by Paula Graves
“Better?” he asked.
She nodded. “You’re going to have to answer questions regardless.”
“I know.” He slanted another wry grin in her direction, making her belly squirm. “I’d just like to look my best when I talk to the cops.”
Uniformed officers arrived first to take their statements, but within half an hour, a detective arrived, a tall, slim black man with sharp brown eyes and a friendly demeanor. He’d come around the trucking company asking questions last month after a couple of their employees had been murdered, Rachel remembered. Antoine Parsons. Nice guy.
He didn’t look particularly nice as his gaze swept the scene and locked, inevitably, on Seth’s battered face. “Seth Hammond. You do have a funny way of showing up at all my crime scenes lately.”
Seth’s smile was close to a smirk. Rachel felt the urge to punch him in the shoulder and tell him to stop making things worse. But apparently he just couldn’t help it. “Antoine, Antoine, Antoine. Still sucking up to the Man, I see. How’s that working out for you?”
Antoine barely stopped an eye roll. “We have a missing person?”
Rachel stepped in front of Seth to address the detective. “His name is Davis Rogers. I was talking to him on the phone when I heard a thud and the phone went dead.”
“You came here to look for him?”
“He’d left an earlier message on my voice mail, telling me where he was staying. It seemed the obvious place to look. I got here and found his car parked in the lot. But he’s not in his room. And I found a patch of blood in the leaves nearby.” She waved toward the woods.
Antoine’s gaze slid back to Seth’s face. “Who gave you a pounding, Hammond?”
“Not sure,” he answered.
“What are you doing here? You with Ms. Davenport?”
“I came looking for Rogers. He wasn’t in his room, so I was about to leave when I thought I saw something in the woods.”
“Just happened to see something in the woods?” Antoine was clearly skeptical. Rachel was beginning to understand why Seth hadn’t wanted her to include him in this police investigation at all. Maybe he’d earned the distrust, but clearly nobody in the Bitterwood Police Department was going to give him any benefit of the doubt.
“I heard something, actually.” Seth slanted a look her way. She saw fear in his eyes but also rock-hard determination in the set of his jaw. “I heard a cell phone ringing. I found it on the ground beneath those bushes.” He pointed toward the hydrangeas.
He was telling the truth about the phone, she realized with a thrill of surprise.
“It was Ms. Davenport, calling Rogers.”
Antoine’s brows lifted. “You said you were looking for Rogers. Why?”
She saw the hesitation in Seth’s face. The truth, she realized, could be a scary thing. And not just for Seth. For her, too.
But it was better than the alternative.
She took a deep breath and answered the detective’s question for Seth. “He was trying to find out what happened to me last night.”
* * *
IT TOOK ALMOST two hours to work through all the questions Antoine had for both of them. His attitude toward Seth had settled into guarded belief, though Seth knew it would last only as long as it took to get in trouble again.
At least Antoine had asked good, probing questions. Unfortunately, neither Seth nor Rachel had any good answers. She still couldn’t remember most of what had happened the night before, and Seth’s memory of the attack that had left him bruised and half-conscious was similarly spotty.
He’d refused a trip to the hospital, though the paramedics thought he’d sustained a concussion. His mind was clearing nicely, and most of the aches and pains in his body had faded to bearable. He probably did have a mild concussion, but he didn’t think it was any worse than that. He’d go spend the night at Delilah’s and let her play nursemaid.
Except apparently Delilah was out of town for the night. “She said she was driving down to Alabama for a business meeting,” Rachel told Seth after he’d assured the paramedics he’d have his sister keep an eye on him.
Well, hell. He’d just have to keep an eye on himself.
“You could stay with me tonight.” Rachel’s blue eyes locked with his, but her expression was impossible to read.
“That’s kind of you—”
“I’m not sure it’s kind,” she said, the left corner of her mouth quirking upward. “I could use another set of eyes and ears in the house. I’m not inclined to stay there alone after all of this.”
So when Antoine finally agreed to let them leave, Seth called a wrecker service to take the Charger to the local garage and got into the passenger seat of Rachel’s car.
“You don’t have to do this,” he told her as she buckled herself in behind the steering wheel. “I’ll be okay.”
“I was serious. I don’t want to be alone. I’m not sure I’m safe alone with everything that’s going on.”
She probably wasn’t, he realized. “I’m sorry about Davis. I hope I’m wrong about what happened to him.”
Her lips tightened. “I wish I believed you were.”
“Do you know why he was here?”
“He must have come to the funeral.” She looked close to collapse, he realized, so he didn’t ask anything else until they reached the sprawling two-story farmhouse on the eastern edge of Bitterwood, a few miles south of Copperhead Ridge and light years away from the hardscrabble life Seth had lived growing up on Smoky Ridge.
