Hotshot P.I.

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Hotshot P.I. Page 9

by B. J Daniels


  “It isn’t that I think you’re making anything up,” he said, sliding into the seat next to hers. Voices carried across the water, followed by laughter. “I believe you believe that’s what happened.”

  “So you think I’m.what? Crazy?” She reached impatiently for the key, obviously annoyed that he’d taken it to begin with.

  “I’ve never walked in my sleep, but I’ve had some doozy dreams where I couldn’t tell reality from dreamland,” he said, dropping the boat key into her hand. “They scared the hell out of me, they were so real.”

  Her fingers closed around the key. “But this is real, Jake. Someone is…after me.” Her gaze shifted to the darkness beyond the shoreline. “This morning I found a place in the lilac bushes next to my kitchen window where someone had stood looking in. Someone’s stalking me, just like Dex was. And I have no idea why.” She flicked a look back at him. “You do think I’m crazy.”

  “No.” That was the last thing he thought. “I think you’re scared. And for a good reason.” Someone was after her. Jake Hawkins. But he’d check under the lilacs. He was sure it had just been some kind of animal. “You’re facing a murder rap. Anyone in your situation would be running a little scared.”

  Tears of frustration stung her eyes as she glared over at him, the skepticism in his tone still ringing in her ears. “You think that’s all this is? I’m just running a little scared? There’s a mountain of evidence that says I killed Dex Westfall. I can’t sleep at night because my dreams force me to wander to places I don’t want to go. Now someone is trying to kill me.” She fumbled the key into the boat’s ignition, her fingers trembling with anger, frustration, fear. “And you say you can understand why I’m running a little scared? Great, Jake. At least on top of all that you’re not here to help send me to prison.”

  She turned the key, the motor rumbled to life, and she gave the boat full throttle, roaring out of the marina, ignoring the no-wake buoys.

  They raced across the smooth, dark surface of the lake. The night air felt cool and sweet, the speed of the boat pleasurable. Jake sat silent, his face dark with a scowl that she knew meant she’d hit a nerve. It gave her some satisfaction. But she knew she’d be a fool to rely on Jake Hawkins for anything but more heartache.

  She felt her anger slipping away as the early-summer night soothed her senses, the lake calming her as it always had. But nothing could chase away the fear at the edge of the darkness. Someone out there wanted her dead.

  Clancy pointed the boat toward Hawk Island. The wind from the speed whipped her hair. She let it blow away her thoughts, let the steady throb of the motor lull her, promising her she had nothing to fear on such a beautiful summer night, on an island that was her home.

  But as they rounded the end of the island, Clancy saw a light flickering in her lodge and knew differently. “Look!” she cried.

  “What?” Jake asked, suddenly alert.

  “A light in the garret. Didn’t you see it?”

  It was obvious he hadn’t, but still, as she pulled back on the throttle, he reached over and shut off the running lights.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t just a reflection?” he asked.

  She ground her teeth together. “It was a flashlight. Someone’s in the garret.”

  “Don’t go to the dock,” Jake said. “Pull into the beach.”

  She did as he said, silenced by fear as she steered the boat to the nearest stretch of shoreline and cut the motor. She had seen a light. She wasn’t starting to imagine things as Jake kept insinuating.

  As they reached land, Jake jumped out and pulled the boat up on shore. Clouds hid the moon, pitching the narrow stretch of beach into darkness. Jake tied the boat to one of the pines that grew almost to the water’s edge.

  “I’m not leaving you here alone,” Jake whispered as he gave her a hand out of the boat. “Stay behind me, and if anything happens, get to cover.”

  Clancy followed Jake along the beach, hugging the rocky cliffs and the pines, her anger at him dissipating quickly. What would she have done if she’d come home alone? She’d sworn she wasn’t going to rely on Jake, but right now she’d make an exception.

  Water lapped at the shore as they crossed behind Jake’s lodge. The light in the garret room had flickered like a firefly caught in a jar. What was someone doing in that room, the room where Dex had died? She felt a chill, although the summer night was exceptionally warm.

