Riverbend Road

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She had done the same thing with the old manual-transmission pickup truck she and Wyatt had traded driving when they were teenagers.

  She was stalling. Maybe she didn’t really want to know what happened that night. Maybe she should just tell Ronnie she had made a mistake, jump back in her vehicle and leave Sulfur Hollow for good.

  No. She was here. She should follow this through.

  “I need to ask you a question on an old case you might have information about,” she said, before she could lose her nerve.

  He scratched his cheek, avoiding her gaze. “Yeah, you’re probably gonna have to be a bit more specific than that.”

  Under other circumstances, she might have smiled. She had always liked Ronnie, even though he was one of those guys like Walter Emmett who always seemed to slip in and out of trouble. Ronnie, though, didn’t have a malicious bone in his body—unlike Walter Emmett, who had seemed filled with them.

  She didn’t smile, though. There was nothing amusing about this conversation she suddenly wished she had never started.

  “I’d like to talk about the night my father was shot.”

  “I don’t know how helpful I can be. That was a long time ago.”

  Two years, six months. But who was counting?

  “The thing is, I was going through some old files and found a witness statement signed by you that seems to run contrary to the official report.”

  “Like I said. A long time ago.”

  She had interviewed enough reluctant eyewitnesses to recognize that Ronnie didn’t want to talk to her. “This might jog your memory. See your name down there? That’s you, right?”

  He squinted at the copy she had made of the report for a minute then busied himself wiping a rag across the screwdriver in his hands.

  “A lot of water has flowed under my bridge since then, ma’am. I can’t be sure.”

  “You seemed pretty sure of what you said that night,” she pressed. “You wrote in this statement that you were a hundred percent certain the first shot came from the two officers, that the suspect was preparing to surrender and had even laid his weapon down when he was shot.”

  Ronnie released a long breath. “Here’s the thing. I was pretty drunk that night. Me and the wife had a big fight and she threw me out. That’s why I was trying to sleep in my pickup down by the dock, even though it was colder than a witch’s, well, you know.”

  He shrugged. “Some investigator with the state police threw out my statement, said I wasn’t a credible witness.”

  “Ronnie, I need to know, straight up. Were you telling the truth as you knew it in this statement?”

  He scratched his cheek. “Why you have to dredge all this up again now? Your dad’s dead. Why go messing around in the past? Things that maybe ought to be left alone?”

  She needed to let this go. What did it matter who shot first?

  She thought of her father his last difficult two years, unable to speak in complete sentences, unable to dress himself or even use a knife and a fork.

  Her heart ached at the hard memories. John Bailey would have pushed to know the truth. He wouldn’t stop until he had the answers he needed, even if the truth was hard.

  “Ronnie, you said your statement was thrown out by the state police but you didn’t say it was inaccurate. I need to know what you saw that night. Did the police fire on a man trying to surrender?”

  He dropped the rag to his side. “I don’t know. Wish I could say yes or no a hundred percent, you know? Like I said, I was drunk. But seems to me, that’s what happened. One minute the guy was going to his knees with his hands up, the next I saw a flash then heard the shot and him yell out a second later. He went down, then scooped up his gun and started firing. It was like a movie, you know? A real shoot-out. I ducked down out of the way and crouched on the floor of my pickup. Not ashamed to say it. I was scared as shit. The whole thing lasted maybe two, maybe three minutes and when the shooting stopped, I saw both your dad and that punk from California on the ground with Cade Emmett yelling into his radio while he did CPR on your dad.”

  Wyn let out a breath. She was gripping her car keys so hard the cuts were gouging into her skin and she forced herself to relax her fingers.

  She had interviewed many witnesses in her years as a police officer. She liked to think she had developed a pretty good internal polygraph over the years. Though she certainly wasn’t infallible, Ronnie’s words rang with veracity.

  He believed what he had originally said in his statement. He believed that one of the officers had fired on an unarmed man who was in the process of surrendering.

  “Could you...tell which officer it was?” she asked. Her voice sounded hollow and thin, as if she were trying to talk at high altitude without quite enough oxygen.

  He shifted, his expression now filled with discomfort. “Don’t know. It was dark and pretty rainy. I know what I think I saw but how can I be sure of anything? Maybe I’m crazy.”

  She didn’t think so. Something else had happened that night but she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what.

  “Your dad was a good man, Wynona. I always said so. He was never anything but kind to me, even when I didn’t always deserve it. Same goes for Cade Emmett, come to that. He’s always done right by me. Does it really matter exactly what happened? Your dad’s in the grave now and so is the son of a bitch who put him there.”

  He was right. She shouldn’t have come. She should have let it go, just as Cade had told her to do.

  If you’re gonna go pokin’ at a wasp’s nest, make sure you’re ready for the swarm.

