by Sammi Carter
Something heavy clattered to the ground beside the truck, and the shadowy figure began to run.
“Hey!” I shouted, taking off after him. “Wait a second!”
About twenty feet from the truck, the figure veered sharply to the right, and I saw him clearly for the first time. He ran awkwardly, dragging one leg behind him, and the shock of recognition brought me to an abrupt halt. I shook off my surprise and started running again, but my hesitation had given the man a large lead.
Maybe I should have gone back for the car, but Brody and Caleb were in there, and I didn’t want to put them in danger. Kicking myself into high gear, I ran flat out. After only a few yards, my lungs burned, and my legs felt like rubber. While I was still at least forty yards away, the limping man jumped into a dark-colored SUV that had been idling at the curb, and the car shot away from the curb. I tried to get a look at the license plate, but I wasn’t close enough. By the time I reached the street, the only thing left to see were their taillights.
Chapter 9
“Aunt Abby!” Brody’s voice cut through the wind and pulled my gaze away from the tail end of the car. Still fighting to catch my breath, I whipped around to see why Brody sounded so close. In spite of my warnings to stay where he was, he’d left the Jetta and Caleb. He stood about thirty feet behind me, looking like a kid who’d just seen Santa Claus.
A gust of cold November wind swept around me, and I shivered. The shock of seeing Brody standing there in the dark brought me back to earth in a rush. Brody and Caleb were my responsibility at the moment, and I’d just been hideously irresponsible by leaving them in the car alone. Sure, we were in Paradise, where the crime rate still hasn’t risen to match the rest of the country, but still . . . bad things happened to good people every day.
Trying to look stern, I started across the pavement. “What are you doing out of the car? I thought I told you to stay put.”
Brody wore only a light T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Even from a distance, I could see his bottom lip quivering from the cold, and his breath formed wispy clouds above his head. “That was the guy, wasn’t it?”
His question startled the stern right out of me. “What guy?”
He craned to see around me. “The guy. The one with the limp. That was him, right?”
Praying that he wouldn’t catch cold and earn me a black mark in his mother’s book, I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the car. “What do you know about the guy with the limp?”
“I heard you telling Mom and Dad about him.” He twisted away from me so he could see the road. “That’s the guy who got shot, right?”
“Nobody got shot,” I said firmly. By now, that was obvious even to me.
“Uh-huh. Remember? Last night when you came back to get my dad.”
Brody was obviously too excited to listen. I caught him by the shoulders and made him look at me. “Nobody got shot,” I said again.
“But you said he did.”
“You shouldn’t have been listening to our conversation,” I said, sounding so much like my mother, I winced. “Did Caleb hear what we said last night?”
Brody nodded, and his chin quivered in the cold. “Yeah, but don’t worry, he’s okay. And I wasn’t eavesdropping. You were in the kitchen, and that’s right under our bedroom. We can hear anything anybody says through the heat vent.”
My skin tingled, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from irritation with myself or from the weather. I knew how those old farmhouses were built. I should have known the kids would hear us.
Still trying to look like someone Brody should pay attention to, I pointed toward the car and snarled, “Back. Right now. If you’re not inside that car with your seat belt done up by the count of three, I’m quitting the team.”
Brody stared up at me for half a second, judging my sincerity, then spun away and raced back to the car. I joined him there, checked to make sure Caleb really was all right, and started the car again.
I turned up the heat and shifted in my seat so I could look at both of them. “Do your mom and dad know that you heard us talking?”
Brody shook his head quickly. “Are you kidding? Dad would be all right, but Mom would have a fit.”
“Well, then listen to me,” I said, “and listen good. Nobody got shot last night. Whoever it was, they were just pretending.”
Caleb leaned forward as far as his seat belt would allow. “Pretending to get shot?”
“That’s right. Pretending to get shot.”
“He’s getting away,” Brody pointed out with a worried frown. “We should go after him before he can hide.”
I looked him square in the eye, hoping to make some kind of contact with his excited little-boy brain. “We’re not going after him.”
“But he’s getting away!”
“He’s already gone,” I said. “And even if he weren’t, I’m not putting you two in danger just to chase some creep with a limp who was trying to steal my car.”
“He wanted to steal your car?” Caleb asked.
Brody shot an exasperated look into the backseat. “They do it all the time, Caleb. Don’t you ever watch TV?”
“I watch it all the time,” Caleb protested. “But why would they want this car? It’s old.”
Brody sighed heavily and shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? For the parts.”
He seemed so sure of himself, I didn’t have the heart to tell him Caleb was probably right. The Jetta wouldn’t be worth much, even stripped. Whatever the man with the limp wanted, it hadn’t been my car.
“Was he trying to steal Coach’s truck tonight?” Caleb asked.
I put the Jetta in gear and shook my head. “I have no idea what he was doing.” But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a look.
Detouring on my way across the parking lot, I pulled up next to Butthead’s truck a few seconds later. He’d parked beneath a light, so it was easy to see the scratches in the paint as soon as we got close enough. I couldn’t be absolutely certain the man with the limp had put them there, but it seemed like a pretty good bet that he had.
