He drained the rest of the coffee from his mug and set it down. “She knows something. She has to. There’s no other explanation.”
“Serena was…
“What?”
“She was talking a lot of gibberish last night.” Tammie got up from the table. “Do you mind if I make another pot of coffee?”
“I could use another,” he said. “Did you talk with her?” As Tammie tossed the old coffee grounds and placed a new packet of coffee in the machine, she recalled the events in Serena’s room.
“Not really,” she finally said. “She was having a nightmare and was pretty out of it. It woke the whole house up. She kept crying over and over, ‘They’re stealing babies.’”
“Babies?”
“Yeah. It didn’t make any sense.” With the coffee-maker filled with water, Tammie hit the on button and sat back down.
“I’ll admit I didn’t expect her to be like that,” Dylan said. “I didn’t expect any of this.” He said the last part quietly, looking out the window into the campground.
Some of the other campers were starting to rise, making their way out of tents and building campfires.
“Do you think Cash skipped the country?”
“Cash? No way.” He laughed, but it held no humor. “He’s not the type to run from trouble. In fact, he’s more the type to go straight into it with both guns cocked. Cash doesn’t run from trouble. He runs to it.”
She raised an eyebrow.
He responded to her look by repeating, “Cash doesn’t run from trouble. He runs to it.”
“Did anyone see Cash here in town? I mean, if he came here to help Serena, someone might have.”
“If they did, they’re not talking.”
Tammie thought of her parents, and the strange way they were behaving in the last months before their deaths. “Then what?”
He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “I’m afraid to even think sometimes, but it’s hard. He was in trouble. And for someone to have it in for him enough to do the kind of damage they did, bringing in the drugs, making sure the DEA had him as a suspect, they’d have to be pretty heavily connected to organized crime. I hate even thinking of him caught up in that. It’s the kind of thing he’d fought against in his job.”
“How do you think Serena is connected to Cash?”
“I think Cash was in love with her—is in love with her.”
Her breath hitched. Had Dylan already given up hope that his brother was still alive?
“Yeah, I know,” he said, misinterpreting her reaction. “But a relationship with Serena is the only thing I can figure. He never mentioned her at all. Not until the last day I saw him. It’s like he was giving me a message that day. A riddle of some sort that he wanted me to figure out. Except hard as I try, I can’t.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t he just come out and tell you what was going on?”
“He said he was afraid for her. She was in danger and he had to get her out of here. The look on his face...”
“He never mentioned why?”
“No. I was so bowled over by the drug-trafficking charges at that point and what to do about them—how to prove his innocence— that I didn’t pay it much mention. I warned him about coming out to Eastmeadow, since he was on bail and he didn’t need added trouble. He assured me it was going to be fine and that it was only going to be for a day or two.” Dylan looked out onto the campground, regret etched in the lines of his face. “I should have come with him.”
Dylan abruptly got up from the table and picked up his half-eaten plate of eggs. She hadn’t done much better on her plate. He tossed his paper plate into the trash and stood by the camper door.
“What do you really think happened, Dylan?”
“I thought maybe Serena had something to do with his disappearance. But after meeting her, seeing how out of it she is, I think he stumbled into someone’s territory and they didn’t like him being there. He’s not one to back away easily just because someone intimidated him. I know you’re skeptical about his innocence.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve read the expression you gave me many times. No one thinks he’s innocent. But I know better. He never would have disappeared to get out of punishment if he was due. And he never would have let someone else pay bail like that and then leave them hanging. If he doesn’t come back, Serena Davco will owe the bondsman one million dollars.” Dylan sighed. “Something happened to him that kept him from coming home. In my heart, I don’t want to believe it. I don’t even what to think of the possibility. But I think he’s... I think he’s dead.”
He turned to her then, and she saw the pain in his face at the thought that his beloved brother was gone. She knew that feeling all too well.
“You have a ray of hope I don’t have,” she said delicately.
“Meaning?”
Tammie wiped the toast crumbs from her hands onto her plate and then picked it up and tossed it in the trash along with the plastic-ware. She busied herself pouring another cup of coffee before turning around.
“You have hope of finding Cash. Maybe alive. I know it looks bad now. But you have to keep your faith he will be found alive. Somewhere. And when you find him, you’ll have the answers you’re looking for.”
He stared at her for a moment, and awareness flashed across his face.
“You were talking about your parents when you said I have hope that you don’t.”
With the coffee cup in her hand, Tammie pushed through the camper door to the outside. A blast of fresh air hit her face, and she breathed deeply. She hadn’t realized how claustrophobic she’d been feeling inside. Walking to her car, she leaned against it and took a sip of the hot liquid.
It took a minute, but Dylan followed her outside, holding a cup of freshly poured coffee in his hand. Tammie didn’t look at him as he approached. Instead, she watched the people who were milling about. Some had towels draped over their shoulders as they headed toward the pond. Others were dressed in jogging clothes and were just out for a quick morning power walk. They nodded good morning as they walked by, but no one was really paying attention to them.
