Hidden Falls
Episode 8:
All You Need to Know
Olivia Newport
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Copyright
© 2014 by Olivia Newport
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. niv®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Cast of Characters
Quinn – 55, long-time resident, teacher, and beloved citizen of Hidden Falls.
Sylvia Alexander – 54, Quinn’s oldest and dearest friend, mayor of Hidden Falls, daughter of Emma.
Lauren Nock – 28, family ministry director at Our Savior Community Church. Niece of Sylvia Alexander.
Liam Elliott – 38, investment consultant, fiancé to Jessica McCarthy, brother to Cooper, cousin to Dani Roose.
Cooper Elliott – 34, works in law enforcement as a sheriff’s deputy. Brother to Liam, cousin to Dani Roose.
Dani Roose – 32, cousin to Liam and Cooper Elliot, makes her living doing odd jobs, handy person, computer nerd. Loves the lake, fishing, solitude.
Nicole Sandquist – 30, investigative reporter in St. Louis, Missouri, who grew up with and dated Ethan Jordan.
Ethan Jordan, MD – 30, neurosurgeon in Columbus, Ohio, who grew up with and dated Nicole Sandquist. He is estranged from his parents, Richard and Kay Jordan, who still live in Hidden Falls.
Jack Parker – 40, lawyer, recently moved his family to Hidden Falls. Wife, Gianna; son, Colin; daughters, Eva and Brooke.
Friday
8:03 a.m.
Another late night.
The whole week was full of surprises, and Lauren Nock didn’t think she could handle another one. Nor could she keep pushing her tasks off until the next day. She’d run out of days. This was it. Friday. Tomorrow at nine in the morning, the health fair had to be ready.
Nicole was awake, dressed, and fed. Ethan had promised to come early. Nothing was keeping Lauren in her apartment except for the first destination on her list for the day.
Quinn’s notes said he wanted Cooper Elliott to do a safety demonstration. Lauren had called Cooper yesterday, but he preferred to talk in person. At the moment, Lauren regretted not moving this particular task to Benita Booker’s list. But she hadn’t, so now she had to go see Cooper face-to-face at the sheriff’s department.
Being there would remind Lauren she found Quinn’s car smashed into a maple tree last Saturday night—and was detained at the sheriff’s office into the wee hours convincing Cooper she didn’t know how it got there.
It sure felt like he’d needed a lot of convincing. Sylvia said Cooper was just doing his job with his careful questions.
And, of course, there was Cooper himself. He made Lauren nervous. Nothing came out of her mouth right whenever he was around, and that was a horrible feeling.
Lauren double-checked the contents of her cross-body bag and put her head through the strap.
“You look nice,” Nicole said from the recliner, where she sat with her broken ankle elevated.
“Thank you.” Lauren didn’t want to look nice. She just wanted to get the job done. She’d pulled on khakis and a lightweight sweater, as she did most days this time of the year, and corralled her overgrown bangs on the top of her head and held them there with a large brown clip. The rest of her dark blond hair tumbled around her face, and she would probably end up hooking it behind her ears at moments when she concentrated hardest.
“So you’re off?” Nicole tapped the screen of her iPad.
“Yep. Call me after you see the orthopedist.”
Lauren chose to walk through the park across the street and down two blocks before cutting over toward the sheriff’s department. When she passed Town Hall, she wondered if her aunt was in her office yet. The box she’d seen in Sylvia’s attic last night had floated through Lauren’s dreams. It wasn’t locked. Quinn must have expected Sylvia would need to be able to open it at some point.
Safekeeping, Sylvia said. Sylvia would keep the box safe, but what was Quinn trying to keep safe?
Outside the old sheriff’s building, Lauren took a deep breath. She had a standard list of questions she was asking everyone about the health fair now. All she needed was a little information and she would make sure Cooper had everything he needed tomorrow. She tugged the door open and entered.
Cooper sat in his chair at the quad of desks clumped in the center of the main room. As far as Lauren could see, he was the only officer on the premises. No one hovered at the coffee machine or fiddled with buttons on the old photocopier.
Cooper looked up. “Good morning, Lauren.”
“Good morning.” Lauren opened the door in the half wall separating the waiting area from the officers’ desks.
Cooper arranged a chair for her beside his desk. Lauren set her bag on the floor and extracted her clipboard.
“So,” she said, “I understand you and Quinn had an initial conversation.”
“We did.” Cooper held a pen between thumb and forefinger and tapped against a pad of paper on his desk. “Quinn’s logic was that you first need to feel safe to have good health in body and spirit.”
Lauren could follow the reasoning. Sort of.
