Nielson met Ezra’s gaze levelly. “No. Which, I figure, you’ll find out on your own—that’s the only reason I’m telling you, Detective.”
“Understood.” He absently massaged his leg and stared out the window. It was a pretty view of a quiet, peaceful-looking town. He could understand Nielson’s urge to protect that.
“She’s not the type to imagine it, either,” Ezra said, recalling the way she’d moved through the trees with him and Law. Steady and confident—a calm, confident woman. She wasn’t going to imagine something like this. “My gut says if she claims she heard screaming, then she heard screaming.”
Nielson scratched his chin and said, “And as I’ve explained, the problem is that we can’t find a single soul who could be responsible for the screams she heard.”
Then you didn’t look hard enough, Ezra thought, but he kept that quiet.
“Besides, it’s just the one incident. Until something else turns up, there’s just not much more we can do. But … I’m not going to shelve this. I’ll have my boys come out there every now and then, do a pass through the woods where she says she heard the screaming. Do random drive-bys. If something is going on, sooner or later, we’ll see something.”
Hell.
It wasn’t much, but Ezra had to admit it was better than nothing.
As he left Nielson’s office, the green-eyed, steel-haired dragon shot him a glare. “Next time you need some of the sheriff’s time, try calling for an appointment,” she said.
“Absolutely.” Ezra ambled past her, well aware that she was drilling daggers into his back with her eyes.
As he left the sheriff’s office, he debated on what to do next.
He didn’t want to work on the damn deck.
He couldn’t concentrate worth shit and he knew it. He’d end up smashing his thumb or fucking up his plans, which would require fixing the screw-up, and his patience was absolutely shot to hell.
No … what he wanted to do was go out and see Lena.
It was an edgy, burning need, one that crawled around under his skin and tore at him, ate at him. It was a hunger, a need, an ache, and one he had to listen to, or it would drive him insane. But he also knew listening to it was a bad, bad idea.
Bad idea, very bad idea, he told himself. Friends, remember? Just friends.
“Yeah, and as a friend, I can go out there and see how she’s doing, right? I mean, after the weekend she had, what could it hurt?” he muttered to himself.
Trying to talk himself out of that idea, trying to cool the need, the fire in his gut, he decided to stop by the store. His last grocery store run, he’d been distracted—and without a list. Today, he was still distracted, and still without a list, but one thing he’d realized he needed was deodorant, so he made himself stop before leaving town.
He made it halfway through the store, congratulated himself for not thinking about Lena. But as he stopped in the microscopic health and beauty section—crap, why did they put men’s deodorant in the beauty section?—he found himself in front of the display of condoms.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
He did not need condoms for a friendly relationship.
Once more, his focus was right back on her, and this time it had nothing to do with the strange mystery of the screams and everything to do with the shape of her mouth, the round curve of her ass, and the weird way he found his heart skipping when she stood close. The way he smiled when she laughed, and the way his chest ached when he saw that sad look on her face.
It was almost like the way he felt when he’d first started dating Stacy Traynor back in high school—first major crush—that hot, fiery burn of young love.
But the deal with Lena? It was worse. Way worse.
Shifting his weight away from his stiffening right leg, he grabbed a box of Trojans and threw them in his handheld basket before stalking out of the aisle. Fine. So what? He’d bought a box of condoms—he was being practical. Nothing else.
Just practical.
Except he was having a hard time thinking about practical when it came to thinking about sex and Lena at the same time. It gave him the weird sensation of burning his brain cells—causing little microscopic implosions—and he could almost hear the neurons blowing up, one by one.
In self-defense, he started thinking about something else—and the best way to distract himself was to focus on the puzzle. The screams.
“Not a car wreck. We pretty much know that,” he muttered.
There would have been records at one of the local hospitals, a vehicle, even just the sign of an accident, something.
That was off the list.
Missing person? Somebody had been kidnapped, maybe escaped only to be recaptured by her abductor?
Problem with that line of thinking, in a town the size of Ash, if a person disappeared, people would notice, and he figured the sheriff would have mentioned it if somebody had fit that bill.
“Could be somebody not from around here, though …”
“Ezra!”
Stopping in his tracks, he winced. That creaky voice was familiar. Normally, he would have welcomed it, but he really, really wasn’t in the mood for the thirty-minute distraction that was Lucy Walbash.
Miss Lucy had been his grandmother’s best friend, and Ezra had known her for as long as he could remember. When he’d come back home for his grandmother’s funeral, Miss Lucy had sat in the front row, right next to him, and she’d held his hand, patted it as he tried not to cry.
When he hadn’t been able to fight it anymore, she’d whispered, “She was a fine woman, you know. Would be a shame if you couldn’t shed a few tears for her, I think.”
She was, without a doubt, one of his favorite people in the world, and probably his favorite person in Ash … with the possible exception of Lena.
But he really didn’t want to talk to her just yet—especially not with the box of Trojans sitting right there in his basket.
You’re a grown man. Thirty-six years old. The fact that she used to teach the Sunday school classes when you went to church with Gran doesn’t change the fact that you’re a grown man, he told himself.
