Met Her Match

by Jude Deveraux

  “Yeah?” Rowan smiled. “I agree. Simple. Clean.”

  “You remember the Stanton house?”

  Rowan put his hand to his forehead. “Stanton house? Big place smack in town? Falling down but could be restored?”

  “That’s it.”

  Rowan opened a drawer, pulled out a stack of menus and looked through them. “That’s a great old house. I always liked it.”

  Nate shook his head. “You like that house?”

  “Very much.” Rowan handed Nate a menu. “Italian. Lots of meat. If you can’t read it, I can translate. Call and order while I take a shower.” He left the room.

  Nate looked at the menu but didn’t see it. Likes kale, loves the Stanton house, his apartment is all white. Maybe Kit had been right in matching his son with Stacy. And maybe he’d been right in putting Nate in Terri’s house.

  But Nate had messed it up. He’d been so jealous that Kit had given his son a beautiful young woman that Nate had... He took a breath. He’d done whatever he had to do to win her—including becoming someone he wasn’t. He didn’t want to think this was true, but maybe he’d tried to be a Montgomery—specifically, he’d tried to make himself into Rowan.

  “I gave Stacy beer when she wanted champagne,” he whispered.

  Rowan appeared in the doorway, a towel wrapped around his waist. “Did you order?”

  To Nate’s eyes, Rowan was too thin. In good shape, but with little muscle on him. But maybe that’s what Stacy liked. From the way she was always trying to get Nate to reduce his size, he thought so. “Not yet,” he said, and pulled out his phone.

  * * *

  By the time their meal arrived, Rowan and Nate were so glum they were hardly speaking. They sat at the glass-topped table, heads bent. That Rowan didn’t get plates and proper silverware out showed that he was in a serious funk. He moved a plastic fork around in his lemon pasta that was still in the foam container.

  “Can you get me a picture of William Thorndyke?” Nate asked. “But then, maybe I should check at a church because by now the kid is probably up for sainthood. Terri will float away on a cloud with him.”

  “Rayburn! I just remembered. Didn’t her mother run off with some man?”

  “Yeah,” Nate said gruffly. “Her mother did.”

  “I was a kid but I remember when it happened. We were in Dubai at the time. Dad got angry and wanted to go home and find out what really happened. He was on the phone yelling at somebody.”

  “I wasn’t there then or I’m sure it would have been me.”

  Rowan ignored Nate’s statement. “It was the sheriff. Dad was yelling that Lisa—”

  “Leslie.”

  “Leslie could have been murdered and her body thrown in the lake, but the sheriff wasn’t investigating.”

  “I can believe that. I was cleaning up garbage around the old dock and I saw something down there. It looked like...” Nate’s eyes widened like in a horror movie.

  “Like what?”

  “Like...” Nate’s voice fell to a whisper. “It looked like the roof of a car.”

  Rowan looked at his cousin, trying to read his mind. “Maybe Dad was right. Could have been an accident.”

  “She left behind a note,” Nate said.

  “Any reason not to believe she wrote it?”

  “Yeah. Everyone who knew her says she was mad about her husband and kid.” Nate took a breath. “Frank said that Leslie Rayburn didn’t exist before she came to Summer Hill. You have access to FBI files? I’d like to do some research.”

  “I do.” Rowan was smiling. “Anything to get my mind off what’s in my brain!”

  Nate took out his phone and started typing a text. “Frank gave me his cell number.”

  Send me your files on Leslie. Everything you have.

  He added his FedEx account number and the address of the apartment. At the end, he inserted: My FBI cousin is with me. He’ll search all. He put his phone on the table. “The files should be here in a day or two. If Frank is even speaking to me, that is. I’m going downstairs to the gym.”

  “I’ll go with you.” They both needed the physical exertion.

  * * *

  At 4:00 a.m. the next morning, Rowan flung open Nate’s bedroom door. “They just called me from downstairs and said there’s a man in the lobby with a bunch of boxes and he wants to come up.”

  Nate had had a hard time going to sleep and he was groggy.

