Finding You

by Carla Neggers

  “Geez,” she breathed, “you really are losing it.”

  More pins came out. She had a handful of them.

  “Evening, Ms. Cozie.” Daniel Forrest stepped from the shadows of the Civil War statue across from the Citizen building. “Party over already?”

  She jumped, pins flying everywhere, but she recovered quickly. “No, it’s not. I left early. What are you doing out here?”

  “Having a chat with old Lieutenant Alonzo here on the inscrutability of Yankees.” He patted the statue’s stone boot. “Relative of yours, I take it?”

  “And I thought by now you knew everything about me.”

  His eyes fell on her, and he said in that languid, sandpaper drawl, “Not by half.”

  An unbidden heat spread through her, making her glad for the darkness. She glanced up at the tall statue of Alonzo Hawthorne in his Union Army lieutenant’s uniform, his proud, young face caught in the glare of a streetlight. “He was my great-great-grandfather. He died at Gettysburg.”

  “It stays with you, losing someone to a war.”

  “I recited the Gettysburg Address at his feet for a Memorial Day program in high school. I’m not sure I could do it now.” She shook off her sudden melancholy. “Did Alonzo give you any insight into Yankees?”

  “No, ma’am. He remained inscrutable.”

  Daniel’s eyes were colorless in the darkness, but Cozie felt their relentless intensity, the control of the man behind them. What lengths would he go to to get what he wanted? What did he want?

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders, but before she could deal with it herself he reached out and gently pulled it up, using both hands. His touch lingered, its intimacy warming her far more than the thin shawl. She wondered if he noticed and decided probably he did. He caught a bobby pin as it fell from her hair and tucked it into her hand with the others. His fingers seemed almost hot compared to hers, never mind that he’d been outside longer.

  “I think your lips are purple,” he said, and brushed her mouth with one finger.

  She swallowed hard. “Actually, the air feels good.”

  He smiled, dropping his hand from her mouth. “Something only a Yankee would say.”

  The man knew exactly what he was doing, Cozie thought. Exactly. Daniel Forrest, she was quite sure, did virtually nothing that wasn’t calculated and very deliberate, even touch a woman’s lips on a chilly Vermont night. What could he possibly hope to gain?

  “Did you—did you catch up with my brother?”

  His manner changed almost immediately, as if reminded that she was, indeed, his landlady and he ought to mind his manners. “I met him at his place this afternoon and we settled up. So, where’re you headed?”

  “Nowhere.” She tried not to squirm under his probing gaze, tried not to imagine what he thought of her in her Ingrid Bergman dress, so different from the old work clothes he’d seen her in earlier. “I just wanted to walk around, clear my head before I started home. Did you park in my space again?”

  “Wouldn’t dare. I’ve learned I was lucky you didn’t skin me alive for snatching it. No, Julia Vanackern gave me a ride down. I figured I’d walk home. Exercise’d do me good.”

  From what Cozie could see, one thing Daniel Forrest didn’t lack was enough exercise. “It’s a ways. Would you like a ride?”

  The offer was out before she could stop herself. The big Texan leaned back on his heels, studying her, and for a moment she thought he’d have the decency to refuse. But he shrugged. “Sure.”

  There was no graceful way to renege. Cozie glanced up at the Civil War statue, as if her long-dead ancestor could help her out of a mess of her own creation. But she had only herself to rely on, and she walked with Daniel Forrest back across the common, to where she’d parked her Jeep in the inn’s front lot.

  “I see you didn’t buy a new Jeep with your newfound fortune,” he said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this one. Runs like a top.”

  “Body’s in rough shape.”

  “Well, nobody would recognize me if I drove a sports car or one of those fancy new Jeeps.”

  Daniel looked across the rusted roof. “I don’t know, I’d bet they would.”

  But Cozie was distracted by a folded sheet of white paper tucked under her windshield wiper. Assuming it was just an advertisement, she reached over and plucked it free.

