The Miles Between Us
Jackson Falls Book 6
Laurie Breton
c. 2014 by Laurie Breton
All rights reserved.
I have to once again give thanks
to my critique partner and niece,
Patti Korbet, who shoots from the hip
and always gives me wise counsel. Mwah!
This, my thirteenth book, is dedicated to my father,
gone these many years, but alive forever in my heart.
You never got the chance to read any of my work,
but you were an avid reader, and I’d like to think
you would have been proud of me.
Love you. Always.
BOOKS IN THE JACKSON FALLS SERIES
Coming Home: Jackson Falls Book 1
Sleeping With the Enemy: Jackson Falls Book 2
Days Like This: Jackson Falls Book 3
The Next Little Thing: Jackson Falls Book 4 (A Jackson Falls MINI)
Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5
The Miles Between Us: Jackson Falls Book 6
ALSO BY LAURIE BRETON
Final Exit
Mortal Sin
Lethal Lies
Criminal Intent
Point of Departure
Die Before I Wake
Black Widow
prologue
He’d been driving aimlessly for an hour. Too fast, but that was nothing new. It should have helped to cool his anger, driving fast through the velvety darkness, with the windows open and the radio blaring, the night air threading fingers through his hair.
Except that it hadn’t. The fury was still there, festering in his gut, twisting and knotting his insides until they felt like a box of snakes. That damned Irish temper. The MacKenzies weren’t known for mincing words or for backing down. They were jackasses, and proud of it, with hair-trigger tempers that could ignite with little provocation. He’d inherited that temper from a long line of MacKenzie forebears, and he’d passed it on to Paige. The jury was still out on Emma; his youngest daughter was strong-willed, but she seemed to have a cool head and an even temper.
It would probably make her journey through life one hell of a lot easier than his.
Rob gripped the wheel harder, his shoulders aching, his muscles taut with tension. Arguing had been futile. They hadn’t resolved a thing. His wife might not possess the famed MacKenzie temper, but Casey was about as malleable as a chunk of granite. The woman refused to back down, refused to admit that he was right. He loved her, but at times, he wanted to throttle her. This was one of those times.
Tires squealing, he took a hard right turn onto yet another anonymous blacktop road. He was hopelessly lost. These twisting back roads made no sense to a boy raised on the streets of South Boston. He’d lived in Maine for three years, but he still didn’t have a clear picture of the lay of the land. It all looked the same to him. Trees, trees, and more trees, interspersed with fields and pastures and crumbling nineteenth-century barns. Casey, who’d grown up here, knew intimately every acre of land from Jackson Falls to the New Hampshire state line. He could spend the rest of his life here and never absorb what came so naturally to her. What was the saying he’d heard? Just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make ‘em biscuits. He was an outsider. No matter how long he lived here, no matter that his wife and his daughter had both been born here or that he paid substantial property taxes, he would always be viewed with suspicion.
The road curved to the left. He stepped on the accelerator, felt the quick response of the engine, the rush of adrenaline as he steered into the darkness with no idea of what awaited him on the other side of that curve. It chapped his ass that she didn’t give enough of a damn about him, about Emma or Paige, to listen to reason. He wasn’t the villain in this piece. He was just a guy who loved his wife, a guy who was trying to build a decent life with her.
A guy who didn’t want to lose her.
He rolled into the straightaway and started down a steep hill, wheels humming against the pavement. They’d always been so connected they could finish each other’s sentences. But the last few weeks had created a rift in the tightly-woven fabric of their relationship, had opened a vast gap between them that he had no idea how to breach. And, damn it, he was tired of fighting. He just wanted his life back.
The radio was playing an up-tempo Tom Petty song, a little too bouncy for his foul mood. His attention temporarily diverted from the road, Rob punched buttons until he found WTOS, the Mountain of Rock, where George Thorogood was belting out a song about being bad to the bone.
There. That was more like it.
When he returned his attention to the road, the doe was standing directly in front of him, frozen in time and place, her eyes glowing in the reflection from his headlights. Rob hit the brakes so hard the car fishtailed. He gripped the wheel with both hands and veered to the right to avoid her. His right-front tire dropped off the pavement to the soft shoulder. The deer bounded away into the woods. Cussing, still moving too fast, he yanked the wheel to the left and over-corrected.
Time seemed to slow as, tires screaming, the car lost control. He had a single instant of clarity, a single instant of knowing he was going to die, a single snapshot of Emma’s face in his mind, before he reached the opposite shoulder.
And the car went airborne.
PART I: THE LOSS
Rob
New York City
Six Weeks Earlier
In the isolation booth, Kitty hit a high note, and Rob leaned back on his tailbone, then closed his eyes to better appreciate its rich vibrancy. That voice, that bloodied-and-torn been-to-hell-and-back voice, should have made Kitty Callahan a star. But for some inexplicable reason, fame had eluded her. Most of the record-buying public had no idea who she was, but every professional musician from New York to L.A. was familiar with Kitty. She’d made a career of singing backup vocals on dozens of albums and a steady stream of road tours. He’d been exceedingly lucky that she’d had this one day free in the middle of a three-month tour, even luckier that she’d been willing to use her day off to fly from Seattle to New York because she, and only she, possessed the sound he was looking for.
