grayson or where he’d come from. Aside from a complete lack of knowledge as to his past or his identity, he seemed sharp enough. Nothing in any of his reactions or conversation seemed to indicate that he’d suffered any sort of long-term cognitive loss due to his ordeal in the desert. Judging from a few comments he made, she gathered he didn’t know too much about current events or popular culture, either, unless that was just another manifestation of whatever trauma had caused him to lose his memory.

  She really would have liked some wine with dinner, but alcohol was probably n
ot a good idea for Grayson, and it didn’t seem very fair to drink in front of him. So they both had iced tea, and she shooed him out to the living room when he offered to do the dishes. Enough was enough. Maybe he was bending over backward to show how useful he was so she wouldn’t kick him out, but she didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of the poor guy.

  Even now, though, as she told him goodnight and watched him close his bedroom door, she couldn’t keep her mind from ticking away at the problem. Maybe it was long overdue, but she thought she should at least make a call to the Sedona P.D., see if anyone had been reported missing. She wasn’t too worried about tripping any alarms; she knew the chief detective, Lt. Gonzales, well enough. He was a straight-up guy. Had to be, since he’d married her college roommate, Jennifer Morales.

  So she went to her office and shut the door, then picked up the phone. Of course, the Sedona P.D. was a pretty small outfit, all things considered, and she had no way of knowing whether Joe was on duty that night or not. If he wasn’t, no big deal. She’d try again and call him in the morning.

  However, when she dialed the number, it was his voice she heard on the other end of the line.

  “Gonzales.”

  “Hey, Joe, it’s Kara.” Silly of her to feel such a sense of relief knowing he was there. Then again, he’d helped her out more than once in the past — minor stuff, like a break-in at the store that turned out to be the work of some bored high school kids, another time when someone managed to walk out of the UFO Depot with a couple hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise without her noticing.

  “Hey, Kara. What’s up?”

  “Are you busy? Because I can call back — ”

  He let out a not very professional-sounding snort. “Busy? My hottest case is the theft of someone’s riding mower up in Shadow Rock. I think I can spare a minute or two.”

  She probably should have expected that. Sedona wasn’t exactly a hotbed of criminal activity. Most of what went on was petty theft, residential burglary, minor drug possession. “Thanks, Joe. Actually, I was calling to see if anyone had filed a missing-persons report lately.”

  “Why? You find somebody?”

  “More like he found me, but yeah.”

  A note of warning entered Joe’s voice. “Kara…”

  “Come on, it’s me. The guy is harmless. He weeded my backyard for me this afternoon without my asking. What do you say to that?”

  “I think you should ask him to marry you.”

  “Very funny. Anyway, have you heard anything?”

  Joe let out a little chuckle. “Description?”

  “Early thirties, I think. Six foot two, one-eighty. Dark hair. Green eyes.”

  “Sounds like you ordered him from Match.com or something.”

  I wish… “So have you got anyone on file like that?”

  “Let me check.”

  Kara heard a clicking noise on the other end of the receiver that she guessed was Joe looking up the information in a database. Were there really that many missing persons in a town as small as Sedona?

  A minute later, Joe was back on the line. “Here in Sedona, I got nothing, unless you count Mrs. Haskell calling me for the umpteenth time to complain about her husband disappearing to go fishing on the Verde River. Guess that’s not the sort of thing you meant…and anyway, Philip Haskell is anything but a thirty-something stud with dark hair and green eyes.”

  “I never said he was a stud.”

  “You didn’t have to. I heard it in your voice.”

  Kara bit back a sigh and began to regret making the call in the first place. There were other people she could have asked. Then again, Lance was one of the people she looked to when she needed someone to dig into law enforcement data, and right now Lance was about the last person she wanted to know anything about Grayson.

  “Anyway, over in Cottonwood I’ve got a man who got in a fight with his girlfriend and took off. Haven’t heard from him since, but I don’t think he’s your guy, either, because the party in question is Hispanic and five foot eight. No one up in Flagstaff, and nothing down in Camp Verde or all the way over to Prescott. I can check Phoenix if you like.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said absently, her thoughts turning over the information Joe had just given her. Somehow she knew in her gut that Grayson hadn’t wandered here all the way from Phoenix. “I thought I’d check with you just to be sure.”

  “Are you sure everything’s okay, Kara?”

  “Of course it is. You know how careful I am.”

  “True. You have a good night.”

  “You, too, Joe. And tell Jen I said hi.”

  She hung up and stepped away from the desk, arms crossed as she considered what to do next. The call to Joe had been a long shot. At least she knew he would let it alone. After all, wasn’t she Careful Kara? She couldn’t possibly be involved in anything as crazy as letting a stranger with amnesia crash at her house.

