by Gina Wilkins
She laughed softly, ruefully. “Really, Lucas, you should learn to be more outspoken about what you’re thinking. It can’t be good to bottle up your feelings this way.”
He chuckled reluctantly. “I guess that wasn’t very tactful, was it?”
“Tact has never been a word I’ve associated with you.”
“So you’ll leave your father’s things alone for now? At least until I’ve had a chance to look into this more?”
“I’ll think about it.”
He was aware that she was making no promises. He was equally aware that he had no right to demand any from her.
“I want to see you again, Rachel.”
“When?”
Now, he wanted to answer. Instead, he said, “Tomorrow. Have dinner with me.”
Which, he realized, meant he’d just committed himself to another full day in Honoria.
“I would like to have dinner with you, Lucas.”
He nodded in satisfaction. They had just made an official date. He supposed it was about time.
“My grandmother is usually in bed by eight o’clock. I can meet you somewhere afterward, if you don’t mind waiting that late to eat.”
“You forget, I’ve lived in California for most of the past fifteen years. Eight o’clock doesn’t seem that late. And we don’t need to meet anywhere. I’ll pick you up.”
“What if someone sees us?”
“Then they see us.” He, for one, was tired of sneaking around.
“Fine. I’ll see you at eight, then.”
“Fine. Er...good night, Rachel.”
“Good night, Lucas.”
He hung up the phone, then leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head, and gazed at the lights on the Christmas tree.
RACHEL KNEW Lucas wanted her to stay away from her uncle, and she had no real desire to spend time with Sam, anyway. But her discovery of that wallet nagged at her. It just didn’t make sense that her father would have buried the wallet and its contents. Lucas was probably right that she would find no explanations among her father’s things, but she had an almost overwhelming compulsion to see for herself.
After spending Saturday morning trying to talk herself out of doing so, she drove to her uncle’s house late that afternoon, thinking she would only stop by for a few minutes, and if the opportunity arose, she would ask about her father’s things. She was relatively sure she could bring it up in such a way that Sam wouldn’t find her request unusual.
It had been years since Rachel had been to her uncle’s house. As far as she could tell, he’d made few changes to the white-shuttered, redbrick farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Several outbuildings surrounded the house. There was a detached, three-car garage in addition to the two-car garage connected to the house. A workshop. Two metal storage buildings.
Her uncle, it appeared, was a pack rat.
He was also not home.
Rachel stood for some time on Sam’s front porch, trying to decide what to do. She shouldn’t even consider going into the storage buildings without her uncle’s permission, of course. But she was only interested in her father’s things—which her uncle had offered to save for her, after all.
The buildings were probably locked, she told herself, even as she walked toward the first one. Sure enough, there was a heavy padlock on the door. The second building was secured in the same manner.
“Dam.”
She really should wait for Sam, she thought, even as she made her way to the detached garage.
The big doors were locked. As was the smaller door on the side. Rachel peered through a dirty window. A couple of tarp-covered vehicles sat inside—as well as a stack of cardboard boxes against one wall.
She frowned, pushing her nose nearly against the side-hinged window. She gulped when it swung inward. Either Sam had forgotten to lock the window, or the old lock had just given way when Rachel leaned against it.
“No, Rachel,” she said aloud. “You are not climbing through this window. You have no right.”
But she couldn’t stop looking at those boxes. They looked a lot like the ones she’d found in her grandmother’s attic.
“You’re too old to climb through windows.”
But she had climbed the gate across the lane several times now. Easily. All she’d have to do now was step over a low sill.
She shouldn’t. But would Sam really mind if she told him she was only looking for her father’s things?
She’d had a week full of reckless, daring, impulsive actions. What was one more? She stepped over the sill.
Skirting the two covered vehicles in the three-car garage, she headed straight for the boxes. It was almost with a sense of inevitability that she saw her mother’s handwriting on the outside. “Al’s things.”
