by Maggie Price
That she did now had Rory tightening his fingers on the phone. “Yeah, I think O’Connell was the target. I’ll give you all the details when I get to Prosperino.”
“You still think he’s the one who attacked Peggy?”
“Yes. He’s the only one who could have hidden those samples in the greenhouse. He was probably checking on them when she came in. Putting her out of commission was the only way he could get out without her seeing him.”
“Sounds like we’ll have a lot to talk about.”
“You’re right about that.” Rory glanced again at his watch. “I’ve got to get some sleep before I climb into Longstreet’s plane. After that, I’ll do some research on DMBE. I’ll call you before I leave here so you can let me know where and when we’re going to meet.”
“Okay. Rory, thanks. I know we have a lot more answers to dig up, like how DMBE got into the ranch’s water, but this is a start. I appreciate you losing sleep over this.”
Rory smiled. “Yeah, well, Fallon, wait until you get my bill.”
Blake chuckled. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
Rory replaced the receiver, rose and strode down the dim hallway and into the small office where a couch lined one wall. Before, he’d been so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t noticed the dark offices, the lack of noise and activity around him. Now he was conscious of the building’s eerie stillness.
When he closed the door of the office, a lonely quality permeated the darkness around him. Slowly, he made his way past the desk, sidestepping the two visitors’ chairs, finally reaching the upholstered couch against the far wall. He slid off his shoes and stretched out on the soft cushions. With the contaminant identified, the tight leash on which he’d kept his mind slipped away.
Free to wander, his thoughts went straight to Peggy.
He pictured again the anger that had sparked in her green eyes, the betrayal that had welled there.
Rory closed his eyes. He hadn’t known how much it would hurt to have her look at him with such pain and fury.
Again, he tasted the panic that had raced through him at the finality in her voice when she’d told him to leave Honeywell House and never come back. Those words should mean little to someone like him. A wanderer. A nomad. A man who had never had a real home. Had never wanted one.
Slowly, he sat up, put his feet on the floor and rested his elbows on his knees. He had never wanted a home, yet Peggy had provided him one. In a few short days she had given him back what had been taken away from him after his mother died. He thought of how many hotels he had slept in alone, of all the people he had walked away from. First, he added grimly. He had shunned emotional entanglements, made sure he was always the one who walked away first. Leaving had always worked because no one had held on to him before. Held on to his heart.
Until now.
Sitting there in the cool, still darkness, Rory felt the truth drop on him like a stone. For the first time in his adult life, his future stretched before him, a barren gray plain. He could travel to hell and back, and never find what he needed. He had already found it, about three hundred miles to the north. In a cozy, charming inn nestled on a hillside in Prosperino, California.
On a low groan, he buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t avoid it any longer, he thought. He couldn’t keep denying that he had fallen in love with Peggy. It had probably happened the moment he’d stood in the inn’s foyer, watching her green eyes shoot fire while she threatened to toss the lech O’Connell out the door.
Rory scrubbed his hands over his face. Okay, so he was in love with Peggy Honeywell. Not only her, he amended when his heart clenched, but her elfin-faced daughter with dark gypsy curls. He loved them both. Wanted them. Problem was, he’d gotten himself tossed out of their lives, which was the one place—the only place—he wanted to be.
Well, Peggy could just forget it, because he wasn’t going anywhere. And he wouldn’t—by God, he wouldn’t—let her walk away from him.
Muttering an oath, he switched on the lamp on the table beside the couch, rose and stalked to the desk. He jerked up the phone, stabbed in the inn’s number. After a few rings, the answering machine picked up.
“This is Peggy Honeywell at Honeywell House.” The smooth, silky drift of her voice had Rory fisting his frustrated hand at his side. “We’re taking a break for a couple of weeks, but are accepting reservations for the middle of February and beyond. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.”
When the beep sounded, Rory hung up, scowling at the phone. A couple of weeks? He would be stark-raving crazy in a couple of weeks if he had to go that long without seeing her.
