by Amie Denman
“And the living room carpet?”
“My mother always wanted hardwood floors anyway,” she said.
“So, did the skunk incident curb your desire to investigate things?”
“No way. It just reminded me to be careful how I go about it.”
Matt focused on his food so he could keep his mind off the beautiful but disconcerting woman across the table. He had an important job to do.
A glance at the time on his cell phone told him that his crew would be arriving on-site in less than seven hours. Late nights with Caroline Bennett wouldn’t further his cause, and her penchant for asking tough questions might cause him a major headache.
“Did you have a dog when you were a kid?” she asked.
“Beagle. His name was Benson.”
“Benson the beagle, I like it.”
“My dad loved that dog, but he—”
Matt remembered the dog barking madly when the police came to haul his dad away. His mother had leashed the dog and handed the leash to Matt. As Matt had stood on the front lawn with his mother and his little brother watching their dad get in the back seat of a police car, Benson had howled as if he were losing his own father.
When Matt and his brother had visited their dad in prison for the first time, he remembered his father asking about the dog and nearly breaking down in tears when he heard Benson had gone to an animal shelter.
Did his father shed tears over the fact that he and his brother and his mother had lived in a shelter for a week while the police treated their home as if it were a crime scene?
“I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “I can see this is a sad story for you. I wish dogs would live as long as people.”
Matt cleared his throat.
“I was talking to Virginia Hamilton while we worked the 5K,” Caroline said. “She told me about her dog, Betty, passing away last winter. She’s thinking of getting a puppy. You could get a dog.”
Matt shook his head. “I work too many hours when the weather is nice, and I don’t think a dog would appreciate waiting inside on sunny days.”
When they finished eating, Caroline took the check from the waitress and paid the bill. They headed to the parking lot where Matt opened the passenger door of his truck for Caroline to get in. The truck noise forced their silence as they crossed the bridge, but Matt cut the engine when he pulled into the lot in front of Caroline’s dorm.
“Thanks for the food and company,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Thanks for being my victim in the class tonight. Virginia said she’d find some extra volunteers for the other nights, so you don’t have to come. Unless you want to.”
Did he want to? Matt hadn’t made a fool of himself over a girl in a long time. There’d been a few relationships in college, but even though one of them had lasted an entire semester, he was quite sure he hadn’t felt anything like the emotional roller coaster Caroline put him on.
The smart choice would be to cut a wide swath around her.
“I’ll see what my schedule looks like,” Matt said.
Caroline put a hand on the door lever, but then turned to him and paused, lips slightly parted for a few seconds. Had she not been a police officer with a powerful curiosity about an incident involving his family, he might have leaned forward and kissed her.
But that was a risk he was not ready to take.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“SO WHAT HAPPENED after I left last night? Did you go on a date with the teacher?” Lucas asked.
The day after the self-defense class, Lucas and Matt were spending the evening at their parents’ home in Bayside. The brick home on the lake was part of a small community of similar structures. All of them had wide front lawns and a sweeping back lawn that led down to the water. Most houses, including the Corbin house, also had a dock.
Growing up there had been like a dream for Matt and his brother. The comfort and luxury went a long way toward erasing the pain in their mother’s eyes whenever their former life came up.
“I didn’t go on a date with the teacher,” Matt said. “And I sure hope you didn’t tell Mom any of this.”
“Haven’t had a chance to since I got home late last night and worked all day.”
“Good.”
Matt handed his brother the screwdriver he was using to dismantle a dock light while they waited for dinner to be ready. The thirty-foot steel dock was only ten years old, but the wiring was temperamental.
“Can you get some caulk from the garage?” Matt asked. “I think if I seal this light fixture it won’t draw moisture and go out all the time. I’m sure Dad is tired of changing the bulb.”
“Be right back.”
Matt sat on the dock and waited for his brother to make the quick trip across the lawn. Finding the caulk in the well-organized garage would only take moments.
The sun slanted across the bay and lit the small waves with color. Across the water, lights on the Starlight Point roller coasters contrasted with the darkening sky. The view from his rented house wedged in a downtown neighborhood was lousy by comparison, but he was twenty-six. Too old to live with his parents.
His brother was still in college and kept his room at home for breaks and summer. Lucas had considered living in the dorms at the Point, but he’d opted for a comfortable bed and his own bathroom. The sunroom on the back of the house was also his temporary art studio. With good lighting and plenty of space, Lucas spent the hours he wasn’t drawing caricatures at the Point there.
He was working on a book of illustrations as part of a joint project with an English major at his college. Matt had been surprised when Lucas had wanted to show him the work in progress when he’d first arrived for dinner.
In the past, Lucas had been very guarded about letting anyone, even his family, see his work. But his younger brother had opened up lately. Perhaps it was the experience of drawing portraits on an open midway while guests waited and cable cars traveled overhead. It was hard to have secrets in a place as wide-open and populated as Starlight Point.