Rachel sighed and rubbed a finger over the stark black letters. How must her mother have felt, packing up her husband’s belongings, knowing that he had abandoned her and their children for another woman?
She winced as the questions brought back the sense of overwhelming betrayal she had felt when her father lef her. And, later, when she had been told Lucas had spent the night with Lizzie Carpenter. She’d been devastated. She could only imagine how her mother must have felt.
Learning that Lizzie had lied to her about Lucas had shaken Rachel so much that she still didn’t know quite how she felt about it. If she dwelled on it too long, she would become fixated on how much time she and Lucas had been apart—and how much might have been different if she had taken his call the night he left.
The sealing tape on the boxes was yellowed and brittle, but still securely adhered. Rachel plucked at it futilely for a few moments, then looked around for something sharp for cutting. She didn’t immediately see anything useful. The garage was clean, with very little in it besides the shrouded vehicles and the neatly stacked boxes. There weren’t even any shelves along the walls, though a door at the back of the garage probably led into a storage room.
She stood and started through the shadowy room toward the door. She stumbled when her foot caught in the corner of a dusty car cover.
She hastily made a grab for the tarp. A glimpse of bright orange made her go still. Very slowly, she lifted the cover and looked at the classic two-seater sports car beneath.
Want to go for a ride in my magic pumpkin, princess?
Staring at the car, she could almost hear her father’s voice.
It couldn’t be the same one, she told herself dazedly. She hadn’t seen her father’s car since she was nine years old. It was just a coincidence that her uncle also owned an orange two-seater.
Moving as if in an eerie dream, she circled the hood, trailing her fingers along the time-dulled paint.
Her father had kept his sunglasses in the car. When he’d slid those aviator-styled glasses on his nose, Rachel had thought he was the most handsome man in the world.
She reached inside the vehicle and opened the tiny glove box, reaching inside as nervously as if she thought a mousetrap might clamp down on her fingers. And then she pulled out the sunglasses.
So many questions were spinning inside her head. Had her father left the car with his brother? Had Sam known Al and Nadine were planning to run away together? Maybe he’d even helped them. Maybe he’d given Al money, so that burying a wallet full of cash hadn’t been any big deal.
Maybe Sam had only pretended to be as shocked and outraged as everyone else when Al and Nadine disappeared.
Not certain what she was looking for now, Rachel reached into the glove compartment again. What she pulled out this time made her gasp.
The heavy, gold-link bracelet gleamed dully in her hand. It looked old. Solid. Expensive.
It looked very much like the one Lucas had described to.her. The bracelet that had been taken from Emily’s wrist.
The small door at the front of the garage rattled. It was the only warning Rachel had before her uncle stepped inside.
He looked at her. At the uncovered car. And at the bracelet in her hand. And then he si
ghed.
“I really wish you hadn’t done this, Rachel.”
11
IT SEEMED that nearly everyone had plans for Saturday afternoon. A wedding shower was being given for Emily by her aunts and cousins. A large number of Emily’s friends and co-workers were expected to attend.
Bobbie and Ernestine had declared that men had no place at a shower, so the male members of the family were bundled off to Emily’s house to spend the afternoon watching football. Lucas waited until Caleb McBride and his sons were settled in front of the TV, along with Kit Pace and Savannah’s teenage son, Michael. Clay played patiently with Trevor’s toddler son. Seeing that everyone else was occupied, Lucas drew Wade out to the front porch.
“Feel like taking a walk in the woods with your future brother-in-law?”
Wade studied Lucas’s face. “Why?”
Lucas rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced wryly. “What would you say if I told you we’re looking for buried bodies?”
“I’d say that’s not very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Wade opened the door and spoke into the living room, raising his voice to be heard over the blaring television. “Lucas and I need to go out for a while. Can you guys keep an eye on Clay for me?”
Without looking away from the game, Trevor waved a hand. “We’ll watch him. Take your time.”
Wade zipped his jacket. “Okay. Let’s walk in the woods.”