Dylan didn’t say anything to her, as if he were giving her space to make up her mind about whether or not she wanted to talk. And she did want to talk. To someone who would listen to her without judgment, as Dylan had done with her. But it was still hard. She’d spent so long trying to listen to Bill and believe his words were true, even though deep in her gut she thought otherwise.
“I don’t remember telling you about my parents,” she finally said.
“You didn’t tell me directly. You mentioned to Aurore they were killed.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes, in a boating accident, nearly two years ago.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. That’s the reason I came here to Eastmeadow.”
He frowned.
Her smile was weak. “We’re not so different, you and I. You’re searching for your brother and the truth about what happened to him. I’m trying to put my parents’ deaths to rest by learning the truth about what really happened to them.”
“You said they were killed in Oregon, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But I think the answers lie here.”
“Oregon and Massachusetts have a whole lot of country between them,” he said.
“It’s not like I put my finger on the map and decided to come here. I had my reasons.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense. What brought you here?”
Something prickled inside her. She didn’t need any more people shooting down her suspicions. She needed help. Dylan’s interest in what she had to say was refreshing. After so many months of opposition from Bill and her other friends, to have someone believe that there might be something to what she’d suspected for a long time gave validation that she wasn’t so crazy for coming all this way.
“After my parents were
killed, I had the task of closing up their house in Winchester. It was…very difficult. Very difficult. I’d found a hatbox in my mother’s closet. I’d seen it there before many times but I never really paid any attention to it. It was her private stuff. That’s what she said. I never dared to look inside.”
“Until she was gone.”
Tammie nodded. “There were little mementos in there. A few birthday cards from my father, love notes, some pictures of my mother, me and my grandparents when I was a little girl. They’d died when I was quite young. And there was this letter from a person named Dutch. It came from Eastmeadow, postmarked a few weeks after I was born. It mentioned closing their old house and taking care of things for them and not to worry. And it said for them to stay safe. It was cryptic, to say the least, and it only had a post office box number from Eastmeadow.”
Dylan thought a second. “Dutch. Was that a first or last name?”
“Don’t know.” She shrugged lightly. “There’s a whole lot I don’t know or understand about Eastmeadow or what happened, Dylan. I never even knew my parents lived here before. I’ve never seen a place that is so beautiful and yet holds so many secrets. Everyone that I’ve met here seems to have something to hide. And I only just got here yesterday.”
He darted his eyebrows up and made a face. “I get that.”
“My parents weren’t like that normally, though. At least, I’d never known them to be. So it seemed odd when for a few months before their deaths they acted...”
“Weird?”
“Exactly. I was so busy that I dismissed it as them getting old. Can you believe it? I was working and living on my own in Vancouver at the time, and hadn’t been home in a few months. But then, all of a sudden, Dad called and insisted we go on a family vacation right away.” Tammie snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”
“What’s strange about that?”
“This private cruise was like some urgent thing that had to happen right then. My mother called me every night to press me on it. I told them I couldn’t get time off work and to just go without me. But they insisted I go with them and we had to go quickly.”
She put the coffee mug on the hood of her car and turned around, leaning her elbows on the car. “I finally agreed because I knew it was important to them. It was such short notice that I ended up having all these wild ideas that one of my parents was dying of cancer or something and wanted to go on one last family trip before they...”
She played with the dust on the hood of the car with her finger, making swirls and then wiping her fingers on her jeans.
“It was a nightmare getting the time off from work but I did it. The semester had just started at the private school I was working at, and because I wanted to get ahead and make sure my lesson plans were in place for the substitute teacher, I ended up being late to the marina.”
“What happened?”
“I’d called my mother’s cell phone to tell her I was going to be a little late. To save time, the captain decided to fuel the boat while they waited for me. The boat was at the fueling station when I got there.”
She laughed without any humor, shaking her head at the memory. “I remember looking at that boat, thinking my parents had to have spent their entire retirement to afford this stupid trip, and how angry I was that they did it. At the same time, I was scared out of my wits, because the only way I could figure my parents would do something so out of character was if someone was dying.”
She dug her heel into the dirt, stared at a rock to keep control of her voice. “And then the boat just blew up.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Just like that. Flames and a million pieces all over the harbor. The boat exploded, and they were on it. My parents were killed, along with the captain.”
Dylan blew out a quick breath. “I’m so sorry. It must have been horrible to see.”
“Actually, I remember very little of the actual explosion. I was blown back into the water by the force of it, and was fished out by someone who’d seen the whole thing happen from the parking lot. If there hadn’t been someone there who’d seen me go into the water, I would have drowned. The wind had been knocked out of my lungs. At first I couldn’t breathe because of the force of the blast, and then later because I couldn’t believe my eyes. Couldn’t believe what had happened.”
“You were lucky, then,” Dylan said, placing his hand on her shoulder.
