His Brother's Bride

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Appreciating his professional air, Laurel pushed away from the piano and moved over to join Scott, more comfortable with herself as she slipped into a professional role herself.

  She told him what she knew, which wasn’t much. She hadn’t seen Byrd since breakfast the morning before.

  “I asked the others before they left this morning if they’d seen him, but no one had,” she told him.

  “You’ve already questioned the other guests?”

  Laurel nodded. “I wondered why he wasn’t at breakfast, and I guess it’s just habit to ask questions when something’s afoot.”

  “This is great.” Scott jotted something in his notebook. “What else did they say?”

  “Not a whole lot.” There were no real clues as far as Laurel could tell. “We all went to the barbecue in town yesterday. No one remembered seeing William there.”

  “There’s been no report of any accidents in the area, and Clint said he’d checked the local hospitals just in case.”

  “Something unexpected had to have happened.” Laurel said aloud what she’d been thinking all morning. “He was perfectly relaxed at breakfast yesterday—a weekend vacationer like the rest of us. William had a great sense of humor, dry, witty. He kept us all laughing. He was like everyone’s favorite uncle.” She paused, thinking about the still-commanding figure of the older man. Though mostly bald, he’d been in great shape, muscular and trim. “I know he was planning to attend the barbecue,” she continued, “because he told me he’d see me there....”

  While Scott scribbled in his notebook, Laurel itched to get to her tape recorder. And then it dawned on her that this situation was far different from the stuff she normally did. Usually the subject of a story agreed to interviews before she ever began. She probably wasn’t going to be able to have her recorder on during an unofficial police investigation.

  “Seems kind of silly for us both to be taking notes as we do this,” she said aloud, remembering what a meticulous note-taker Scott was in school. Notes that she’d borrowed, along with most of his friends. Though never, as far as she knew, did he use them himself. “Do you mind, if I do end up doing a story, if I borrow your notes?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled at him, and he smiled back. And nothing made sense for a second.

  “So,” Scott said, maybe a little more loudly than necessary, “did Byrd give any sign of being preoccupied? Was he wearing wrinkled or mismatched clothes, losing track of the conversation, lapsing off into silence?”

  Shaking her head, Laurel clasped her hands and rested them on top of the table. “Nope. He was meticulous. In his dress and in his manners.”

  Scott glanced up from his notebook, catching her off guard. The instant intensity that flared between them shook her. Badly.

  “Shall we go up and take a look?”

  Laurel nodded, almost pathetic in her relief as he broke the spell. Dazed, she followed Scott upstairs to William Byrd’s room.

  “We’re going to find William,” she told Scott, forcing her mind to concentrate on the only thing that mattered. “And he’s going to be just fine.”

  And because she was so sure of that, she felt a bit uncomfortable as Scott worked the key in the sticky lock until he got it to open. She felt she was invading William’s privacy. But she was also very eager to get inside and see what she could find out about his disappearance.

  Somehow William’s safe return had linked itself in Laurel’s mind to her own ability to move on with her life. As though in order for her trip back to Cooper’s Corner to be successful on one level, it had to be successful on all levels. If she couldn’t help William, she couldn’t hope to help herself. It was illogical, but very real just the same.

  “I did a surface scan when I was up here earlier,” Scott told her as they entered the room. “This time I want to know about the dust particles in the corners.”

  They looked under the bed, in the drawers, behind every piece of furniture.

  Laurel crossed to the dresser, using a pencil to type on the laptop keyboard.

  “This computer’s password-encrypted,” she told Scott.

  He joined her by the dresser, looking over her shoulder at the darkened screen. “Must be something important in there...”

  “Something that could, perhaps, put William in danger....”

  “Except why would he have left it sitting here like this?”

  “For that matter, why would he have left it out in the open like this at all...”

  “...unless he didn’t plan to be away from it,” Scott concluded.

  Laurel felt a rush of familiar warmth as her mind melded with Scott’s. The two of them had always thought more alike than she and Paul had.

  Paul had teased them about it.

  And she’d punished him with heated kisses...

  “But then, writers are by nature a somewhat paranoid bunch,” she said, refusing to allow herself to be sidetracked. “It’s probably more likely that William is simply protecting his next bestseller.”

  “What do you make of this?” With the back of his hand, Scott nudged the birth certificate until it was facing them and more clearly legible.

  Laurel whistled softly. “The birth was thirty-five years ago. In Iowa. And...”

  “No parents.”

  “I wonder who Leslie Renwick is....”

  “I’ve never heard of any Renwick family around here. Maureen and Clint hadn’t, either.”

  “It’s got to be significant, though. People don’t just leave important documents like that lying around.”

  Scott pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed some numbers.

  While he gave the specifics of the birth certificate to whoever was on the other end of the line, Laurel moved on to look at the copy of Byrd’s B and B guide on the nightstand.