  “Door’s unlocked,” she told her passenger as she opened the driver’s side door and slid in behind the wheel.

  The paper fell open when she flung it between the two front seats.

  Her heart stopped, and she cried out in shock.

  She stared at the large black letters in the harsh glare of the streetlight.

  WELCOME HOME, COZIE CORNELIA.

  AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU MADE IT BACK ALIVE?

  The message was laser printed in Times Roman bold, probably thirty-two-point type. Being a newspaperwoman, Cozie knew her typefaces.

  She was shaking. Her hands felt stiff and cold and too heavy even to hang onto the steering wheel.

  “Cozie?”

  Her tormentor was in Woodstock…

  …had found her Jeep.

  “Cozie, are you all right?”

  Daniel was in the passenger seat, regarding her with a quiet intensity she found oddly comforting. She had the message in her hand. “I’m fine.”

  He nodded to the paper. “What’s that?”

  “It’s an ad for a pizza parlor.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is.”

  “Then let me have a look.”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t let him see it. But he got to the paper before she could toss it in the back.

  He swore softly as he read it.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “This isn’t the first one of these, is it?” His voice was quiet, controlled, serious, the sardonic humor of a few moments ago gone.

  “My first here. Look, I meant what I said. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Do the police know?”

  She refused to answer. Of course the police didn’t know. What could they do besides tell her what she already knew? Someone was trying to throw her off center, annoy her, even frighten her. But not, they would assure her, trying to hurt her.

  “Cozie,” Daniel repeated, “do the police know?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I haven’t told them,” she said, sticking the key in the ignition and starting up the engine.

  He settled back into the ragged passenger seat, winced, and reached under him. He pulled out a long, sharp, black needlelike something. “What’s this?”

  Cozie gave it the barest glance. “Porcupine quill.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Zep got into a porcupine a few weeks ago. I had to take him to the vet.”

  “Sounds plausible. You’re a prickly lady, Ms. Cozie, but I don’t think you’d booby-trap your passengers.” He cast her a look. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders. She was shivering. “If you slide any closer to that door, you’re going to squirt right out onto the road.”

  She loosened her tight grip on the wheel by sheer force of will. “I’m just a little rattled.”

  “Rightfully so.”

  She turned onto sparsely populated Hawthorne Orchard Road. There were no streetlights and few houses; they met no other cars.

  “Do you ever get spooked out here all by yourself?” Daniel asked.

  “Why should I?”

  “I didn’t say you should, just asked if you did.”

  “I’ve lived on this road most of my life. It’s what I know.” She licked her lips, dry from the shock she’d received, and resisted a look at the message she’d found on her Jeep. “Under ordinary circumstances, no, I don’t get spooked.”

  She passed the black-shuttered house on the gently sloping hill, then careened down the steep driv
eway to her renovated sawmill, just as she had countless times in the past ten years.

  Except that everything had changed.

  She came to a hard stop behind her tenant’s black truck.

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said, so very close to her.

  “You’re welcome. Good night.”

  She sensed his reluctance to leave. He would want to ask her more about the note on her windshield and whoever had left it. He wasn’t the kind of man to leave such questions unanswered. But he said, “I’ll be keeping an eye out for you, Cozie Hawthorne.”

  Her breath caught. “For all I know you could be responsible.”

  “I’m not.”

  She gave a small nod. “I have no reason to disbelieve you.”

  “Cozie…” He leaned even closer to her and tucked a finger under her chin, turning her face toward him. “If you believe nothing else about me, believe that. I didn’t leave that note on your windshield.”

  And his mouth grazed hers, and she didn’t even consider pushing him away, but the kiss—if that was what it was—didn’t last. “If you find you don’t want to be alone tonight,” he said, still very close to her, “you know where to find me.”

  He managed to make it sound both like a simple statement of fact and an invitation, a promise.

  “Thank you.”

  But he’d already slid out into the cold, dark night.