As she drew nearer, he angled the basket so the box of Trojans slid around—score—they fell down and got lodged on their side, no longer quite so prominently on display.
“Hey, Miss Lucy.”
She shook a finger at him. “Don’t you hey, Miss Lucy me. You’ve been telling me for the past month you’d be coming by for a visit and you still haven’t done it. What is your excuse this time?”
“Ahhhh …”
She sniffed. “You went and forgot.” She gave a theatrical little sigh. “You young people, always forgetting about us older folks.”
“Now, come on, Miss Lucy …” Chagrined, he shifted on his feet, feeling the same way he’d felt when she’d discovered him reading a comic book during her Sunday school class instead of paying attention.
“Grandma, leave Ezra alone. He’s been busy, that’s all.”
As her granddaughter came sauntering up behind her, Ezra managed to muffle his sigh of relief. Natalie was pushing along a mountainous cart of groceries—probably helping her grandmother get her monthly shopping done.
She met his eyes and smiled. “Don’t pay attention to her nagging. It’s just her way of showing affection.”
Lucy sniffed. “Affection. Why should I show affection to a boy who can’t even keep his word and come by to visit me? All he does is sit out there at his place and brood.” The teasing light in her bright eyes faded, replaced by a serious, somber intensity. “I hate to think of you just sitting out there, day after day. You’re a young man, Ezra … you’ve still got your whole life ahead of you. Can’t let that leg slow you down forever, you know.”
Natalie reached up and patted Lucy’s narrow, stooped shoulder. “Now, Grandma, you’re meddling.” She winked at Ezra and then added, “Besides, you’re also slipping. Otherwise, you’d know that Ezra was out at the café yesterday—had breakfast with L
ena Riddle, too.”
“Lena …” Lucy peered at him. She pursed her lips and then, a slow, pleased smile curled them. “Lena Riddle. Oh, pretty girl, that one. Been living here nine years now. She’s a nice girl, too. Not afraid to work, and my goodness, she can cook …”
One good thing about a small town was how easy it was to find out information on a person.
One mention of her name and Ezra had inadvertently ended up hearing a Reader’s Digest version of her entire life. Only child, had been born in Ash, but her parents had decided to move to Louisville when she was young. Her father had died in an accident when she was twelve.
Went to school in Louisville, ended up graduating, and bought the house that used to belong to her parents, before they moved.
She was a chef—of course, that fact he already knew, but now he knew her schedule, her specialties, and if he was smart, he’d ask her to whip him up some white-chocolate, macadamia, and cranberry cookies.
She took a break long enough to skim her list. “Natalie, we’re done, right?”
“Yes, Grandma. And you told me once we had everything on the list, to make you get in line—you didn’t want to do any of that ‘evil impulse buying.’ ” She delivered that last line with a deadpan expression on her face.
Ezra studied the heap of groceries in the cart, then glanced at the minuscule piece of paper Lucy held. “You actually had all of that on the list?”
“Oh, a lot of these are staples.”
Ezra craned his head and studied the neat little stack of paperbacks tucked in the front part of the basket. “Books are staples?”
She arched snow-white brows. “Books are one of the most important staples. And you mind your own business about the groceries and I won’t mention that personal item I saw in your basket.”
Blood rushed up his neck.
He was not blushing. No way in hell had an eighty-year-old woman managed to make him blush over a damn box of condoms.
Natalie gave him a look of sympathy. “She’s got eyes like an eagle. They keep saying eyesight is one of the first things to go when you get older, but I swear, her eyesight gets better.”
“My hearing is just fine, too,” Lucy said smartly, marching ahead of them toward the lines. “So. Lena Riddle, Ezra? Is she the reason you haven’t come by to visit?”
This could be a land mine, he decided. Lucy wasn’t a gossip, exactly, but she heard things. If he let her assume he was dating Lena when he wasn’t …
Shit. This woman was like super-mom or something. She had the ability to make him feel like a teenager, sneaking outside after curfew. And he’d only done that like twice.
“We’re not dating or anything. Just friends,” he said, blowing out a sigh.
“A nice girl—you could do a lot worse, you know. I haven’t talked to her much, mind you, but she seems to be quite a nice girl. After all, Natalie likes her.”
Natalie smiled at her grandmother. “Lena’s a sweetheart.”
Lucy inspected the contents of Ezra’s handheld basket and shooed him in front. “You go first. You’ve only got a few things there.” Then she winked at him. “And it’s not like you have to hide your purchases, after all.”
Courtesy demanded he decline. But then he looked at Lucy’s heaped basket. Forget courtesy. Besides, he really would rather get out of there before she decided to strike up a conversation regarding his “purchases.”
“If you don’t mind?”
She beamed at him. “If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered, now would I? Natalie, didn’t Lena date Remy for a while?”
“I think so,” Natalie said, her voice distracted. She was scanning the magazines on the rack, nibbling her lower lip.
“If you’re talking about Lena Riddle, yeah, she dated Remy. Almost a year, I think.” That came from the cashier.
Natalie and Lucy didn’t look at all surprised and Ezra stood by, a little bemused as the woman jumped feet-first into the conversation. “A few people were talking like it was kind of serious and then they just stopped going out. Never did hear why.”