The only question was, why? It didn’t make any sense.
“Ooooh, look at that,” Caleb breathed from the backseat.
Brody’s face puckered into a frown that made him look like his father. “Coach is gonna be piss—” he caught himself, shot a guilty look at me, “—really ticked off when he sees that.”
Trying to keep her sons from using language like my brother is just one of the lost causes my sister-in-law has undertaken. My mother tried for years to keep Wyatt from talking like Daddy, and she’d failed miserably. Knowing how the boys looked up to their dad, I thought Elizabeth would have better luck beating her head against the wall.
“Speaking of Coach,” I said with a glance toward the recreation center’s doors, “I wonder what he’s doing inside for so long.”
“He always stays late,” Brody said. “I think he works out in the weight room or something.”
That made me think about the clang of metal as the limping man ran away, so I backed the Jetta up a foot or two and scoured the pavement for something he might have dropped. After a few minutes I saw a long piece of metal with an odd hook at the end lying a few feet from the truck.
With a stern glance at the boys, I slipped out of the car and picked it up by the ends, being careful not to smudge any fingerprints that might be on it.
I propped one end against my leg and pushed the button on the dash to open the hatch. When it popped up, I carried the metal piece to the back of the car and found a safe place for it. I slid behind the steering wheel and finally managed to get the Jetta all the way out of the parking lot—just as the door to the recreation center opened and Kerry Hendrix came outside.
For about two and a half seconds, I toyed with the idea of going back to tell him about the guy with the limp. But why bother? He probably wouldn’t believe me, and I didn’t want to subject the boys to another disagreement between us. Besides, Elizabeth w
ould be expecting us, and I wanted to get the boys home on time.
I kept driving, never dreaming that such a small choice would turn out to have such large consequences.
Chapter 10
The next morning dawned gray and cold, a harbinger of the coming winter. The previous night’s wind had stripped away the last remaining leaves from the trees, leaving the mountainsides looking stark and uninviting.
Before leading Max outside for his morning ritual, I threw on a pair of sweats and a jacket. The frigid air bit through both in short order. Teeth chattering, I tried to hurry Max along. Unfortunately, he enjoyed the brisk morning air, so the two of us were at cross purposes. As usual, he won. One of these days, I swear I’m going to convince him that I’m the boss.
When I finally got home again, I climbed into a steaming hot shower and stood under the spray until I felt some of the chill leave my bones. As I warmed up, I started to wonder why the man with the limp had turned up at the recreation center. Had he been trying to steal Kerry’s truck? If so, he must not be very good at what he did. A competent thief would have had that truck open, hot-wired, and gone before I’d even noticed him messing around with it.
Hard on the heels of that thought came a flash of irritation with Elizabeth for her reaction when I delivered the boys safe and sound to her doorstep last night. Sure, we’d been fifteen minutes late, but it was only fifteen minutes, and we had a good reason. Wyatt had been concerned but cool. Elizabeth had started fretting about letting the boys go anywhere until somebody figured out what was going on in Paradise.
Unfortunately, the police wouldn’t do anything until something really bad happened; meanwhile, the good people of Paradise could suffer a whole rash of irritating incidents. One or two more, and I knew Elizabeth would keep the kids home—which seemed blatantly unfair. On the other hand, if I could figure out what was going on, maybe we could put a stop to all this nonsense before the whole thing got out of hand.
After attacking my hair with a blow dryer, I dressed in an oversized green sweater, a soft pair of jeans, and tennis shoes, then hurried downstairs to Divinity a few minutes before we opened at ten.
It was Sunday morning, so I wasn’t expecting much foot traffic. I’d just finished making a pot of coffee and digging out the lone remaining piece of leftover coffee cake when the front door opened, and Jawarski stepped through.
I smiled when I saw him—right up until I realized he had his cop face on. Letting my smile evaporate, I poured two cups of coffee and shoved one across the counter at him. “You look down in the mouth. What’s going on?”
Jawarski leaned on the counter, grabbed the mug with one hand, and wiped the other across his face. He has a nice face. A solid, steady, reliable kind of face that also happens to be sexy as hell. In the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him without his regulation cop mustache, and I’m not sure I want to. It suits him.
When he finally looked at me, I saw that his eyes were the color of storm clouds, and I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever he’d come to say. Two seconds later, he proved me right. “Tell me what you were doing at the recreation center last night,” he said.
“I was there for basketball practice. I’m assistant coach of the Miners this year.”
One of Jawarski’s eyebrows rose. “I heard about that, but I wasn’t sure it was true. Since when?”
“Since yesterday. At least, yesterday was my first practice. I actually joined the team earlier in the week.”
“Why are you coaching basketball?”
I ignored the implied insult in that question and spooned sugar into my cup. “Why shouldn’t I coach basketball?”
“No reason,” Jawarski said quickly. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. It doesn’t seem like something you’d enjoy.”
