Grave Risk

by Hannah Alexander

  He hesitated. “Thought I’d see if you wanted to come out for coffee. Maybe even breakfast down at the bakery. They’ve got some pretty good popovers.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Yeah, you know, as in coffee and food? Old friends talking over old times?”

  She studied his expression for a moment. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was lonely. “I have some breakfast casserole sitting in the fridge. I was going to try it this morning and see if it’ll work for an overnighter I’m going to with some friends.”

  “Is that the one with Doris, Peggy and Sherry?”

  Jill blinked in surprise. “Where’d you hear about it?”

  “Jed Marshall told me the other day before he stopped speaking to me.”

  “He isn’t speaking to you?”

  Austin shook his head. “You girls are planning the class reunion, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, whatever you do, try not to seat me with the Marshalls. I’m not exactly their favorite person lately.”

  “Why not? Did you and Jed get into some kind of argument?”

  Austin hung his head and fingered the rim of his hat. “Guess you could say that. I heard tell you asked about an autopsy for Edith.”

  Jill frowned. “You’re getting around a lot.”

  “I hang out at the old haunts. Nothing ever changes around here. Or, at least life and gossip don’t change. Say, why don’t you hop into some clothes, then hop into the truck? Tell you what, we can go down to the bed and breakfast. Bertie’s at least speaking to me.”

  She sighed. “Would you like some of my breakfast casserole? It won’t take long to bake, and my coffee will brew quickly.” She stepped back and gestured for him to enter.

  He hesitated for a moment, then smiled and stepped in. “That sounds good to me.”

  He glanced around the sitting room with apparent appreciation. “You always were good with color and decorating and such. I was going to talk to you Wednesday at Bertie’s after the funeral, but you weren’t there for long.”

  “It was a busy day. I still can’t stop thinking about Edith.”

  “I know. Neither can I.” He placed his hat on the bentwood hall tree at the foot of the stairs, and followed her into the kitchen-dining room. He glanced around the room. “You’ve done a lot with this place since your grandparents lived here.”

  “It needed some updating, and I enjoyed the remodel. Noelle helped me.”

  “Then I’m surprised she didn’t hang my picture up somewhere on a wall for target practice.” Austin’s voice and expression failed to deliver the lighthearted tone he was no doubt aiming for. It had always hurt him that Noelle resented him. In fact, Austin had always had a need to be liked. He covered it well most of the time, but Jill had known him before he had the techniques perfected.

  He wandered around the room, glancing out the bay window that overlooked the flower garden in the backyard.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” Jill turned on the oven. Austin was making her nervous. Not that that was a new experience for her these days.

  He nodded, but continued looking out the window. “You can see Edith’s house from here if you look between the two oak trees in your neighbor’s backyard.”

  Jill pulled a small baking dish of egg casserole from the refrigerator. “I used to watch for Edith’s porch light to come on when I was a little girl, staying with my grandparents. I would always walk down to her house, and she would serve me milk and freshly baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.”

  “Did you go for the cookies and milk, or just to talk to her?”

  Jill took some juice glasses from the cupboard, and some mugs for coffee. “I went for the hugs. I loved to sit on her front porch swing and chatter away about my day.”

  “I can’t forget about how Ramsay shot her cat.” Austin’s voice suddenly held all the horror with which he had first discovered the news about his son. “She found the little thing right there on her front porch.”

  Unfortunately, Ramsay’s past behavior had become public knowledge. Everyone remembered the day Ramsay had offered to take Cheyenne to pick up some things for the Hideaway festival two years ago. Instead, he’d taken her to an isolated creek and tried to drown her, in full view of Dane, Blaze and Austin, who were tipped off and coming to the rescue.

  “I’ve never gotten over the shock, Jill.” Austin’s voice was rough with emotion.

  “I know that.” Though she had never heard him admit his feelings so openly.

  “I needed to apologize again to Edith about her cat.”