He was a man who had some serious crawling to do, and he didn’t feel like waiting. His mouth settled in a firm line. He didn’t have to wait, not since he knew where she’d gone. She had mentioned closing the inn when he left and taking Samantha to Tahoe where friends had offered the use of their lake house.
Tahoe, he thought.
Late that afternoon Rory sat on the green leather sofa in Blake’s office on Hopechest Ranch. Blake sat at the opposite end of the couch. Joe Colton and Mayor Michael Longstreet had each settled into one of the wing chairs that faced the couch across the span of the small coffee table. Blake’s secretary, Holly Lamb, had brought in the tray of coffee that sat on the table.
The mayor leaned forward, his face grim. “So, Rory, you’re saying there’s no way the DMBE could have gotten into Hopechest’s water supply naturally?”
“Not in the way you’re asking. It’s man-made, a gasoline additive, so it didn’t fall from the sky when it rained or anything like that. As for whether the DMBE is in the water due to an act of sabotage, I can’t answer that until we know if there are underground petroleum pipelines near the aquifer that supplies water to Hopechest. If there are, it’s possible the DMBE could have leaked from one of those pipelines.”
“There are no pipelines.”
Rory met Joe Colton’s gaze across the table and decided he had never seen anger so cold, so controlled. “You’re sure?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.” Joe’s hands clenched on his thighs. “The minute we knew there was a problem with the water, I had a couple of people from my oil company start researching records. There aren’t any underground oil or gas pipelines on Hopechest property. That means someone dumped the DMBE intentionally.”
“Now we have to find out who.” Rory shifted his gaze to Blake. “As soon as we’re done here, I’ll notify the Bureau and the EPA. They should have teams here by morning to start investigating.”
Blake’s mouth tightened. “Hopechest is under attack, and it could be because of me. Because my dad tried to kill you, Joe. I’m turning in my letter of resignation to the Hopechest Foundation before the close of business today.”
“Absolutely not.” Joe surged out of the chair. The man might be sixty-one, Rory thought, but he was still a formidable figure with that whipcord build and linebacker shoulders. “You and I have talked about this, Blake. What Emmett did isn’t your fault. If some misguided moron dumped the DMBE into the ranch’s water to get back at you for that, we’ll deal with him when we find him. For whatever reason Hopechest Ranch is suffering, it needs you at its helm. You hear me, Blake?”
“I hear you, Joe. I’m just not sure you’re right.”
Joe’s mouth curved. “Well, son, you can have Holly go to all the trouble of typing your letter of resignation and submitting it to the foundation. The problem with that is Meredith and I sit on the foundation’s board of directors. My nephew, Jackson, is the foundation’s legal advisor. I imagine he’ll find some flaw in your letter so he’ll have to recommend to the board that we reject your resignation.”
Rory slid Blake a sideways glance. “Looks like you’re staying.”
“Yeah.”
Settling his hands on the back of the chair he had vacated, Joe met Rory’s gaze. “Let’s get back to O’Connell. You said he should have identified the DMBE a few days after he took th
e first water samples.”
“That’s right. The samples I found in Peggy Honeywell’s greenhouse are dated the day O’Connell arrived in Prosperino. Because the DMBE is so concentrated in those samples, it took me only two days to ID it.”
“So, he had a reason to keep that information to himself.”
“Yes. While I waited for the results on the samples, I ran a background check on O’Connell. When he arrived in Prosperino, he was in debt up to his eyeballs. Last week he paid off half the money he owed. He’s divorced, has no kids, no immediate family. I can’t find any record of a sudden inheritance or anything like that to explain where the money came from.” Rory raised a shoulder. “It’s possible he took a trip to Vegas and won big there. My instincts tell me that’s not what happened.”
His dark eyes intent, Michael crossed his arms over his chest. “So, at least on the surface, it appears O’Connell somehow figured out who dumped the DMBE in the water. He confronted that person and told them to pay up or else.”
