“Summer?”
She looked up. Above them a solitary stoplight blinked, red one way, yellow the other. Of course she knew who’d been driving. What kind of a question was that? She looked past the police chief at the bleary-eyed man who stumbled on the side of the road. Blood dripped from a cut on his head and from his mouth.
“Mr. Hartwell,” she whispered. In a breath, she indicted the elementary school custodian.
The policeman nodded and closed his notebook.
Summer forced herself to step through the gate and ignore the wave of dizziness that swept over her. Follow the path on the right, Joe had told her. It goes all the way to the back. Big oak tree standing in the northeast corner. Can’t miss it. Donnie’s buried right underneath.
It took her less than a minute to find it.
She drew in a breath and dropped to her knees. A simple stone with simple printing rose a few inches off the ground. She pulled at the weeds that choked the letters of his name. Donald Francis Thompson. Beloved Son. Bright Angel. Forever Missed.
Here at the back of the cemetery, she heard nothing at all except a whisper of wind through the trees. She glanced at the stones around her and saw familiar names: Hadley, Simpson, Graves, Bernstein. A few hundred yards away, wilting flowers surrounded a new swell of ground. She leaned over and laid her cheek on the plain white marker. As she knelt there, unmoving, the sun came out again. Eyes closed, she felt its warmth on one side of her face, a granite chill on the other.
“I miss you.”
Donnie’s stone didn’t say beloved brother, and yet he’d been just that. The tagalong, the brat, the grass-stained kid who caught snakes and hid them in her closet. The baseball player. The country music lover. The round-eyed face that listened to her problems, the little boy who brought her breakfast in bed every year on her birthday.
One week past thirteen, he’d left her. Summer let her fingers trace the letters and dig into the edges that had worn smooth with time and wind. At twenty-eight she’d lived more than two whole lives to Donnie’s one. Nothing seemed more unfair.
She sat back on her heels. At least her father had picked a good spot, quiet and private—though what corner of a cemetery wasn’t, when you thought about it? It overlooked the sloping hill that led down to a stream a hundred yards below. Not a bad place, if you had to choose. Of course, Ronald Thompson shouldn’t have had to. His son shouldn’t have been in the ground at all; he should have been finishing college, starting a job, bringing home a girl, sketching out a life.
Summer rocked to a stand and glanced over her shoulder. Above the trees rose the top of the mansion. She recognized the outline and the way three stories speared the clouds. She couldn’t hear anything, and yet she knew Mac and Damian were working less than a mile away from where she stood.
Something inside her chest thawed. I can see it from here. She pushed her hair behind her ears and realized for the first time that maybe her father hadn’t just bought the house so he could stand at the top of the second floor landing and see the ground that held his dead son. Maybe he’d bought it so that someone standing in this open grassy area could look up and catch the glimpse of a familiar silhouette in one of the windows. Or so that someone sleeping here could sense that family lived and breathed and loved just a few hundred yards away. Maybe that kind of connection went both ways.
She scanned the cemetery. The bouquet of bright red tulips she’d brought with her looked silly, out of place in a daisy-and-dandelion-filled meadow. Again she studied the rooftop of the house in the distance. She raised the flowers to her nose and breathed in the heavy, heady scent.
So many questions. So many pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle inside her head. Summer blinked with a sudden realization. She wasn’t going to change her flight just so she could find a way for the Knights to stay in their farmhouse a little longer.
She was going to change her flight because she couldn’t leave Pine Point until she knew exactly what had happened the night her brother died.
Chapter Ten
Summer and Gabe sat in a shadowy corner of Marc’s Grille. Around them, plush chairs and elegant place settings waited for the dinner crowd to arrive. She shifted and adjusted her blue silk sundress. Legs crossed at the ankles, she tucked her Jimmy Choos under the table. She pulled a dinner roll in half and separated it into smaller and smaller pieces without eating it. Crumbs fell onto her plate as she looked past Gabe, through the restaurant’s enormous front window. Outside stretched a quarter-mile block of spotless storefronts, manicured landscaping and wrought-iron benches. Posh boutiques and cozy bars had replaced the rambling cornfields of her childhood. This new avenue, Park Place Run, looked like it had been lifted from the east side of some upscale city and transplanted amid the hills and farmland.
“I won’t bite,” Gabe said.
Summer looked back at him and felt herself color. “Sorry.” She couldn’t meet his gaze so she steadied herself on the cleft in his chin. “It’s just—it’s been a long day.” That was the truth, anyway. Why did I agree to this? What are we doing here?
The front door opened, and Summer recognized the couple who entered. She smiled and waved. The young woman took a step toward their table and then stopped. With a tight smile, she laced her fingers through her husband’s and pulled him toward the hostess stand instead.
“That was weird.”
“What?”
“Alyssa Reynolds. Or Williams now, I guess. Didn’t you play ball with the guy she married? Frank?”
“Yeah.” Gabe dug into his salad.
“She just totally ignored me.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But—”
“You know how people are here.”
“They used to be nice.”
