In the morning, Rebecca drove her own car to the hospital. Cate returned two calls that were on Belmont Investigations’ answering machine and made notes to pass along to Joe. She’d barely set the phone down when it rang again. Her intuition kicked in with a name. Mitch! She was surprised when her heart gave a non-PI-ish flutter. Then she looked at the caller ID. Not an Oregon number. This was more normal. Her intuition had reverted to its usual not-a-clue status.
“Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid speaking.”
“Well, howdy there, little missy. Is Joe handy?”
Jeremiah Thompson. Spoofing again.
“I’m sorry, he’s still unavailable.” Her mind did a spin and loop as she tried to decide how to handle the call.
“So, do you have that little redhead’s address for me now?”
“Is this Mr. Thompson?” she inquired as if she didn’t already know, stalling for time while she decided what to do.
“Yes, missy, it sure is. You got Willow’s address for me?”
“I’m, um, working on it. Are you sure you can’t give me any more information about her?” she added. Knowing whatever he knew about Willow might help her escape him. “Oregon’s a big state.”
“Well, like I tole you, she’s a real fanatic about the tree stuff. Hey, did I mention she might be using some other name? Holly or Aspen or Laurel. Some tree thing. I don’t like saying this, but Willow’s kind of a flighty little gal, not too reliable. Always jumpin’ up and movin’ around, busier’n a squirrel packin’ nuts.”
Willow, flighty, always “movin’ around”? Of course she was always moving around! Because she was afraid of him. With good reason.
“Mr. Thompson, I think it would be best if you gave up this search for Willow,” Cate said. “In fact, I must inform you that the agency cannot continue working for you at this time.” Under the circumstances, Uncle Joe would surely approve of that decision.
Silence. “You found her, didn’t you?” The accent hadn’t totally disappeared, but it had definitely moved north. “I already sent Belmont a deposit, you know. Cash on the barrelhead.”
Stalking Willow, and now demanding his money’s worth! “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Thompson, but I’ll see that you get your deposit back.” Sweetly she added, “If you’ll just give me an address there in Texas to send it to?”
“I’m a-thinkin’ you Oregon folks are a buncha shysters, that’s what you are,” he growled. Southern style, of course.
“And I’m a-thinkin’, Coop, that you’d better back off and leave Willow alone!”
Uh-oh. Not a smart move. But his blatant deception fired her temper into the red zone. She expected him to sputter and ask what in tarnation she was talkin’ about, but instead total silence translated into a peculiar ringing in her ears. She squelched a nervous impulse to jump into the silence.
“You have found Willow, haven’t you? And she’s told you some off-the-wall story about me.” No trace of accent now, and no longer the voice of a shaky old man.
“I know now that Willow has no great-uncle named Jeremiah Thompson and no dead grandmother in Texas. But that there is a man named Cooper Langston right here in Eugene looking for her, and he’s certainly not someone she wants to find her.”
“Of course she doesn’t want me to find her! Look, there’s a whole lot more to this situation than you know, and it sure isn’t whatever wild story Willow told you. The fact is—”
“We’ve heard enough of your ‘facts.’ And the next episode of this story is that Willow is going to the police to get a restraining order against you.”
To her surprise, he laughed, a deep, all-male chuckle. “Don’t hold your breath on that one,” he advised.
The comment made Cate both curious and uneasy, especially since Willow had seemed reluctant to go to the police about Coop. But no way was she going to let him suck her in with more wild stories. “Okay, this conversation is over,” she said. “If you won’t give me an address, you won’t get your deposit back. But thank you for using Belmont Investigations.”
She hung up the phone. Good-bye, Jeremiah Thompson/Cooper Langston. She’d get busy on a new internet site for job hunting that she’d recently heard about.
But there were a couple of loose ends to tie up first.