  “You apologized to her about that. I remember, because she told me.”

  He looked at her. “I needed to do it again. Selfish reasons, but I needed to do it.”

  She nodded. She understood. Sometimes she felt as if she could never apologize enough about the mistakes she had made in the past that had hurt others. If she’d had a child who had tried to kill someone, that guilt would scar her for life.

  “You ready for coffee?” she asked, holding up the pot.

  He pulled out a chair at the dining-room table and sank into it as if he had done a hard day’s work. “Sounds great. Smells good, too.”

  She reached for the mugs she’d taken from the cabinet. “Austin, is everything okay?”

  He sat frowning at the table for a moment, not answering.

  “Is Ramsay doing any better?” she prodded.

  The heaviness of grief—something she easily recognized—drew down his once-handsome features. “Ramsay’s struggling, Jill, but he’s…he’s going to be okay. He needed a lot of counseling, and a lot of love. He’s getting it.”

  She frowned at the catch in Austin’s voice. Something else was on his mind.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The squeak of the old, wood-framed glass door of the barbershop put Rex in mind of the Mayberry RFD episodes he used to love watching on television. In fact, quite a few things in this town put him in mind of a simpler place and time, where neighbors sat out on their porches in the warm, late-summer evenings and waved at friends who cruised by, or walked or rode bicycles. Many more rode bicycles on these quiet streets than he’d seen in any other town.

  Now he understood why Hideaway, Missouri, had so many visitors. Some locals predicted they would soon surpass Branson in visitors per capita, especially in the autumn when the craft show and antique sales were held. He wasn’t sure he believed that. Hideaway was too compact to carry that kind of load.

  Still, there was something…so quaint, yet so gentle about this place, where the antique stores abounded on the square, and more shops radiated from the central municipality. Old things brought back memories of times that seemed simpler, their sharp edges dulled by the passage of years.

  People still did show interest—even if, at times, too much interest—in the welfare of their neighbors. It was simply the way of small towns, and yet this town had that little something extra that set it apart. The interest shown was often kind, not voyeuristic—not much, anyway.

  Why was it that darkness often attempted to outpace the light? Hideaway was one of the most charming places he had ever visited, but from what Rex had learned this week, ugliness, deception and death had also haunted the local hollows.

  Dane Gideon sat in the barber’s chair, getting his gray-blond hair trimmed. When it was safe to move his head, he gave Rex a friendly nod.

  “I hear you’re whipping our clinic into shape, Dr. Fairfield.”

  The eyes of the other men in the shop, including Frank, the barber, and Cecil Martin, turned to him with interest.

  “It’s already in excellent shape. Cheyenne’s done a good job.”

  “Too bad,” Dane said. “She doesn’t particularly like directing. She just wants to be a doctor. I don’t suppose you’d consider settling around here and taking over the reins eventually? Then maybe I’d get my wife back for a few extra hours a week.”

  The other men chuckled. “Wish my wife would spend
a little more time out of the house,” one man said. “Then maybe she’d stop griping about all the hours I like to fish.”

  “It’ll only get worse, Dane,” Frank said. “You should’ve thought about that before you talked her into starting the clinic.”

  “Now, Frank,” muttered Cecil, “What do you think she came to Hideaway for? Certainly not for the company.”

  The other men chuckled again, and Rex picked up on the forced tone of their laughter. He saw Dane watching Cecil with affection and concern.

  Rex knew the clinic staff had been almost as concerned about the effect Edith’s death would have on Cecil Martin as they were about the effect on Jill and Bertie.

  As the men continued to joke with one another, discussing everything from the price of beef to the abundance of rain this summer, Rex felt a wave of longing to belong someplace again. He traveled so much, and felt so detached from his former life, he thought he’d learned to deal with his loneliness.

  He’d discovered that, after all, he couldn’t help a certain need for connection. He thought about his stepsons and felt the familiar ache of loss. Their father had abandoned them for another woman. Did they feel their stepfather had also abandoned them?