  “It’s open to a place in Vermont,” she said as soon as Scott hung up the phone. “I wonder if that means anything.”

  Again, Scott came to stand closely beside her. Again, Laurel reacted strangely, feeling an odd combination of security and excitement. Scott was reminding her of Paul—reigniting the torch that had burned so brightly for her fiancé.

  Was she ever going to be over her intense love for Paul? Had she set herself an impossible goal in believing she could move on?

  “Might be someplace he was planning to visit. I’ll give them a call, see what I can find out,” Scott was saying as he jotted down the phone number and address. “What do you make of the picture?”

  Laurel glanced at the old photograph, briefly. A young couple hugging was not what she needed to be focusing on right now. Turning from the nightstand, she noticed the negligee hanging on the bedpost.

  “I wonder if the picture has any connection to that,” she said, pointing to the sexy nightgown.

  “Perhaps,” Scott said, inspecting the gown as closely as he could without actually touching it. “I’m guessing that what it does mean is that a woman plays a significant part in whatever happened to Byrd yesterday.”

  “Unless he was a cross-dresser...”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AFTER PULLING A few strings to have Byrd’s possessions sent down to the lab in Pittsfield for fingerprinting, Scott invited Laurel to take a drive into Cooper’s Corner with him to do some questioning. Depending on what he turned up, Scott figured he just might be spending the better part of his vacation working on the case.

  Chances were someone had seen William Byrd the day before, or at least seen the unfamiliar BMW driving through town. Cooper’s Corner wasn’t that big. A nice car like Byrd’s rental was bound to have been noticed.

  Focusing on business took Scott as far as the end of Twin Oaks’s drive. He’d filed all of the current clues in his mind and was in a holding pattern until h
e had something more to assimilate. As it was, speculation could lead him in very different directions and he didn’t want to be heading the wrong way when the right clue came in. That was how detectives didn’t solve cases.

  But without the diversion of the case, he had only Laurel to think about. Just having her in the Blazer with him, inhaling that hint of lilacs, created an ache he’d spent the past three and a half years trying to avoid.

  “It’s great to see you again.” The words broke free of the restraints he’d put on them, but Scott wasn’t surprised. He was the most self-controlled person he knew—until he was with Laurel London.

  It had always been that way, and he hated it. Hated himself for it. He’d spent many fruitless hours trying to figure out why one person, and one person only, in the entire universe could do this to him.

  She glanced over at him and smiled. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing against you, Scott, it’s just...”

  “I know.”

  Sitting there next to him, she had to be aching far more than he was. While the woman he loved was right beside him, still bringing him a measure of exquisite pleasure, the man she loved was dead, gone from her forever.

  Because of him.

  He’d bet his life she wouldn’t be finding it good to see him again if she knew that.

  “Remember that exposé you did about the foster-care system back in high school?” he asked. It seemed prudent to remind himself of the not-so-warm feelings she’d had for him at one time.

  “You mean the one you found in my notebook and submitted to the school newspaper without my permission?” she asked, her voice filled with the feistiness that only those closest to her ever witnessed.

  “It was damn good,” he said. “Too good to go the way of everything else you wrote.” He jumped right into his side of the familiar argument, feeling more in control by the second.

  It was an argument that had never been resolved. And if history was at all reliable, it could easily occupy the few minutes it was going to take to get them to Cooper’s General Store.

  “It was highly personal, not meant to be seen by anyone but Paul.”

  “It’s not my fault he left it out. My dad read it, too.”

  “But he didn’t steal it.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Scott said defensively. “I borrowed it. Your insights were too intensely on the mark to be wasted. People needed to hear what you had to say, not only for your sake, but for all of the other kids who were being shuffled around like you’d been.”

  “And that was reason enough to plaster my innermost feelings all over the state without even so much as asking me first?”

  “I didn’t plaster them all over the state. I had nothing to do with that,” Scott said, relaxing as the old adrenaline pumped through him. Town was right head. He could see the weathered bronze statue of the Revolutionary War soldier standing guard in the village green, his rifle and bayonet held proudly upright. “I can’t help the fact that Warren Cooper picked up the article.”

  “Or that someone sent it to the Boston Globe, too?”

  “It wasn’t me,” he told her for the hundredth time.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “And I don’t know how to convince you. But I didn’t do it.”

  “Who do you think did?”

  His gaze shot over to her. It wasn’t a question she’d ever asked before. Did that mean she was actually starting to believe him on this? It had been the only time in their entire eighteen-year history that she hadn’t believed him about something. And this wasn’t the one time he’d lied to her.

  He couldn’t let the fact that she was softening mean anything.

  Not one damn thing.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, wishing like hell that he knew who’d sent that article to the Boston Globe. And how they’d been able to print it without permission from the author.