“I thought I would do something about bicycle safety,” Cooper said, “and maybe fire safety. Then I can talk to the kids about what to do if an adult, even someone they know, makes them feel uncomfortable in any way.”
So far we could have done this on the phone. Lauren flipped a few pages on her clipboard until she came to her standard questions. She asked them systematically. How much space did he require? Did he need electricity? How many times did he plan to present? Would he like chairs or was open space better?
Cooper gave answers, and Lauren made notes. This wasn’t so bad, she decided, as long as they stuck to the details of the fair. When she prepared to put away her notes and pen, Cooper leaned forward and touched her knee.
“I can see you’re doing a terrific job,” he said, “but I’d like to know how you are.”
Air refused to flow through her throat.
“You’ve had a lot to deal with,” Cooper said. “I know you were counting on Quinn for the fair, and you’ve really stepped up for Nicole by taking her in.”
“Ethan is the one taking care of her most of the time,” Lauren muttered into her bag. She’d hardly been home the last two days. All she’d done was give Nicole a place that was easier to navigate than Nicole’s empty two-story family home.
“I’ll be there all day tomorrow,” Cooper said. “Could you use some help early to set up?”
So far the setup crew was Lauren, Benita,
Pastor Matt, and maybe Ethan. He still hadn’t promised he’d be around to help. If he came to set up, then who would look after Nicole?
Yes, Lauren could use all the help she could find. But did it have to be Cooper?
“Of course,” she heard herself say, with a frightening flash of insight that she was probably underestimating the task. “Can you be on the lawn behind the church at six thirty tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll do your bidding every moment of the day.”
Lauren couldn’t decide if the offer was kind, romantic, or creepy. “I’m sure there will be plenty to do.”
“And when it’s all over and things start to settle back down, I hope you’ll agree to go out with me.”
“Out?” Lauren’s stomach fluttered in a way it hadn’t in years.
He smiled. “A date.”
“Um. . .it’s hard for me to think about anything but the fair right now.”
“I understand. I’ll ask again, if that’s all right.”
Lauren’s ringing phone saved her from having to give an immediate answer. She pulled it from her pocket and looked at the number she had begun to dread.
“Do you have to take that?” Cooper asked.
“Nope.” Lauren hit Ignore, and the phone silenced. For two days she hadn’t had a spare moment to look up the area code. “Do you know where a 918 number comes from?”
Lauren shocked herself by asking, but Cooper calmly pulled a binder from a row on his desk, flipped a few pages, and put his finger on a map.
“Oklahoma.”
“I don’t know anybody in Oklahoma.”
“People mix up numbers all the time,” he said.
“I suppose so.” But usually the person who answered the mistaken call heard a voice on the other end. And usually the same wrong number didn’t show up on a phone four times in three days.
Lauren fastened her bag closed and stood up. Cooper rose as well.
“I’ll see you bright and early, then,” he said.
“Thank you again for your help.”
Outside, alone on the sidewalk, Lauren let out her breath and tried to remember where her next stop was supposed to be. The church was just down the street. She could go there and get herself organized.
And then there he was, across the street. After hearing city noises on the last call she answered, Lauren thought Nevin Morgan had left Hidden Falls. Had he gone and come back? For what? Lauren’s stomach clenched with dread, which in that instant became an unacceptable way to live. Turning in the opposite direction from Our Savior Community Church, Lauren began to follow Nevin’s path. He turned toward Main Street, walking past the dry cleaner and a vacuum repair shop. Lauren followed his turn with one of her own but remained behind him and across the street. When he made another turn and approached a parked car, Lauren had just about decided to call out to him. She could get this over with right now.
He unlocked his car, a midsize beige Chevy.
Lauren increased her speed.
“Oh good, there you are!” An arm reached out to grab Lauren’s elbow.
She turned to see Benita tugging on her.
“I know you have a million things to do,” Benita said, “but I’ve been working on the sketch for how to set things up. Do you have time to look at it?”
His car was running now, and he backed out of his parking space. Lauren released him from her sight and tried to focus on the graph paper Benita handed her.
9:43 a.m.
The will and the graves last night gave Jack Parker a jolt. He’d gone home in time to say good night to his family, as he promised, and then he unlocked his briefcase and took out the file. Jack added to his notes the cemetery information he’d typed on the tiny keys on his cell phone as he stood in the dark with Lauren, Nicole, and Ethan. He’d stayed up late, sitting in the high-back leather recliner in his home office, jotting the questions that prevented any consideration of sleep until one in the morning.
Jack couldn’t bill Nicole for this time, of course. He had already done what she asked him to do, and when they met in the graveyard last night, she seemed satisfied with what he turned up. But he couldn’t let go of this until he made sense of his suspicions.