Until her father’s cancer diagnosis, Rachel had kept her own apartment in Maryville, living off her earnings as a public librarian. But everything had changed when a series of doctors confirmed the initial diagnosis—inoperable, terminal liver cancer. Too late for a transplant to help. They’d given him four months to live. Chemo, radiation and a series of holistic treatments had prolonged his life by a few more months, but shortly before his death, George had said, “No more,” and spent the remainder of his time on earth preparing his daughter to run the trucking company he’d built.
Seth knew all these intimate details about Rachel’s life because Davenport Trucking was like any business that maintained a family atmosphere—everybody knew everybody else’s business. Few secrets lasted long in such a place.
But he didn’t know what Rachel thought about the drastic change in her life. Did she regret leaving the library behind? From what he knew of her work at Davenport, she had a deft hand with personnel management and seemed to have a natural affinity for the finance end of the business. People who’d grumbled about her selection as her father’s successor had stopped complaining when it became clear that the company wouldn’t suffer under her guidance.
But nobody seemed to know what Rachel herself thought about the job. Did the benefit of fulfilling her father’s dying wish outweigh the loss of a career she’d chosen for herself?
“This house is too big for just one person,” Rachel commented as she unlocked the front door and let them inside. “I don’t think Diane plans to come back here. Too much of my mother here for her tastes.”
The front door opened into a narrow hallway that stretched all the way to a door in the back. Off the hallway, either archways or doors led into rooms on either side. To the immediate right, a set of stairs rose to the second floor, flanked by an oak banister polished smooth from years of wear. “Did you ever slide down that banister?” he asked Rachel.
“Maybe.” A whisper of a smile touched her lips. “Think you can make it up the stairs? The bedrooms are on the second floor.”
He dragged himself up the steps behind her, glad he was feeling less light-headed than he had back at the bed-and-breakfast. Rachel showed him into a simple, homey room on the left nearest the stairs. “I’ll make up the bed for you. Why don’t you go take a shower? The bathroom’s
the next door down on the right. There’s a robe in the closet that should fit you. I’ll see if Paul’s left any clothes around you can borrow for the night.”
When he emerged from the shower fifteen minutes later, he returned to the bedroom to find the bedcovers folded back and a pair of sweatpants and a mismatched T-shirt draped across the bed. A slip of paper lay on top of them. “Sorry, couldn’t find any underwear. Or anything that matched. After I shower, we’ll find something to eat.”
She had finished her shower first and was already downstairs in the cozy country kitchen at the back of the house. “Something to eat” turned out to be tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
Rachel had finally shed the dress she’d worn to Smoky Joe’s the night before, replacing it with a pair of slim-fitting yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that revealed her long legs and slender arms. She was thinner than Seth normally liked in a woman, but he couldn’t find a damned thing wrong with the flare of her hips or the curve of her small, firm breasts.
“Is tomato soup okay? I should have asked—”
“It’s fine. I can grill the sandwiches if you want.”
She turned to look at him, smiling a little as she took in his mismatched clothes. Her stepbrother, Paul, was a little slimmer than he was, so the clothes fit snugly on his legs and shoulders. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?”
“The shower worked wonders,” he assured her, bellying up to the kitchen counter beside the stove, where she’d already prepared the sandwiches and set out a stick of butter for the griddle pan heating up over the closest eye. He dipped to get a better look at the stove top, relieved that it was a flat-top electric with no open-flame burners.
She gave him a sidelong glance as he moved closer to where she stood stirring the soup. “I’m not used to cooking with company.”
“Me, either.” He dropped a pat of butter on the griddle pan. It sizzled and snapped, and they both had to jump back to avoid the splatter.
Rachel laughed. “I see why. You’re dangerous.”
“We could switch,” he suggested. “Surely I can manage stirring soup.”
Switching positions, they brushed intimately close. As Seth’s body stirred to life, he realized the cut of the sweatpants wasn’t quite loose enough to hide his reaction if he didn’t get his libido under control, and soon.
Just stir the soup. Clockwise, clockwise, switch it up to counterclockwise—
“Why are you so interested in what happened to me last night?” Rachel broke the tense silence.
He glanced at her and found she was looking intently at the griddle, where she’d laid both of the sandwiches in a puddle of sizzling butter, her profile deceptively serene. Only the quick flutter of her pulse in her throat gave away her tension.
“What is it they say? Save a person’s life and they’re your slave forever after? Maybe I’m just waiting for you to pay up.”
She cut her eyes at him as if to make sure he was teasing. “Yeah, that’ll happen.”
He grinned. “Maybe I’m sucking up to the new boss.”
Wrong thing to say. Her slight smile faded immediately. “New boss. I haven’t even let myself think about that yet.”
“Is that going to be a problem? Me being an employee, I mean. And being here like this. Because I’m feeling a lot better, really. I don’t have to stick around so you can watch out for my mental state.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I was thinking about being the boss, period. All those people depending on what I do and say now.”