He’d paid her way, of course. While the record company hadn’t given him carte blanche, he still had an expansive budget for this album they’d wooed him into producing for Phoenix Hightower, the latest teenage pop star. It might be a kiddie pop album, but if Rob MacKenzie was attaching his name to it, then it was going to be a damn good kiddie pop album. And damn good meant Kitty Callahan on backup vocals.
Rob opened his eyes, took a slug of lukewarm coffee, and exchanged glances with Kyle, the sound engineer. Kyle grinned, gave him a thumbs-up and, nodding in Kitty’s direction, said, “Nice pipes. Not to mention easy on the eyes. I’d do her in a New York minute.”
Studying the slender blonde on the other side of the glass, Rob remained silent, in part because he was a happily married man, and in part because a million years ago, in a different lifetime in some alternate universe, he and Kitty had been lovers. It hadn’t been serious; they’d never been an item. They’d simply been friends with benefits who, in between marriages, one-night stands, and various relationships with other people, got together every so often for dinner, a movie, and a sleepover.
Their relationship was ancient history. It had happened back in his wild and crazy rocker days, back when he was still touring, back before the love of his life finally opened her eyes and realized they belonged together. Before Paige and Emma, his beautiful daughters, came into his life. Before he gave up the booze and the endless array of female companions, put a ring on Casey’s finger, and chopped off his tangled mane of hair to become the domesticated family m
an who now looked back at him every morning from the bathroom mirror.
Back in the day, he’d had a preference for blondes, and he sometimes wondered about the psychology of that. Had it been an attempt at self-preservation, a way of distancing himself, heart and mind, from the dark-haired goddess with whom he had an inexplicable and unshakable bond? The woman who, for nearly two decades, had been his gold standard for measuring other women, all of whom invariably fell short?
The woman who’d spent thirteen years married to his best friend?
It was a moot point now. Time marched relentlessly on, and the only constant was change. Danny had been dead for six years, and Casey was his wife now. But once in a while, something—like hearing Kitty sing—would stir those old memories and the past would creep up silently behind him and bite a chunk out of his ass.
The studio door opened, and he swiveled around to see who had the audacity to breach its staunch barrier while he was recording. Sheila, the front desk receptionist, shrugged her shoulders in apology. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. MacKenzie,” she said, in her nasal Brooklyn accent, “but I have a call for you. She says she’s your sister-in-law, and it’s an emergency.”
His insides liquefied. Shoving back his chair, he said into the mic, “Take a break, Kitty. I have a call. I’ll be right back.”
He sprinted down the corridor, past a half-dozen closed doors. Studio C. Studio B. Studio A. Breaking the corner a half-step ahead of Sheila, he snatched up the telephone receiver that sat on her desk. Breathless, he said, “Hey.”
“Thank God I found you,” Trish Bradley said. “I didn’t have any idea how to reach you. I had to track down Colleen in Bermuda and ask her where you were. It was either that, or find a Manhattan phone directory and start calling every recording studio in New York.”
Colleen Berkowitz, his wife’s sister and his invaluable right hand, was honeymooning in Bermuda with her new husband, Harley Atkins. If Trish had interrupted their honeymoon, this had to be serious. “Trish?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m at the hospital. Casey had another miscarriage.”
“Shit,” he said. “Not again.” His brain flooding with visions of gruesome and bloody death, Rob sank onto the corner of Sheila’s desk. Rubbing his forehead with the fingers of one hand, he said grimly, “How bad is it?”
Trish hesitated for an instant too long. “I don’t know.”
Her reticence exponentially increased his fear. “Goddamn it, Trish, how bad?”
“It's bad. I won’t lie to you. I found her on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood—”
He muttered an oath.
“Emma was in the playpen, wailing, and—”
“Where’s Emma?” he demanded. “Who’s with her now?”
“She’s fine, hon. Ali has her.”
He exhaled a hard breath. “Tell me.” He’d thought he was terrified the last time, but that fear had been nothing compared to this. The last time, he’d been there with her, and in spite of his fear, he’d calmly and quickly taken control of the situation. This time, he was four hundred miles away, and utterly powerless. Powerlessness wasn’t something he wore well. “Tell me,” he repeated. “How much blood did she lose?”
“I don’t know. A lot. Sweetie…she was unconscious. I tried to revive her. I couldn’t.”
A heavy weight, like that of a wrecking ball, settled itself atop his chest, squeezing his lungs until they were about to burst.
“Rob?” she said. “Are you still there?”
He took a ragged breath. Cleared his throat. Said, “I’m still here.”
“I’m not trying to scare you. I just think you should be…”
“What?” he snapped. “Prepared?”
“I’m sorry.” She was crying softly now. “I don't know how this will turn out. Yes, I think you should be prepared for any eventuality.”
