Stranger in Town

by Cheryl Bradshaw

  CHAPTER 23

  “So, that’s it?” Maddie said. “You’re packing up?”

  It was morning, but my lack of sleep had made it seem like the past few days had all blended together somehow. I was packing, and for the first time in my life, I had no plan. No next move. Nothing. I didn’t know why I was packing or what I was doing, but I had to do something. So I folded and organized. My current method of finding out what happened to the girls wasn’t working. I needed a new one. I just didn’t know what that was yet.

  “I’m thinking of going home,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I need to clear my head.”

  “You’re not quitting, are you?”

  “Have I ever?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “You’re running away. It’s what you do when things like this happen.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Of course it is. How long did it take you to return to your hometown after you graduated? And even then, you’ve only been back twice: once for your aunt’s funeral and just recently to solve a murder.”

  I flung a folded shirt into the suitcase, knowing I wouldn’t be able to resist refolding it and lining it up with the others later. “Getting my head clear is not the same thing as running away. I don’t bail on my cases. I don’t need a lecture, Maddie. Not from you. Not today.”

  “Sloane, listen to me.”

  I folded a few more items and tossed them in.

  Maddie stood in front of the suitcase, blocking me. “Will you stop for a minute and listen to me, please?”

  I didn’t want to, but I did anyway.

  “You have the ability to push past all this,” she said. “You’ve never backed down from a case before. Mrs. Tate is dead, Cade yelled at you, you haven’t had any new leads in a few days, and you’re under pressure. Part of it is probably because you’re worried that when you find these girls, they won’t be alive. I know it’s hard. But you can’t leave, not now.”

  “I’m not backing down. It’s just…I’ve never had a case like this. It’s not going anywhere. I feel like all I’m doing is letting people down. It’s not who I am, Maddie.”

  “All you need is one break,” she said. “Just one. Who knows? Maybe you’ve already set something in motion and you don’t even know it yet.”

  “I honestly don’t know where to go from here, Maddie,” I said. “The children are ghosts in the wind. I have no idea how to find them—not even with the few new leads I have.”

  “You know why you’re feeling this way, right?”

  I shrugged. She continued.

  “You haven’t had any sleep, sweetie.”

  “I don’t have time to sleep.”

  “Sure you do. Stop arranging your already-organized suitcase and lie down and rest for a few minutes. Clear your head. You’ll thank me later.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Maddie flipped the lid of my suitcase closed. “It wasn’t a suggestion. The Sloane I know doesn’t back down from anything. So you’re getting in that bed, and when you wake up, we can talk about where to go from here.”

  I took her advice, changed clothes, and snuggled up next to Lord Berkeley. It felt good to shut down, and this time, my body allowed it. When I woke several hours later, it was dark outside. Maddie was in the living room talking to someone. Her voice was low, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I swept my hair back into a ponytail, pulled some pants on, and opened the door. To my surprise, Cade and Maddie were sitting at the table, chatting like they’d been friends for years. His snub from a few nights before at the bar seemed to have been long forgotten.

  “Cade came by to see you,” Maddie said. “But I’ve kept him a lot longer than he bargained for.”

  I looked at him. “Why?”

  “We can discuss it tomorrow,” he said, “when I take you to breakfast.”

  “Why don’t we talk about whatever it is now?”

  He glanced at his phone. “Because it’s almost midnight, I’m tired, and it can wait.”

  “How long have you been here?” I said.

  “A couple hours.”

  Cade stood up and walked to the door.

  “I might not be here in the morning,” I said.

  Maddie disregarded my comment and looked at Cade. “She’ll see you in the morning. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Cade nodded and opened the door, glancing at me before he went through it. “Night ladies.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “When you said ‘take you to breakfast,’ I was thinking more along the lines of a diner, preferably one with a fireplace,” I said.

  Cade inhaled the cool mountain air and glanced around at the landscape surrounding us. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful place than this. Besides, you got your very own fire right there.”

  He walked to the truck, lifted up the seat in the back, and pulled out a blanket. A minute later, it was wrapped around me.

  “Don’t you live in Park City?” he said. “I thought you’d be used to this kind of weather.”

  “I have no problem with winter. I just think it’s a season best experienced indoors.”

  He shook his head.

  “You know,” he said. “You’re just about the farthest thing from a country girl that I’ve ever met.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it is. You’re different.”

  “Different good or different bad?”

  Instead of answering, he stirred some eggs in a thick black pan with a wooden spatula. The more he mixed them around, the more little black flecks of what appeared to be pieces of the pan mingled with the eggs until it resembled pepper. I tried not to make a face and instead wrapped the blanket tighter around me.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” I said.

  He placed a finger in front of his lips and pointed across the meadow. “Do you see it?” he said in a hushed voice.

  I saw nothing but trees and various kinds of sagebrush. “See what?”

  “Here, look through my binoculars,” he said, handing them to me.

