by Emily James
I gave her my best who me? look because I was having too hard a time not laughing to do anything else. My silly grin probably only made me look extra guilty.
The sedative and pain killers they’d given Mark might have loosened his inhibitions a bit, but he still seemed to have enough good sense to look mollified and lay still while the nurse reconnected the sensors.
“Now try to leave them in place,” the nurse said. “We need to monitor you a little longer to make sure you don’t go into delayed shock.”
With one more stern look at us both, she left.
“I think she saw us,” I mocked whispered.
He met my gaze, and his face was serious. “I don’t care who sees us.”
Very few of my past relationships had lasted long enough to require a definition, but this time I wanted one from the start. I didn’t want to risk any more misunderstandings. We lost enough time due to that already.
And yet as I went to ask, I felt a little like a clingy teenager. It was stupid. This was Mark. I shouldn’t have to ask. But a small part of me was still afraid, afraid that I’d disappoint him like I’d done so many others, and that if he knew what I was truly like and all my flaws, he wouldn’t want to be with me.
He linked his fingers with mine, my mascara smeared over both our hands. Maybe he did see me as I was, my best and my worst.
He squeezed my hand. “What’s wrong?”
I wasn’t good at being vulnerable. I never had been. Vulnerability and weakness were the same things in my parents’ eyes. But Mark was the first man I’d ever met who I wanted as both a best friend and a romantic partner. I had to imagine that combination didn’t come around often.
“We’ve had a lot of misunderstandings, and so could you…could we be clear about what this is?” I lifted our linked hands.
He brought our hands to his lips and kissed my knuckles. A shiver shot straight down my arm and into my stomach.
“I don’t want you dating anyone else. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that earlier and that I didn’t make sure you knew about Laura.”
Her name had been Laura. It was a pretty name. And now that I knew she was a love he’d lost, I wasn’t jealous anymore. The ring he still wore spoke to how deeply he could love.
I did want to know exactly what had happened, though. “How did she die?”
“I guess I owe you the story.” Mark’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’ve never had to tell anyone before. Everyone here knows.”
The pain that etched his face was so deep I almost regretted asking, but it was the kind of thing I needed to know if we wanted a chance at a future. He’d loved her. Their history would always color our relationship in some way.
“You saw the picture on the mantel,” he said.
There’d been more than one, but he must be talking about the picture of him with a pregnant woman. The other photo had been of their wedding day.
“We were living in New York at the time, and I had the privilege of working as part of a team that was trying to develop more sensitive testing procedures for poisons and toxins in the body. She was only seven-and-a-half months along, so we thought it would be safe for me to go out of town to lecture at a convention.”
Now that I’d passed the point of no return and saw what was coming, I didn’t want to hear anymore. Mark didn’t have a child, so she must have lost the baby.
“The baby shifted and the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. The doctors did an emergency C-section. They managed to save Laura, but not our little girl.”
His hand held onto mine so tightly my fingers ached, but I held still.
“Laura blamed me. She thought if I’d been there, I would have been able to save them both.”
It was ridiculous. Mark wasn’t a pediatric specialist. He dealt with dead bodies, not live ones. And he wouldn’t have been allowed to practice on his own wife anyway.
I opened my mouth to say all that, but the look on Mark’s face stopped me. The lines around his eyes were tense and carried right down into his jaw bone. He knew all those things. Knew them and yet still struggled to accept them because someone he loved had told him otherwise.
If I said anything to try to console him, it could come out as attacking her. I didn’t want to start our relationship that way. “I’m so sorry.”
He sucked in a breath. “I quit my job, and was thankfully able to get a position in Fair Haven, where we both grew up. I was hoping bringing her home would help, but her depression got worse and she refused help. One day I came home and found she’d overdosed on sleeping pills.”
I slumped back in my chair.
“I didn’t want to believe she’d killed herself. I wanted it investigated as a crime, but…” He shook his head. “It wasn’t like Stan’s case. In the end, all the evidence pointed to Laura taking her own life.”
I stared down at our interlocked hands. That’s why he’d offered to help me, why he’d pushed the chief of police to investigate Uncle Stan’s case further. He’d stood where I was, desperately hoping it wasn’t true. In a way, I gave him a chance at a do-over. If I hadn’t been so deep in my own grief at the time, I might have seen the clues and put it together sooner, saving us both months of heartache.
But somehow, his grief, and the depth with which he’d loved his wife and the daughter they lost, only made me love him more.
I leaned forward to kiss him.
“I told you we should have stayed away a little longer,” Elise’s voice said from behind me.
I pulled back before my lips touched Mark’s, and he groaned. I groaned inside along with him. For months I’d been daydreaming about what it would be like to kiss him, and now that I could, we kept getting interrupted. It was enough to make me want to scream.
“You have impeccable timing, Lise,” Mark said.
Elise leaned against the wall at the foot of his bed and grinned. “I hope this means you two finally worked things out. I don’t know if I could have stood you moping around much longer.”
“I don’t know.” I tossed Mark a cheeky grin so he’d know I was teasing. “I’m not sure about the wisdom of dating a man who seems to have a death wish. Earlier this year he got himself shot at, and this time he drove into the backend of a semi truck.”