  Cozie resisted an impulse to leap out after him and instead turned back up the sawmill driveway. The offending message seemed like a live, vicious animal in her Jeep with her, but she couldn’t just throw it out onto the road. It was hard evidence that someone, indeed, was harassing her.

  But not Daniel Forrest. No, she didn’t believe that. Still, he was keeping something from her.

  She shook off the thought. She had enough as it was to keep her awake. A nasty note on her windshield, and a brief—too brief—kiss from a sexy, mysterious Texan.

  Yes. Definitely enough.

  Inside the converted sawmill, Daniel found a few coals still hot in the efficient Vermont-made cast-iron woodstove that dominated the middle of the single downstairs room. He added kindling and in a few minutes had a decent fire going. In the small, simple country kitchen on the far end of the room, he reheated some coffee left over from that afternoon. It was your basic rotgut, but he didn’t care. He needed his wits about him. He needed to think.

  Or, more specifically, to stop thinking. Whatever had possessed him to kiss Cozie Hawthorne? Hell, to stop kissing her?

  He stood at the butcher block table, in front of a window looking straight down on the nineteenth-century stone dam and its picturesque ten-foot waterfall. Even with the windows shut, he could hear the rush of water. It was almost soothing. He took his coffee into the living area, which consisted of an old couch and a couple of slip-covered chairs on a hand-hooked rug. A polyurethaned apple crate served as a coffee table. He set his mug on it and sat on one of the chairs and closed his eyes, trying to put it all together, Texas and Julia and Seth and the helicopter crash and the note on his landlady’s windshield, because they all fit. Somehow they were connected. He knew it.

  But his mind wouldn’t cooperate. He kept seeing the fear and worry in Cozie Hawthorne’s eyes, a deeper green in the darkness, the bobby pins flying out of her hands when he’d greeted her at the Yankee statue, the tight grip she had on the wheel of her Jeep. Things were going on in the lady’s life that she’d never expected, never counted on. She didn’t know what to do, how to react—to her sudden success, to someone out to scare her. Maybe to an angry, troubled younger brother.

  “Leave it, my man,” he said aloud.

  He jumped up, putting another log on the fire, then reached for the phone in the kitchen and dialed J.D.’s hospital room. Central Time made it an hour earlier than in Vermont, but it was still late. A nurse answered. She reluctantly admitted J.D. was awake and put him on.

  Daniel filled him in. “Our smart-mouthed Yankee friend found a nasty little note on her windshield tonight. I’d say someone’s been messing with her head for a while, and I’ll bet she hasn’t told a soul.”

  “Any threat?”

  “Nothing direct. The implication is the son of a bitch is watching her every move.”

  J.D. was silent a moment. “The brother?”

  “I don’t know. He knows who I am but won’t admit it.”

  “Think the little creep’s trying to spook his own sister?”

  Daniel didn’t answer at once. He listened to the quiet sounds of the Vermont night and imagined Cozie Hawthorne alone in her rambling old house. Would she get spooked tonight? Finally, he said, “Something’s going on. Maybe it has nothing to do with why our helicopter went down—”

  “But you’ve stuck your hand in the fire.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Stay on the case, Danny Boy. Wish I could be there with you.”

  “I wish you could be, too.” His eyes burned; he could feel the tension building inside him, the frustration with his own helplessness. But he could also hear the fog of fatigue and pain in his partner’s voice. “How are you doing?”

  “Hell, half the time I don’t know. I’m either so doped up I don’t know what’s going on or I’m hurting so fucking bad I don’t care what’s going on.”

  “Right now?”

  “If I’m talking, pal, I’m hurting. Mostly it’s the leg. I still dream some nights it’s gone, they’ve sawed it off and thrown it to the dogs.”

  “I wish—”

  “It’s too late for wishes.”

  He knew. Only too well he knew. “Take care of yourself, J.D.”

