Cold River

by Carla Neggers

  “No.”

  “You could be right. Rose Cameron’s golden retriever is extraordinary, but she has the time, skill and patience to train him. I wouldn’t want an adult dog—I’d want a puppy. I don’t know that I could train one to turn out like Ranger.”

  “You couldn’t.” She looked up at Lowell as he dusted bits of bark off his hands. “You just like the idea of a dog. Having a golden retriever trailing behind you here in Vermont fits your image of yourself as a country gentleman.”

  “Ranger is a beautiful animal.”

  She returned her gaze to the fire. “What if we’re a loose end for these killers? What if we know something and don’t realize it?”

  “It’s been a long day. Come have a drink.”

  “What if your precious Hannah is involved?” Vivian didn’t move, just drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her throw around them. “What if she and Bowie O’Rourke are working together? She’s tried to put her past behind her, but what if she can’t? What if he knows something about her that she doesn’t want the rest of us to know, and he’s using that to manipulate her? Or vice versa. She knows something about him.”

  “This is all a matter for the police,” Lowell said patiently. “We’re not from Black Falls. We weren’t close to Drew Cameron or even to Alex Bruni and the Ashers, for that matter. We certainly weren’t close to Melanie Kendall or Kyle Rigby. We were just being hospitable.”

  Vivian hardly heard her husband’s words. He just wasn’t a fighter. “Sean Cameron will take care of Hannah. I have no one who will take care of me.”

  “We’re out of coffee and we need milk,” Lowell said.

  Of course he wouldn’t reassure her. She watched red-hot coals fall from a burning log. “Lock the door on your way out.”

  As he drove down the winding road along the river, Lowell turned up the heat full blast and flipped on the seat warmer. The snow squalls had covered the road with an inch of fresh powder, but the sanders had been out. His car’s headlights were all that penetrated the darkness. There was no moon. The dark mountains loomed around him, and somehow the stars seemed farther away than they did in New York—when they could be seen at all—but they were also brighter, sharper against the black night sky. He and Vivian had talked about taking a class in astronomy and learning the constellations.

  More lights appeared as he came to the village. Christmas lights still lit up the town green. He pulled into a space in front of the library and looked across Main Street to Sean Cameron’s brick house and the café.

  The café was lit up, and he could see Zack Harper, Beth Harper, Scott Thorne, Dominique Belair—he whispered their names as if they were his friends. He was only forty-eight, but he suddenly felt old. Vivian would say she wanted to meet people in Black Falls and be involved in the community, but she also recognized that they were destined to remain apart from them. “They’ll never let us in,” she’d say, “and that’s not what we want, anyway.”

  Yet Lowell longed to walk over to the café and be a part of relationships formed in childhood. He and Vivian and their children and friends lived in a bigger, more open world than this one small, insular Vermont town. He didn’t romanticize Black Falls. He knew its shortcomings. He didn’t care—he wanted this simple life made up not of people scattered across the country, even the globe, but who lived nearby, who had to deal with each other because who else was there?

  His heart jumped when Hannah came into the front window. She was smiling, laughing. She was so delicate, so vulnerable—and she had fire and grit. She knew from experience that being passive and hoping for the best never worked.

  He shuddered as the heat went out of his car. There were those he’d hired and who’d hired him over the past fifteen months who would be anything but passive. They weren’t ones who hoped for the best. They made it happen, and they’d deal with him should he fail.

  He’d covered his tracks well, but it would only take one person, one mistake, to undo him.

  He had to make certain that didn’t happen.

  Then Sean Cameron slipped in next to Hannah in such a proprietary way that Lowell cringed, his stomach twisting in real, not just emotional, pain. Vivian would be disgusted with him and remind him how incompetent he was compared to any of the Cameron brothers.

  If she could lust after them, why couldn’t he lust after Hannah?

  It was more than lust, Lowell thought as he started his car again. His feelings for Hannah Shay were as pure as any he’d ever known.