“Yes. I found out O’Connell made a call to the state water commission.” Rory didn’t add he discovered that by running a check on the phone number he found during his search of O’Connell’s room at Honeywell House. “A clerk at the commission said O’Connell asked if there was a schematic of one of the water aquifers near Hopechest. The aquifer was mapped twelve years ago, so the schematic is no longer reprinted, though it’s available in the archives. O’Connell showed up there the next day and took a look at that schematic.”
Joe rubbed his chin. “Which maybe led him to whoever dumped the DMBE.”
“Possibly,” Rory agreed. “Because of O’Connell’s unexplained windfall, it looks like that person paid part of the money O’Connell demanded. I say that because it doesn’t make sense for him to ask for only half of what it would take to cover his debts. My guess is, he demanded a hell of a lot more and agreed to take the blackmail payments in installments. The meeting he mentioned to Peggy when he borrowed her station wagon was probably to collect more money from the blackmailer. Whoever he or she is made sure O’Connell wasn’t going to be around to talk, or to collect more.”
“If your theory pans out, that makes the dumper a murderer,” Michael said quietly.
“If I’m right about all of this, it does.”
The mayor narrowed his eyes. “You’ve already told us that a group of ten petroleum companies originally banded together to test DMBE. That means workers in ten different companies have access to DMBE. It’s going to take the feds time to look at the records of all those companies, run backgrounds on all of their employees, then check them all out.”
“True,” Rory agreed. “And since we can’t come up with a solid motive for why that person dumped the DMBE in the first place, no one can automatically be eliminated from the suspect list.”
Michael rose, hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans. “In the meantime, I’ve got to figure out how to tell the city council and the rest of the town that the dumping was a criminal act. As long as the possibility existed that the contaminant got into the water through an act of nature, people were willing to stand back and wait for results. When they find out we know for sure someone dumped the contaminant—and could hit Prosperino’s water supply next—I might have a full-scale panic on my hands.”
Joe laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
Michael gave the older man a wry look. “Have the citizens of Prosperino burned a mayor in effigy anytime in your memory, Joe?”
“No comment.”
Shrugging, Michael leaned across the table, offered Rory his hand. “I appreciate the advance notice on this.”
Rory rose, returned the mayor’s handshake. “And I appreciate the use of your Bonanza.” Rory dug into the pocket of his slacks, retrieved the plane’s key and handed it to Michael. “You saved me a lot of time and a lot of driving.”
“Glad to have been of help. I’m going back to city hall. I need to phone and advise each of the council members of your findings. I’m scheduling an emergency council meeting for tonight. Can you be there to answer whatever questions come up?”
Rory felt a slash of guilt, quelled it. “Sorry, I’m leaving right after I make those calls to the Bureau and the EPA.” He caught Blake’s knowing look before turning back to Michael. “The three of you know as much about this as I do so far. The fact sheets the EPA sent me cover the short-and long-term effects of DMBE consumption. That’s probably going to cover most of the questions you’ll get tonight.”
Michael angled his head. “What about the pregnant girls?”
Blake rose, stepped around the coffee table. “Just before you got here, I sent Suzanne Jorgenson over to the hospital to outline everything to Doc Colton. You should have seen her face light up when she read on the fact sheet that it takes years of continued exposure to DMBE to cause birth defects.”
“Sorry I missed seeing her,” Michael murmured, disappointment flashing in his eyes. “She’s worried herself sick over the pregnant teens.”
Joe offered Rory his hand and a smile. “Glad to have made your acquaintance, Agent Sinclair. Hope you’ll make it back to Prosperino someday.”
“I’m counting on being back soon.” If he could convince Peggy to open her heart to him. He had to convince her.
When Joe and Michael strode out the door, Rory headed for Blake’s neat-as-a-pin desk. After placing calls to the FBI and EPA to advise both agencies of his findings, he turned to Blake. “Did you find out where the house is at Tahoe?”
