Hidden Witness

by Beverly Long

  Raney waited until the woman had walked away. “Well, if I have to be stranded in the sticks, I’m grateful that Summer and Trish are close by. By the way, what kind of paint are you getting?”

  “Off-white.”

  “For?”

  “Every room. Upstairs and downstairs.” He could tell by the look on her face that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. “That’s what sells. Neutrals.”

  “But the woodwork in your house is amazing. At least it will be once that paint is stripped. And the fireplace in the living room is stunning. Off-white isn’t going to work.”

  He rubbed his head. “What would you do?”

  “Well.” She leaned forward in the booth. “The dining room, a soft sage green with the windows trimmed in tan. The living room, I’d do the wall with the fireplace and the one that butts up to it in a nice brick red with the other two walls in taupe. You know, the paint colors won’t actually be called this—they’ll have some much fancier name—but you get the drift.”

  He did. She wanted to decorate and he wanted to get it cleaned up enough that a prospective buyer wouldn’t run out the door.

  His mother had never been much of a decorator. Perhaps she figured with three boys there was really no sense trying. And from the looks of it, Brick hadn’t spent much time watching HGTV.

  He didn’t care enough about the house to even have this discussion. “I’m pretty set on off-white,” he said.

  * * *

  THE GROCERY STORE wasn’t big, but it had the basics. Chase went to the coffee aisle first and bought grounds and filters. “We’ll get a coffeepot when we buy your sheets,” he said.

  Raney took control of the cart and found the produce aisle. She loaded up, selecting several of almost every fruit and vegetable they stocked while Chase, reluctantly it appeared, added a bag of chopped lettuce. When she was finally done, Chase made a point of looking at his watch. She ignored him.

  She might have lost the paint discussion but she wasn’t losing the grocery store. She added whole-wheat bread, cereal and skim milk. Chase added chips and peanuts. In the meat aisle, Raney picked up chicken breasts and Chase went for the ground beef. “I’m starting to see a pattern here,” Raney said.

  “Yeah,” Chase agreed. “You’re too healthy. I had high hopes for you when you ordered the bacon cheeseburger last night, and then again when I discovered you were a candy hoarder. But I can see that I was wrong.”

  “I’m not a hoarder, I’m a connoisseur.”

  In the condiment aisle, she got some olive oil and Chase grabbed mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup. “I’m throwing away everything in the refrigerator and cupboards,” he said.

  She couldn’t argue with that. The kitchen was a hazard. She’d been trying to figure out what to do first when Lloyd had burst through the back door.

  “Ready?” he asked, once they added bleach, ammonia and other assorted cleaning products along with gloves, sponges and a mop.

  “Yes,” she said. She was halfway to the front when she remembered orange juice. “I’ll meet you at the cash register,” she said.

  She found the orange juice, remembered that she wanted peanut butter, and by the time she finally got to the front of the store, her husband was hugging another woman.

  To be fair, he was being hugged by the woman ahead of him. She had her arms wrapped tight around his neck with her breasts pushed up against his chest. His arms were down at his sides. She watched as he stepped back, breaking contact. He couldn’t go far. There was a cart behind him and the older woman steering it was grossly engaged in what was going on ahead of her.

  Chase made use of what space he had and he and the woman were no longer touching.

  The cashier, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, was watching everything. She had a little smile on her well-lined face.

  The woman who’d been hugging Chase wasn’t smiling. She had her lower lip extended. She was pretty, Raney thought. A little too made-up, perhaps, for a morning grocery store run. Foundation, blush, eyeliner, the whole bit. Her dark hair was perfectly straight and worn in an angled cut around her face. She had on tan linen pants and a matching jacket with heels that made her tall enough to almost look Chase in the eye.

  Raney felt short and oddly inadequate in her cotton skirt and casual shirt.

  “Don’t I at least get a hug after all this time?” the woman asked.

  Chase looked over his shoulder, saw Raney and motioned for her to come. She excused herself and stepped in front of the shopper behind Chase. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Sheila, this is my wife, Raney,” he said. “Raney, Sheila Stanton. We went to high school together.”

  The woman tilted her chin down. “Wife?” she repeated. “Terri from the bakery told me you were back. She didn’t say anything about a wife.”

  “Raney was sleeping in while I got pastries,” Chase said.

  “You’re not wearing a ring.”

  “Both of ours are getting sized. We’re just newlyweds,” Chase answered.

  Sheila finally looked Raney in the eye. “Congratulations.”

  She didn’t sound as if she meant it.

  “Well, I should be going,” Sheila said, grabbing the plastic sack that the cashier was holding out in her direction.

  She was barely out the door when the cashier started laughing, a low chuckle that didn’t show any signs of ending soon.

  “What?” Chase asked. He was looking out the big front window of the store. When he turned, he looked as if he was ready to strangle someone.

  “I saw her sitting in her vehicle when I came into work an hour ago. I wondered what the hell she was up to. I guess she was waiting for you because you hadn’t been here three minutes when she suddenly came in.”

  Chase pulled out his billfold and Raney thought about what he’d told her the previous night about how news traveled in a small town. Sheila had gotten word that Chase was back, had made a logical assumption that he’d need to get groceries at some point and staked out the location.