Lucas came back with a tube of caulk and a dispenser. He handed it to his brother.
“So, tell me about the date you didn’t go on with the lady who was not our teacher,” he said.
“We went to the Pony Express. I had a burger. She had the chicken basket.”
“And?”
“And we talked.”
“Did she talk about all the ways she could kill or maim you if she wanted?”
Matt laughed. “It didn’t come up. I think it was already implied in the class.”
He laid a neat line of caulk around the bottom of the dock light to prevent moisture from seeping up from the ground. As he replaced the top of the fixture and screwed it down, he glanced along the row of lights. There were half a dozen.
“I probably should do all of these,” he said.
“I’ll take them apart if you’ll do the caulking,” Lucas offered.
They worked together in silence for a few minutes. Matt wondered how much he should share with his brother about Caroline and her curiosity about the Loose Cannon.
“We talked about dogs,” he said suddenly. “Do you remember Benson?”
“A little. Mom has a picture of us with Benson in front of the Christmas tree.”
“Caroline had a dog that got sprayed by a skunk.”
“Messy. And wonderful date conversation. I hope you did better than that.”
Matt shrugged. “We talked about college some. And what drives us, I guess.”
“I know what drives you.”
The way Lucas said it made Matt wonder how obvious it was.
“What do you think drives me?” he asked as he tightened the top of the third light.
Lucas sat on the dock next to him and swung his legs. “Fea
r. Same thing that drives me. Fear of being like our dad. Fear of failing and being a giant disappointment to our mom. Fear of letting down Bruce, who’s been like finding the gold at the end of a rainbow for our family.” He lay back on the dock. “I’ve never said that out loud before and now I sound like I’m afraid of breathing. Pathetic.”
“Not pathetic,” Matt said. “But unless you’re embezzling hundreds of thousands from the caricature stand on the midway, you’re in no danger of being like our dad.”
“I’d hate prison,” Lucas said. “Can’t imagine staring at white walls all day long.”
“And getting outside once a day if you’re lucky.” Matt almost shuddered. One of the many things he loved about his construction job was being outside, even dealing with snow, mud and rain. Being the boss on the job site also represented freedom to him, something he valued as much as the good opinion of his family.
“So what’s her deal?” Lucas asked.
“She loves justice.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not like she does. She has this burning thirst to figure out mysteries and haul guilty parties before the jury. It’s a little scary.”
“Only if you’re hiding something, I suppose,” Lucas said. He sat up, but continued swinging his feet off the dock while Matt caulked the last light. “I wonder what made her that way.”
Matt wondered the same thing. He’d almost asked her directly but relented.
“She’s interested in the Loose Cannon,” Matt said. He lowered his voice when he said the name of the ride, even though a wide lawn separated them from the house where his mother was finalizing dinner and his stepfather was probably upstairs changing out of his work clothes.
Lucas narrowed his eyes. “What’s there to find out? The ride failed, they tore it down. End of story.”
“It’s uncomfortable. And weird. I always assumed Uncle John sold the business to Bruce because he felt as if he’d failed. Especially when he got the contract to tear down something he’d just built. Can’t imagine what that would feel like.”
Lucas laughed. “You’re not going to add that to your truckload of stuff to worry about, are you? Don’t even think you’ll end up tearing down the Shooting Star in your lifetime. Not going to happen.”
“You never know what’s going to happen. I’m sure Uncle John never thought he would.”
“Did you ever think it was strange that Starlight Point didn’t give that ride much of a chance? They tore it down after only one season. Doesn’t seem like they were even trying.”
Matt shoved the screwdriver in his back pocket and picked up the caulk gun. “It was a nasty accident. Killed a girl. That kind of bad publicity doesn’t go away.”
“So what does Sherlock Holmes think she’s going to find out about it?”
Matt looked across the darkening water at Starlight Point. Next year, a giant new coaster would tower over the skyline and mingle with the existing ones. He hoped it would never be dogged with an accident like the Loose Cannon. If he did something wrong as he built it, could someone die? How would he live with that guilt?
Had Uncle John done something wrong? Matt didn’t even want to consider it. He swallowed the thought like a bitter pill. “I don’t know what Caroline thinks she’ll find. And even though there was obviously nothing criminal that went on, her questions make me uncomfortable. It seems as if she suspects something, but I don’t know why.”
“Is it about that other guy who was killed around the same time? The maintenance guy?”
Matt nodded. “I think that’s part of it.”
“Well,” Lucas said as he got to his feet, “she sure can’t blame that part on Uncle John’s construction company.”
“No.” Matt rolled his shoulders. “I just don’t like having it all brought up. It’s like having a stranger dig around in your attic and judge your family. We don’t need any hint of bad publicity, and Bruce doesn’t need one more thing to weigh on his bad heart.”
“Dinner,” their mother called from the patio door.
