by Paula Graves
A quart-size resealable plastic bag nestled amid the pieces of wood. Inside the bag, four smaller clear plastic bags were tucked together. Each of the smaller bags contained dozens of crystals the color of pale champagne.
Around these parts, he knew, there was only one thing those crystals could possibly be.
Leaving the bag where it lay, he pulled out his cell phone and hit the first number on his speed dial.
Alexander Quinn answered. “We do get days off, you know.”
Under any other circumstance, Cain might have smiled at his boss’s dry response. If anyone in the world didn’t know the meaning of the term “day off,” it was Alexander Quinn. Cain wasn’t sure the man even slept.
But Cain wasn’t in the mood to smile at the moment.
“I’ve got a problem,” he said into the phone, his gaze still fixed on the bag of crystals inside the woodbin.
“What’s up?” Quinn was instantly all business.
“I came home to a note stuck in my door frame that told me to look in my grandmother’s woodbin and be glad nobody had called the police.”
“And what did you find?”
“I can’t be sure until we test it, but I think I’m looking at about fifty grand’s worth of crystal meth.”
Chapter Eight
Sara pulled up in front of the small, neat cabin on Mulberry Rise, her gaze slanting toward the silver Airstream trailer parked beside it as she put her truck in Park and let it idle a moment.
She hadn’t planned to come here when she’d left the house that morning, but when the turnoff to Mulberry Rise loomed in her windshield, dead ahead, her hand had flipped the turn indicator and she’d headed up the mountain as if following some inexplicable instinct.
Cain Dennison was trouble. He’d always been trouble, he probably always would be trouble, forever and ever, amen. But she’d spent a whole night feeling terrible about turning up her nose at his offer to work with her to find Renee Lindsey’s killer, so the least she could do was apologize for being so blunt with him.
Except why should she apologize? She hadn’t changed her mind—his history with Renee Lindsey made him the wrong person to be leading The Gates’ investigation in the first place. She wished she could go ask his boss why he’d made such a confounding decision.
Then again, she didn’t exactly see her own connection to Renee as a deal breaker, did she? She’d been married to Renee’s brother. She couldn’t imagine her mother-in-law, Joyce, would be happy to hear that she was delving into Renee’s murder, either.
As she reached for the gearshift to put her car in Reverse, the front door of the cabin opened and a wiry woman in her seventies stepped onto the shallow stoop. Her gaze turned toward Sara’s truck, and she offered a placid smile of greeting.
Stifling a sigh, Sara left the car in Park and shut off the engine. She could hardly rebuff two people in the same family within a twenty-four hour period, could she?
Lila Birdsong wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders as a chill autumn wind blew through the trees, stirring her wispy white hair around her pretty, heart-shaped face. “Sara Dunkirk. Ain’t seen you in ages.”
“No, ma’am. I’ve been down in Alabama for a long while.”
“My grandson tells me you’re back for a spell. Thinkin’ of stayin’?”
Sara wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “I’m just thinking, at the moment,” she said finally, managing a smile. “Is Cain here?”
Lila shook her head. “He headed out early so he could drop the girls off at the high school before going to the office.”
“The girls?”
“Mia and Charlotte Burdette. Daughters of a cousin of mine who’s smack in the middle of a mess.” Her tone darkened. “I took those poor girls in to keep them out of the DCS.”
Sara nodded, understanding. Like many child-welfare agencies, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services was perennially overworked protecting children from unsafe or abusive home situations. Keeping children out of the system when possible was the better choice.
“How old are they?”
“Sixteen and seventeen.” Lila grinned at Sara. “I reckon they were happy enough havin’ Cain drive them around.”
Sara could imagine. Even though she’d been in love with Donnie Lindsey since middle school, she hadn’t been immune to the bad-boy appeal of Cain Dennison. He’d possessed the feral charms of a wild creature, both beautiful and dangerous.
He still did, she thought, remembering her first look at him in years, standing outside her hiding place at Crybaby Falls. Dangerous, yes, but also sexually exciting.
Lila’s smile widened as she beckoned Sara to join her. “I’ve just brewed up some coffee. Come on in and tell me what’s on your mind.”
The last thing she intended to tell Cain Dennison’s grandmother were the thoughts that had just flashed through her mind, but the offer of coffee sounded good. She followed Lila into the warm cabin and sat in the chair Lila waved toward.
“Cain ought to be back soon enough. He was just going into town for an early meeting.” Lila returned to the table with a battered old stove-top percolator that had seen better days. But the fragrant, steaming brew she poured into a couple of stoneware mugs smelled like heaven.
“Thank you.” Sara picked up the cup and took a sip. It was hot and strong, the way she liked it.
“No cream or sugar,” Lila commented with a smile as she opened the refrigerator that stood in a corner near the table. “Must’ve been raised by a strong man.”
Sara laughed. “Yes, but it was my mother who taught me to like coffee black. My father likes his cream and sugar.”
Lila laughed with her as she retrieved a carton of cream from the refrigerator and poured a dollop into her coffee. “I reckon I do, too.”
“Cain likes his coffee black, too,” Sara commented as Lila returned to the table.