  They were almost to her lodge when an owl let out a hoot. Clancy jumped, grabbing Jake’s arm. He patiently unhooked her clawlike grip and motioned for her to stay low behind him.

  They crept the last few yards in silence. Darkness draped the back of the lodge. Clancy held her breath as they climbed the steps and crossed the old wooden porch. The boards groaned under their weight.

  “Is that your bike?” Jake whispered, motioning to the black mountain bike by the back door.

  She nodded.

  Jake tried the door. Locked. Clancy shook her head; she hadn’t locked it. She could remember locking it only once in her life. And that night it hadn’t kept Dex out, had it?

  As she stood on tiptoe to reach above the door for the key, Jake groaned next to her. “Great place for a key. No one would ever look there.”

  Feeling Jake’s reproachful gaze on her, she quietly slipped it into his waiting fingers and pressed against his back as he inserted the key in the lock. If he thought for a moment she was going to let him out of her sight, he was sadly mistaken. As she clung to him, she felt something hard. A gun.

  The door creaked open. Jake drew the gun. Her heart dropped to her knees as she realized the danger she was putting him in.

  “No,” she whispered. He stopped and she collided with his back.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you getting killed because of me.”

  “How thoughtful of you. Now, shut up.”

  He turned and started across the kitchen floor, with her right behind him. Something thudded, and Clancy let out a squeal before she realized the sound had just been Jake crashing into her microwave cart.

  “Quiet!”

  “Jake,” she pleaded, suddenly more afraid for him than herself.

  “Stay right behind me,” he commanded as he headed up the stairs. “And be quiet.”

  Clancy held her breath, afraid to breathe, as they started up the stairs. She followed, her heart in her throat, her hand gripping a handful of Jake’s shirt. They were almost to the top when she looked back. She let go of Jake. The front door stood partway open. Starlight slipped through the crack and splattered onto the living-room floor. Clancy reached for Jake but he was several steps ahead of her. A shadow moved into the light.

  “Jake.” It came out little more than a whisper.

  The shadow turned into a dark figure in a hooded sweatshirt. It looked up at her. A startled, pained cry escaped her lips. She caught only a glimpse of the face beneath the hood. But it was enough. Clancy screamed.

  The figure disappeared out the open door and into the darkness as quickly as it had appeared.

  Clancy dropped to the stair, her gaze locked on the wedge of light still spilling in from the night.

  “Clancy!” Jake cried, charging down the stairs to her. “What is it?”

  She heard him groping for the light switch but couldn’t answer him. Instead, she stared after the intruder, too stunned to speak.

  The living room was suddenly flooded with light.

  “Are you all right?” Jake demanded, pulling her to her feet on the stairs. She fell into his arms. He held her tightly. “What happened?”

  She stared over Jake’s shoulder, her gaze fixed on the open doorway and the darkness beyond it. “I saw him.”

  “Who, Clancy?” Jake asked, pulling back to search her face.

  She looked up. “Didn’t you see him?” she asked, knowing he couldn’t have. Pleading with him to say he had.

  “Who did you see, Clancy?”

  Her mouth opened but no words came out. Sh
e closed her eyes, willing away the image of the man in the dark hooded sweatshirt. “It was Dex Westfall. He’s alive!”

  Chapter Eight

  Jake grabbed Clancy’s shoulders and pulled her around to face him. “You saw Dex Westfall?” he demanded. He watched doubt flicker across her face. Worry settled in his stomach like a chunk of granite.

  She tried to avoid his gaze. “I only got a glimpse so I can’t be completely sure—”

  “Clancy?” Jake asked, pleading.

  She swallowed. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “It was Dex. I swear. It was Dex.”

  His grip tightened. “The late Dex Westfall?” He felt her flinch and let go of her, realizing he was hurting her. He led her down the stairs. The front door stood open.

