Perilous Homecoming

by Sarah Varland

“Sure. I was here working late—”

  “What were you working on?”

  “I was just doing my job, assessing some of the artifacts and antiques from the exhibits, as the Treasure Point Historical Society asked me to.”

  “You’re an appraiser?” O’Dell asked.

  “Yes, for the Harlowe Company, an insurance group in Savannah.” Kelsey was glad it was true, that she hadn’t been in danger because of her determination to poke around and see if she could learn anything that would lead her to the man who was trying to kill her.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  She shook her head. “No. I heard a thud through the wall from the next room over.”

  “Could you identify what caused the thud?”

  Kelsey frowned, concentrating, then shook her head. “No, I can’t be sure. But there was more than one thud. After that, the lights went out and I heard footsteps in the hall. Then he came in here. The closet door opened, but I think the noise of your arrival must have scared whoever it was off.”

  “That’s not surprising. Whoever this is has gone to great pains to keep his identity a secret. He wouldn’t risk being caught, not even to kill you. And it’s probable he didn’t know for sure where you were inside the museum. He couldn’t have been certain he’d find you in the closet, even if he was looking for you.”

  Kelsey nodded. “Right, that makes sense.” She rubbed her arms, where goose bumps had risen during her time in the closet. It was disturbing how much of a physical effect fear could have on the body.

  “Well—” O’Dell surveyed the room and then looked back at Kelsey “—you’re free to go. I don’t see any reason to keep you here any longer.”

  “I’m more than ready to go, so I appreciate that.” Kelsey tried to say it in a lighthearted way, but no one even cracked a smile. She didn’t blame them—none of this was funny.

  “I’ll follow you home,” Sawyer offered.

  Kelsey nodded, grabbed her bag and walked out of the room. Sawyer followed her.

  She climbed into her blue Jeep and Sawyer got into his own truck. They drove the long road off the museum property without incident, and then headed toward Kelsey’s house. As they drove away from the museum, there were more questions in Sawyer’s mind than ever.

  He followed her to her house, staying right behind her, and climbed out of his truck once he’d parked, moving fast enough that he was on the front porch of the house only a second behind her. He was barely in time to catch the door before she closed it behind her.

  “Would you wait for me? It’s a little hard to help keep you safe if you don’t.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know you were planning to get out of your truck. I thought you were just going along with me, keeping an eye on things during the drive. I don’t recall keeping me safe being part of your job description.”

  “Well, it is. Stop being difficult.”

  Her head whipped up and her face was ready with a glare, but Sawyer grinned. “I was teasing about that last part.”

  “Okay, fine, you got me. But it’s been a rough day.”

  “I know, Kelsey. So are you going to let me in, or just leave me standing on the porch?”

  “Let you in?”

  “Into your house. I don’t really think you should be alone yet.”

  She didn’t say anything, but that meant she hadn’t said no yet. Maybe Sawyer was making progress showing her that he could be a good friend.

  “I just don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “I could always just sit out here, I guess. It’s not that uncomfortable, although I hear you have spiders on this porch.”

  Kelsey rolled her eyes. “Fine, come in.” She stepped inside and he followed, double-checking to make sure she locked the door behind them.

  He understood that she was still making her mind up about them being friends, but Sawyer wondered how long this would continue before Kelsey realized that she was in over her head with this investigation, and needed help. Not only would they have to trust each other to make sense of the things that kept happening, but there was a good chance they’d have to find a current law enforcement officer who trusted them, too, and was willing to keep them in the loop.

  It was a lot to ask for someone like Kelsey, who was used to relying only on herself. Sawyer found himself whispering a small prayer as he followed her farther into the house, praying that she’d be able to trust the right people and would be willing to depend on them.

  Because their ability to solve the case might depend on that.

  * * *

  Sawyer wouldn’t be talked out of leaving her house unless she called someone else to stay with her or relocated somewhere else where she wouldn’t be by herself, or at least wouldn’t be so isolated. Kelsey wanted to fight that just as a matter of principle, the same way she fought any suggestion that she might not be able to take care of herself. She had to admit, though, she was starting to see how nice it was to have people caring about her, people who weren’t depending on her for anything, but who wanted to help her. Still, part of her still clung to that independence. It was comfortable. It was who she was.

  Is it unreasonable to want to stay in my own house, God? I don’t mind taking some precautions to be safe, but should I really have to let this killer turn my life and my plans upside down?

  “So, do you want some coffee?” Kelsey asked him after he’d been sitting on the couch for a minute. Much too long in Southern-hospitality time for her not to have given him at least some sort of drink option.

  “I’d love some.”

  “Great.” Honestly, she was relieved he wanted coffee. It gave her something to do with her hands, maybe a way to work some of the nervous energy out so he wouldn’t notice that they were still shaking after the last incident. It also gave her space from him, something Kelsey was beginning to find that she needed. How had she spent all of high school being mean to him? He was so easy to be friends with, and would be so easy to care about more than that...