He had stopped stirring while they were talking, and a thin skin was forming on top of the soup. He started stirring again, quickly whisking the film away. “Hasn’t that been the case for a while now?”
She was quiet a moment. “I guess so. It just didn’t feel real as long as my father was around to be my safety net.”
To his dismay, he saw tears glisten in her eyes, threatening to spill. The urge to pull her into his arms and hold her close was almost more than he could resist. He settled for laying one hand on her shoulder and giving it a comforting squeeze.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of one hand and flipped the sandwiches over. “I had a long time to prepare for my father’s death. And it was a relief by the end to see him finally out of pain. But now that I’m past that numb stage—”
“Your dad was a good man. Not many people would’ve taken a chance on someone like me. This world’s a worse place with him gone.”
His words had summoned tears again, but also a smile, which she turned on him like a ray of pure sunshine that brightened the room, even as the drizzle outside darkened the day.
He smiled back briefly, then forced his attention back to the soup before he got any deeper into trouble.
Chapter Six
After lunch, Rachel made a pot of coffee and they took their cups into the den on the eastern side of the house, where a large picture window offered a glimpse of Copperhead Ridge shrouded with mist. The rain had picked up again, casting the trees in hues of blue and gray. When she turned on the floor lamps that flanked the room, the scene outside faded into reflections of the warm, comfortably furnished den and the two slightly bedraggled people who occupied it.
Seth found his own reflection depressing, given how quickly his bruises were darkening, making him look like the loser of a cage match. He turned his attention instead to Rachel, whose honey-brown hair lay in damp waves around her face. Scrubbed clean and pink, she looked about a decade younger and prettier than she had any right to be.
“How’s your head feeling?” she asked.
Light, he thought. But it didn’t have much to do with his mild concussion. “Better. Not really hurting anymore.”
Her brief smile faded quickly. “I don’t know what to think about Davis.”
“You mean whether or not he’s still alive?”
She sank into an armchair across from the sofa, curling her legs under her. She waved for Seth to sit across from her on the sofa. “I mean if he’s dead. How am I supposed to feel about it?”
“I don’t know that you’re supposed to feel any particular way,” Seth offered. “You just feel what you feel.”
“I did love him once. He was the first man—” She stopped short, a delicate blush rising in her cheeks. She slanted a quick look at Seth. “It didn’t last. We wanted such different things out of life.”
Whatever it had been that Davis Rogers had wanted out of life, it was surely closer to Rachel’s desires than anything Seth had done or wanted to do in his own life. If she and Davis had been miles apart, she and Seth were separated by whole galaxies.
But it doesn’t matter, does it? That’s not why you’re here.
“I haven’t even seen him in years. We ran into each other a while back at a football game in Charlottesville. Said hi, promised to call but never did—” She closed her eyes. “Why did he come here?”
“Probably to attend your father’s funeral and see how you were.”
“And now he might be dead because of me.”
Seth reached across the space between them, covering her hands with one of his. “If he’s dead, it’s because someone beat the hell out of him.”
“Because of me.”
He crouched in front of her, closing his fingers around her wrists. “Look at me.”
Her troubled blue eyes met his.
“I know someone’s been methodically removing people from your life to isolate you. I know whoever’s pulling the strings hired Mark Bramlett to kill four women who were close to you. And now, maybe, he’s killed your old boyfriend, who came to town to make sure you were okay. I think he may have been behind drugging you last night, too.”
Rachel’s eyes darkened with suspicion. “How do you know this?”
“I started to
suspect something was going on when I realized three of the four Bitterwood murders involved women who’d worked at Davenport Trucking. That was strange enough. Then I asked around and found out that Marjorie Kenner had been your friend and mentor—another librarian, right?”
“Right.” She looked stricken by his words, as if the mere reminders of all she’d lost had hit her all over again. He wished he’d found some way to soften his words, but he doubted anything he could have said would have made her feel the pain any less keenly.
“What I don’t know,” he added more gently, “is why. If someone wanted to get you out of his way—”
“His?”
“His, her—whichever. If someone wanted you out of the way, why not just kill you?”
She blanched. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do. You just can’t say it out loud for some reason.”
She slanted a troubled look at him. “How do you know so much about me?”
He ran his thumb lightly over her knuckles, gentling her with the movement. He saw her start to relax a little, soothed by the repetitive movement of his thumb. “I know because I observe. I used to be a con man, you know. That’s what con men do. Observe, compile, formulate and exploit.”
Her nostrils flared with a hint of distaste. “You’re approaching my trouble like you would approach a potential mark?”
“Might as well use those skills for good.”
Her eyes narrowed a little, but she gave a slight nod. “So what have you observed?”
“You’re scared of something. Not everyone can see it, because you hide it really well. But I see it, because that used to be my job. Finding a person’s vulnerable spots and figuring out how to use them.”
