by Donna Fasano
Luanne promised, her mind struggling to catch up to full speed as she made coffee, only half hearing as Jen said, “You sound terrible. What time did you get in?”
Luanne tried to think back. “Not sure.”
“Date went that well?”
“Brett never showed.” But she couldn’t think about Brett. Last night was a fuzzy mess in her head. Her thoughts circled around Earl.
She hung up with Jen and caffeinated, hanging on to the hope that some java would untangle her brain. Her mind was a disjointed, foggy mess, the mother of all hangovers using her head for a punching bag.
Her dollar-store coffee was as dark and thick as tar, and just as tasty, but it did the trick. She felt half-human by the time she walked to her front door, ready to leave, dark premonitions circling in her semicoherent brain.
Think.
But she couldn’t remember anything past meeting Gregory.
Prior to that, she could remember being mad at the trucker, Brett, Earl. She could clearly recall thinking about Earl in the alley, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
She walked through the door, squinting against the morning sun, biting her bottom lip against the pain.
Earl. Dead. She had a very bad feeling about this.
She tried not to panic. She might have fantasized about fighting back, but so had the other maids—a harmless way to blow off steam. She would never have acted that fantasy out, could never cross over to actual violence. Could she?
“No.” She said the word out loud to settle her brain.
Earl was an equal-opportunity jackass. He harassed every woman he came across, stiffed every employee he’d ever had. There had to be at least two dozen people in town pissed enough to want to kill him.
But how many of them had a dented grill?
OhGodohGodohGod.
She came to a staggering stop in the middle of her lawn to stare at her Mustang parked by the curb, the same color red as the fire hydrant ten feet or so in front of it. Both the car’s bumper and the grill were crushed in the middle. Clearly, at one point last night, she’d run into something.
She wished and hoped she’d just bumped the fire hydrant, but that didn’t show any damage. She couldn’t bear thinking of the alternative.
She almost threw up, prevented only by the fact that her stomach was empty. Shit. Had she… She swallowed hard, her head spinning.
Gone and done it, run him over. The 1989 Mustang had come from the used-car lot with its share of nicks and dents, but the damage to the front was definitely new. Gone and done it.
Cold panic cut through her, an ice blade. She’d done a horrible, terrible, despicable thing. Guilt and regret made her knees wobble. Whatever the punishment was, she deserved it.
Except, she couldn’t go to prison. She had her four-year-old twin sisters to take care of. She was Mia and Daisy’s sole guardian.
Luanne drew air in big, gulping breaths to wrestle down the shock and nausea. Get moving. One foot in front of the other. She couldn’t stand there and stare all morning. She had to find a way to get away with murder.
Her head pounded, her mind in a stunned haze. Her fight-or-flight response was firmly locked into the flight setting. She stopped by the car. Squinted. Was that blood on the bumper? Her stomach rolled again.
If she was put away, the twins would go to foster care. They were cute and young. They’d be adopted out faster than she could say “termination of guardianship.” She’d never see them again.
The thought brought a new flash of pain coursing through her body.
She felt guilty as hell, horrible about what happened to Earl. She wished more than anything that she could take it back. She deserved to go to prison, she really did. But she wasn’t going to give up the twins. Not ever.
Nobody could find out what she’d done.
As panic gripped her hard in its cold clutches, her gaze fastened onto the fire hydrant. Nobody could ever find out.
She squared her shoulders, then looked up and down the quiet dead-end street. Not a soul in sight. She slid behind the wheel, revved the engine, and, pedal to the metal, drove straight forward.
The crash rattled her brain, threatening to split her head in half, the explosion of water instantaneous. She leaned back in her seat, not having to bother with airbags, the car too old to have any.
Oh God. Fighting back tears, she closed her eyes and waited for any incriminating blood residue to be washed away by a thousand gallons of water.
After a minute or two of sheer misery, she filled her lungs, put the car in reverse and backed away. She had to get to the motel. The police were waiting.
On her way over, she called the fire department to report the hydrant accident, cringing as she lied through her teeth.
What’s next? Her brain felt like gelatin. This here was why she didn’t normally drink.
Think.
Who’d be at the motel? Probably Captain Bing. Murder was big news in Broslin. She didn’t care who came, as long as it wasn’t Chase Merritt.
She’d gone to high school with Chase.
She’d been in love with Chase.
She’d lost her virginity to Chase.
That last bit hadn’t gone well. Afterward, she’d shared her disappointment with Jen, blaming Chase for the lack of earthshaking pleasure she’d read about in romance novels. Unfortunately, Jen told her other friends, and the rumor spread that Chase was less than adequate between the sheets. He hadn’t been amused.
Luanne wasn’t one of his favorite people. Mostly, through the years that had passed since, he’d avoided her.
She didn’t need to think about that now. But as she shoved the past aside and turned her focus to the trouble she was in, a heart-stopping thought popped into her head.
Had there been witnesses?
Her muscles froze. Oh God.
No. Wait. If there’d been a witness, Luanne decided, she would have been woken by the police knocking on her door, instead of Jackie’s phone call.