She shrugged. It hadn’t felt that way when she woke up. Still didn’t.
“What caused the explosion?”
“Officially? A fuel leak. But even the detective who investigated the explosion had his doubts.”
“Why?”
“The boat my parents had chartered was a diesel. Diesel engines don’t explode when taking on fuel, not like gas-powered engines. It takes a lot longer for the diesel fuel to fire. If there had been a leak, the captain would have recognized the signs well before the leak had a chance to ignite, and they would have all been able to get off in time before it exploded. But they didn’t. It just went up.”
“Did the detective find any evidence the engine was tampered with? An accelerator?”
“There was no evidence to support it, even after a thorough investigation. But it was enough to cause suspicion.”
His hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, Dylan stood there, no more than three feet from her, just looking at her. “You would have been killed if you’d been on that boat—”
“Yeah, if I hadn’t been late. I would have been on that boat with my parents.”
She closed her eyes. “Since then, I’ve had a hard time accepting the reason why I lived and they died. I’ve been angry. Especially since...”
“Don’t stop. Since what?”
She swallowed, trying to find the strength to put her thoughts in words. “Since I found out they weren’t my biological parents.”
His face registered surprise. “You mentioned that yesterday. Are you saying they never told you that you were adopted?”
“No,” she added in a low voice. “I found out quite by accident a few weeks ago.”
Admitting the truth out loud hadn’t been as hard as she thought it would be. Until today, Tammie hadn’t spoken a word about it to anyone except Bill. None of her other friends knew. She had no other family to speak of Out West. Her aunt Betty had died a few years before her parents, and she’d barely known her grandparents. There was no one to call up and interrogate about why her parents had made the decision not to tell her.
But for some reason, it was easy to talk now. To Dylan. “That’s the reason I had to come here. It wasn’t like them to keep a secret like that. I have to know why. I need to know what happened to them. Why they were acting so strange and why I can’t shake this feeling that I should have died on that boat with them.”
“You have survivor’s guilt.”
“It’s more than that, Dylan. I don’t deny the guilt part. Believe me, I’ve been through that range of emotions already. It’s the truth I’m after. The whys that only they can tell me, except they can’t because they’re dead.”
Tammie saw the compassion in Dylan’s eyes, but before their gazes could hold for more than just a brief moment, he looked away.
“You do that a lot, you know,” she said as he walked to the camper.
He opened the door, pulled out a half-full bag of trash and tied the ends into a knot. “Do what?”
“You’re having a hard time looking at me. Don’t try to deny it.”
“Really? I wasn’t aware of that.”
She walked toward him. “Well, I am. Is it because when you look at me, you see Serena?”
#
Chapter Six
Dylan was still holding the bag of garbage in his hand. He dropped it to the ground and gave Tammie his full attention. He hadn’t been unable to look at her straight on. But not for the reason she thought.
“The resemblance is striking. It took me off guard yesterday when I first saw you.”
Tammie folded her arms across her chest “You blame Serena for Cash’s disappearance.”
She didn’t seem surprised that he didn’t deny it.
“I’ll admit that for the weeks I’ve been in Eastmeadow, I’ve built up a fair amount of anger toward the woman, without having any reason, other than the fact that she has something to do with Cash’s disappearance.”
Tammie closed her eyes briefly, and sighed. When she opened them again, his breath caught in his throat. Those beautiful blue eyes. That’s what he had a hard time looking at. That’s what had kept him awake last night. A man could lose all self-control just gazing at Tammie Gardner’s eyes.
His fear over his brother’s disappearance had been overwhelming at times. He couldn’t deny that. But that wasn’t Tammie’s fault. She was just as lost in this web of secrets as he was. And every truth he uncovered seemed to bring more questions and secrets.
“After meeting Serena yesterday, I wonder if she is as much a victim as Cash.”
Dylan wasn’t completely convinced. “Do you really believe that?”
Tammie sputtered. “Serena could hardly stand up on her own. Something is going on with her. And last night she was so incoherent. How could you blame her for anything that happened to Cash?”
Regret filled him. “Anger isn’t an emotion I’m proud of. As you saw yesterday, I let my frustrations get the better of me sometimes. But I also know that any anger I have toward Serena is wasted energy. It’ll only detract me from my real purpose here, and that is to find Cash. She may be weak now, for whatever reason. But clearly, the woman in that picture was not incoherent or staggering when she’d been with Cash.”
She was in love. And so was his brother.
Emotion swelled inside of him. There were moments when Tammie would look at him when he’d feel transformed, removed from this situation and the frightening possibility that his brother was dead. Until he’d met Tammie, he didn’t think it was possible for a woman to twist him into such a knot that he’d lose his perspective. But it had been under twenty-four hours and already the pull he felt toward Tammie was startling. Had that happened to Cash? Is that what Serena Davco had done to him?
Reckless Hours: a Romantic Suspense novel (Heroes of Providence Book 3) Page 8