“They still are nice. They just keep to themselves.”
“But she didn’t even say hello.” Surely Alyssa remembered her. They’d sung together in the school choir for three years.
“Maybe she’s not sure what to say to you.” He met her gaze. “People might feel a little awkward.”
“I guess.” Summer pushed lettuce leaves around her plate. “This is a great place,” she said after a minute.
“It is.” Gabe set down his fork and studied her. “The owner worked hard to get it going.”
Conversation lapsed into silence. She had so many questions she wanted to ask and no idea where to begin. The waitress came and cleared their salad plates. An open bottle of wine sat on the table between them. Gabe split it between their glasses and sent it away with the woman, empty.
The front door opened again and this time elderly Grant Knicke walked in. The former elementary school principal held hands with a little girl decked out in a ballerina’s tutu, leotard and princess crown. A slender woman followed them, carrying a toddler on her shoulders.
“Oh, there’s Mr. Knicke. And Mandy and her kids.” Summer smiled at the man beloved by every kid in Pine Point. With a stash of lollipops in his desk drawer, Mr. Knicke had been head of the only school in town where kids actually tried to get into trouble, just so they could spend ten minutes in the spacious corner office with the gentle giant who let you cry into his handkerchief without calling home or telling your parents.
The man glanced at Summer and she thought she saw recognition in his eyes. She pushed her chair back, meaning to go over and say hello. He nodded in her direction, looked briefly at Gabe and then patted his granddaughter on top of her head and steered her to the other side of the restaurant.
What the hell is going on here? She frowned and tried to shrug off the paranoia. Maybe Gabe was right. Maybe people just didn’t know what to say.
When her salmon arrived, she speared it with a fork, glad for the distraction. “So how did you end up working as a paramedic, anyway?”
He sliced his filet mignon. “They needed more guys in the corps. A
nd I always liked medicine—you remember that.”
She did.
“Figured it’d be as good a job as any.”
She took a long sip of wine. “It never gets to you? Especially after what happened to us?”
He laid down his fork. “That’s part of the reason I chose it.”
“Oh.” Her heart crept into her throat. “Well, you’re braver than I am.” Ask him. Ask him what really happened that night.
He smiled. “Or dumber. Haven’t really figured it out yet. How did you get into…whatever it is that you do?”
Summer blew out a long breath. “I’m a curator for a small museum in San Francisco.”
“Ah. Yeah, well, you always were a history buff back in school. All those dates and details. You like it?”
“Love it. I get to arrange exhibits, do some research, set up shows and workshops for kids in the local schools…”
“Sounds cool.”
“It is.” More silence.
She pushed away her fish, mostly uneaten, and leaned back in her chair. “So are you dating anyone?” Her gaze dropped to his left hand. No ring. “Girlfriend? Fiancée?”
He chuckled. “Nah. Playing the field, that’s all. No one came close to you.”
She let herself smile. “Of course they didn’t.” A familiar ache rolled around her heart and fell away. “So?”
“So what? The dating thing?” He shrugged. “I, ah, hooked up with Tara Hadley for a while, if you can believe it.”
“I can, actually.”
“Then she left me for some older guy. She got bored with him, so we started going out again. We’d go out for a few months, break up, get back together a few months later…until about two or three years ago. She went on a trip to Jamaica with her sisters and came back married.”
“Married?” Rachael hadn’t shared that bit of Hadley gossip with Summer.
Gabe shrugged again. “Lasted about a year. Long enough for the guy to get his green card and dump her. Since then, we don’t really talk.”
Summer wondered about that. Relationships that wandered through the years rarely ended with neat corners and final goodbyes. Rather, they were messy, with residual feelings and a history that didn’t always fade with ease. She knew that better than anyone.
They finished dinner and ordered coffee, full-strength for both of them.
“When did you start drinking the hard stuff?” He’d always hated coffee back in high school, even when all his friends started drinking it mornings after a big game or a bigger party.
“After the accident.”
And just like that, the ice broke. The past swerved into the present, and everything came rushing back.
Summer sat without moving while Gabe stared into his coffee. Steam rose into the air. She reached for his hand and he let her take it. “Gabe.” She paused. “I wished we’d talked. Said something, or seen each other, or… After it happened, I mean. Before I left.”
He stroked his thumb along the ridge of her palm. “Me too.”
“Did you—God, this sounds stupid—” She exhaled. “Were you hurt?”
“What do you mean? Physically?”
Or emotionally, or psychologically, or all the other ways something like that can hurt a person. “Yeah.” She pulled her hand away again. “Physically.”
He dumped two packets of sugar into his coffee. “Just banged up. Bruised back. Broken nose. Nothing too bad.” He paused. “You had it worse.”
She sipped her coffee and burned her tongue. “I don’t remember a lot of what happened. And after—I only know what my father told me, which wasn’t much.”
He nodded. “I sort of figured.”
She opened her mouth to ask him something—Why did we get out of the car?—and shut it again. She didn’t know how to negotiate this line of questioning, and suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answers.
Something beeped.