  They didn’t mean he couldn’t do what he knew he had to do. He understood when a situation demanded caution and restraint, and when one demanded boldness and action.

  He headed down Main Street. He would drive up Cameron Mountain Road to the ridge. If anyone saw him, he would say he was looking at the stars. But he wasn’t worried.

  No one would see him.

  Twenty-Eight

  Sean took a bucket of dirty cleaning water from Hannah and dumped it into the utility sink in the back storage room. “The work helps clear my head,” she said as he set the bucket in the sink. She turned on the faucet and filled it with fresh hot water, the steam helping to return some color to her cheeks. “Bowie didn’t stash that money jar. He’s not that subtle. He’d just have smashed it and grabbed the cash.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the leak in the cellar sooner?”

  “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  She didn’t protest when he lifted the bucket out of the sink and carried it to the dining room. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Home.” He set the bucket on the floor by a back table. “The place is clean. You can dump out this water and—”

  “I might as well wipe down these windowsills,” she said, pointing to the riverside windows.

  “Does Rose ever join you on cleaning night?” Sean asked.

  Hannah shook her head as she grabbed a steaming cleaning rag out of the bucket and suspended it in midair, letting it drip into the water.

  “A.J. and Lauren are concerned she’s spending too much time alone.”

  “She was upset about your father as it was. Then came that mess in November. It’s a lot.”

  “She’ll work her way through it,” Sean said.

  “She’s strong, yes. A true Cameron. Granite spines.” Hannah gently squeezed excess water from the rag. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “There could be a man, too, you know.”

  He reached for a sponge floating in the bucket. “Do you know something, Hannah?”

  She smiled at him. “I know that men can be a problem.”

  “Women can’t?”

  “Romance, then. Romance can be a problem.”

  “Are we talking about Rose, or are we talking about you? If you and Bowie—”

  “Bowie’s covered in plaster and cement dust half the time, and he’s more like family than anything else.” She slapped her rag onto a windowsill, scrubbing nonexistent grime. “I’m not falling for Bowie, Sean, and he’s not falling for me. After my mother died, he was security. He helped out. He has his demons. That’s why he stayed away for as long as he did.”

  “Maybe he’s back because of you.”

  “He’s back because he loves it out on the river, and his place there is the one thing he owns in this world. It’d be hard to sell. He wouldn’t get anything for it—and he doesn’t want to sell it. The hollow wasn’t his problem.” She moved to another windowsill, attacking it with as much fervor. “Scott called Devin and Toby and asked them both about the money jar.”

  “Were they any help?”

  She shook her head. “They’re just as creeped out by the idea of a killer walking in here under our noses as I am.”

  Sean said nothing, just took his sponge and wiped up the drips from Hannah’s rag.

  “Devin’s as fascinated as ever by your work as a firefighter,” she said. “He mentions it whenever we talk, even tonight. Your friend Nick’s been telling him what he needs to do to become a smoke jumper.”
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  “It takes a lot of work,” Sean said. “He’s in good shape from humping up and down Vermont mountains. He can do it. He’ll have to get experience before he can try out. He’ll know.”

  “What if he fails?”

  “He’ll have learned a lot about himself as well as have developed some solid skills along the way. We all fail, Hannah. We all make mistakes.”

  She glanced back at him, her cheeks rosy from the steam of the hot water and the exertion of her manic cleaning. “Do you think I baby my brothers?”

  Sean shrugged, standing up with his sponge. “You’re protective of them. It’s understandable.”

  “Why, because they’re orphans? Because I’m—”

  “Hannah. Hell.” He grinned at her. “Stop already.”

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. It’s a sore spot with me, obviously. I guess there’s a fine line between providing helpful encouragement and support and being overprotective. I just want to be there for them.”

  “Has anyone ever been there for you?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point.”

  “You’re so serious,” he said. “When’s the last time you really laughed?”