“Yes.” Blake pulled a piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “The house belongs to Colt and Thea Newman—they own the art gallery just to the west of the movie theater. Peggy caters receptions at their gallery sometimes. Every year they offer Peggy and Samantha the use of their lake house, but Peggy hasn’t taken them up on it before. Thea said Peggy called two days ago and asked if their offer was still open.”
The day he left. Rory fisted his hands, flexed them. “Do you know what she’s driving?”
“No. When I talked to Colt, he mentioned Peggy had rented a car, but he didn’t say what kind. He also said the house is out of the way and hard to find.” As he spoke, Blake handed the paper to Rory. “Don’t lose this.”
“You can bet I won’t.” Rory pulled his leather jacket off one of the visitors’ chairs, shrugged it on, then slid the paper into his inside pocket.
Blake angled his chin. “Since you’re heading to Tahoe, I guess whatever’s between you and Peggy is serious.”
“As far as she’s concerned, there’s nothing between us. I’m hoping to change her mind.” He would beg, promise, fight, do whatever it took to put her back into his life.
Turning, Rory strode toward the door, then paused. “Wish me luck,” he said over his shoulder.
Blake grinned. “You’ve got it, pal.”
Thirteen
Peggy closed the door on the small, cozy bedroom Samantha had claimed on the lake house’s second floor. It had taken at least thirty minutes to steer her daughter’s questions away from the topic of “Mr. Rory” and on to the storybook adventures of Barbie.
Pressing her palm against the tightness that had settled around her heart, Peggy walked soundlessly down the staircase into the large living room that was topped by a loft and skylights. The only light in the room came from the flickering flames in the fieldstone fireplace that dominated one wall. Opposite the fireplace was a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out on Lake Tahoe. Tonight the moon was full, its silver light shimmering like a fall of diamonds across the dark water.
A coldness more gray than the dawn seeped into her body, into her very bones, and she heard herself make an anguished little sound. Moving to the fireplace where wood crackled and sparked, she lowered onto the hearth and waited for the fire’s heat to sneak through the heavy knit of her sweater.
Over the past two days her anger had died away to misery. Gut-wrenching misery. Here, now, she could admit that
what Rory had done had been for her own good. He hadn’t kept the fact he was a cop to himself in order to get her into bed. He had remained quiet to protect her from whatever threat Charlie O’Connell presented.
Her thoughts scrolled back to the morning the EPA inspector tripped over Bugs and tumbled down the inn’s staircase. The man had stood tight-lipped at the bottom of the stairs, as she’d knelt to comfort a sobbing Samantha. In retrospect, Peggy realized that, for an instant, O’Connell’s expression had been almost frightening in its coldness.
Even then, Rory had stepped between them, a protector. If O’Connell was the man who attacked her, Peggy knew without doubt he was capable of much more than cold, killing glares. Rory had sensed that, too.
Rising from the hearth, Peggy skirted around the sofa and armchairs scattered near the fireplace. She roamed past the wall of built-in bookcases, stopping when she reached the expansive window. Wrapping her arms around her waist, she stared unseeingly out at the dark lake.
Would she have acted the same way toward Rory—pursued him—if she had known he wore a badge, just as Jay had? Would she have been strong enough to turn away from that compelling, intense face and those killer-blue eyes that held a hint of danger? Could she have truly resisted the desire that had clawed at her since the first moment she had laid eyes on him?
It didn’t matter, she told herself. She hadn’t resisted. Sure hadn’t been forced. She’d gone after what she wanted, taken it. Now she had to deal with the consequences of her actions.
Which was the real reason she’d closed the inn and brought Samantha to Tahoe. Here, away from the place where memories of Rory assaulted her at every turn, she would heal. Get her balance back.
And get over the infatuation she’d mistaken for love. She didn’t love Rory Sinclair, she told herself, stiffening her shoulders. Wouldn’t let herself love a man who had probably already wiped all images of her from his mind. A man who excelled at leaving.