I slipped out from behind the counter and carried my cup and cake to one of the wrought-iron tables in the seating area. I settled in comfortably and helped myself to a chocolaty bite. “That shows how much you know. For your information, I wasn’t always this sedentary. When I was a kid, I did a lot of things I don’t do now.”
Jawarski dipped his head, conceding the point, and joined me at the table. “So you just had a desire to turn back the clock, is that it?”
“No, Brody and Caleb asked me to take the job. They needed another adult on the coaching staff, or the team was going to fold. Now tell me why you want to know.”
He propped his feet on an empty chair and scrunched down on his tailbone. The day had barely started, and already he looked beat. “I want to know because Kerry Hendrix thinks you vandalized his truck last night.”
“What?” The coffee cup was halfway to my mouth when he said that, and the shock made me spill about half of it into my lap. I let out a yowl and stood, brushing ineffectually at the hem of my sweater and the front of my jeans. “Kerry Hendrix thinks I—? What a jerk! He thinks that I—?”
Jawarski listened to me sputter for a few minutes, then offered another bit of information. “He says he saw you in the parking lot when he came outside last night. Everyone else had been gone for half an hour or so, and you had no reason to stick around.”
“What an idiot.”
“He also says that you were upset with him for—” He consulted his notebook and read, “—‘for putting you in your place in front of the boys.’ ” Jawarski gave me a long, slow look. “You want to tell me about that?”
“No, but I will if you insist. I thought he was pushing the boys too hard. He didn’t agree with me, and he didn’t like me challenging him in front of the kids. The boys insisted they were all right, and Hendrix sent me back to the bench to count towels.”
“And why were you there so late?”
A couple of people slowed to look into the shop’s windows. I waited until they’d walked on again to answer. It was the first time in a long time that I’d actively willed customers away from the store, and that made me even angrier.
“I was there,” I snarled, “because I saw someone messing around with his truck. At first I thought it was Hendrix, but when I got closer, I realized the guy was too short, and it couldn’t have been him. I shouted at him, and he ran away. That’s when I realized that it was the same man I almost hit the other night—the man with the limp.”
Both of Jawarski’s eyebrows shot up at that. “You’re sure it was the same man?”
I nodded, torn between feeling contrite and being pissed as hell. “I probably should have called and told you—and if I’d had any idea I’d need to prove my innocence, I would have—but how was I supposed to know that jerk would accuse me of vandalizing his truck?”
“Let me get this straight. You saw the guy with the limp at the rec center last night. The one you thought you hit. The one you thought had been shot.”
“Unless there are suddenly two men with the same limp skulking around Paradise in the middle of the night.”
“And you’re saying he’s the one who vandalized the truck?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted, “but he was doing something, and when he ran away he dropped a long piece of metal.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I heard it hit the pavement. I don’t know what it was, but he could have been using it on Kerry’s truck.”
Scowling, Jawarski pulled out the notebook he always kept in his shirt pocket. “Hendrix doesn’t say anything about seeing a man with a limp.”
“That’s because he was long gone before Kerry ever came outside.”
“So nobody saw him but you?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Brody and Caleb were with me. They not only saw the man with the limp, they also saw me pick up the metal piece he dropped.”
Jawarski looked surprised at that. “You have it?”
“Of course I have it. After I saw what Kerry’s truck looked like, I thought it might be some kind of evidence. It’s in the back of the Jetta.”
He gave me an atta-girl smile that pleased me a whole lot more th
an I wanted it to. “Did you happen to see where the guy ran off to?”
“I saw him get into a dark-colored SUV, but I couldn’t get close enough to get the license number. I have no idea who was driving, and I didn’t see where they went.”
“Did the boys see the car, too?”
“Brody did. I’m not sure about Caleb.”
Jawarski nodded, made a note, and slipped the notebook into his pocket again.
“You’re not going to talk to them, are you?” I asked.
“Why not? If they corroborate what you’ve told me, Hendrix will have to back off.”
“Yeah, and Elizabeth will pull the boys off the team. You know how protective she is. She’s already talking about keeping them home, but the boys will be devastated if she does. Please don’t drag them into this.”
Jawarski looked at me for a moment, then shook his head. “If you say so, but I doubt Hendrix is going to believe that you’re innocent just because you say so.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Fine,” he said with an exasperated shake of his head. “You want to show me that metal strip?”
He didn’t agree with my decision, but I didn’t care. With Brody working his way toward the starting lineup and Caleb trying to prove he wasn’t a sissy, getting yanked off the team by a concerned mother was the last thing either of them needed.
The door opened, admitting two women into the shop, and I seized the opportunity to cut our conversation short. “Love to,” I said, “but it looks like I’m going to have to work.” I ducked into the kitchen, grabbed my keys, and tossed them to Jawarski. “I didn’t have anything to pick it up with, but I tried to only touch it on the edges in case somebody left fingerprints.”
The corners of his mouth lifted again, and before I knew what he was thinking, he leaned across the counter and kissed me soundly. “Well, at least there’s one good thing that came from all of this,” he said with a wink, “if you saw the guy with the limp, at least we know he’s okay.”