  She tossed her wet rag at him. He caught it and laughed, and next thing, he had her over his shoulder and was carrying her into the center hall and up the curving stairs to her apartment. The bucket, the wet sponge, the wet rag—they all could wait right where they were.

  He carried her all the way back to her bedroom without so much as a peep from her.

  “Thank God your brothers are in California,” he said, laying her on the bed, coming up off her. “Hannah, kick me out if you have to, but at least let me kiss you first.”

  She was already draping her arms over his shoulders, pulling his mouth to hers. “Those men last spring.” She spoke between light kisses, obviously determined to get the words out. “What they said about me wasn’t true.”

  “Nothing they said matters.”

  “No, Sean. It does matter. What they said wasn’t true.”

  “I know,” he whispered, her hands cold on his as she caught his fingertips into hers. An urgency he’d never experienced surged through him. He had to have her. Now. “Hannah, if you want me to go…” But he freed his hands from hers and skimmed his palms over her, through her clothes, her soft shirt, her jeans, and he heard her moan, felt her sink deeper into the layers of blankets. He said, finally, “I’ll go.”

  “Don’t go.”

  It was a whisper between kisses, and when she slipped her hands under his shirt, they weren’t cold anymore. He smiled. “Now that I know you won’t freeze, I feel free to tear off your clothes.”

  “I was hoping that’s what you were thinking.” Her hands drifted lower, easing between his jeans and the hot, bare skin of his hips. “You’re very warm yourself.”

  “About to get warmer,” he muttered, lifting her shirt, trying to be patient, even gentle.

  But he was aching, the feel of her smooth skin, the sight of her breasts in her filmy slip of a bra almost more than he could handle. He took a moment to get his jeans off, and when he came back to her, he’d lost all patience for tiny clasps and delicate fabrics. “I’ll buy you a new one,” he said, snapping the bra, whisking it off her.

  Her nipples were pink and pebbly, and he heard her gasp, knew she was self-conscious. He responded by taking one nipple between his lips, tonguing it as he eased her pants down her hips. She moaned, parting her thighs as he slid his fingers between her legs, found the heat and wetness of her. As much as he wanted to drive into her now, without waiting, without thinking—just give in to the pounding ache—he wanted even more to satisfy her. To feel her urgency, to feel her in release.

  He scraped her nipple with his teeth as he eased his fingers into her, thrusting as she went very still. She seemed almost to stop breathing. He didn’t relent. He trailed his tongue down her abdomen, over her hips, then followed where his fingers had been.

  He was on fire now. Heat and desire poured out of her, and she cried out as he drove into her, clawing at him in a frenzy of wanting, matching his pace with a want and urgency of her own. She held him, quaking in his arms as she came, and it was all he needed before he let himself go.

  It was a long time before they needed to crawl under the blankets.

  “Sean…” She felt warm next to him. “I don’t think you need to worry about the furnace this winter.”

  He laughed and held her close, knowing there was no going back now. Elijah’s truck was parked outside. It’d be parked out there in the morning. By dawn, word would be out that he’d spent the night with Hannah Shay.

  Twenty-Nine

  January 4—Black Falls, Vermont

  Hannah had showered, dressed and was on her way down to the café before sunup, leaving Sean warm under the covers in her bed. She didn’t know whether he was asleep or wide-awake, contemplating finding himself in her bed. Would he get out of there before either of her “sisters” arrived, or would he join them for coffee and scones as they did their morning routines?

  He’d been about five minutes behind her, and when she’d seen him in the light in the café dining room, dressed and fully awake, she’d had to stifle a wave of the stubborn self-consciousness that had plagued her for so long. He’d caught her around the waist and kissed her, lifting her off her feet. Dominique or Beth or anyone could have walked in, and it pleased Hannah that he didn’t seem to care. He’d gone off to collect Elijah to see their sister and take another look at the crypt.

  She hadn’t had any nightmares last night.