  I held them in front of my eyes. “I can’t see a thing out of these; it’s blurry.”

  He reached over, messing around with a knob in the middle. “You gotta adjust them a bit. Turn this dial until you can see clearly.”

  I tried what he suggested and gasped when I looked through the lenses again. The animal was far off, but viewing it through the binoculars made it seem closer. Too close. “That’s the biggest deer I’ve ever seen!”

  Cade smacked the side of his pants and laughed so hard I thought he’d fall off the log we were sitting on.

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “That’s no deer, woman. It’s a bull elk.”

  Woman?

  I shrugged.

  “Deer, elk, same difference,” I said.

  “Actually, they’re not the same at all. Elk are about three times bigger than deer, and their hair is yellow. A deer has brown hair.”

  The elk seemed to notice our presence, even though it didn’t seem likely given our distance. It glanced around and slanted its head upward, making a noise Cade later explained as “bugling.” Then it camouflaged itself inside a group of trees. I tried to find it again, but it was gone.

  Cade scooted a little closer to me. “Would you look at that?”

  The sunrise was among the prettiest I had ever seen and worth every moment I’d spent whining about the chilly temperatures. Just looking at it made me feel warmer.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  Cade scooped the eggs onto two paper plates and handed one of the plates to me along with some hash browns that he’d mixed with pieces of bacon. I took a bite. They were surprisingly good.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Does it meet your standards for breakfast?”

  I nodded. He tossed a couple pieces of wood, stoking up the fire.

  “I, uh,
wanted to apologize for getting angry with you the other night,” he said.

  “You had every right. I would have done the same thing in your position.”

  “I was frustrated and tired, but not just at you,” he said. “Coming back hasn’t been easy. The guys at the station make me feel like an outsider even though I grew up around here. And when the chief announced I’d be filling my father’s position, it didn’t go over well. I suppose I understand why, but I went to school with some of these guys, and they’re being completely ignorant.”

  “Have you talked to them about it?”

  “Tried to, but they haven’t been very receptive,” he said. “Chief Rollins and my dad go way back. They lived next door to each other when they was boys. Rollins is more like family to me than anything else. The other guys know it, think he’s playing favorites. And maybe he is, but they don’t know how qualified I am for the job or how many years I’ve been at it. They don’t care, neither.”

  “In many ways, I know how you feel,” I said. “It’s not easy being a private investigator. I have a love/hate relationship going on with the police department in my town. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve helped them over the years, they don’t want me around. Not really. They probably feel like I make them look bad when I get something right that they couldn’t.”

  “The truth is, I know a lot more about you than you think,” he said.

  I pulled my knees up in front of me, resting my chin on top. Then I repositioned the blanket. “Like what?”

  “For starters, you’ve solved every case you’ve taken.”

  “How did you know? Did Maddie tell you?”

  He shook his head.

  “I looked into your background the day you met with Tate,” he said. “Impressive. But what I don’t understand is why’d you become a PI instead of a cop? You would have made detective by now.”

  “I don’t like people,” I said.

  He raised a brow. “Care to explain yourself?”

  “I don’t possess the works-well-with-others gene. Never have. I like being on my own with no one to answer to but myself.”

  The look on his face let me know he could relate.

  “The chief ran the paper Tate gave you.”

  “And?” I said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “About what?”

  “The guys won’t tell me if they got anything off of it. Right now, I’m not a member of their ‘club,’ but that’s fine. If they’re gonna continue actin’ how they are, I don’t wanna be.”

  “What about the envelope?” I said. “I’m guessing you handed it over too.”

  “Nope. Your friend Madison has it.”

  “Maddie? Why?”

  The envelope had gone from Mr. and Mrs. Tate, to me, to Maddie, to Cade, and back to Maddie again. It would be a miracle if it produced anything useful at this point.

  “I’ll explain later, but right now, I was hopin’ you’d tell me more about what you know about the case. You said a few things at Tate’s house, and I have some questions.”

  I set my plate down and stood up. “Is that why you invited me out here, so you could get me to tell you what I know? I don’t think so.”

  I considered walking back to the hotel, but I had no idea where we were.

  “Calm down, would ya? It’s not what you think. I want us to work together.”

  I almost spit out the mouthful of eggs I had been chewing. “What? Still?”

  “You heard me,” he said.

  “No one in law enforcement has ever wanted to work with me—not when they had another choice.”

  “Maybe they’re intimidated because you’re a woman, or maybe it’s because you don’t wear a badge,” he said. “You’re feisty as hell, but I don’t scare easily. And besides, this is my dad’s case. If anyone else is going to solve it besides him, it’s going to be me.”

  There it was—the motivation behind why he wanted to work together. Cade knew the other guys were keeping things from him, doing all they could to make his job harder. They wanted him to fail. Either that or for him to reach a breaking point and leave, giving one of them his father’s job. But Cade didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who got pushed around. He wanted to find Savannah for his father, but he also had something to prove.