  “I know it sounds…crazy.” She seemed to hesitate. “How could I have seen him when he’s dead? I didn’t get a really good look at him. He was wearing a dark gray hood that hid part of his face, but—” Her gaze flipped up to his, her eyes full of pleading. “It was him, Jake.”

  That rock of worry in his belly turned into a fifty-pound boulder. He went out on the deck and looked down the beach. Empty. He came back in and had barely closed the door when the breeze blew it open again, making them both jump. This time Jake closed the door and locked it.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Jake doubted she had any idea what he was thinking. He wasn’t even sure himself.

  “But I know what I saw,” she said, the look in her eyes scaring the devil out of him. “It was Dex Westfall.”

  The cynical private eye side of him argued that Dex Westfall was dead; Clancy couldn’t have seen him. She’d probably imagined it, or dreamed it, or she’d gone off the deep end.

  But the man who’d fallen for her years ago made a good case that Clancy Jones had been one of the most rational, sensible and credible people he’d ever known. She might be a murderer, but he had his doubts that she was crazy.

  “I’m telling you, Dex is alive,” she cried. “Don’t you see what this means? I didn’t kill him.”

  Jake didn’t want to burst her bubble, but it was time for a reality check. “If Dex isn’t dead, then whose body did the sheriff find upstairs?”

  Clancy blinked. Her face fell. She turned away from him to stare out the window. “I don’t know. And no matter whose body it is, the sheriff thinks I killed him, right?”

  That about sized it up. Jake knew how desperately Clancy wanted to believe she hadn’t killed anyone. But the bottom line was someone had died in the garret upstairs and Clancy had had the murder weapon in her hand.

  “If Dex is dead…” Her eyes turned dark with pain, her features drawn with fatigue. “Then his ghost has come back from the grave for me.”

  Jake glanced toward the darkness outside, his mind flashing on an image that freeze-dried his blood. The face of the woman his father had gone to prison for murdering. What if Lola Strickland’s pretty face suddenly appeared outside his window one night? He shuddered at the thought. And reminded himself that no one came back from the grave. Not Lola. Not Dex.

  He turned to lean with his back against the window, the last of the adrenaline ebbing. His body felt tired, his mind exhausted, as he settled his gaze on Clancy. Had someone been in the lodge tonight or had Clancy just imagined it? Like the person who’d tried to drown her last night?

  “You first saw the light in the garret?” Jake asked after a moment. All he wanted to do was sit down, close his eyes, catch a few winks. He was too tired to think, too tired to try to figure out anything tonight. With effort, however, he pushed himself off the wall. “I’m going upstairs to take a look around. Why don’t you—”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  He looked at her, surprised she would willingly go back to the scene of the crime. “Look, I’m not wild about going up there. If I were in your shoes—”

  “I’m coming with you,” she repeated.

  He nodded, recognizing that old familiar glint of persistence shining like a searchlight in her eyes and the stubborn way she stood when she wasn’t about to budge an inch.

  “There’s nothing up there but old furniture,” Clancy said as he led the way up the stairs to the third floor.

  Old furniture. And bad memories.

  The tiny room was indeed filled with furniture, Jake saw as he turned on the light and stepped through the open doorway. The single overhead light did little to illuminate the room. Shadows pooled everywhere. With the furniture covered in white sheets, the room had a ghostlike quality. Or maybe it was just the fact that Clancy believed Dex Westfall had come back from the dead that made it seem that way. It was enough to spook even nonbelievers, Jake thought.

  The only bare piece of furniture was a couch in the corner under the eaves. The sheriffs department had obviously stripped it, taking the blood-stained sheet and cushion as evidence, but left behind the couch.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Jake said, turning to shield Clancy from the view.

  “I have to do this,” she said, her tone brooking no argument. “Besides, I’m the only one who knows if something is out of place up here.”

  He nodded and stepped out of her way. As he watched her walk into the room he thought to himself: here is a woman to be reckoned with.

  With all the courage she had, Clancy looked toward the couch where she’d found the body. Her fingers flew to her lips to stifle the cry that rose from deep within her. Memories of that night flashed before her, flickering images of horror. She staggered. Jake reached for her.