  No. It didn’t matter how much he helped her, how much she liked being taken care of by him, even if she didn’t need it. A relationship would never work between them. Their lives were too different. Kelsey was ready to launch herself firmly into the business world as an antiques insurance estimator, and was looking forward to the heavy travel that came with the job. Her focus was on her career, and the opportunities it held. It wasn’t going to take her around the world. Not quite yet. But it was another step in the right direction, as the company she’d joined got calls from all over the Southeast. She just needed to prove herself, and then she could start climbing the ladder.

  If she didn’t stop caring about him so much, if she let her heart get involved, she wouldn’t be focused. Either she’d be caught up in a new relationship or she’d be heartbroken over its inevitable end. Her only option right now was being alone.

  “Anything I can do?”

  She jumped at Sawyer’s voice. She felt she did a pretty good job with situational awareness, but Sawyer seemed to have a knack for surprising her. The man must have extraordinarily quiet shoes.

  “No, I think I’m okay,” she said, knowing it was true in relation to the coffee making, if not much else.

  “Rattled from today at all?”

  Yes—and yet she was more rattled by him than by the near encounter with the killer. Ridiculous. She dumped in two extra heaping scoops of coffee. That should knock some sense into her.

  “Uh, you sure you’ve got the coffee under control there? It’s looking a little strong.”

  “You’re not scared of a little strong coffee, are you?”

  “I can take it, but then again, I’m planning to stay up all night. Are you?”

  He had a point there. But Kelsey didn’t like to back down, so she dumped another scoop in. Then pr
essed the start button on the machine.

  Sawyer raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “So, what now?”

  “Well, now it takes about five minutes to go through the brewing system...”

  “You know I’m not talking about the coffee.”

  Okay, yes, she did.

  “What are you talking about, then?”

  “The museum seems to be the obvious key to this murder. The curator was killed, and you mentioned the murder could have been in that room for a reason. We need to figure out if it was.”

  “Good idea. How did you get so good at this with no investigative experience?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not much different than marine biology. You see a problem or something out of the ordinary, you start to investigate it, make lists in your mind and follow up on leads and theories until you get somewhere.”

  So true. And Kelsey had enjoyed that in police work for a time, and thought she could do a good job at it again now, but what she really wanted was the kind of life the antiques insurance business offered—more artistic estimation based on facts and less stabs in the dark. It was exciting to chase hypotheses for a little while, but she appreciated facts. Black and white. Listening to gut instincts, chasing suspicions...she couldn’t handle that anymore. There were too many opportunities to read things wrong—the way she had in that awful case with the Hamiltons.

  “I guess I can see that,” she replied. “I suppose if you’re not planning to leave anytime soon anyway, you can help me go through my information about the contents of the room where the murder took place. I don’t see anything there that could have provoked the killing, but maybe another set of eyes examining it would be good. I’m guessing you were paying less attention to the room’s contents the other day and more to whether anyone was around.”

  He smiled. “Guilty.”

  Even if it had feel a little like overstepping the bounds of their relationship for him to be so protective, Kelsey had to admit that knowing he was there to watch her back the other day had allowed her to focus a little more on the work she was doing, instead of splitting her attention so she could watch what was going on around her, too.

  She walked to where she’d put the leather satchel-style handbag she used as a briefcase. It was one of the possessions she was most proud of—she’d bought it with her first paycheck from the Harlowe Company, a sort of visual reminder to herself that she’d finally succeeded.

  Kelsey opened the bag and rifled through the pictures she’d taken earlier that day. She’d taken them on her iPad, emailed them to herself and then printed them at the museum earlier. She pulled them out, walked to the dining room table and laid them all out, side by side. They weren’t as nice looking as they could have been—she’d print them on glossy photo paper later, but she’d wanted to have hard copies at the museum so she’d settled for using the color printer and regular paper there.

  Sawyer frowned. “Did you not get to the last exhibit?”

  “Which one?” Kelsey scanned the pictures. She’d documented everything carefully before going to investigate the room where she’d gotten trapped.

  “The one with the map of the areas where people believe there are sunken ships.”

  “No, I photographed that one. It was just one picture, the map, since that’s all the exhibit contains.”

  Kelsey flipped through the pictures again. Looked up as she felt a wave of overwhelming dizziness at what she’d just realized. “It’s not here.” She’d left her briefcase by the desk. Someone had known she was there, no question about it. And while they might not have had time to kill her on the spot, they’d clearly had time to go through her bag and take something out. Had it been that important to the killer that she not have a picture of that map? It seemed like it, but why? And what if they’d left something, too, something dangerous?

  Kelsey dropped the bag and stepped away from it, mind racing, wondering if her would-be killer had the kind of access to dangerous chemicals that could mean there could be some sort of toxin on the bag, or if that was taking her imagination too far. “Call the police,” she said to Sawyer.