Cate drove around by the construction area. One yellow dinosaur was loading chunks of asphalt and concrete on a dump truck, another was digging more ditch. Another tree had been felled, and the raw stump and crushed branches gave Cate a pang. Couldn’t they have done this a different way? Willow’s tree was still standing, and Cate couldn’t tell if Willow was in it. No one seemed to be paying attention if she was.
Cate obviously couldn’t go wandering through the construction zone with the machinery running full blast, so she went to the house on Lexter. She hoped to find that Willow had decided to take time off from tree-sitting to contact the police about both Amelia and Coop, but no one answered her pounding on the door. She decided to drive on to Beverly’s, since that was the second item on her to-do list. She’d come back to the tree later.
At the little house on Westernview, Cate knocked and Beverly yelled, “C’mon in.”
Cate pushed the door open under the tinkle of the wind chimes and caught a whiff of fresh paint. “You really shouldn’t holler for just anyone to come in,” she scolded. “What if it were a burglar or home invader at the door?”
“You think my yelling ‘Go away, I’m not home’ would be more effective?”
“It wouldn’t hurt to keep the door locked. And then take a peek through the window first.”
“I’ll think about that. So, now that we have that settled, I’m glad to see you again.” Beverly pointed the remote at the TV and flicked off a game show.
Impulsively, Cate reached into the wheelchair and hugged her. “I wanted to come and tell you I located Willow. She feels really bad that you think she may have taken your ring. She mentioned that you sometimes hide it and then can’t recall where.”
“Well, yes, I guess I’ve done that.”
“She said you might have put it under the mattress or in the freezer. I’ll help you look, if you’d like.”
Beverly touched a finger to her cheek. “Oh, my. I did make some Kool-Aid cubes a while back. They’re really good to suck on, you know? And sometimes the neighborhood kids come around for them. Maybe I did put the ring in there.”
Cate inspected a half dozen trays of rainbow-colored cubes from the freezer section of the old refrigerator. No ring. At Beverly’s suggestion, she also defrosted several frozen containers of chili and stew in the microwave, enough so she could poke around in them with a spoon. No ring. But Beverly said they may as well completely thaw one of the containers of chili and some cornbread too, if Cate could stay for lunch. Cate said she could. Before they ate, Beverly took Cate’s hand and offered a blessing.
“Awesome chili,” Cate said when she spooned up a second helping.
“Willow made it. The cornbread too. She always made extra so we could freeze some. But I’m going to run out pretty soon. I do miss that girl.”
“She told me why she picked up and left so suddenly. It had to do with a man.”
“A man. I shoulda known.” Beverly nodded, a frown puckering her forehead. “I hope she didn’t get involved with some guy who’ll do her wrong. There’s a lot of ’em around, you know.” Apropos of nothing, or so it seemed to Cate, she added, “Mitch has a lot of good qualities, as a man. A real handy kind of guy. I think he’s interested in you. You could call him up and tell him about finding Willow to kind of get things going.”
“I haven’t had much luck with relationships.”
“Finding a good man isn’t luck. It’s you and God, seeing what’s right for you,” Beverly chided. “Did Mitch tell you about himself?”
“A little.”
“You do like him, don’t you? He’s a great guy. He can do all kinds of things. He’s going to paint the outside of the house in a few weeks.
He has to fix Roberta Elly’s fence first.”
“I like him okay. But it seems a little, oh, self-serving to go to church occasionally just to pick up painting and handyman jobs.”
“That’s what he told you?”
“He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you had to trick him into going to church this past Sunday.”
“That’s true,” Beverly conceded. “But …”
“But?”
“I don’t know if Mitch would want me to tell you or not.” Beverly buttered a square of cornbread while she thought. “Well, phooey, I’ll tell you if I want. Painting isn’t a job with Mitch. He and a partner have a business doing individualized computer setups for small businesses. The Computer Solutions Dudes. They write some of the … what do you call it? … software themselves. He says they aren’t running Bill Gates any big competition, but they do okay. That’s his real job.”
The information surprised Cate, but she gave it a second inspection. “Apparently the Dudes aren’t doing too great, if Mitch has to work nights and weekends for extra money.”