  “It’s your sheriff.”

  Nate’s eyes opened. “Frank?” He threw back the cover, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and slid his feet into sandals. “I’ll go down.”

  “So I don’t have to hear him say what he thinks of you?”

  “That and so I can get my hands on the files before he changes his mind.” He quickly left the apartment. If he hadn’t been on the eighteenth floor he would have run down the stairs. As it was, the elevator seemed to take forever.

  Frank Cannon, looking worn-out and angry, was standing in the big marble lobby, his hand tightly gripping the bar of a tall luggage cart. Half a dozen beat-up old file boxes were piled on it. He gave Nate a look that said he hoped he and his descendants went up in smoke.

  Nate didn’t say anything, just gestured toward the elevator, then stepped aside. Silently, Frank pushed the cart inside.

  Inside the elevator, cheerful music was playing. It seemed out of place considering the dark looks of the two men standing on opposite sides of the cart.

  The elevator stopped on the sixth floor and a white-haired lady got in, her little dog in her arms. The door closed.

  “How’s Stacy?” Nate asked.

  “Tearing into the Thorndyke house remodel with a fury. She gave away all that white furniture and the bucking bronco pictures, and she’s sending you the bill. I think she’s keeping the barbed wire as a special memory of you.”

  Nate nodded. The woman got off at the tenth floor.

  “Brody and Elaine?” Nate asked.

  Frank’s jaw was barely moving. “He’s staying in his office. Somebody asked him to help back a boat into the water and Brody told him what he could do with the boat. In detail. Elaine put everything in her store on sale. Looks like she may leave town.”

  Frank pushed the red button, the elevator halted and he looked at Nate. “Why aren’t you asking about her?”

  Nate stared straight ahead. “Because I know about her. She’s doing her job but she’s quiet. She won’t participate in anything. At night she sits in one of...” He hesitated. “In one of our chairs and watches the water.”

  Frank stared at Nate’s profile for a moment then he pushed the red button again and the elevator started. Nate was right. “So who’s the FBI cousin?”

  “Kit’s son.”

  Frank gave such a loud sigh of being pleased that Nate rolled his eyes.

  Rowan was waiting for them at the open apartment door. He was fully dressed in a crisply ironed shirt, trousers with a crease down the front and Italian loafers.

  Frank looked from him to Nate in his T-shirt that said “Shhh... I’m dreaming of beer,” jeans and ugly black sandals, then back again. “You the son Kit wanted Stacy Hartman to meet?”

  “I am,” Rowan said.

  “Smart man, your father.”

  Behind him, Nate glared, and Rowan suppressed a laugh.

  Frank finally let go of the cart. “You two kids get busy reading. I drove all night to get here so I’m going to bed.” He looked at Rowan in expectation.

  “Both beds have been slept in. I can change the sheets, or—”

  “Show me to your bed,” Frank growled, then followed Rowan down the hall. He paused at the doorway. “He made up his bed,” he said loudly, meant for Nate to hear. “A real gentleman.” Frank went into the bedroom and firmly shut the door behind him.

  When Rowan got back to the livi
ng room, he looked at Nate and laughed.

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny. I told you the whole town hates me.” Nate was taking the boxes off the cart and stacking them on the dining table.

  “I’m astonished that he even let you touch the files.”

  “Don’t rub it in.” Nate pulled the lid off the box marked Leslie. There were file folders inside, all of them worn from what looked to be years of use. Inside were newspaper clippings, pages with old-fashioned typing and some handwritten papers that had been torn from spiral notebooks. There were lots of photographs.

  When Rowan picked up a folder, he caught three photos before they fell out. He looked at the stack of boxes, then at Nate. When he spoke, it was with the voice of an FBI agent, not a cousin. “Put that cart in the hall, then help me move the long couch. We need to clear a wall so we can put all this up where we can see it.”

  Chapter 18

  Hunger woke Frank, but he didn’t get out of the bed immediately. He didn’t know what kind of sheets were on the bed but they sure beat the close-out-sale kind on his bed. There were nice curtains on the windows and he could see a line of sunlight between them.