  “On it.”

  As he punched the numbers on his phone, Kelsey struggled to breathe, worked to quiet her mind, but it was racing in circles like some kind of out-of-control race car. Had the killer even noticed her bag? She was assuming so, because that was the worst-case scenario in this situation, but it wasn’t necessarily true. There could be another explanation for the missing photo.

  Kelsey scanned the pictures again, from a distance. Everything else she’d appraised was there, it was only the picture of the map that had the general shipwreck areas that was gone. It wasn’t even a picture she’d needed to take, since there was practically zero value for insurance purposes in the modern map. She’d snapped it because she was curious, because it had piqued her interest.

  Apparently for good reason.

  “Sawyer, you’re right about the case, then,” she said as pieces started to fall together in her mind. “It’s something in that room. It has to do with that map, the pirate shipwreck map.”

  “You think that map will lead us closer to him?”

  “A different sort of treasure map...” she mused. “But yes.” She shivered. “This keeps getting more complicated. The other night I actually thought the murder might just be its own incident. A crime where someone lost his temper and made a mistake, you know? But the way this keeps escalating says it is more than that.”

  “Can you call the police station for me?”

  He looked at her with a funny expression. “The police will be here any minute. I called a minute ago, the first time you asked.”

  She shook her head, frustrated that she wasn’t able to get her thoughts out fast enough. They were darting around her brain right now, too fast for even her to keep track of, but they were good thoughts. She was starting to make sense of some things. “I know, but I have something else that can’t wait. I know they cleared the rooms at the museum when you rescued me earlier to make sure the killer wasn’t still lurking, but I wonder how close attention they paid to the contents of the rooms.”

  “You think something was stolen.”

  Kelsey nodded. “This map. I’m almost sure of it.”

  Excitement pulsed through her veins. She’d forgotten this part of police work, the thrill when everything started to come together, or even when a little piece here or there started to make sense. She was on to the killer, had a theory forming in her mind about his motive for committing the murder and everything else.

  And if she was right, things were about to get crazy.

  TEN

  Sawyer hadn’t seen Kelsey like this before. Her normally stoic face was knit in an intense frown, but one that looked more like she was thinking than angry, and she was pacing.

  He’d called the police four minutes ago, not that he was staring down the time on his watch. In a town Treasure Point’s size, they should be here at any minute.

  There they were.

  “They’re here, Kels.”

  She looked up at him, clearly surprised, and he flinched a little—just because he had the tendency to nickname her in his head didn’t mean she’d be open to him using it out loud.

  But she didn’t comment, either positively or negatively, which didn’t surprise Sawyer. He could tell that she was on to a lead for the case, and that had her focus right now, to the exclusion of everything else. For someone who’d only been marking time, making money as a police officer years ago, she seemed to have been an awfully good one.

  He tucked that thought away to come back to later, and walked over to where Kelsey was just letting the officers in the door. It was O’Dell and Hitchcock. He was glad to see the two of them. Maybe it was from growing up with them and spending so much free time with them in the Georgia woods, si
tting by bonfires, dreaming about the future, and driving too fast down muddy dirty roads. Either way, he trusted them to look out for Kelsey more than he’d trust the other officers, even the older ones with more experience.

  “Where’s the bag?” another voice asked from behind the two men.

  “Shiloh.” Kelsey smiled. “I’m glad you’re here. I touched it already but then got to thinking about what all there could be...”

  “So far, whoever is behind this has been pretty uncomplicated. Bullets and underwater attacks aren’t exactly subtle. So I’d say the chances of any kind of poison or powder that could harm you are fairly slim.”

  Sawyer was thankful to hear that. He’d seen Kelsey drop the bag, but hadn’t really thought about why she was doing so. He figured it had just been a reaction, not a calculated move.

  “I also called in to the station and asked if someone could check out the museum for me, and see if a map had been stolen like I thought,” Kelsey continued.

  “We heard that on the radio,” Hitchcock said. “The officer stationed at the museum went to check.”

  “I’m heading there right after I get this bag,” Shiloh added. “We have a better chance of getting prints off that scene than this, I think. But better safe than sorry.” She snapped disposable gloves onto her hands and reached for the bag. “This is it?”

  Kelsey nodded. “Yes.”

  “These pictures were in the bag while you were at the museum earlier?”

  Their eyes moved to the dining room table, Sawyer watched it happen like it was in slow motion, watched their eyebrows rise at the setup. Did they suspect that she was investigating on her own?

  “Is this for what you’re doing with the insurance?”

  “That’s why I needed to take the pictures,” Kelsey said calmly, not fully answering the question. Sawyer looked away from her, not sure he’d be able to play it as cool, and found himself accidentally looking straight at Clay.

  The other man studied him for a minute, eyes slightly narrowed.

  Sawyer was pretty sure Clay wasn’t buying it.