A slender blond man in a World-War-II-style leather bomber jacket with a Sherpa collar stepped around the corner of the house. “You guys mind if I come along? I really don’t like football.”
Lucas frowned at Blake Fox. “You spend a lot of time eavesdropping on private conversations?”
Blake responded with a cocky grin. “You might say I’m somewhat of an expert at the art.”
Lucas debated, then decided maybe a P.L’s perspective would be useful. “Come on, then.”
Blake fell into step with them. “What’s this about buried bodies?”
As they walked the trail toward the rock house, Lucas told them the full story. That his mother had died young, leaving Josiah a widower with a young son to raise. That Josiah had decided, for some reason, to marry Nadine Peck, one of the “wild women” of Honoria. That Nadine had begun a clandestine affair with Al Jennings after the birth of her daughter—an affair that had come to light when Al and Nadine had run away together, leaving their spouses and children behind without a word of explanation.
“Want me to look into it?” Blake asked. “There’s a good chance I can find out what became of them.”
“Let me tell you the rest of it first.”
Lucas went on to detail how, nine years after Al and Nadine’s disappearance, Roger Jennings had come up with the theory that they had never left town at all. That they had, in fact, been murdered. And then Lucas described the dirt-encrusted gold bracelet Roger had thrown at him only a few days before he’d died in a fall from a thirty-foot bluff.
Wade reacted strongly to that bit of information. “The bracelet stolen from Emily had been dug up by Roger Jennings?”
Lucas nodded grimly. “I hid it, myself, before I left town, but Emily apparently found it and started wearing it.”
“She gave me the impression she found it among her father’s things after he died last spring.”
Lucas shook his head. “That’s not likely. I haven’t talked to her about it, though.”
“And from finding that bracelet, Roger concluded his father had been murdered?”
“He apparently found something else. Something I didn’t know about, myself, until Rachel showed it to me yesterday.” He told them about the wallet and its contents.
“Now that’s interesting,” Blake murmured. “Leaving the driver’s license behind—maybe. But the cash? Unusual.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lucas led them into the clearing at the end of the path. “This is where Al and Nadine apparently met for their trysts. Rachel and I used to spend a lot of time here, too.”
“Rachel. Roger’s younger sister?” Blake asked, following the story with a frown of concentration.
Lucas nodded. “Roger saw her here with me while he was looking for clues, or God knows what, and he went ballistic. He came to me the next day.”
“He ordered you to stop seeing his sister?” Wade hazarded.
“He said he’d kill me if I didn’t.”
Wade’s expression didn’t change. “And what did you say to that?”
Lucas knew exactly what kind of risk he was taking when he looked the chief of police in the eyes and replied, “I told him I would kill him before I let him come between us.”
Blake coughed, then scooped up three pinecones from the ground at his feet and began to juggle them.
Ignoring Blake, Wade continued to look narrowly at Lucas. “You told me you didn’t push Roger Jennings off that bluff.”
“I didn’t. I wasn’t here the night Roger died.”
“You were with the Carpenter girl.” Wade repeated the accepted fact with a rather skeptical expression.
“I wasn’t here,” Lucas repeated. “I had nothing to do with Roger’s death. I can only assume it was an accident. He was either looking for evidence or hoping to catch me with Rachel, and he somehow stumbled off the path.”
“Where was Rachel?”
Lucas scowled at Wade. “Don’t start that again...”
“It’s a legitimate question, Lucas. You said Roger was trying to break the two of you up. She could have been as determined as you were to prevent that. She wouldn’t have known, of course, that you were seeing another girl at the same time. The one you spent the night with when her brother died.”
“Rachel,” Lucas said between his teeth, “was out of town that night. She’d gone to Atlanta with her mother and her grandmother to do some shopping. They returned to the news that Roger’s body had been found at the bottom of the bluff by a couple of hikers.”
Wade nodded. “Just wondering.”