  Yesterday when the text from Nate came through, Frank had wanted to throw his phone down and stomp on it. That boy had turned the whole town upside down! The mayor was angry, Brody was furious, Elaine had been crying and little Stacy Hartman looked so mad he was afraid she’d take a bulldozer to the Thorndyke house.

  The mayor called to ask if Nathaniel Taggert could be forever denied entry into the town. Frank said, “Wish I could but ol’ Thomas Jefferson said I couldn’t do that.”

  By the time the text from Nate appeared, Frank was ready to turn in his badge. “Like hell I’ll send those files to that bastard,” he mumbled.

  But an hour later, he changed his mind. This was his chance to have someone look into his files on Leslie. He well knew that no one else would look at them. Not anyone in Summer Hill, not any other law enforcement people he knew, no lawyer, no one. Their opinion was that she ran off with a lover and disappeared. The end. That no record of her could be found before she arrived was proof of what a lowlife she was.

  Frank had known Leslie. She was a kind, sweet young woman. She was what he needed since Jake thought his little brother was a waste. In one of his many belittling gestures, he’d hung a pair of handcuffs on the wall over his desk. “Having them here will save the sheriff some time since he arrests you about three times a week.”

  It was Leslie who never lost faith in him. He never told anyone but he used to spend afternoons with her and the baby. Between her housework, baby care and helping with lake business, she was overwhelmed. He got good at diaper changing. And Leslie used to listen to him bellyache about his brother, about how he didn’t know what to do with his life.

  After the storm and Leslie went missing, Frank told Sheriff Chazen that he didn’t believe that damned note she supposedly left behind. He didn’t believe she had a lover. “I was at her house one or two afternoons a week,” Frank said. “She wouldn’t—”

  “Are you telling me you were one of her lovers?” the sheriff said.

  “No! I never touched her. I helped with the baby.”

  Chazen sneered. “Unless you want me to tell people you’re involved in this, I suggest you get the hell out of here.”

  Frank didn’t walk out the door, he ran. It was the most cowardly moment of his life and he’d regretted it every day since.

  Wanting to overcome his cowardice of that moment, needing to take away the shame he felt, had been the driving force of his life. He’d thought that if he became the sheriff, he would have the resources to investigate Leslie’s disappearance.

  He put himself up as a candidate for election, gave gung ho pep talk speeches, and he won.

  Within a month he’d found out that a small-town sheriff had little power—at least not the kind he needed. He couldn’t get a federal investigation going, couldn’t get the Big Boys with all their money and tech equipment to get involved.

  Frank had done the second-best thing. He’d started gathering local info. He interviewed people who’d known Leslie, people who could have seen something that night. He went through old newspapers and collected data.

  As the years went on, he started spreading out to include people Leslie’s disappearance had affected. Namely, Terri.

  One year she’d had trouble with a couple of boys at school. As sheriff, Frank had stepped in. It wasn’t really his job but Terri was like a daughter to him. Unfortunately, she was as stubborn as her father was. She refused to tell Frank everything that had happened with those boys. He had an idea but without Terri’s word on it, he could do nothing. “You’d lock them up?” she’d asked. “Put them in jail?”

  “I’d enjoy doing it,” Frank answered.

  Terri clammed up and said nothing. He knew she was protecting the boys. An early indictment could affect their entire lives.

  Terri never complained about the harassing she received in school and in town that he knew was aimed at her. When she broke up with Billy Thorndyke at the end of high school, she’d refused to tell anyone what had happened. Maybe if Elaine had been there then, Terri would have confided, but she wasn’t.

  When Jake died unexpectedly right after Terri graduated from college, Frank had gone into full battle mode. He told Brody he could not—NOT!—let Terri give up her life to help out at the lake.

  “Let her have some fun!” Frank had shouted. “Give her some freedom. Let her travel. Let her meet some guy who didn’t grow up in this town.” Frank never mentioned that Terri needed to get away from Leslie’s reputation hanging over her head, but they both knew what he meant.