“Like hell I will.” He turned to Sheila, motioned for a pen and paper. Said into the phone, “Give me the number you’re calling from.” He wrote it down, repeated it back to her. “Don’t move away from that phone until you hear from me again. I need to be able to reach you. I’ll be on the next flight out.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Bill’s here with me, and we’re staying put for as long as we’re needed. If one of us has to leave, the other one will stay with the phone.”
“She’ll be fine,” he said. Was he trying to convince Trish, or himself? “She will. You want to know why?”
Through tears, Trish said, “Why?”
“Because she wouldn’t leave me.” And with trembling hands, he hung up before she could respond.
* * *
He spent twenty minutes on the phone with the airlines, arguing because there wasn’t a seat available anywhere. The best anybody could give him was standby; the next available seat was tomorrow morning at 3:50 a.m. He could walk to Maine faster than that. Nobody gave a damn that he had a family emergency and needed to get home, and their lack of empathy was maddening. Finally, realizing he was wasting precious time, he snarled, “Thanks for nothing,” and slammed down the phone.
He picked it back up again and dialed the concierge desk. Lenny answered immediately with a cheerful, “Good morning, Mr. MacKenzie.”
Lenny was a minor god who, besides knowing all the best places to eat and having the instincts of a more stylish Radar O’Reilly, was capable of performing miracles at a moment’s notice. Lenny was one of the reasons he always stayed at this hotel when he was in Manhattan.
“Lenny,” he said, “I’m checking out early. My wife’s had a medical emergency and I can’t find a flight home. I need a rental car, and I need it yesterday. Is that something you can help me with?”
“Absolutely. What kind of car would you like?”
“I don’t care, as long as it’s fast.”
“I’ll have it in fifteen minutes,” Lenny said. “Ten, if traffic cooperates.”
“Bless you. You’re a good man, Lenny.”
While he waited for the rental car to arrive, he packed. It didn’t take long. He always traveled light: his studio guitar in a padded case he could sling over his shoulder. A briefcase that held sheet music, pencils, a stack of CDs, spare guitar strings. A backpack containing a few changes of clothing and his toothbrush. Casey had spent years quietly but determinedly augmenting his wardrobe, hoping to improve his fashion sense. She’d finally arrived at the conclusion that there was no hope. He wasn’t as clueless as he’d been two decades ago, when he’d found paisley and plaid to be perfectly acceptable traveling companions. He knew how to dress up if and when it was required. But he was most comfortable in worn jeans and a cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up, unbuttoned over a faded concert tee.
Downstairs, Lenny was waiting. The dapper black man held up a shiny set of car keys. “Green BMW,” he said, “with a five-speed stick, because you look like a stick-shift kind of guy.”
“I’m now adding mind reader to your list of exemplary skills.”
Lenny grinned. “Just sign here, and you can be on your way.”
Rob scrawled his signature, took the keys, and clasped hands with Lenny. “You are the man,” he said.
“Have a safe trip, my friend. I hope your wife recovers quickly.”
“Thanks. That makes two of us.”
The BMW was parked at the curb. Rob nodded to the doorman, opened the passenger door and tossed in his backpack, his briefcase, then took the time to wrap the seatbelt around his guitar, which had cost more than the annual budget of at least one third-world country and was a primary source of his income.
He buckled himself into the driver’s seat and took stock. Tachometer, leather seats, A/C, CD, moon roof. And, tucked into its own little nook in the dashboard, a mobile phone. He picked it up, examined it thoroughly. He’d been toying with the idea of getting one of these gadgets, but the technology was in its infancy, and from what he’d heard, they only worked in certain places. The place where he spent most of his time, a rural property tucked
into the mountains of Western Maine that his wife was determined to turn into a sheep ranch, was highly unlikely to be one of those places. So he’d believed there was no point.
Until today. Now, thrust into a crisis situation and trapped in a car, hundreds of miles from home, with no means of communication, he suddenly understood. Once this crisis was resolved, he’d be heading to Radio Shack to pick up a cell phone for each of them.
As an experiment, he punched in the number Trish had given him and hit the send button. To his surprise, it worked. “Still no news,” she told him.
“I have a rental car with a phone in it. I’d give you the number but…” He looked around, turned the phone over in his hand, opened the glove box, but it held nothing except the owner’s manual. “I have no idea what it is. I’ll call you again from the road.”
He opened the briefcase, took out Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast, and popped it into the CD player. Slipping on his Oakleys, he started the engine, checked his side mirror, and pulled out into Manhattan traffic.
It was hot, it was crowded, and it was slow, and being at a standstill gave him too much time to think dark thoughts. While Henley sang about the boys of summer, Rob tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. He could lose her. He could end up raising Emma alone.
The unthinkable possibility struck terror into his heart. He’d told Trish that Casey wouldn’t leave him, but his words were nothing more than false bravado. Whistling as he passed the graveyard. There were no certainties in this world. Life, with all its warmth and vibrancy, could be snuffed out in an instant. While he sat in a Lower Manhattan traffic jam, surrounded by horns honking in protest at those inconsiderate motorists half a block ahead who refused to sprout wings and fly over the gridlock, the woman he’d loved since he was twenty years old could be drawing her final breath.
The Miles Between Us Page 1