“Shit.” Gabe’s hand moved to his lap and he glanced down. “Summer, I’ve gotta go. I’m on call tonight. Sorry.”
She sat back. “Oh. Okay.”
Seconds later, the beeper went off again. He pushed back his chair and flagged down the waitress. Outside, a siren wailed down the block.
She reached for her purse. “Let me leave the tip.”
“Already got it.” Gabe signed the credit card slip and tore off his copy.
“I feel like I owe you.”
They moved toward the exit, and the smile she remembered from school flashed across his features. “Oh, you do, Thompson. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.” He held the door for her and they stepped into a humid evening.
Summer rummaged around in her purse for her car keys. She felt unsettled, as if they’d only just creaked open the past without daring to look inside. She needed more. She wanted more. “Can we maybe have coffee sometime?”
He slid an arm around her waist. “I’d like that.” They stood there for a moment without speaking, and then he leaned over and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “How long are you staying?”
“I changed my flight to next week.”
“Yeah? Thought you were leaving sooner than that. Any special reason?”
“I’m trying to work out a contingency with the house sale so the renters can stay on.” She didn’t add that one of the renters had kissed her the other night under moonlight and turned her topsy-turvy with desire. She didn’t suppose that was something you confessed to an ex-boyfriend.
An ambulance passed, its lights flashing. Something cold slipped down her spine, and she marveled again at the fact that Gabe did this, rescued bleeding people the same way they’d been rescued all those years ago. She could never do it. It would be like staying trapped inside that night forever. She shivered.
Gabe caught her gaze and held it longer than he needed to. “It was nice seeing you.” His smile faded. “I’m glad you came back. It’s good to make peace.”
Summer rested in the circle of his arm for another minute. She wasn’t sure she had, not yet. She still resented her father. She still missed her brother with a heartache that overwhelmed her. She still wanted to know what had happened that night, under the stars—and only one person could fill in those blanks.
“Coffee sounds good,” he said at last.
She nodded.
“I’ll call you, then.”
She watched him walk away from her without another word, until Gabe Roberts was just a silhouette in the evening and she was left with more questions and more memories and a longing she couldn’t explain.
* * * * *
Theo eased his battered car into the dirt parking lot. Bill’s, read the sign above the door. The neon flickered in and out, making it look more like a strip joint in Vegas than the local watering hole it supposedly was. He smoothed both hands over his hair and took his time getting out.
He was close. He could feel it. Screw that private investigator he’d wasted too much money on. After seven hours of driving north from Baltimore, he’d found the junior college Damian had graduated from, and though the bitch in Admissions wouldn’t give him any personal info, he had a damn good feeling the kid and his mother were still around. Tracing her cell phone had turned into a dead end, and the number wasn’t much good without a location.
Now he was stuck in this piss-ant Adirondack Mountain region trying to blend in and do a little sleuth work without getting noticed. Already had a headache from trying to negotiate the winding roads that connected all these shitty blue-collar towns, and he couldn’t find a decent place to get a meal, let alone a beer or two. But he’d found himself a part-time contracting job yesterday, so he could blend in with the locals and do a little spying in the meantime.
Inside, six heads swiveled in unison as he pushed open the door. A ball game played on the television hanging behind the bar, volume off. He lif
ted his chin in greeting and pulled up a stool.
“Evenin’,” said the bartender. His belly hung over a pair of jeans, and arms thick as slabs of meat strained at a faded blue T-shirt.
“Draft,” Theo pointed to the tap closest to him. “Thanks.”
The rest of the patrons turned back to their game. In the corner, a couple sat holding hands and staring at each other in a way that made Theo want to gag. He trained his gaze on the television.
“You new in town or passing through?” The bartender folded his arms and leaned in.
“Ah, just here part-time, doing some contracting work for a friend.” Theo downed half the beer and prayed the guy wouldn’t ask him which friend.
“Yeah?” A toothpick shifted from one side of the bartender’s mouth to the other. “You working on that new development in Cedar Crest?”
Theo nodded. That, at least, was true.
“Shit. Them houses gonna be mansions. Don’t know who the hell can afford ’em.”
“Not me, that’s for sure.”
The bartender guffawed. “Damn straight.”
Theo finished his beer and pushed the mug back across the bar. “Another, thanks.”
No one spoke for a few minutes. Theo watched the Yankees score two runs against the Cleveland Indians before he got up the nerve to ask the question he really wanted to know. “Hey, anyone know a guy around here name-a Damian Knight?”
The guy closest to him shifted on his stool. Red-eyed, he looked Theo up and down before answering. “Nope.” His head turned on a thick neck. “Johnny!”
A man in blue flannel and camo pants looked up from his pool game. “What?”
“Know a guy named Damian Knight?”
The man spit into a cup and shook his head. “Nope. He live in Cedar Crest?”
“Not sure,” Theo said carefully. Last thing he needed was to get anyone suspicious. “I worked with him a while back, thought he said something about moving up here. He graduated from Adirondack Community College a few years back.”
Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 Page 9