“He isn’t painting for money.” Beverly waved her spoon in exasperation with Cate’s denseness. “He’s doing it with the Helping Hands volunteers from church. His grandparents back in Tennessee are dead now, but they’d told him how the church helped them when they were in need. He wanted to help repay what the church did for them by helping someone else’s grandparents now. He doesn’t meet needy people much in his regular life, so he started coming to church so he could be a part of the Helping Hands group.”
Another rethinking. A man helping people in need not because he was a Christian, but joining with a Christian group because he wanted to help people in need. A little backward, but there was that old line that even Willow knew: the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
After lunch, Cate wrestled with the heavy mattress. By the time sweat ran down her back and she’d found a parrot earring, which Beverly embraced with glee, plus toenail clippers and a page from a 2008 calendar, she was reasonably certain no ring was hidden between mattress and box springs. Beverly’s other ideas had her down on her knees checking under a chest of drawers, rummaging through a box of Cheerios, and running her hand to the scummy bottom of the toilet tank. No ring.
Beverly thanked her profusely when she left. “And if you see Willow again, you tell her I’m sorry I thought she took my ring. I’m sure it’s right here under my nose somewhere, and one of these days I’ll find it.”
“If you think of any more places to look, let me know and I’ll come back and help you.”
“Okay. And you think about what a great guy Mitch is.”
At the house, Cate parked in the driveway, leaving space for Rebecca to pull her car into the garage beside Uncle Joe’s SUV. There wasn’t room in the garage for a third car, of course, and she always parked in the driveway or at the curb. She was putting her key into the front door when her back suddenly prickled with the feeling someone was watching her.
She whirled and instantly knew who he was. Tall, blond, and rugged. Too handsome for his own good. Long-legged in jeans, broad-shouldered in a black leather jacket. Maybe he wasn’t sneaking up on her, but that didn’t make her feel any safer.
“You must be Cate,” he said with a smile, as if they shared some secret joke. Then his head jerked back in a double take. “Hey, you didn’t tell me you looked enough like Willow to be her sister.”
Cate yanked the key out of the lock. Rebecca wouldn’t be home yet, and no way was she giving him a chance to get inside the house with her alone. She didn’t need video-at-eleven to know he was way more dangerous than that easy grin suggested.
With what she hoped was a professional edge to her voice, she said, “I don’t believe we’ve met?”
“You know who I am. Willow surely gave you the full description.” More easy smile. Coop Langston oozed male self-confidence. He draped his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans as if he were posing for her inspection.
“Why are you here?” Finding the house hadn’t been any problem for him, of course. Belmont Investigations was listed in the yellow pages, with an address.
“You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. What choice did I have?” He managed to sound both reasonable and reproachful.
“I told you, as far as Belmont Investigations is concerned, you are no longer our client. Not as Jeremiah Thompson, not as Coop Langston.” Cate’s gaze edged around him. The sidewalk was empty. The yards around the houses on both sides were empty. Where was a nosy neighbor when you needed one? “I can’t at this moment return your deposit, but I’ll discuss it with Joe and get the money back to you.”
Big put-upon sigh. “I don’t want my money back. I just want to know where Willow is.”
“Stalking is against the law, in case you don’t know.”
“Stalking? Is that what Willow told you, that I’m stalking her?”
“If the shoe fits, wear it.” Oh, great originality, Cate. That ought to really intimidate him. She tried to put more threat into it. “I think she will get that restraining order against you.”
“Restraining me from what?”
“From stalking.”
“How can I be stalking her?” he asked, his tone still reasonable. “I haven’t seen her for, let’s see, almost eight months now, which was when she picked up and left. I haven’t known where she was. I kept thinking I’d run into her somewhere around town, but I never did. So I figured maybe she’d left town, and it would take a real investigator to find her. That’s why I hired you.”
“But you located her at Beverly’s. And you tried to choke her!”