Mark’s forehead crinkled again. “What do you mean? I didn’t drive into it. My brakes didn’t work.”
All the warmth in my body leeched out and pooled in my toes. Mark told me before that his truck was in the shop having the brakes fixed. They should have worked perfectly. Unless someone tampered with them.
18
Elise called Erik with the new information. I could tell by the way she crushed her lips together until they almost disappeared that his end of the conversation wasn’t happening the way she’d expected. “He’s going to send Quincey to take Mark’s statement,” she said after she disconnected, “but he thinks it’s unlikely this had anything to do with Noah’s case.”
“It does seem like there isn’t a connection,” Grant said.
Elise and I glared at him in unison.
He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m only stating the facts as I see them.”
Since Grant and Meagan had to get home to their kids, they took down a list of what Mark wanted them to bring back later and headed out. Elise and I decided to stay until Quincey arrived.
Mark still held onto my hand as though he never wanted to let go. While I couldn’t speak for him, I knew I didn’t. It felt unreal that something so good could come out of something as horrible as a car accident. “Do you want us to go, too, so you can rest?”
He shook his head. “Now that you’re not working so hard to avoid me, I want in on this.”
Elise dragged a chair from the other side of the room and updated him on our conversation with Stacey Rathmell.
“Tony might have had motive for Noah,” Mark said, “but he’d have no reason to want to hurt me. I wouldn’t even recognize his daughter.”
I chewed the edge of
my lip. Mark’s accident did seem unconnected to Noah’s attack and the explosion at the sugar shack. “It could be something you know. You examined Noah’s wound, and you looked at the crime scene.”
“All of that’s in the records now.”
I wanted to growl or stomp my foot. We were getting nowhere. Even in investigating Noah’s attack, we still didn’t have concrete evidence that Tony had done it. “Are there any common factors between all three events?”
“All the people who were injured are men,” Mark said. “But I doubt this is a weird vendetta against the male gender.”
I squeezed his hand. “Russ wasn’t the only one injured. Another employee was burned by the sap, and she’s a woman.”
Elise punched one fist into the palm of her other hand. “And whoever sabotaged the reverse osmosis machine couldn’t have known who’d be close by when it exploded.”
This was the first I’d heard that they had clear results. “The lab is sure now that it was rigged?”
Elise nodded. “The pressure relief valve was soldered shut. They didn’t set a timer or anything like that, but without a working valve, they had to know the machine would blow.”
I couldn’t sit still any more. I let go of Mark’s hand with an apologetic smile. “I need to move. It helps me think.” I paced the length of the short room, from window to door. “So two of the events were mechanical, but not the first, not Noah’s accident.”
“And two were at Sugarwood,” Mark said. “My accident wasn’t far from Quantum Mechanics.”
I pivoted and headed back the other direction. It felt like there was no connection between the events, except that I knew all the people involved, which wasn’t saying much given how small the town was. We had to be missing something.
Unless the connection was me. I stopped short.
Mark sat up straighter. “What is it?”
“I think we’ve been chasing the wrong goose.” If I was wrong, I was going to sound like a narcissist, but that was a small risk in comparison. Because if I was right, everyone and everything I cared about could be in danger. “We might have sent Erik after the wrong person. I think I might be the link.”
“You’re not the link,” Mark said, but his voice had the tone of someone who knew they were fighting against the truth and the truth scared them.
Elise had her professional demeanor back in place. “We have to figure this out before Quincey gets here. If someone were targeting you, how do they all connect?”
“Without Noah, we have no repairman and we’re short-handed for the sugar season and for giving tours. Taking out our reverse osmosis machine on top of that came very close to sinking us. If we hadn’t had a backup and so many volunteers helping out, I would have had to drain my savings to get us through. And Mark’s—”
My cheeks felt like I’d lain out in the sun too long. I almost said Mark’s the man I love.
“I think everyone could see how I feel about Mark,” I finished lamely.
I couldn’t make myself look in his direction to see if he’d filled in the blanks anyway. I couldn’t expect him to feel the same when we’d only officially begun dating a few minutes ago. Instead I focused my gaze on Elise. “If someone wanted to hurt me, Mark, Sugarwood, and my dogs would be the best way to do it.”
My dogs were the last ones unaffected, and they were vulnerable targets all alone in my house. Even though they were a Great Dane and a large Bullmastiff, someone could give them a poisoned piece of food and they’d eat it.
I held up a finger and scrambled to my purse. I yanked out my phone and dialed Russ’ cell.
“How’s Mark?” he asked before I could even say hello.
What was it with this town? It was like they had a system of signal flags set up that transferred news as soon as it happened. “He’s going to be okay. We’re waiting for Quincey to come talk to him, so I’ll be a bit yet. Could you go to my house and take the dogs back home with you?”
I’d asked Russ to feed or walk them before, but never to take them home with him.
“Any particular reason?” His voice was too measured, like he knew he wasn’t going to like what was coming. I’d dropped enough unpleasant ideas on him that he probably thought twice about even taking my calls anymore.