  It wasn’t noon yet and she already had her fill of crazy for the week. Chase appeared to be thinking the same thing.

  He didn’t say another word while they were getting checked out. They had the groceries in the SUV and were belted in before he looked at her. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Somebody you knew well?”

  “We dated off and on for a few years after high school. Got arrested with her one night,” he added with a smile.

  “Arrested? What did you do?”

  “A little misunderstanding about some drag racing. Charges were dropped when the cop realized it was Sheila in the car with me. Her dad was the mayor.”

  She laughed. “I’m beginning to think that you had quite a reputation when you lived here,” she said. “I’m married to the local bad boy.”

  He smiled at her. “Does that make you the new bad girl?”

  The minute he said it, he seemed to realize how suggestive it sounded. “Sorry,” he said.

  The old Raney, with the mousy-brown hair, would have politely ignored it. Looked in the other direction. Not so with the new platinum blonde Raney. Her mind was suddenly fixated on what she might do to earn a reputation.

  And almost every thought that came to mind had Chase Hollister playing a predominant role. Her face felt warm. “I guess I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have my reputation precede me.”

  He stared at her. His eyes were dark. Sexy.

  But like her hair, her courage was new and obviously fleeting. She swallowed hard. “We should go home. The groceries are getting warm.”

  * * *

  GROCERIES WEREN’T THE only things getting warm, Chase thought as he drove to the house. Sometimes his mouth was a step ahead of his brain. Certainly suggesting to Raney that he was interested in a bad girl was evidence of that.

  He was supposed to be protecting her.

  But who was going to protect him from the crazy connection he seemed to feel every time s
he was within three feet? Truth be told, it had nothing to do with physical distance. She’d been upstairs last night and he’d lain on the couch, wanting her with a vengeance. Even the ache in his leg hadn’t been able to shift his focus.

  He’d known her for less than twenty-four hours but when he talked to her, it was as if they’d been friends for a lifetime. He couldn’t recall ever having a reaction like that to any woman.

  This morning, Sheila had surprised him. When they’d dated, it had been an intensely physical relationship. Truth be told, that was about all it had been. As a nineteen-year-old boy, that had been just perfect. He’d always figured she was looking for the same thing. She hadn’t made any big scene when he’d left, although after moving with Cal to St. Louis, his brother had told him a couple times that he’d seen Sheila outside of their apartment. Chase had dismissed Cal’s comments, assuming he was seeing things.

  But then about five years ago he’d gotten an anonymous letter, calling him every name in the book. And while there was nothing overtly connecting it to Sheila, there was something about the sentences, the disparate thoughts that ran together, that reminded him of the woman.

  It hadn’t been threatening and he’d basically ignored it. By that time, he was hip deep in catching bad guys and didn’t have time to worry about hate mail.

  But now, the cashier’s chuckle ringing in his ears, he wondered if he’d missed something with Sheila.

  He and Raney would just need to stay clear of her.

  When they got home, he asked Raney to stay in the car while he checked the house. He didn’t expect Lloyd to have come back, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  The place was clear and if anything, looked even more dismal in the daylight than it had last night. They carried the groceries in but before he put them away, he made good on his promise to toss everything that was in the refrigerator. He dumped a liberal amount of ammonia into a clean bowl, added some water and wiped out the appliance. When he was done, he realized that Raney was wiping down the stove.

  “You don’t have to clean,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “What am I going to do, watch you?”

  “It’s not your mess,” he said.

  “Yeah, but it’s my house for a while.”

  He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m guessing your last safe house was in better shape.”

  She looked at the trash-strewn counters, the table laden with papers and dirty dishes, the floor that her sandals were sticking to. “You got one thing going for you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Nobody’s shot at me yet today.”

  He stared at her for a long minute, then a slight smile crossed his face. “The day’s early,” he said.

  She slapped a sponge in his hand. “Got to love an optimist.”

  Chapter Five

  Toward evening, they drove to Hamerton. They hadn’t gotten very far before Raney, her face toward the window, said, “I didn’t expect it to look like this. It was dark when we came in last night and I guess I didn’t fully appreciate it.”

  Chase glanced across the countryside. They were on a two-lane highway with cornfields on both sides. One of the farmers was more industrious than the other, evidently, because his crop was freshly picked. The trees were just starting to turn. “In a couple weeks, these trees will be really pretty. People come from all over to see the fall colors.”

  “When they told me I was going to Missouri, I thought Midwest, which made me think flat. And I wasn’t expecting all these trees.”

  “We’re far enough south of St. Louis that if you slip up and say you’re in the South, nobody will throw green tomatoes at you. And the heavily wooded areas, all part of the Mark Twain National Forest.”

  “Did you camp around here?”

  He had. It was another thing that had changed once his dad died. “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never been camping. It seems as if it would be fun.”

  He studied her. “At the risk of generalizing, the women I’ve known have associated camping with being wet, cold, hungry and bitten up by mosquitos. That was before we got into the discussion about the possibility of snakes.”