The disadvantage was now Nicole Sandquist was on the trail of the same information.
The advantage was if there were legalities involved, Jack would have the upper hand. He had the files.
What Jack didn’t know was why Nicole was so interested in an old will executed long before she was born by someone she had no connection to—at least not that Jack had found.
Yet.
Maybe impending surgery on her broken ankle would slow her down. He could only hope.
Names multiplied. Marriages introduced new names and new trails. Jack now had his own list of surnames of interest that took him back into the old files. And this was what brought him to the point of canceling two appointments, rolling up the sleeves of his bold yellow dress shirt, and sitting on the floor of his office. He’d entered the suite at seven in the morning and started all over again with a new system for sorting files that quickly overtook the surface space of his conference room table. He set the business lines to go directly to voice mail if someone called and turned off the sound on the cell phone and put it out of sight in his briefcase. Jack wanted full concentration.
There was something here, and he was going to find it if he had to create a cross-referenced inventory of every single yellowed document in every single brittle file.
Using a permanent marker and sheets from a yellow legal pad, Jack labeled stacks, making sure he knew which file every document he removed came from. All those clandestine sessions looking through these old folders were starting to pay off. He felt a jump-start familiarity with their contents now that he had a specific task to pursue.
With two doors closed between his piles and the hall outside his office, Jack blocked out the usual sounds of the building—approaching footsteps or the turn of the doorknob on the heavy door or a voice in his outer office. A rap on his inner door made him close a folder over his hand before he looked up.
“Jack?”
Gianna.
“Come in.” Jack braced himself for the onslaught.
The door opened. Gianna scowled. “What in the world are you doing?”
“Working.” He ought to get up and kiss her cheek, he thought, but his piles left him little space to maneuver.
“Is this the same client from last night?”
Jack couldn’t say yes because he was off the clock. To say no would trigger an interrogation.
“Jack?” Gianna rarely had patience when Jack hesitated to reply.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Try me.”
He didn’t find the right words quickly enough.
“Jack, this looks. . .entirely unprofessional. What are you doing?”
“I wasn’t expecting you,” he said.
“Clearly.”
“Did you need something?”
“I’ve been trying to call you for an hour. What happened to answering the phone?”
“I wanted to concentrate.”
Gianna made a wide gesture. “On cleaning dusty old files?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t answer.” It wasn’t the truth, but it seemed the right thing to say—what she would like him to say. “What did you want to tell me?”
“Never mind. Since I came into town to see if you’re all right, I’ll do the errand myself.”
He was going to have to tell her something or she wouldn’t stop. Next would come a speech about how he was losing perspective about what really mattered, or how he was letting his obsessions control him, or how he couldn’t just cut himself off from real life. He had responsibilities and relationships, after all.
Jack retrieved the pad of sticky notes he’d lost under one thigh and peeled one off the stack to affix to the document he’d been reading. He let it hang off the edge of the page so he could find his place easily again.
“Let’s go sit in the reception area,” he said. “We can talk there.”
Jack carefully stood up and took a long step over one pile to get to the clear space where he could put down a foot. He followed Gianna to the corner seating arrangement and sat next to her on the love seat.
He didn’t tell her everything. He didn’t know everything yet. He didn’t say who his client was. But Jack told his wife more than he had in a long time.
“So you think this all has to do with a prominent family in Hidden Falls,” she said when he finished, “and there’s some secret from seventy-five or eighty years ago.”
“I do.” He refused to feel apologetic.
“Why is this so interesting to you?”
Because I’m bored in this little town. Because I want you to be happy, but I’m not sure if I can stand it.
“Because it’s not straightforward,” he said aloud. “Because it’s something to figure out, something that has ramifications. This could change somebody’s life.” Maybe it could change mine. Ours.
“I don’t understand.” Gianna crossed her legs. “I don’t think all the puzzle pieces are in the box. You could be wasting your time and never get the whole picture.”
Had she always been so utterly practical?
“Gianna, please don’t stomp all over this.”
“But, Jack—”
“Please.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
“Do you remember,” he said, “in the beginning? When you were a paralegal in Atlanta, and then Memphis? I was always glad to have you assigned to work with me because I knew you could dig like no one else.”
“That was another life, Jack.”
“I know. You don’t want to be a paralegal anymore. You want to be there for the kids. But I remember how good you were at your job, and I learned from you.”
“What did you learn from me?”
“How the odd fact is the one that matters. How hunches are worth chasing down. How finding the string that connects two random facts can break a case wide open.”
All You Need to Know Page 1