  She motioned him away. “I’m fine,” she said, knowing that if he touched her now it would be her undoing. She hugged herself to still the trembling, her gaze scanning the room, trying to remember every detail.

  Before the night of the murder, she couldn’t remember the last time she was in this room. How could she know if something was missing? On top of that, Kiki had hired a cleaning crew after the sheriffs department finished taking prints and collecting evidence.

  Clancy stared at the garret. Bits and pieces of memory floated back from Friday night.

  Dex—Her gaze leaped back to the couch. It had been Dex, hadn’t it? Something had made her think it was, but what? The bright red cowboy boots. The moment she saw them she’d known it was Dex because of those stupid boots he loved. But had she really looked that closely at his face? All that blood—She shook her head, frustrated at her inability to remember any more.

  As she walked around the room, she quickly realized it was impossible to tell if an intruder had been here. But how desperately she would have liked to prove he had.

  She pushed open the balcony doors and stepped out, immediately assaulted by a memory. She gripped the railing. “Oh.”

  “What?” Jake asked, joining her.

  She shuddered as she stared out at the lake. “Friday night,” she said as it came back to her. “I remember waking up on this balcony.” She glanced down; her head spun just looking at the dizzying drop to the rocky beach below her. “What was I doing out here?”

  Jake followed her gaze from the rocky beach below to the lake, sprawled to the horizon, a dark, silent pool, its slick, silken surface a reflection of the star-splattered sky overhead. He had no idea what Clancy had been doing out here. No idea what she had been doing in the tiny room beyond them just moments before Dex Westfall died. God, how he wished he did.

  “I remember standing here not knowing where I was at first,” she said. “The view was all wrong.”

  “What do you mean ‘all wrong’?”

  “I thought I was on my bedroom balcony.” But it was next to her studio and at the east end of the lodge. She couldn’t see this bay from it.

  Turning slowly, she moved back through the open doorway as if she were still sleepwalking. “At first all I saw was the furniture. The white sheets were blowing in the breeze from the open doors and I realized I was in the garret.”

  Jake followed her, watching
her face as she relived the night of the murder. She stopped, her gaze going to the couch. “Then I saw him in the corner.” She looked down at her left hand. “I guess that’s when I realized I had the sculpture in my hand. I dropped it on the floor. My feet—”

  “What was wrong with your feet?” Jake asked.

  “I must have been to the beach, because the tops of my bare feet still had sand on them.” All of the shore around Flathead Lake consisted of small flat rocks—no sand. But Hawk Island had sandy beaches.

  “What the hell were you doing on the beach at twothirty in the morning?” he demanded, then shook his head. “I forgot. Sleepwalking.”

  If she heard the doubt in his tone, she didn’t respond to it. “Dex’s boots had sand on them, too.”

  “Maybe he followed you up here.” An unpleasant thought skittered past. “Or maybe you’d been on the beach together.”

  She stared at the stained arm of the couch as if there were things there she could see that he couldn’t. From the horrified expression on her face, he was damned glad he couldn’t see them.

  “Where had I been that night?” Clancy asked, shifting her gaze to Jake. “I hadn’t sleepwalked in years.”

  Not since the night of the resort fire, Jake thought bitterly. The night Clancy saw his father kill Lola Strickland. Or at least that’s what Clancy would have him believe.

  “Why would I suddenly start sleepwalking again after so many years?”

  Jake wished he knew. He wished he could believe she sleepwalked at all. “What’s the last thing you remember before you fell asleep?”

  “I had been working late in my studio. I have, or I guess, that’s had now, a show planned in August at a gallery in Bigfork. I was finishing up one of the pieces for the exhibit. As I headed up to bed, I couldn’t help thinking about Dex, worrying about why he’d shown up here.” She let out a long sigh. “That’s the last I remember.”

  “Did Dex wear underwear?” Jake asked.

  “What?”

 

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