“I’m not sure yet, but I’m not comfortable with them being there alone.” Or eating anything in my house. “Don’t take their food. I’ll buy a new bag on my way home.”
Russ spoke again, but his voice was muffled, like he was talking to someone in the house with him with his hand over the phone.
“I’ll head over now,” he said. “Oliver’s here with me talking over the possibility of filling in for Noah for repairs at least for the sugar season, so he says he’ll walk there with me ’cause of my head.”
My throat clogged. I might have to eventually tell Oliver that the attack on Noah had been my fault, however indirectly, just like his dismissal from the police station. After that, he might refuse to work for us anymore, and we’d be back to scratch for filling Noah’s spot. “Thank him for me, okay?”
“Will do.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?” Elise asked as soon as I disconnected.
“I don’t think—” I dropped my face into my hands. There had been something else going wrong. I forced myself to look at them again. “Our sap lines are springing leaks that the manufacturer can’t explain. They blamed it on squirrels, but Russ wasn’t convinced.”
Elise took her notebook and pen out. “Let’s assume you’re right. The real question is who’d want to hurt you.”
I quirked a smile at her. “You didn’t like me much when we first met.”
She pulled a face. “Hardy har har.”
I sat back beside Mark and took his hand again. It felt so good to be able to do that. Besides, I’d need the moral support if I was going to try to figure out how many people might hate me enough to sabotage my business and seriously injure the people close to me. “My ex-boyfriend would love to see me dead, but he’s already in prison.”
Mark cocked an eyebrow. “I’m not the only one who didn’t share everything.”
“She can give you the full story later,” Elise said. “Right now, we need a list of names, and unless her ex hired a hitman, who he is and what he did isn’t important at the moment.”
Most of the people with a violent level of fury at me were in jail. That was the problem.
“Ashley at Tom McClanahan’s office hates me for some unknown reason, but I don’t think she’d resort to this level of crazy or that she’d have the mechanical skills to do it.”
“She hates you because of Mark. She might have cut your brakes, but not his,” Elise said matter-of-factly. “She’s wanted Mark ever since Laura died.”
Aside from what Ashley might have deduced about Mark’s feelings, the rumors around town said I’d been playing him, along with Erik, Dave, and Noah. She could have just waited it out.
Holy crap. The rumors. “What if Stacey heard the rumors and believed that Noah was cheating on her with me?”
Elise gave the slow I’m-thinking-it-through nod. “She’s waited all these years for him, her eighteenth birthday comes, they consummate their relationship, and then she hears that Noah’s been linked to you…that could have pushed her over the edge, especially since she’d have been embarrassed that everyone was right about Noah only wanting one thing from her. It would have seemed like he did only want one thing, he just didn’t want to risk going to jail for it.”
Mark raised his hand like a child waiting his turn in school. Elise and I had kind of been dominating the conversation. “Unless Stacey’s a particularly tall woman, the angle of the wound is wrong.”
Elise swiveled toward me. “Noah could have been down on his knees or bent over, examining something on your horse’s leg.”
He only would have been doing one of those things outside the stall, with Key in cross-ties. But it was possible, and it would have been easier for someone to
sneak up on him if that was the case. “I did see flecks on Key’s front leg that could have been blood spatter. Do you think Stacey’s strong enough to haul an unconscious man’s body five to ten feet?”
“She looked it,” Elise said. “She’d need to be able to lift heavy parts and equipment.”
I didn’t want it to be Tony, but I didn’t want it to be Stacey, either. “Do we have any other reasonable options?”
“Not unless you think Georgiana Abbott was lying to you.”
She hadn’t been lying to me, but in my shock over how much Noah owed, I hadn’t remembered to ask an important question. “I didn’t ask if she had ideas about who else might hold a grudge against Noah.”
I pulled the card Georgiana gave me from my purse. True to form, the embossed letters only said G. Abbott.
Her bartender—Devin I think she called him—answered. “She’s out. Want to leave a message?”
The impression I’d gotten when I was there, based on Devin’s reaction to me and on what he said to Georgiana about me when he brought me to her office, was that he was more than simply the bartender. “Maybe you can answer my question instead. Did Georgiana tell you why I came to see her?”
“Yup.”
Close-mouthed and loyal. It was the worst combination when trying to get information from someone. I’d have to make it clear that I wasn’t after Georgiana. “I know Georgiana wasn’t involved in what happened to Noah, but I wanted to know if he had problems with anyone else there that you two knew about.”
I almost said maybe another regular, but that might have shut down any hope I had of Devin talking. Georgiana’s establishment seemed like it valued its regulars. And their privacy. She’d only talked to me about Noah because of what had happened to him.
“He had a screaming match with some jailbait out in the parking lot recently. Not that unusual around here, though. Seems like every week there’s some family member upset about the tabs our clients run up. We stay out of it.”
Jailbait usually referred to an underage girl. Despite her true age, Stacey didn’t look over eighteen, so it could have been her. Which was the opposite of what I’d hoped to hear. “Do you remember what she looked like?”