  Right.

  Even though the missing-person angle was a dead end, there had to be something, some scrap of evidence that would help to explain the mystery of Grayson’s origins. But he’d wandered in out of the desert with nothing on him, no I.D., no car keys, not a single piece of jewelry, not even a watch. All he’d had was the clothes on his back.

  The clothes on his back…

  Suddenly purposeful, Kara strode out of her office and into the garage. She’d discarded Grayson’s wreck of a jumpsuit out here in a messy pile by the washer and dryer, not knowing what else to do with it. Even now she didn’t relish the thought of picking up the dirty, odorous garment, but there didn’t seem to be anything else for it. Using only her fingertips, she lifted the jumpsuit from the ground and spread it across the top of the washer, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything that might provide a clue.

  The stink of it rose from the rusty, grayish-black fabric, and Kara did her best to breathe through her mouth so she wouldn’t have to smell any more than was absolutely necessary. Nose wrinkling, she turned the garment over, but it just looked like a worn-out jumpsuit. It was stained everywhere, holes worn through the knees and the elbows, and with a jagged tear at the bottom of the left leg where it must have gotten caught on some rocks or been ripped by a juniper branch or something similar. Grayson obviously had gone through hell, whatever had happened to him.

  As she flipped the jumpsuit back over again, a flash of white at the back of the neck caught her eye. It was the tag. Simple enough — it had a stylized American flag and the words “Patriot Uniform Company” woven into the fabric, with the legend “proudly made in the USA” written out below that in smaller type. On the back it said “100% cotton, machine wash,” but below that was a tiny number, so small that Kara had to lift the jumpsuit closer to the bare lightbulb on the wall above the washing machine so she could read it: “23111056.” It must be a serial number of some sort.

  “Gotcha,” Kara said aloud. Of course it was too late to be calling this Patriot Uniform Company, whoever and whatever they were. But she’d look them up online and get the information together so she could call from the shop in the morning. If they were meticulous enough to be weaving a serial number into their jumpsuits’ tags, then there was a good chance they’d have some information stored on who they’d sold the garments to.

  The jumpsuit suddenly seemed too precious to be left lying on the garage floor, so she folded it up the best she could and tucked it into a spare garbage bag before turning off the light and heading back inside. She paused in the hallway outside the room where Grayson lay sleeping, but she heard nothing. Good. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to know about her latest Nancy Drew trick or not. He obviously seemed troubled by the subject of his past, but whether that was because of his inability to remember anything, or whether he actually had begun to catch glimpses of something unpleasant, she didn’t know.

  The phone rang as she was halfway down the hall to her office, and she hurried to pick it up, hoping she’d caught it before it woke Grayson. She g
lanced at her watch. Five minutes after ten. Usually she didn’t get calls at this hour unless there was an emergency. Her heart rate sped up a little as she grabbed the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  “Hey, Kara, I know it’s kind of late, but we’ve been so busy running around that I didn’t really get a chance to call — ”

  “It’s okay, Kiki.” Kara willed her heartbeat to normalize, then said, “So you got into town okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, but the traffic was a nightmare. We didn’t even get to the hotel until almost eight. And then Ginger wanted to take us all out — she is so cool, totally bought drinks for the whole table. And we’ve got the coolest rooms at this Chateau Marmont place — ”

  “Well, that’s good,” Kara cut in, knowing if she didn’t do so she’d probably be subjected to a long description of everything else “cool” in Kiki’s immediate vicinity. “So what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”

  “Seph has to do some wedding stuff with Ginger, and Paul is meeting with some members of the local MUFON group. Jeff said he’d pick me up here in the morning and take me back to his place, since he doesn’t live far.”

  Jeff. Kara was still less than thrilled about the whole thing, but Kiki was an adult. Let her make her own mistakes. Kara couldn’t figure out what the hell her sister saw in that scruffy, anti-social computer hacker. He might be halfway decent if he were cleaned up, but a good haircut and a shave wouldn’t do much to improve his attitude. And there were plenty of presentable young men here in Sedona who would be more than happy to date Kiki, now that she and Adam had broken up, but she was having none of them. Oh, well.

  “Going to do a little hacking 101?”

  Kiki sighed. “Oh, please, Kara, we’re way past 101. But yeah, he has some stuff he really wants to show me.”

  I hope it’s just code he wants to show you, Kara thought. However, she only said, “Well, it’s good you’ll have something to keep you occupied while Seph and Paul are busy. Doing the same on Saturday, then?”