  Now, ten minutes after Sean had left out the back, she pulled a stool over to the counter to do paperwork ahead of a visit from a supplier later that morning, but she couldn’t concentrate and closed her notebook and laptop. Beth and Dominique had the routines at the café under control. They hadn’t mentioned finding a cold cleaning bucket in the dining room. Hannah figured they could draw their own conclusions. She could feel Sean warm next to her in her bed and suddenly she realized she didn’t care who knew he’d spent the night in her apartment or what anyone thought of it.

  Beth sprayed hot water into a sink full of baking pans. She shut off the faucet and wiped her wet hands on her apron. “I hate doing dishes. Have I ever mentioned that?”

  Hannah smiled. “Every day.”

  “Ah. Every day I forget how much I hate doing dishes. Especially pots and pans.” She leaned back against the sink. “Plans for the day?”

  “I can finish up here. After that I don’t know.”

  Judge Robinson appeared in the back doorway to the kitchen and invited Hannah to join him out in the café. “If you have time,” he said.

  Beth turned back to the sink and said cheerfully, “That’s the judge’s ‘make time’ voice. I’m fine here. Back to sink duty. You two go talk Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.”

  Hannah joined the judge at his favorite table in the corner by the side porch that faced Elm Street. “I crave sugar and caffeine,” he said cheerfully, a warm scone and mug of coffee in front of him. “I wonder if it’s winter.”

  “In August you wondered if it was summer.”

  “I always said you have a mind for detail.” He leaned back in his chair. “It’s also a mind that’s not focused right now on getting ready to study for a bar exam.” He smiled at her. “I’m an experienced jurist. I can tell.”

  Hannah didn’t argue. “I’ve been thinking about Drew and Bowie in the months before Drew’s death. I knew Bowie was working in Black Falls. I thought I had Drew all figured out as a hard-bitten, unforgiving man—decent, but once you’d crossed him, you were done.”

  “But he gave Bowie another chance and recommended him for a job at the Four Corners church,” Everett said.

  “What if it was a mistake that cost him his life? What if Bowie knew about Drew’s cabin and told Melanie Kendall or Kyle Rigby—”

  “Inadvertently, Hannah, or deliberately?”

  She looked out at the str
eet, quiet on the cold morning. “Bowie’s an expert on historic stonework.”

  “Yes, he is,” the judge said. “It’s an interest of mine—of a lot of people in this area.”

  Hannah turned from the window. “I’m going out to talk to him.”

  “He’s working at the Whittaker place, isn’t he? He might appreciate the company. Vivian isn’t an easy person. She can be belittling and controlling. Lowell doesn’t say anything, but he must notice. People order their lives in different ways, but when a couple relies on that kind of communication style…it doesn’t make them easy to be around.”

  “Communication style?”

  “All right.” He shrugged, grinning. “So I’d smother her with a pillow if I were married to her.”

  “Then you’d come before a judge in the state of Vermont and off you’d go to prison. You can’t take the law into your own hands.”

  “That doesn’t mean one can’t fantasize.” He sighed, sitting back, his scone barely touched. “You’re under a lot of strain, Hannah. Everyone in town is. We’re all struggling to get back to normal, but until we have answers, it’ll be difficult.”

  “What’s on your mind, Judge?”

  “Crime and punishment.”

  “Are you talking about Bowie or my father?”

  “Neither. I’m talking about you.”

  “I learned a love of the woods and New England history from my father. I’m not making excuses for Bowie, if that’s what you’re worried about. If he’s involved with these killers—wittingly or unwittingly…” She felt a tightness in her throat. “I was rough on him last night. He’s had a chance to think, and so have I.”

  “Hannah—”

  She smiled at him as she got to her feet. “I’ll take my cell phone and call you if we get into a snowball fight.”

  She left him at his table and went into the center hall and back to the mudroom. She grabbed her coat, hat and gloves and slipped on the boots she’d worn when she’d snowshoed up Cameron Mountain to find Drew’s cabin.

  It was below zero, the coldest morning yet of the winter. She got in her car and gave it a minute to warm up before she headed out past the common and up along the river.