Matt and Lucas headed for the garage to stow their tools before sitting down at the table. As they crossed the lawn, Matt wondered if his brother was right. There was nothing to those old stories, and they couldn’t hurt Bayside Construction now, no matter how hard Caroline looked in old dusty corners.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IN ONE OF her criminal justice classes, Caroline’s professor had made an important point about the value of listening. Their class had taken several field trips and each student was required to write down everything they heard. They’d gone outside where the distant noise of trains mingled with birdcalls, wind and car traffic. At a local coffee shop, students hunched over their drinks listening to conversations at nearby tables. They’d even gone to a baseball game on campus and a bank during busy Friday hours.
Caroline had been amazed by the different sounds and impressions the students had heard. How could two people sitting side by side at a coffee shop come away with different perspectives on a neighboring table’s conversation? This summer, wherever she was posted at Starlight Point, Caroline had resolved to practice listening.
Most days, it was a failure. The scrambler ride created a whooshing wind noise. The roller coaster down the midway clacked and induced screaming. Lots of screaming. The train whistled and puffed. Kids cried and yelled. Sometimes parents cried and yelled, depending on how their day was going.
Starlight Point was a cacophony of noise. Which was one of the reasons Caroline was happy to take an early morning shift even though it would be a long day with another STRIPE class scheduled for the evening.
Beginning in the cool morning air at seven o’clock, Caroline gradually added sounds to her collection. Employees arriving, vehicles on the Outer Loop road, rides groaning into action for their first guests. Eventually it would become deafening, but the rise in volume was gradual over the first several hours of her shift.
At around nine in the morning, Caroline heard the park coming to life. But she could still hear the construction sounds from behind the fence. Those noises of trucks, backup alarms, digging and men shouting over their own noise had become her early morning friends, a constant assurance that work was progressing.
But something was not right. She heard beeping that indicated reverse gear on some large piece of equipment, but when it stopped she heard something else. Shouting. Voices raised not in anger or greeting or directions, but fear and panic instead.
“Get it off him. Off. Hurry!”
A door slammed. More shouting, and the voices held wild notes of panic.
Something was definitely wrong. It was not her job to open the gate and snoop on the construction zone, but she didn’t need her police training to know those shouts were fueled by something bad.
Caroline unlocked the gate closest to the midway and swung it open. The usual trucks, steel beams, piles of earth and stone, and excavating equipment littered the site.
But all the men were grouped around the back of one of the dump trucks. At least one person was on the ground. Her heart raced as she looked for Matt in the chaos. She found him.
He stood over the man on the ground, one hand over his eyes and holding his cell phone to his ear. Although his posture suggested he was in agony, he appeared physically unharmed. Caroline’s relief at finding Matt on his feet was so strong she wondered how much room she’d allowed him in her heart. And how much more she should.
Caroline dashed across the uneven ground, hoping she could help. She’d completed first responder and CPR training in college. Without hesitation or fear, she parted the circle of men standing around their coworker on the ground. She noticed their faces. Wide eyes, mouths open, even a few tears. Her eyes dropped to the man on the ground. Was he dead?
A man kneeling next to the injured worker was talking to hi
m, and Caroline noticed a small movement in response. His chest rose and lowered with breath. Not dead, thank goodness. But what had happened?
Matt finished his call and slid his phone into his pocket.
“What can I do?” Caroline asked. She’d heard him give an exact location over the phone. Any 911 calls from Starlight Point were directed to the dispatcher at the Starlight Point police station, so an ambulance was only moments away.
He shook his head, his jaw tight. She watched him swallow hard as if he were trying to force down terrible emotions.
“Guide the ambulance when it gets here.”
“I’ll get the gate on the Outer Loop open and wait there,” she said. How she wished she could erase the pain on his face. “What happened?”
“Run over by that truck. His legs...”
Caroline’s need to ask questions and seek answers nearly clawed its way to the front line of the conversation. She wanted to ask how it happened, who was driving the truck and how many witnesses there were. She would ask those questions. Later. She’d have to for the report.
The man on the ground was still, his skin growing even paler. Tension radiated from the circle of workers. They looked to Matt as if he held the answers, even though there was nothing anyone could do until the ambulance arrived. Caroline abandoned the questions she desperately wanted to ask and headed for the gate.
She pulled the radio off her belt and informed the dispatcher she’d have the Outer Loop gate open and reiterated which gate it was. The fire and ambulance crew used the same frequency the police did, and she knew they’d hear her message. She wanted to add a special request that they hurry, but she knew they always did.
Matt was competent and trustworthy. Of course he’d already conveyed the extent and seriousness of the worker’s injuries when he called it in.
Waiting, even though it was only minutes before she heard the siren approaching, was torture. She looked back at the construction site. Matt was on his phone again, and the other men stood over their coworker, shoulders slumped. One of them still knelt next to the injured man, talking to him. What had happened?