Ezra frowned as he tried to place the name. Once he did, the frown threatened to turn to a sneer—Remy Jennings. Yeah, he knew that name. The pretty-boy lawyer he’d met in the sheriff’s office that day, and he was more than a little disgusted to think of the pretty boy putting his hands on Lena.
Remy Jennings—who might or might not be related to the kid who had been driving all over his property, too—an issue he had agreed to let go, he remembered. Scowling absently, he dumped his stuff on the conveyor belt as the cashier decided to prattle on, at length, sharing all she knew about Lena.
She knew quite a bit. As far as information went, the woman had it nailed. She knew how often Lena had her dog to the vet, to the groomer’s, how often she went into Lexington, how often she went to Louisville. Her brother-in-law had done some contract work out at Lena’s place, and how it was just plain odd that a blind woman would choose to live so far out in God’s country when she could be living back in Louisville.
“Maybe she likes living in God’s country,” he said when the cashier stopped to take a breath.
“I don’t see why. I mean, it’s not like she can drive herself into town or anything.”
“Yeah, because driving into town is of the utmost importance in everybody’s life,” Ezra said.
She just blinked at him, looking vaguely confused.
He took advantage of that to push the money for his stuff into her hands and make a break for it. He needed to get the hell out of there before he did something really humiliating—like pry for more details about this so-called relationship between Lena and Remy Jennings.
Man … he had it bad.
“Deputy, did I ask you what your thoughts were about that complaint?”
The sheriff kept his voice mild.
Nielson wanted to make absolutely sure that Prather got this message.
He was still pissed off—he’d kept it hidden well, he knew, but Detective Ezra King’s visit had not started his day off in a good manner.
He’d made a few calls and discovered pretty much what he’d expected to discover.
King was a good cop. Had a bad case six months earlier and could have died—it was the sort of case that could break a good cop. Could break a person.
King hadn’t broken, but only time would tell if he could go back to the job or not.
Having a good cop in here, telling him about one of his own cops—a lousy fucking cop—set his teeth on edge, but it only made it worse because King wasn’t wrong.
Prather wasn’t dirty, but he sure as hell wasn’t a good cop.
He also didn’t know how to control his temper worth shit. He glared at Nielson with eyes that all but glowed with all the anger he had trapped inside him. Nielson wished, just once, the man would let some of that anger slip … in his direction, of course. If he could put it in writing that he felt Prather might prove a danger, he could boot the bastard out.
But Nielson couldn’t do it just because he didn’t like the bastard, and the man hadn’t crossed the line in any way that could get him fired, either.
“What is the problem, Sheriff?” Prather asked, his voice stiff and level, despite the rage that had his face red and snapped in his eyes.
“My problem is that we had a civilian call with a valid concern and you did everything but shove her out the door when she came in to discuss it.”
“A valid concern?” Prather snapped. “She didn’t see anybody—she can’t see anybody. She heard something and nobody else heard it. Nobody fucking believes a word …”
“I do,” Nielson said, his voice cool, quiet. Yelling at buffoons like Prather might make him feel a little better, but he’d learned a long time ago, those buffoons listened better when he didn’t yell … and there was something about a cool, quiet voice in the face of temper that just unnerved people. “She’s not a quack, she’s not a flake, and if she claims she heard a woman screaming, and very explicitly det
ails the screams, the words, and even the direction and general area of the screams for my deputies, then I’m more inclined to believe her. This isn’t like the crock-of-shit reports Deb Sparks calls in, just to get one of us out there.”
Then he leaned back in the chair and pinned his deputy with a direct stare. “What’s more, Jennings feels there’s something odd going on. As does the state cop you insulted when he was here. You’re making an ass of yourself on this and you didn’t just insult a civilian, you also insulted a fellow law-enforcement official. Are you trying to cause me problems, Deputy? Or is it just natural?”
Prather’s chin rose a notch. “What does it matter if King believes her or not? It’s not like he’s out here investigating anything. He’s on leave.”
You’re so damned stupid. Nielson resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. He’d woken up with a headache—it was a sign, he realized, a sign that today would be a crap day and nothing else. That headache had only gotten worse as the day went on.
When Prather came swaggering in just before two, the headache had grown to gargantuan proportions. The bastard was an insult to his uniform, and every year that passed, he just got worse.
Taking a slow, calming breath, he focused on Prather’s face and said, “No, Detective King isn’t out here on an official investigation, but then again, that’s not going to keep him from poking around if he decides to poke around, is it?”
“He ain’t got no fucking reason to poke around. Nothing happened.”
As if Prather hadn’t said a word, Nielson continued, “Not that I much care for having some state big-shot messing with my territory, but then again, considering he’s gone and developed an … interest in Ms. Riddle and you were about as insultingly rude as you could get, how could I expect him to do otherwise?”
Prather’s face went pasty white, then back to ruddy red, all in the span of five seconds. “Now listen here, Sheriff, if that woman is claiming I acted improper somehow, she is lying—”
“Did you tell her she should consider getting a live-in companion?”
If You Hear Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense Page 14