  “Is that why Maddie has the envelope?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “No one besides the three of us knows you found it.”

  “And you’re not concerned about—”

  “I only care about one thing right now: finding out what happened to Savannah any way I can.”

  He sounded more like me all the time.

  I told Cade about the other missing girl and her parents who had also received a coloring page in the mail. I told him about my visit to Maybelle’s Market and about meeting Todd, the only person to have seen the kidnapper. I told him about meeting Kris and Olivia’s stepdad and the two old coots who thought Terrence was somehow involved in Olivia’s abduction. Talking about it to someone else made me feel like I hadn’t been such a failure, but it still wasn’t much to go on.

  Cade remained silent until I finished, and then he stuck his hand out. “You interested in tryin’ this again?”

  It seemed silly, but I shook his hand anyway.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Now you go back to the hotel and say goodbye to your friend. She said she needs to get back to her lab in order to process the envelope.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you’re going to meet Chief Rollins.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I saw Maddie and Lord Berkeley off and joined Cade at his father’s house. Cade wanted the meeting between the chief and I to take place outside of the police station, away from the scrutiny of the other members of the department, and I agreed. I hadn’t wanted to meet the chief at all, but Cade insisted. He felt the new developments in the case needed to come from me. I wasn’t so sure.

  When I arrived, Chief Rollins was already there waiting. He said nothing to me when I entered the kitchen. Cade, his father, and the chief were huddled around the table arguing over a recent football game. Cade and his father smiled at me. The chief didn’t even look up.

  Cade’s father didn’t look well. His skin had yellowed even more than the last time I saw him, and he was nothing but skin and bones. I couldn’t have been the only one to notice.

  “Good, you’re here,” Cade said. “Chief Rollins, this is Sloane Monroe, the woman I was telling you about.”

  The chief still hadn’t made any effort to look at me. I wasn’t sure what Cade thought would happen by throwing the two of us together, but it couldn’t have been this. I sat down and thought about getting up and leaving, but I didn’t. Cade looked at me like they were all waiting for me to say something, so I did.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Chief Rollins,” I said.

  He looked up, but he didn’t smile. He squinted at me through a pair of glasses that were too big for his narrow face. They had the thickest lenses I’d ever seen. And they were dusty, like they hadn’t been cleaned in ages. How he could see anything out of them was a mystery to me. The look on his face was neutral. I’d learned to read most people over the years, but I couldn’t read him.

  Without saying a word, the chief reached into the front pocket of his blue flannel shirt. He pulled out a small pad of paper and a pen, flipped to the first page of the pad, and snapped the top of the pen. He then looked back at me and twirled his hand around as if to say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  Cade sensed the obvious tension in the room and said, “Why don’t you tell him what you told me?”

  The chief took notes as I relayed what little information I had that they didn’t. He seemed to find what I said interesting, but not enough to ask any questions.

  When I finished talking, he said, “Anything else?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good, you can go now,” the chief said.

  I could see this shocke
d Cade, from the look on his face, but I’d gotten used to it over the years. I didn’t want to be there any more than the chief wanted me there.

  Cade placed a hand on my arm before I could go anywhere. “Wait a minute.”

  The chief flicked his hand toward the door. “Let her go. We got what we needed.”

  “That’s not why I asked her to come over,” Cade said. “Sloane’s good at what she does. She can help us. I don’t see why she needs a badge. We all have the same goal here.”

  The words rolled off his tongue like he truly believed it, and maybe he did. But he was naïve to think he could put us in a room together and we’d get along.

  “We don’t need her,” the chief said.

  The sleep forced on me by Maddie had made me feel a lot more like myself again. And I didn’t intend to stand there and listen to him talk like I was already gone.

  “Of course you don’t need me,” I said. “You were doing a great job before I came along.”

  “Your sarcasm is unnecessary,” the chief said. “As are you.”

  “Come on now, Harold,” Cade’s father said to the chief. “The girl’s just trying to help. I’m grateful for what she’s done.”

  Detective McCoy’s eyes widened, and he gave me a look that said: He’s not always like this.

  “You have a missing girl, a dead mother, and a father who wants nothing to do with any of you,” I said.

  Cade and his father exchanged looks but said nothing. The chief didn’t take his eyes off the notebook.

  “Best if you went back to your hotel, packed your things, and were on your way,” the chief said.

  “I’m not leaving. I was hired to do a job, and I’ll stay here until I see it through.”

  “Tate should be working with us, not with you,” the chief said. “Why he sought you out in the first place baffles me. I’ll make sure he corrects his mistake. He’s only to deal with us now.”

  I leaned across the table until I was uncomfortably close to the chief’s face. “Don’t ever speak to me like I’m some second-class, second-rate person. You don’t own me, and you don’t own Mr. Tate.”