  “Dane,” one of the men said from behind his newspaper, “I heard you and Austin are good buddies now.”

  “Did Austin tell you that?” Cecil asked the man. “Since when did you ever believe anything he said?”

  “Heard tell he paid the Gideons a call at the ranch, and there seemed to be a lot of handshaking and backslapping going on.” The newspaper man chuckled. “Never thought I’d see that man pay the boys’ ranch a friendly call.”

  “That’s what he did,” Dane said.

  “Our former mayor’s acting awfully strange, if you ask me,” the newspaper man said. “He spends a lot of time just sitting down by the dock, watching the boats go by and looking all hangdog. You want to tell me when that man’s ever been droopy like that?”

  “I guess if your son had tried to murder the town doctor, you’d be a little long-faced, too,” Cecil said. He glanced at Rex. “Doc, a couple of folks have asked if you were seeing any patients while you were in town.”

  Rex felt the sudden attention of the others in the room. That seemed to be a popular subject this week. He shook his head. “That isn’t my job anymore. I’m strictly here as a consultant for the hospital.”

  Cecil shrugged. “Too bad. There’s lots of men in these parts who’d sure like to stay local for their doctoring, but they get a little squeamish with a woman.” He glanced at Dane. “No offense intended to your wife, boss.”

  “No offense taken,” Dane said. “As long as I don’t tell her what you said.”

  “I don’t suppose Austin told anybody anything about his plans, did he?” Frank asked, dragging the subject back to the former mayor.

  “Seen him steppin’ up onto Jill Cooper’s front porch on my way here this mornin’,” said the man behind the newspaper. “You knew they was sweethearts back a few years ago.”

  Rex felt more than a twinge of discomfort.

  “That was high school, you old coot,” Cecil said. “Ancient history.”

  The coot shrugged and the paper rustled. “Could be Austin’s thinkin’ of settlin’ back down in these parts, maybe lookin’ for somebody to settle with.”

  Rex looked up to find Dane’s gaze resting on him as Frank removed the protective cape from his shoulders with a flourish.

  “Cecil, you’re next. Hop on up here. I’ve got a busy practice. You snooze, you lose.”

  Jill refilled Austin’s mug as the aroma of baking breakfast casserole filled the kitchen-dining room.

  “You’ve always been a good cook,” he said, nodding his thanks for the coffee.

  He still drank it black. Jill didn’t know if he drank it that way because he believed a real man should take it straight, or if he really liked it that way. With Austin, it had always been hard to tell.

  Insecure at heart—and a little boy whose father had been an abusive hypocrite of a churchgoer—Austin probably didn’t know what he liked and what he didn’t.

  His formative years had been spent trying to placate his father and avoid beatings. His adult years, from what she could tell, had been spent attempting to please the rest of Hideaway so he could make a name for himself. She had a suspicion any name besides Barlow would have made him happy. Now he had new reason to be ashamed of the name.

  “So, Austin, did you manage to sublet Grace Brennan’s apartment?”

  He nodded. “I sure did. I have that pretty little gal, Fawn, to thank for giving me the heads-up on that. Grace’ll be on the road for at least a month, and she has her condo in Branson, so her mother, Kathryn, told me I could keep the place as long as I stayed in Hideaway.”

  “You plan to stay in town for a while, then?” Jill asked.

  Some of his usual bravado slipped from his expression. He blinked, and she thought she saw apprehension there. “I have a feeling that isn’t going to be up to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He swallowed another gulp of coffee. “Didn’t I hear that Rex Fairfield is a doctor? You know, the guy working with Cheyenne to bring the clinic up to standard?”

  “He was.” Obviously, Austin didn’t want to talk about personal things.

  “Was?” he asked.

  “Rex doesn’t practice medicine now. What do you mean, ‘it won’t be up to you’?”

  “Once a doctor always a doctor, unless he’s had his license revoked for some reason.”