  “Find out who did this to me.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  As he hung up, Daniel could see his reflection in the window overlooking the dam. What if he’d already found out? What if everyone was right and he was an arrogant son of a bitch who’d nearly killed himself and his own partner and best friend, all because he’d wanted to be the first, the best, the toughest. Because it had been a hell of a fire burning out there and he’d been willing to risk his partner’s life, Julia Vanackern’s life, his own life in his determination to put it down.

  He pulled on his jacket and headed outside, plunging through the cold darkness to the path along Hawthorne Brook. He would make sure Ms. Cozie hadn’t gone home to some nut on her doorstep.

  If nothing else, it would keep him from confronting his own demons.

  Cozie was staring at the slanted ceiling in her bedroom, her father’s old crowbar stretched out at her side. She’d plucked it off a rusty nail down in the cellar and taken it upstairs with her, in case of what she wasn’t quite sure. She only knew she hadn’t been so spooked, as Daniel Forrest would say, in years.

  She decided to blame her sandpaper-voiced tenant rather than whoever had left the unnerving message on her Jeep.

  The wallpaper of small roses and forget-me-nots, yellowed and coming down in places, was the same one she and Meg had hung as teenagers. Because Sal had said it’d be easier to rent her sawmill furnished, she’d only brought her flea-market antique chestnut nightstand with her when she moved back in. The twin bed, the marble-topped bureau, the ladder-back chair, the milk-glass lamp—they were all what she’d had growing up. She wanted to put up new curtains, but she had no real urge to decorate.

  She swallowed, her throat tight and dry, and jumped at every creak and groan of the old house, every trick of the wind or ordinary sound of the night. She imagined her anonymous tormentor, someone, creeping around downstairs, outside in the shadows. She thought about ghosts and ghouls and how many times she’d awakened as a kid to a bat flying around and had yelled for her father, until finally she was old enough, brave enough, to catch bats on her own.

  Before climbing into bed, she’d shut up the end room where she was sure the bat who’d been flirting with her since she’d moved in was still lurking. She didn’t want to deal with bats tonight.

  She’d also go
tten the crowbar and checked every inch of the house and told Zep, as if he could understand, to keep good watch on the place. She’d stuck her anonymous note in the junk drawer next to the refrigerator, in with the old rubber bands and pieces of aluminum foil and odd nail and screw and pair of scissors. It was where she’d put the cheap steno pad in which she had recorded the times, dates, and transcripts of the calls she’d received on the road. She’d hoped it could just sit in there and collect dust. That her calls were an on-the-road thing, a price of sudden fame and fortune.

  Now her tormentor had found her in Woodstock. Was in Woodstock.

  She shuddered, snuggling deep down under her covers.

  The ring of the telephone almost killed her. She leaped out of bed, swearing and stumbling around, heart pounding, and picked up the extension on her marble-topped bureau.

  “Hello, Cozie Cornelia. I hope you had fun at the Woodstock Inn tonight.”

  Her knees went out from under her, forcing her to grab the edge of the bureau to stay on her feet. She gripped the phone. She’d recognized the voice immediately. Disembodied. Neither male nor female. Underlined with hate and rage, it had followed her across the country and now back again.

  “Were you there?” she asked in a tight whisper.

  “I can be wherever you are.”

  Click.

  Cozie slammed down the receiver. She had to tell someone. The police, her publisher, her agent, Meg, Seth. Daniel Forrest. Someone. She knew she needed to before this nut decided having her scared wasn’t enough and everyone got to paw through her things while she was on a slab being autopsied.

  But surely if she were in any serious danger, her tormentor would have tried something by now. All he—or she—wanted was to see Cozie Hawthorne scared and frustrated.

  Which she was.

  And even with the note on her Jeep and now the call—with knowing this SOB was in Woodstock—she was aware that her tormentor would be difficult to locate. With no demand, no overt threat, no reason for the harassment, she expected that the police would feel much as she did: not knowing what to do, how to react, uncertain if she was in real danger. “You killed my dog and I hate you,” they all could understand. “You’re famous and I’m not.” “I want your money.” Even, “You’re an asshole and I’m going to make your life miserable.”