“The only reason I’ve told you all of this is because one detail still concerns me, and I thought you should be aware of it.”
“The attack on Emily,” Wade murmured.
Lucas nodded grimly. “It just seems odd that the bracelet disappeared violently again. When I heard about the other break-ins, I convinced myself that it was only coincidence. But I talked to Kevin O’Brien this morning.”
“How the hell...?”
“I managed,” Lucas interrupted. “He swore to me, just as he did to you, that he did not break in to Emily’s house. And, Wade, I believe him.”
Wade grimaced. “He had reason to deny it, of course. There was an attack involved in that break-in, unlike the others. Which makes the charges all the more serious.”
“I know he had reason to lie. And I’m sure he’s damned good at it. But I know the kind of punk he is. Hell, I was that kind of punk, except that I never got bored enough to break in to houses. He didn’t take Emily’s bracelet.”
“And that worries you. You think she was targeted strictly because of the bracelet.”
“Even if someone was specifically after the bracelet—for whatever reason—Emily should be safe now. I just think you should be aware of what I’ve learned today. You should know that there’s another thief around here somewhere. It wasn’t Kevin O’Brien.”
Blake tossed the pinecones high above his head, juggling them skillfully. “Looks to me like you still need to find AI and Nadine.”
Lucas turned to him. “Why?”
“Because it’s the only way you’ll ever know for certain that Roger’s theory wasn’t true.”
“I still can’t believe my father killed anyone.”
“Motive and probability.”
Becoming reluctantly mesmerized by the dancing pinecones and Blake’s cryptic words, Lucas asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Blake let the cones fall and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Not
long after Roger Jennings decided that someone whacked his father, Roger took a mysterious fatal dive, right?”
And Rachel had accused Lucas of having no tact! Lucas stared at Blake through narrowed eyes. “Something like that.”
“Okay, we know you had a motive to kill Roger. So did Rachel.”
Lucas almost growled in frustration. “We did not...”
Blake held up a hand. “I didn’t say you did it, I’m just saying you had a possible motive. Just as your father could have had reason to want to kill his cheating wife and her lover.”
“So who else would have a motive to kill Nadine and Al?” Wade asked. “Assuming they were killed, of course,” he clarified hastily.
“Jane Jennings,” Lucas muttered, reluctantly going along. “Not that I believe she did.”
“Low probability. But a definite motive,” Blake agreed. “Who else?”
“Nadine could have killed Al and split,” Lucas said, remembering some of the improbable scenarios he had thrown at Rachel. “Again—not probable without help.”
“Or Al could have killed Nadine,” Wade suggested.
Lucas huffed impatiently. “Or no one was ever killed, at all—the likeliest probability. Al and Nadine ran off to play house somewhere and Roger walked off the path and into a free fall.”
“No one has heard from Al or Nadine since they left town?” Blake asked.
Lucas shook his head. “Not as far as I know.”
“Nadine had no family?”
“She was estranged from the few relatives she had, long before she disappeared. It’s unlikely she’s ever contacted any of them since.”
“And Al?”
“Rachel told me no one’s heard from him. He had no family left, either...except for his brother.”
“Sam Jennings,” Wade supplied. “He’s a local dentist. Hates McBrides enough to accuse Emily of embezzlement a few months back. Turned out it was one of his own employees. But he really seemed to want it to be Emily.”
Blake looked quickly at Lucas. “Why does he hate McBrides?”
Lucas shrugged. “The guy’s crazy. Always has been.”
“But why?” Blake insisted.
Lucas wondered if he could make Blake understand the old-fashioned, long-standing Southern feud. “My great-grandfather and Sam’s grandfather hated each other. I never knew what started it, but they spent their entire lives fighting and competing. They raised their sons to carry on the tradition, so that Sam’s father and my grandfather were lifelong enemies. So there’s been a long history of animosity. It didn’t help that Sam was briefly engaged to Nadine Peck before she dumped him to marry my father.”