“Who’s Beverly, and when and where was this?” Coop sat down on the step and patted the space beside him. He reverted to Southern drawl. “I think you ’n me better have a talk about all this, little missy, because that sweet-talkin’ redhead has been tellin’ you wilder stories than a tabloid expo.”
Cate didn’t sit. “What do you mean?” she asked warily.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what all she told you, but surely you can be fair enough to listen to my side of the story.”
“Uncle Joe and I listened to your side of the story, about a dead grandmother and an inheritance. Oh yeah, and you being in an assisted-living home down in Texas. Miserly Acres, I believe it was.”
He laughed as if delighted with her memory for details. “That may have been a, oh—”
“Lie?” Cate suggested.
“More like a tall tale. Although I have had to be rather miserly these last few months, considering what Willow did to me.”
Cate didn’t encourage him to continue, but neither, because she had to admit a reluctant curiosity, did she refuse to listen. She folded her arms across her chest.
“The thing is, Willow and I were living in a little log cabin over near the river. Belongs to a friend of mine.” He lifted blond eyebrows, and Cate gave a slight nod to show she accepted this much as fact. “Willow, in case you don’t know this about her, is … Well, some people might call her a free spirit. But when you get right down to it, she’s like I said on the phone, flighty. She’s fun, but you can’t depend on her. Willow and truth have only a passing acquaintance. She likes making up stories. And she has a temper. Oh, hey, does she have a temper!”
“I didn’t see any indication of that.”
“She didn’t throw any frying pans across the room at you? Didn’t toss your socks in the trash because you forgot and left them on the bathroom floor? Didn’t berate you for being insensitive, inconsiderate, stubborn, and cheap?” He sighed. “And forgetful about her birthday?”
“She said you slapped and punched her!”
He touched his chest. “Oh, that’s a low blow. A really low, low blow. I’ve been in a barroom brawl or two, but I’m not a woman hitter.” Both his gesture and injured tone struck Cate as melodramatic, but then he added reflectively, “Though I guess I did throw a dish towel at her once when she complained I didn’t put the dish
es away right.”
Cate hesitated with another retort. He really sounded hurt about being accused of punching Willow. And how dangerous could a dish-drying guy be? Then her spine and resolve stiffened. What phony, good-guy role was he playing now that he’d given up the Jed Clampett drawl?
“The thing is, Willow got mad at me. Like I said, it was about eight months ago. She wanted a new car, and she somehow got it in her head that I was going to get her one for her birthday. But no way could we afford it, and … okay, I admit it, I actually did forget her birthday. But things were rough at work—”
“You worked at home. Willow had a hard time escaping from you because you practically kept her a prisoner.”
Coop blinked, as if the statement amazed him. “I didn’t work at home, except to call a potential customer in the evening once in a while. I worked at a shop called Ridley’s Cycles. We sold and serviced motorcycles and ATVs. I don’t work there anymore. Hard economic times, and the place closed down. Now I’m selling and installing car stereo systems. Though business is going down the tubes there too.”
“Where is this place?”
“You interested in a stereo system?” He eyed her car. “I can get you one that’ll blast your socks off. Place called Sound by Sammy.”
“I don’t think so.” She needed her socks, thank you. “Okay, so you forgot Willow’s birthday.” She didn’t necessarily believe any of this, but his quick and prolific imagination did make her reluctantly curious. “So what happened?”
“When I got home from work the day after her birthday, she was gone. Packed up and moved out. Without so much as a good-bye note. She took everything from the toaster to the bedroom TV. Probably would have taken the bedroom set too, if she could have gotten it in the car. But what was more important, she cleaned out our bank account, almost ten thousand there, and got a bunch more in cash advances out of our credit cards. Leaving me to pay that off, of course.”
“If Willow’d had any money, she’d have left Oregon,” Cate scoffed. “She’s been trying to hide from you by taking live-in jobs around here.”
Dying to Read (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #1): A Novel Page 9