  But to keep Terri from returning, Brody would have had to order her to stay away. And he couldn’t do that. Terri was all he had left and he missed her fiercely.

  Through all the years, Frank kept investigating Leslie’s disappearance. It wasn’t as though Summer Hill was a hotbed of crime and he had too much other work to do. When he got nowhere, he tried to solve the mystery of the Thorndyke family’s abrupt move out of town. He even called the family in Oregon, but all Mr. Thorndyke would say was that he’d received a job offer from his brother and had taken it.

  Frank had even swallowed his pride and once a month he’d listened to Della Kissel’s hateful gossip. He’d drink tea in her cluttered little house and sit through endless hours of her heavy-handed flirting. “I’ve always liked sheriffs,” she’d purr.

  Frank would act as though he was having trouble holding himself back. While it was true that her snooping had helped him solve several petty crimes, he felt that he’d paid a heavy price to get the information.

  Everything Frank learned, did, heard, he recorded and put in the “Leslie file.” He kept the boxes at home in a fireproof container and had never let anyone see them, didn’t even let anyone know he had them.

  Until Nate Taggert arrived in town. And right now, Frank hadn’t decided whether or not that was a good idea. Nate had left behind anger and resentment, and Terri was a ghost of her usual self.

  Reluctantly, Frank got out of the bed, took a shower, then pulled on clean clothes from his duffel bag. It was about noon and he was ravenous.

  * * *

  When Frank stepped out into the hall, so much anger ran through him that he thought he might explode. There the two of them were, calmly sitting at the fancy glass table and eating pizza. Taggert had a beer and Kit’s kid had a glass of wine.

  Frank felt rage come up from his toes to reach his hair. “You lazy bastards!” he yelled. “I came all this way to give you those files and look at you. Sitting there getting drunk. Did you two rich kids even open the boxes?”

  As he spoke, he was stomping down the hallway. Neither of the young men moved or changed expression. They didn’t look the least guilty or ashamed of their laziness.

  “I o
ught to—” Frank began, but then Rowan nodded toward the far wall.

  Frank glanced to his right, then back at the two of them. “I nearly had a wreck getting here and—” He stopped, blinked a few times, then turned back.

  The two couches had been shoved up against the wall of windows, and the upholstered chairs had been placed on top of them. The two solid walls were covered with papers pinned on them. Side tables had more papers piled high. Above the couches, photos were taped on the glass. Hand-lettered signs had been put up. Terri and the football boys. Leslie’s last days. Garden Day. The storm. Chain saw. Dock.

  Slowly, Frank went to the first wall. A copy of Leslie’s driver’s license had forgery written on the bottom, and a note saying Leslie Brooks didn’t exist before she arrived in Summer Hill, Virginia. He knew a lot of it, but there were new details. What did the local florist shop have to do with anything? There were several headings that he knew nothing about. One was “Cabin twenty-six.”

  There was a computer screenshot of an underwater chain saw. In the background was a reflection of the Kissel clubhouse. Frank put his hand on it and turned to look at Nate and Rowan. “I’m not sure but I bet this is the one my brother accused me of borrowing and losing. He kept the box as a reminder of something that I didn’t do.”

  Nate swallowed his mouthful of pizza. “I found the empty box when I cleaned out the motor shed. I think that saw might have been used on the posts of the old dock. When I was down there, they didn’t look broken but cut.”

  Frank had been working on this for over twenty years and he’d never been able to get anyone interested in what he thought. For a moment, he was so overcome with emotion that he felt tears welling up. He got himself under control. “Get up and tell me everything. Don’t leave out a word. Taggert! Get me a beer.”

  It took over an hour for Nate and Rowan to explain what they’d discovered. Nate had called a man at the lake and he’d taken a few underwater photos, including the one showing the chain saw. He’d said it was too deep and too murky around the old dock to see clearly, but yes, it was possible that Nate had seen the roof of a car. To be sure, they’d need divers with scuba gear.