The older woman’s eyebrows ticked upward. “So he does. I didn’t know you knew him that well.”
“I don’t, really.” Sara avoided Lila’s gaze. “I just had coffee with him recently, that’s all.”
“Hmm,” was all Lila said.
Squelching the urge to fill the suddenly uneasy silence, Sara sipped her coffee and wondered why she hadn’t turned down Lila’s offer of coffee and gone on her way.
“I was real sad to hear about your husband’s passing,” Lila said a moment later. “And real glad to see you’re doing good now. I heard you were banged up pretty bad.”
“I was. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky,” Lila murmured, as if she disagreed.
“Well, lucky, I guess, that your grandson was hiking the gorge that night. If he hadn’t found me when he did, I don’t think I’d have survived.”
Lila nodded and looked up, her sharp brown eyes meeting Sara’s gaze. “I don’t think things in this world happen randomly. Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Sara admitted. “Sometimes things in life seem very random.”
“Seem,” Lila said with a nod. “That’s a real good word. I reckon many things seem to be what they ain’t.”
“And sometimes they simply are what they are.”
“Life ain’t simple,” Lila disagreed. “Do you know how unlikely it was for my grandson to be there in the Black Creek Gorge so late at night? He hadn’t been in Purgatory in years.”
“Why was he back here that night?” Sara asked, curious.
Lila smiled over her coffee cup. “He’d just left the Army and gotten himself a good job in Atlanta. It was supposed to start the next Monday, but for the first time in years, his time was his own. So he came home. To see me, I imagine, but I think he really came to pay his respects.”
To Renee, Sara thought. Three years ago, the day after Sara’s car accident, had been the fifteenth anniversary of her passing. “He would have gone to Crybaby Falls,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he was at the Bl
ack Creek Gorge.”
“No, it don’t,” Lila agreed.
Sara waited for her to say more, but Lila just sipped her coffee.
“I wish I’d had the chance to thank him,” Sara said when the thick silence filling the kitchen became too uncomfortable.
“I don’t reckon he thought he needed thanking,” Lila said thoughtfully. “It ain’t his way.”
“It needs sayin’, anyway,” Sara said, smiling a little self-consciously as she heard her accent slip into the old, familiar intonations of her mountain upbringing. She’d been away from the hills for years, but some parts of her past a person could never really leave behind.
The sound of a vehicle coming up the mountain road seeped through the cabin’s walls, drawing Lila’s gaze to the front door. “I guess that’ll be Cain comin’ back.”
Sara felt her heart speed up, just a notch. Just as it might if she heard a black bear approaching in the woods, she reminded herself sternly.
Beautiful but dangerous.
The thud of footsteps on the stoop outside gave her just enough time to steel herself for his entrance. He came through the door, filling its frame almost completely, as if to amplify for Sara’s already pounding heart just how big he’d become in adulthood, how tall and broad-shouldered. As a boy, he’d been lean, wiry almost, but his time in the Army had clearly added brawn and power to his build that his time away from the service hadn’t erased.
His storm-gray eyes met hers, wary and watchful. “I thought that was your truck outside. Has something happened?”
“No. I just wanted to talk to you.” She glanced at Lila, not ready to say the things she needed to say to him in front of an audience.
He nodded at Sara before bending to give his grandmother a quick kiss on the top of her head. The gesture of affection made Sara’s heart contract.
“The girls are safely at school, although they tried to convince me to let them ditch and take them in to work with me,” Cain told his grandmother. The smile in his voice made Sara look up in time to catch a toothy grin so infectious, she felt her own lips curving up at the corners. “They said it would be educational. Sort of a ‘take your grandmother’s wards to work day.’ I told them no, of course. Because education’s a privilege.”
Sara could tell by his intonation that his final words were a well-learned quotation, no doubt from his smiling grandmother.
“And so it is,” Lila said, giving him a swat on the back as she rose to her feet. “It was a real pleasure havin’ coffee with you, Sara Dunkirk, but I’m afraid I’ve got chores to get to, so I’ll leave you with Cain.”
Cain waited until his grandmother disappeared into the next room before he spoke, his tone low and urgent. “Has there been another murder?”
She looked up at his worried expression. “No, I told you, I just came to talk to you.”
His gaze went from worried to wary. “I thought you already said about all there was to say.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk about.” She nodded toward the back door, and he opened it, letting her go out ahead of him.
Outside, the wind had kicked up, swirling fallen leaves around their feet. Sara had forgotten, in the toasty warmth of the cabin, how cold the fall air had become. Winter was coming to the hills, sooner than she liked.
Hugging herself for warmth, she looked up at Cain, finding him no less imposing in the wide open than she had in the close confines of his grandmother’s cabin. His expression was shuttered, forbidding, sparking an unexpected quiver in the pit of her stomach.
“You don’t want me investigating Renee’s death,” Cain said. “I plan to do it, anyway. Not sure anything more needs saying.”
“I don’t want you involved in the investigation because there’s no way for you to not be in the way.”
His eyebrows rose a notch, and she realized how badly she’d just expressed what she was trying to convey.
“I just mean—”
He cut her off. “I know what you mean.”