  “He hasn’t. Austin, are you in some kind of financial bind?”

  He tried with obvious effort to let the old Austin slip back into place, grinning and leaning back. His movements were wooden and awkward. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ve saved enough for a rainy day, and I’m not completely out of the real estate business. Work like that gets into a fella’s blood.” He set the cup down. “Need some help setting the table or something?”

  She reached for plates. “No thanks. I can get it.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You like to do things just a certain way, don’t you?”

  She winced. She knew he meant nothing by that. In fact, when they were dating, he hadn’t been aware of her struggle with OCD. In those days, the problem hadn’t yet been named, and most of her classmates hadn’t even realized there was a problem.

  If Jill were honest with herself, she wouldn’t have been aware of it, either, if not for Noelle’s astuteness, and for the family’s attitude about the curse. Living with a condition like OCD from childhood made it much less obvious than suddenly developing the disorder as a young adult.

  As for Austin, he’d been too consumed by his own home life at the time to take much notice of anyone else’s difficulties.

  He sipped at his coffee and stared out the bay window, more reflective than Jill had ever seen him.

  She sat down across from him. “Austin, won’t you at least tell me, of all people, what you’ve had on your mind since you arrived in town?”

  His gaze played over her face. He raised a hand and covered hers with it on the table. “Do you ever think about the past and things you could have done differently if you hadn’t been such a bumble-headed idiot who didn’t know right from wrong?”

  She withdrew her hand.

  “No, I’m sorry.” He sighed and shook his head. “I didn’t mean you were the idiot. I’m talking about myself, here.”

  “What part of the past are you talking about?” she asked.

  “You name it, I probably blew it. I tried to blame Blaze for those things my son did. Ramsay burned down the barn at the boys’ ranch, which nearly killed Blaze. Ramsay committed all kinds of vandalism. And I blamed the wrong person.”

  “So apologize to Blaze and get on with life. You don’t have to do permanent penance.”

  Austin wasn’t listening. “If I had only realized sooner what was happening. That incident with Edith’s cat? He shot the cat because of a
disagreement Edith and I had during a church business meeting one Wednesday night. If I had only realized…”

  “Austin, how could you? You didn’t know what was going on in Ramsay’s mind. No one did.”

  He leaned forward. “Why did you break up with me when we were in high school?”

  The sudden change of subject startled her. It also alerted her that he might be circling in on the real reason he’d come to visit. “You’re talking about Chet Palmer’s death now?”

  He nodded. “So that was why you broke up. You suspected me, too.”

  Jill was trying to follow his line of thought. Hadn’t she had her own suspicions these past few days about Edith’s death? “I believed you and Junior and Jed were involved in that practical joke,” she said.

  “It was a deadly prank.”

  She noticed he still wasn’t admitting to anything. “Someone just made a horrible miscalculation. I know you never would have done anything like that on purpose. What does Chet’s death have to do with anything now?”

  He held her gaze for a moment, then sighed and returned his attention to the lake. “The thing is, I never could figure out how it happened.”

  “You mean you didn’t plant a stink bomb for Chet to find?”

  For a moment, she didn’t think he would answer. “A stink bomb is a totally different thing from a poison bomb.”

  “Selenium instead of sulfide,” Jill said. “A mistake of ingredients.”

  “As dumb as I was in chemistry, even I knew that selenium would be deadly in that mix. In fact, the selenium was in a different place, entirely. It’s been bothering me all these years.” He spread his hands across the table.

  “Why did you suddenly decide you had to say something about it?” Jill asked. “Why now?”

  He sat staring at his own hands for a long moment, then looked up at her. “I have a good reason to be here, Jill, but it isn’t something you need to worry yourself about. Just let it go, okay?”

  She scowled at him. The old Austin was raising his hard head again. “Just like that? Forget about it?”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up. It isn’t fair to you. You have enough to worry about right now.” He took a deep, appreciative breath. “Something sure smells good. Is that casserole ready?”