Okay. So, very likely, nobody had seen her in the alley. A lucky break.
She had no alibi, but so what. Earl had been murdered in the middle of the night, and she was home alone. Plenty of people were home alone in the middle of the night. That shouldn’t be overly suspicious.
The damage to her car…hopefully, she’d taken care of that. She made a mental note to donate money to the fire department, even if she had to scrape it together a penny at a time.
What else? She was too nervous, her brain pounding too hard to be able to think clearly.
The mushroom cap on the motel, which she always thought cute and quirky, now loomed like a prison tower as she pulled up.
She scanned the single police cruiser up front and went to park in the back. Then she hurried inside, hoping and praying that she’d be able to keep her composure.
The rest of the employees were already gathered around a single detective in the middle of the reception area. Several inches taller than the tallest of the women, he wore dark dress pants—his badge clipped to his belt—with a light blue shirt that did nothing to disguise his massive shoulders. He stood in the typical police power stance, feet slightly apart. She didn’t think he was trying to be intimidating, but the solid mass of his body had that effect anyway.
That she’d once slept with him now seemed utterly surreal.
He turned as Luanne came in, his gaze settling on her face.
“Luanne Mayfair,” Chase said dispassionately as he looked her over.
~*~
Luanne looked in rougher shape than he did, and that was saying something, since Chase was on his second shift. His crazy night had included a street fight, checking out the crawl space under a house after reports of suspicious sounds that turned out to be raccoons, and saving a pet turtle from a tree. He’d also handled half a dozen traffic violations with their share of cursing and crying and threatening with powerful friends. And that was just his first shift. The second started off heavy-duty right away, with
a murder.
And then Luanne Mayfair had walked in.
Chase reached to his hair to brush away any cobwebs he might have acquired in the crawl space, but caught himself and dropped his hand to his side. He was not prettying up for Luanne.
He was a grown man. A detective. He was not going to feel like an awkward, rejected schoolboy when he talked to her. That decided, he strode over for a private word. He’d already interviewed the other maids and the two front-desk clerks.
“Luanne.”
She looked even worse up-close, mouth tight, her whiskey-color eyes spaced out one second, then nervously darting the next.
“Detective Merritt.”
He’d braced himself against her voice, but the low, velvety pitch got to him anyway. “Let’s stick with Chase. Everything okay with the twins?”
“Fine.” She bit out the single word, then cleared her throat, clasping her hands in front of her, her fingers red from scrubbing.
Of all the employees, she seemed the most upset. The others were shocked and dismayed that something like this could happen in Broslin. But not one had shed a single tear over the manager. Yet Luanne looked on the verge of breaking down in tears.
Maybe she’d been closer to Earl than her coworkers.
Chase let his gaze pan over her again. Long, blond hair barely combed, no makeup, a wrinkled silk shirt topped blue jeans that accentuated her slim legs. Long legs. She’d run track in high school. “You don’t look fine.” The assessment came from the analytical-cop part of his brain. The stupid-guy part still thought she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. Her whiskey-color eyes, bleary or not, drew him in.
She cleared her throat again, and he could see as she gathered herself little by little, with effort. She held his gaze. “Exhausting date last night.”
The jealousy that cut through him was beyond stupid, so he refused to acknowledge it.
She has an alibi, he thought instead. Good. He didn’t want to have to interrogate Luanne. She had plenty on her plate with raising her sisters.
He pulled out his notebook and pen. “I’m going to need to talk to your date. Need the timeline for your night. Step one in the investigation is to just rule out as many people as we can. Name?”
She cleared her throat. Looked away. “Gregory.”
He wrote it down. Waited. “Last name?”
She bit her lower lip. “I can’t remember.”
Not like Luanne. Then again, it’d been a pretty long time. Maybe she’d changed since he’d known her. “You have his phone number?”
She shook her head.
A one-night stand? He hated the idea, frankly, but it wasn’t his place to judge, so he went on with his questioning.
“Anybody see you with him?”
“We had drinks at Finnegan’s.”
“Who was at the bar?”
“Tayron.”
He nodded. “I’ll check with him.” He watched her for a second or two, trying to see her impartially, instead of as the first girl he’d fallen in love with, even if all that silky hair and those supremely kissable lips made the task difficult. “What time did you get home?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Alone?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
Okay, by an exhausting date, maybe she’d meant dancing. He liked that idea much better. “Any idea who might want Earl dead?”
“Every woman he ever met?” Even as the last word left her lips, she slapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes turning large and horrified. “I’m so sorry.” She looked genuinely stricken. “What’s wrong with me? What a terrible thing to say.” She really did look like she might cry.
“Relax. It’s pretty much what everybody else told me.” How did he not know that Earl was such a colossal jerk, taking advantage of his employees? “Anyone hate him in particular? Enough to do him harm?”
“I don’t know.” She clutched her hands. “He was the boss. He wasn’t well liked, but…” She gave a resigned shrug.
Right. Earl was a jackass, but he was the jackass who signed the paychecks.
“When did you see him last?”
“Near the end of my shift.” She wrung her hands. “Here at the motel.”