  “None of that sounds nice, so maybe I’ve romanticized the idea in my head. I was thinking of hiking the trails during the day. I’d have on cool boots and one of those insulated vests with lots of pockets that would make it look as if I knew what I was doing. Oh, yeah, I’d have a walking stick, too. I always wanted an excuse to use one of those. At night, I’d sit around a big campfire wrapped in a blanket and eat marshmallows. There are no snakes in my camping world.”

  He laughed. “Maybe when this is all over, you can come back here for a week and give it a try.”

  “When this is all over,” she repeated, her voice more serious. “That has a nice ring.”

  “A month,” he said.

  “Seems like forever.”

  “It’ll go faster than you think,” he said, hoping it was true. Right now, a month in Ravesville sounded like a very long time. But it would take every bit of that to get the house ready to sell.

  They drove another ten miles, to the outskirts of Hamerton where the big box stores were located. They wandered around the store, getting sheets, a coffeepot, more cleaning supplies, and finally ended up in the paint aisle. Chase picked up six gallons of Eggshell White and put them in the cart. Raney did not say anything.

  “Don’t give me that look,” he said.

  “What look?”

  “The look as if you just lost your dog.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have a dog.”

  “Neutral walls. Ask anybody. Neutrals sell.”

  “Maybe in a five-year-old ranch, but not in a hundred-year-old farmhouse.” She continued to walk.

  He stopped the cart. “I’m not going to hear the end of this, am I?”

  She turned around to look at him. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not the one talking about it.”

  He whipped the cart around, unloaded the Eggshell White and waved toward the wall of paint samples. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  She skipped back to him. “To pick or to pick and have it mixed?”

  “Five minutes.”

  It ended up being a total of seventeen minutes but he walked out with two gallons of Toasted Meringue, two of Prickly Pear Delight and two of Sunset Wonder. “These are ridiculous names for paint. Why can’t they simply call it Sort of Yellow, Pale Green and Orange Red?”

  “Because those are boring.”

  “Uh-huh.” They unloaded everything into the car and got buckled in. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “I could eat. I guess I worked up an appetite this afternoon.”

  She’d worked hard. They’d made good progress on the kitchen and then she’d gone upstairs to clean the bathroom while he’d walked outside. There, in the corner of the porch, had been a chain saw, which made him think that Brick had probably intended to do the bushes after he got home from his doctor’s appointment.

  Chase had ruthlessly gone after the big bushes that were crowding the house, not wanting to give anybody with bad intent an opportunity to get close without being seen or worse yet, a place to hide.

  Now he had a hell of a pile of brush that he didn’t have any idea what to do with. Maybe he should burn it. Wait for a windy day, strike a match, and maybe the house would go, too. Save everybody a whole lot of trouble.

  But then he’d have to find another place for Raney and he wasn’t sure how that would go. As crazy as it seemed, she was settling in at the old place.

  “That looks like a steak house,” he said, pointing off to his left. “Does your enjoyment of red meat extend beyond the hamburger?”

  “I’m fond of medium-rare filets with sautéed mushrooms.”

  “Excellent.” He pulled in and they got out. “Let me go in first,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, her tone letting him know that she thought it was kind of u
nnecessary. “I really doubt that somebody is inside just in the off hopes that we might stop in for dinner.” She stopped in her tracks, very dramatically. “Wait, I take that back. Maybe there’s another old girlfriend in there, who sat in the parking lot all afternoon, chewing off her lipstick, confident that you’d come this way.”

  He cocked his head. “You’re funny, aren’t you?” he said drily. He opened the exterior door and motioned for her to wait in the small vestibule, between the inside and outside doors. He went inside.

  He did a quick scan. It was crazy but he didn’t like leaving her alone for even a minute. He had always had a good sense of these things, and something was telling him that Raney was still in danger.

  He stuck his head back into the vestibule. “Looks okay. Six other tables. I didn’t recognize anybody. And they have both a six-and a nine-ounce fillet on the menu.”

  “Do they have flavored vodka?” she asked quickly.

  He pulled back. “I have no idea,” he said. “Let’s go.” He held the door open for her. Once the hostess seated them, the waiter approached. He was early twenties and was checking Raney out. Chase could see the appreciation in his eyes. Raney smiled up at him.

  The guy greeted them, still looking at Raney. “Evening,” he said. “We get a lot of regulars here but I don’t think I’ve seen you before. You live nearby?”

  Chase used his foot to give her a quick nudge on the knee. Maybe he needed to buy her a ring sooner than later. “My wife and I just moved to Ravesville,” he said, jumping in.

  The man finally looked at Chase and he could read the message loud and clear. Lucky son of a bitch. “I don’t live too far from there.” He pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the small candle in the middle of the table. “What can I bring you to drink?” he asked.

  Raney ordered a chardonnay and Chase ordered an iced tea. No drinking for him. He was on duty.

  The waiter walked away. “I thought you were interested in vodka.”

  “No. Not really.” She laughed. “Just making sure that you don’t start thinking that you’re always a step ahead of me.”

  Not to worry. His head felt muddled whenever she was near. He was pretty sure it had something to do with her scent and the way she crossed her legs at the ankles, like a lady.