  Yeah. That was another of her dad’s sayings, one she should have remembered before she turned into Sulfur Hollow. Sometimes asking one question only seemed to stir up a hundred more.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FOUR HOURS LATER, she still couldn’t shake the questions buzzing through her head like those angry wasps she’d been thinking about.

  Was Ronnie right? What really happened? Had her father or Cade fired on Joseph Barlow as the suspect was surrendering?

  She was sorry she had ever picked up that damn stick and poked the nest. Yes, she’d had questions before about what happened but they didn’t fill her with this ball of angst in her stomach.

  She couldn’t spend all afternoon stressing about it. In two hours, she had thirty-five women showing up to her house for McKenzie’s bridal shower and she still had to finish hanging all the heart streamers around her patio overlooking the river. With extreme effort, she forced the questions away, locking them away until she had time to face them.

  This was not one of her skills.

  McKenzie was far better at decorating, with her floral and craft skills and she had actually offered to come early to help. As tempting as that was, Wyn finally decided it probably wasn’t really fair to put the guest of honor to work designing table-scapes and blowing up balloons. Devin and Megan Hamilton were supposed to be helping her but Devin had a patient go into labor and Megan was running late.

  Wyn had always figured she’d missed the whole what-looks-good-where gene somehow. Oh, she had created a comfortable space for her house and loved walking through the door at the end of a long day. In her grandmother’s day, she had loved this house but it had always seemed small and cramped to her. Once she’d cleared out all the clutter and little knickknacks and repainted the dark, close rooms, the house seemed to open up and become warm and comfortable.

  It wasn’t designer-worthy but she liked it.

  She hung the last streamer and was arranging the tablecloths on the extra tables Megan had dropped off earlier in the week when her doorbell rang.

  Young Pete lifted his head, mildly curious, then let it fall back onto his front paws. She envied him that insouciance. She would give anything for a ten-minute nap right about now, though even if she
had the time, she would never be able to sleep with all her thoughts and worries chasing each other.

  The doorbell rang again and she hurried through the house toward it. It was probably Katrina and Samantha Fremont, who were supposed to be dropping off the sugar cookies they’d been making, stacked and decorated to look like little wedding cakes—at least according to the social-media pictures they’d been posting all afternoon.

  Apparently Pete decided maybe something interesting might be on the horizon after all so he lumbered to his feet and padded after her just as she reached the door.

  “Isn’t it just like you to show up when the work is almost done?” she said as she opened the door. Her words faltered when she found not her sister and friend on her doorstep but a big, tough, gorgeous man.

  A big, tough, gorgeous angry man, she amended. She had worked closely with Cade enough to pick up the signs: the hard, uncompromising jawline, the glitter in his eyes, the tension in his shoulders.

  After their last conversation at the station—his shocking revelation that he knew all the difficult pieces of her past and his matter-of-fact acceptance—she found this shift jarring.

  Had he somehow found out she had talked to Ronnie? What was he hiding?

  She took a breath through lungs that suddenly felt tight and achy. “Sorry. I thought you were Kat and Sam. They were coming by to help me decorate for McKenzie’s bridal shower.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  She swallowed at his clipped, furious words. She had a feeling he was upset about something else entirely. She had barely talked to Ronnie two hours ago. It didn’t make sense that he would phrase the question that way, if he was upset about her following up with the man.

  “Tell you what?” she asked carefully.

  He made a rough noise in his throat and stalked into the house without waiting for an invitation.

  “I just had an interesting phone call with your graduate-studies adviser at Boise State. Apparently she couldn’t reach you on your cell and thought she could reach you through the police station. Carrie Anne sent her to me.”

  That ball of angst expanded in every direction and her fingers and toes suddenly seemed cold. This wasn’t the way she wanted him to find out she was leaving. She had a whole speech memorized—about opportunities and possibilities and all—but just now she couldn’t remember a bit of it.

  She swallowed. “Oh. Did she...have a message?”

  His glare would have caught Darwin Twitchell’s barn on fire all over again. “You’ll be happy to know not only that all your previous credits have been accepted but she was able to obtain permission for you to waive two of the required classes because of your work experience so you’ll be able to be that much further along when you start classes on campus next month.”

  A few more days and she would have been much better prepared for this. Not now, when she was already emotionally wrung out, first from the appearance before Judge Jenkins, then Cade’s startling revelations and finally the conversation with Ronnie.

  “Well. That’s good news.”

  “Isn’t it?” he agreed, though his tone made it clear it was anything but. “Here’s the funny thing. I had no idea you were starting classes on campus next month. You’re leaving Haven Point and you didn’t have the balls to tell me?”

  See, that was the whole problem between them. She didn’t happen to possess that particular set of accoutrements.

  “I was planning to tell you. Do you think I would just not show up for my shift one day and send you a text or something? Moved to Boise. Later, sucka.”

  “I don’t know what to think. I didn’t even know you were considering a change! What the hell, Wyn? I thought you were happy in Haven Point. You’ve got a house here. A life.”