  Because she’d just assumed it was Scott and hadn’t wanted to attract more attention to herself, Laurel had never pursued the issue. At least those were the reasons she’d given him. And the reason she hadn’t turned him in for forging her permission to use the article in the school paper.

  “You still shouldn’t have given it to the school paper without my permission.”

  “I know.”

  “Wow!” Scott’s groin tightened at the laughingly condescending tone in her voice. “Miracles do happen on occasion,” she said. “I never thought you’d admit that you were wrong on this one.”

  He wasn’t sure why he had.

  “But since you have,” Laurel said, her voice dangerously soft. “I need to thank you.”

  “For admitting I was wrong?”

  “No, for submitting it in the first place.”

  What? He almost swerved into the gravel on the shoulder of the road.

  “I owe my entire career to that article,” she said, spinning his world into confusion.

  “How so?”

  “I’m such a private person, I never would have submitted anything to anyone. Yet it was all the reaction I got from that article, from people who told me that it made a difference to them, that showed me what I needed to do with my life. Until that article came out I never knew I had any talent for writing.”

  “You have an uncanny ability to get the facts, to filter through them without apparent bias, and then present a sometimes new truth about whatever subject you report on.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her gratitude didn’t sit well with him, because he knew how very much he didn’t deserve it.

  Luckily he’d just pulled into the parking lot and didn’t have to reply.

  * * *

  NERVES TAUT, LAUREL WATCHED silently as Scott found a parking spot at Cooper’s General Store. Philo and Phyllis Cooper were legends in Cooper’s Corner. A distant cousin to Maureen and Clint Cooper, Philo had lived in the village every one of his fifty-seven years, and his fifty-five-year-old wife was a local girl as well.

  It wasn’t that Laurel disliked the older couple. To the contrary, she’d found them a pure delight when she’d first moved to town and had spent hours hanging around their store, learning all she could about the town she’d decided was going to be her hometown.

  No matter what was going on in Cooper’s Corner, Philo and Phyllis knew all about it and were only too happy to give every detail to anyone who asked.

  “Smart choice, coming here first,” she said as they got out of the truck.

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not! Why would you say that?”

  “Sometimes the Coopers’ eagerness to pass on their knowledge is misinterpreted. Some people don’t understand that there is nothing malicious about their gossip.”

  “Of course there isn’t!” she agreed. “They share the good just as much as the bad.”

  “They’re great examples of a small community’s belief in the right of everyone to know exactly what’s going on in everyone else’s life.”

  Laurel really liked how adamantly he was defending his town. But he didn’t need to defend it to her. Cooper’s Corner was her town, too.... Or at least the closest thing she’d ever had to a town she could claim.

  “If it hadn’t been for Phyllis Cooper,” Laurel said, “no one would have known about that time old Mrs. Lathgate broke her hip. The poor woman would have had to cope on her own.”

  “What about the time Lance Brown had that trouble out at the farm and practically every man in Cooper’s Corner ended up out there one weekend, getting a month’s worth of work done in two days.”

  “Wasn’t that the time the Browns ended up throwing that huge impromptu barn dance?”

  That night was
one she’d never forget. It was the first time Paul Hunter had ever spoken to her. She’d been in Cooper’s Corner about a year. She was only fifteen years old and he’d been seventeen at the time—a senior. He’d asked her to dance. And she’d never looked at another man since that night. Impossible to believe that was more than eighteen years ago.

  “If I’m not mistaken, it was Phyllis Cooper who arranged that dance—and their general store that donated all of the food. A way of saying thank-you for everyone’s hard work.”

  Laurel hadn’t known that. Or hadn’t remembered. But she wasn’t surprised to find it so.

  Philo was standing toward the front of the store, talking to an older gentleman Laurel didn’t recognize. He looked just as she remembered him. Not tall, stocky, dressed in overalls, with salt-and-pepper hair that never seemed to get more salty.

  Laurel had seen him and his wife the night before at the barbecue, but had managed to avoid them. By staying close to the other guests at Twin Oaks, she’d actually avoided recognition by anyone who might have known her.

  “Philo, you got a minute?” Scott asked the second the shopkeeper was free.

  “Sure, Scott!” Philo said, patting the younger man on the back. “What’s up? Nothing official I hope?”

  “Well,” Scott said, “in a way it is. I was wondering if perhaps you and Phyllis could spare me a couple of minutes for some questions.”

  Philo’s kind eyes darkened. “No one we know’s in trouble, are they?”

  “I don’t think so,” Scott said quietly, nodding as a middle-aged man left with a bag full of some kind of hardware.

  Philo looked over, seeming to notice Laurel for the first time. She smiled tentatively under his scrutiny. “Pretty young lady you got there, Scott. Someone we should know?”

  “You do know her...” Scott was saying, just as Philo blinked, shaking his head.

  “Laurel?” he asked. “Is that our Laurel London?”

  Laurel grinned, feeling for a second like a prodigal daughter returned home to a loving father.