“No. You don’t.” She caught his arm as he started to turn away.
He looked down at her hand, then up at her, his eyes narrowed. Beneath her fingers, his arm felt as hard as mountain granite but as hot as the coffee cup she’d cradled earlier between her cold fingers. The combination of unflinching strength and fiery vitality sent a different sort of quiver racing through her, straight to her sex.
She stared up at him, both confounded and aroused. His eyes narrowed further, as if he read her emotions and found them just as confusing.
“I know you’re not going to believe me, but I’m as worried about you as I am about the case.” As she said the words, she realized they shouldn’t be true. The case should be everything. In some ways, indirectly, Renee Lindsey’s murder was why she’d decided to come back to Purgatory at all. Her death had been a profound part of Donnie’s life, of their marriage and, she feared, of his death, as well. Solving her murder might answer the questions that still kept her up at night, quiet the fears and doubts that robbed her of her peace.
She should care more about finding Renee’s killer than she cared about Cain Dennison’s well-being. He’d offered to help her with her investigation, and he certainly had more direct knowledge of Renee’s last days than she did.
Why wasn’t she willing to use him the way he’d so willingly offered to be used?
“Why?” he asked, echoing the question hammering in her head.
“You were run out of town by her death,” Sara said, though she knew that answer wasn’t adequate. “I don’t want it to happen again.”
“Why would you care?”
“Fine,” she said. “I think you complicate the case too much. You’d make it hard for people to trust my motives if they knew we were working together.”
“Now we get to the truth,” he murmured.
But Sara knew it wasn’t the truth. Not all of it. Not by a long shot.
What the hell was going on with her? She’d been a widow for three years, not all of those spent in mourning black. She’d been asked out on dates, had even gone on a few, but not once, not a single time, had she thought of those men as anything but casual dinner companions. Not even a spark of attraction had fluttered low in her belly with any of those men, and she’d come to accept, even cherish, the idea that she was wed to her husband for life, dead or alive.
How could Cain Dennison, of all people, make her feel as if that part of herself might still be alive and kicking?
“We don’t have to be open about our...collaboration,” he said when she said nothing more. His lips curved in a wicked smile. “We can be secret partners.”
The low, almost seductive tone of his voice snaked through her like a lightning strike. She felt the thunderous aftermath low in her belly, a shudder of raw, unwelcome need.
Agreeing with him would be the worst possible decision she could make. She knew it bone deep. But when she opened her mouth to speak, the word that spilled from her lips was “Okay.”
He gave her another narrow-eyed look, as if he suspected she was joking. “Okay?”
This was her chance to back out, she thought. Laugh and agree that she’d been joking.
But she couldn’t, she realized. No matter what kind of fluttery things he did to her insides just by being Cain Dennison, he was right about one thing. He did know more about Renee Lindsey’s final days than anyone else in Purgatory, save the killer himself. If she was serious about getting to the bottom of Renee’s murder, she needed his help.
“Okay,” she repeated, more firmly. “You’re right. I need your help. And, frankly, you could use mine, as well.”
“I need you, do I?” His smile made her heart flip-flop.
She had to get a hold of herself, and soon, she thought, before their secret partnership made her spontaneously combust and make a big mess all over his grandmother’s front yard. “You do. I have access to people who, right or wrong, aren’t gonna give you the time of day, much less any useful information. I�
�m the daughter of the primary detective on the case eighteen years ago, and I’m good friends with the deputy who’s running the new murder case.” As she continued speaking, drawing on her professional credentials, some of the sexual tension that had stretched her close to the snapping point began to ease, and she started to think she could make this secret partnership work after all.
Then he touched her. It was nothing but a brief brush of his fingertips along the length of her arm, but it burned through her like a wildfire.
“You won’t regret this,” he said.
She had a feeling he was dead wrong about that.
* * *
SARA LINDSEY LOOKED around his small, sparsely furnished Airstream with a curious gaze, as if assessing him as she took in the decor. He’d come up wanting, he feared, if she judged him on his temporary abode. He’d done little to make it feel like home, mostly because he didn’t want to become too used to the place.
He’d grown up in a ramshackle cabin not much larger than this tiny trailer, and for a long time, even after he’d joined the Army and expanded his horizons, he’d felt too small for the world around him. Too lacking, too unworthy of so much space, so much opportunity.
His father had taught him to think small, to expect the worst. Hell, the man had shown him some of the worst life had to offer, made him think it was all he’d ever have. All he’d ever deserve.
For two short years, Renee Lindsey had made him think differently. She’d liked him. Trusted him.
And he’d begun to dream.
“When Renee died,” he said aloud, drawing Sara’s gaze back to him, “I thought it was the end of my life.”
Sara’s dark eyebrows lowered, her brow creasing. “You must have loved her a lot.”
“I did. More than I realized, I think.” Waving her over to the small sofa that nearly filled the front end of the Airstream, he pulled a ladder-back chair from beneath his tiny kitchenette table and placed it across from her, taking a seat. “I don’t think it was the hearts-and-flowers kind of love,” he added, smiling at the thought. “Renee knew it, even before I did. She didn’t need a lover.”