She seemed to struggle with the interview. She was probably dead tired after being out most of the night. Chase saw her from time to time but hadn’t been this close to her in a while. He hadn’t realized how skinny she was. When had she lost weight? According to the other maids, she put in a full shift here, worked Saturdays at the library, plus took care of two toddlers.
From what he’d picked up from general town gossip over the years, after her parents’ divorce, her father had gone up to Alaska. He’d always been a hard-core alcoholic. Whether he was still alive or not was doubtful. Luanne had gone off to business college once her mother moved in with a new man. The guy—not into crying babies—took off after the twins were born, never to be heard from again. A year later, Luanne’s mother died of breast cancer. Luanne took guardianship of her sisters, quit school, and came home to work.
Regardless of the fact that she’d single-handedly ruined Chase’s manly reputation back in their younger years, he had nothing but respect for her. She was a hell of a woman.
Even if she currently had trouble meeting his gaze.
Maybe she felt embarrassed at having to tell him that last night she’d hooked up with a stranger whose last name she couldn’t remember.
She cleared her throat. “Anything else?”
“Earl ever try anything with you?” He hated the idea and the images popping into his head.
She pressed a hand over her stomach.
His muscles tightened. “Like what?”
“Some…touching. Trying to talk me into…more under the guise of becoming his housekeeper.” She repeated what the other maids had already told him.
“Sounds like a gem.” He swallowed his anger. “Has he ever pushed anyone too far?”
She looked at her feet. “I wouldn’t be surprised. But not that I know for sure.”
Chase nodded. He put away his notebook. He didn’t see much point in questioning her further right now. He had plenty to do this morning—subpoena Earl’s financial records to see if he’d been in some kind of money trouble, track down next of kin, interview his neighbors, go to the morgue in West Chester and see if he could hurry along the autopsy.
He had only one thing left to do here. He stood and turned toward the group of employees chattering around the front desk, six maids and two front-desk clerks. “If you wouldn’t mind, ladies, I’m going to have to take a quick look at your vehicles.”
The women headed outside immediately.
Chase glanced back at Luanne.
She’d gone two shades paler.
Chapter 3
Okay. She was doing fine. At least, she thought she was—difficult to tell in her current mental state. She just had to get through the car check, then she could go home. Luanne desperately wanted her head to stop pounding, so she could think.
She hung back and let Chase inspect all the other vehicles. When he finished and told the staff they were free to go, she led him to the back, to her poor, abused Mustang, which she’d parked nose to the fence so the damage would be mostly hidden.
He walked right up to the busted front end, with that relaxed gait of his, never rushed, always calm and collected. He scanned the bumper silently, then looked from the car to her. “What happened?”
His voice was soft, kind, and low, and for some reason it made her throat burn.
She swallowed hard. Can’t go to prison. Can’t abandon Mia and Daisy. “When I got the call this morning from Jackie, I was upset. I ran into the fire hydrant in front of the house. Stupid mistake.”
“Did you call it in?”
She nodded.
He’d been one of the hottest boys in her senior class in high school, in a natural, non-flashy way, no hair gel, no gallons of aftershave. He really didn’t need embellishment—str
aight nose, strong jaw line, ocean-deep blue eyes that wouldn’t dream of rushing over a person. He took his time then, and he took his time now. Of course, he’d grown into an attractive man, with his easy smile and calm presence that she appreciated.
He walked around the car, back to the front, examined the damage from the other side, bending low. “Have you called your insurance company yet?”
“I haven’t really had the chance to think.”
He nodded as he straightened. “Too much going on this morning.” He was looking at her with regret in his deep blue eyes. “I’m going to have to have the car towed for lab testing.”
She blanched, nerves shooting through her. Breathe. Everything was going a lot faster than she’d thought. How could they be at lab testing already?
Stay calm. Don’t panic. Don’t look scared.
She tried to smile. Her head hurt, her brain fuzzy. Think. Okay, lab testing. How thorough can that be in Broslin? The PD didn’t exactly have a high-tech CSI team. With luck, the fire hydrant had washed off anything incriminating.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” Chase offered.
She didn’t want a ride from him. She didn’t want any of this. She wanted to go back to yesterday, not go to the bar, spend Friday night home with Mia and Daisy.
“The twins are with Jen,” she told him.
“No problem.” He called in the tow, then tucked his phone away. “Arnie will be here in a minute. We don’t have to wait if you’re in a hurry. We can leave.”
He escorted her around the building to his cruiser, opened the front passenger-side door for her. At least he didn’t make her sit in the back. That had to be a good sign.
He went around to slide behind the wheel, and the space was suddenly all filled with his tall, wide-shouldered body that bordered on husky. He was all calmness, as he’d always been. Steadiest person she’d ever met. He was the quiet type, fair, always ready to hear people out. Rumor was even the criminals liked him.
For a moment, her gaze snagged on the short stubble that shadowed his masculine jaw, and her hangover-disabled brain wondered what that stubble would feel like scraping against her sensitive skin. She blinked. Shook her head. What was wrong with her?