  She had a job, she had a house, but her life wasn’t what she wanted anymore.

  “I was ready for a change. I want to go back and finish my master’s degree and maybe do something else with my life.”

  “Besides police work?” He seemed completely stunned at the very idea and she didn’t know how to explain it to him.

  “I can’t give speeding tickets and chase moose out of Aunt Jenny’s yard the rest of my life,” she began.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What you do—we do—is important and necessary. I know that. I grew up with nothing but respect for the uniform and the people with the guts to put it on.”

  “Then why leave?”

  She sighed. “You asked me today why I became a cop. It was both of those things we talked about. After Wyatt died and I was...assaulted, I was lost and grieving. I felt completely powerless. There’s no other word that fits. The world suddenly seemed like this terrifying, senseless, unreliable place and I didn’t know what to do. The only thing that made me feel...stronger was when I helped police identify and investigate the man who attacked me.”

  His frown turned even more fierce. “Helped them how?”

  She decided not to tell Cade about the wire she had agreed to wear or the chances she had taken meeting with Brock Michaels the night he was eventually arrested.

  “It doesn’t matter. But I realized through that process that I couldn’t let what happened to me become my identity. Going through POST seemed the next step—a way to honor Wyatt’s legacy and at the same time prove I knew how to take care of myself.” She paused, then added softly, “But being a police officer was Wyatt’s dream and my dad’s and Marshall’s. And yours. It was never really mine.”

  “I thought you loved your job.”

  “I love parts of it. I do. I love solving problems for people. Finding stolen property or helping someone after a car accident or stopping an underage kid from buying beer. Solving the mystery. But face it. For the most part, our job is triage. We might help people with an immediate problem but we don’t do much to address long-term solutions.”

  “And you really think you’ll be able to do that with a master’s degree in social work?”

  “Yes, actually. I’d like to be a counselor of some kind. Maybe at a youth treatment center or a sexual or domestic-abuse crisis center. I just want to do something that will make a difference.”

  “Why do you have to go somewhere else to make a difference? You’re doing it here! People connect to you. You’re invaluable to the department.”

  His words jabbed at her sharper than a shiv. The department. That was all Cade cared about—all he would let himself care about.

  “It’s not enough for me anymore.”

  “What do you need? I can maybe squeeze a little more out of the budget for a raise. Not much of one but a little. Maybe we can put you in more of an outreach capacity. Working resource at the high school or teaching drug prevention classes. You can’t leave, Wyn. You’re my best officer.”

  Out of nowhere, anger flooded her. She was furious, suddenly. “How can that possibly be the truth, when you don’t trust me?”

  He blinked, obviously taken off guard by the attack.

  “Is this about the fire again? We talked about that.”

  “No. It’s not about the fire. It’s about my father.”

  All the turmoil she had shoved down after talking to Ronnie came roiling back, stirred up by her anger and her frustration and her overwhelming sadness that Cade would never let himself truly see her.

  “Your father? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’ve worked beside you for two and a half years, Cade, and you’ve been lying to me for all of it, haven’t you?”

  “Lying about what?” he asked, but she thought she saw just a flicker of unease in his eyes. The same shadow she saw there whenever anyone brought up the Joseph Barlow incident.

  “You know what I’m talking about. I want to know what really happened the night my father died. An hour ago,
I had a really interesting talk with Ronnie Herrera.”

  His mouth thinned. “We talked about this. Ronnie was drunk, it was dark and rainy. You need to let this go.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  She didn’t know for sure why she was pressing this so hard. On some level, she sensed she really wouldn’t want to know, especially since he was so hell-bent on keeping it from her.

  She also had a feeling that this secret, whatever it was, was one of the reasons Cade kept this careful distance between them and wouldn’t admit he had feelings for her. He blamed himself for something that happened that night and would never be able to open his heart if he didn’t tell her about it.

  “It doesn’t matter. Your dad is gone now. Why dredge it all up again?”

  “I have to know. Please, Cade. Tell me. What happened that night?”

  * * *

  HE SHOULDN’T HAVE COME.

  After that phone call from the university, he should have just waited for her resignation to show up on his desk one day. The minute he hung up, though, he had been so filled with betrayal and loss and hurt that he hadn’t been thinking, he just grabbed his keys and stormed out of the office.

  She was leaving.

  His heart ached so badly and all he wanted to do was wrap her in his arms and beg her to stay. The urge was so deep and so huge, he was having a hard time keeping his thoughts together around it.

  “What happened?” she pressed. “Ronnie said the shots came from the police first. He is certain he saw Barlow lay down his weapon and start to raise his hands and then he heard shots fired and the suspect went down.”

  He couldn’t tell her, for a hundred different reasons. But how could he continue to keep her from the truth?

  “Just tell me!” she cried. “What are you hiding, Cade? Why did you stuff that witness report away? What really happened?”