Cold Dawn

by Carla Neggers

  She was having none of it. “You and I have too much history, Nick. We can’t pretend anything. We can’t start over.” Her drink arrived and she held it in one hand as she nodded toward the crackling fire. “I could toss my martini into the fire, but not tonight. It’s the wrong symbolism.”

  “Rose—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “Scott Thorne stopped by before I came over here.” She took a sip of her martini but continued to hold on to the glass. “They’re looking for one of Derek’s friends, Robert Feehan. Robert was with Derek the night at O’Rourke’s last year. He’s a private ski instructor, too. The police have talked to Brett Griffin, who was also at O’Rourke’s, but he was less vocal than Robert, or especially Derek, and has distanced himself from both of them.”

  “Are they concerned about Feehan?”

  “Scott didn’t say. Robert and Derek were sharing a house for the season. The police talked to another of their housemates, who said Derek had told him he’d be gone for the night and back sometime today. He didn’t say why, or where he was going.” Rose stared into her drink a moment, then added, “For whatever reason, Derek decided to camp in that shed last night. He must have wanted to be there when I arrived at sunrise.”

  “Had he ever met you out there before?” Nick asked.

  “No.”

  “Anywhere?”

  She didn’t answer and tried more of her martini, making a face this time. “Needs a little lemonade or something.”

  “Horrors,” Nick said with a mock shudder. But he didn’t let her off the hook. “Did you tell the police about your history with Derek?”

  “You’re assuming we had a history.”

  “Yeah. I’m assuming.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I hadn’t had anything to do with him in months. What about you, Nick?” she asked coolly. “Last June we got in over our heads with each other after we tried and failed to save Jasper Vanderhorn. He was after an arsonist. Obsessed. Investigators haven’t produced a reason for that hot spot flaring up and trapping him, have they?”

  “Rose, don’t.”

  “Jasper burned to death, and now here we are. You and me, again, with a man dead…” She set her glass down and looked at him, her gaze unflinching. “You shouldn’t have come to Vermont.”

  “If I hadn’t, you’d have been alone this morning.”

  “If you hadn’t, maybe Derek would still be alive. Maybe this arsonist followed you out here and killed Derek to get under your skin, or he’s in Vermont and found out you were on your way. You’re a smoke jumper, Nick. You jump out of planes to fight fires. You’d drive a firebug crazy. If Jasper was closing in—”

  “Jasper didn’t have a suspect.”

  “It doesn’t mean he wasn’t closing in on one. He was working his own personal theory. You’re here to see for yourself if his death has anything to do with Lowell Whittaker and his network of killers.”

  Nick nodded to the handwritten menu. “What do you want for dinner?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not me. I’m starving. If you drink that entire martini on an empty stomach, you’re not going to be fit to drive home. It’s okay, though. There’s a pullout sofa in my room.”

  She pushed her drink aside. “You’re right. No more martini.”

  He got her play on words now. “Lemonade. Right. Clever, Rose.” He glanced at his menu, but he’d already made up his mind. “I’m going with the Vermont turkey.”

  She finally relented and ordered a salad and butternut squash soup with nutmeg.

  “Tell me about winter fest,” Nick said quietly.

  “Nick—”

  “Will there be sleigh rides?”

  She ignored his slight sarcasm. “Sleigh rides, maple sugaring, guided snowshoe hikes, backcountry ski treks, a bonfire. We’re auctioning off a quilt that Myrtle, Dominique, Beth and I stitched from old fabric pieces Hannah discovered in the trunk in her cellar. It’ll be the centerpiece of a silent auction to benefit the local volunteer mountain rescue organization.”

  “I didn’t know you could quilt.”

  “I imagine there are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she said. “Winter fest will run all weekend. It’s as much for the town as for the guests. Vice President Neal and his family want to come if they can. They were all here two weeks ago.”

  “So I heard,” Nick said.

  “They were quite taken with the old sugar shack. They cross-country skied out to it. It’s just in the woods across the meadow. It was built around 1900, but it’s in great shape. Lauren and I are trying to get it up and running and trees tapped in time for this year’s sugaring season.”

  “Starts soon, doesn’t it?”

  “As soon as the temperature warms up a bit. We need freezing nights and above-freezing days.”

  Nick smiled at the prospect of maple sugaring. “Sounds romantic.”

  She smiled back at him. “It’s fun work. I’ve been trying to do more here at the lodge, but Lauren’s in charge of winter fest. I just do what she says.”

  “The Secret Service doesn’t object to the Neals coming?”

  “Not enough to stop them, at least not right now.”

  “Do you believe that all of Lowell Whittaker’s contract killers have been accounted for?”

  Rose’s smile vanished, her eyes distant, cool again. “You get talking about sleigh rides and such, then spring that on me. You’re testing my reaction. Nice, Nick.”

  He shrugged. “What’s the answer?”

  “The answer is no. No, I don’t believe all of Lowell’s killers are either dead or in custody. I don’t think anyone does. It would be reckless to assume otherwise.”

  A.J. joined them, giving no indication he noticed the tension between his sister and guest. “I know better than to ask how you are—you’ll just say you’re fine, no matter what.” He pulled out a chair and sat down, but clearly had no intention of lingering. “You can’t stay up in that house tonight by yourself. Listen to me, Rose. You can’t.”

  “I feel safe there.”

  “I’ll come up—”

  “You can’t leave your family, A.J. You know I won’t let you do that.”

  “We’ll all come. The kids would love it.”

  Rose shook her head. “I don’t feel unsafe, A.J. If Derek was murdered, his killer had every opportunity to attack me, too.”

  “Maybe Nick here scared off the killer,” her brother said.

  Nick picked up his whiskey but didn’t drink any. “I don’t think anyone was lurking in the woods when I arrived, but it’s possible.”

  A.J. glanced at him but made no comment.

  Rose sighed and took a healthy swallow of her martini. “The police will have checked for prints in the snow, tire tracks. If they believe Derek’s death wasn’t an accident or suicide and I’m in danger, they’ll tell me. I don’t take undue risks, but I’m not one to panic, either. But tonight,” she added, “for your sake, A.J., Ranger and I will stay here at the lodge.” She gave her eldest brother a faint smile. “I anticipated this and brought my things.”

  “You always were the smart one,” A.J. said with a grin.

  Rose waited for him to leave before she picked up her drink glass. “This means I can have another martini, this time with pomegranate juice.” She gave Nick an enigmatic smile. “I like my martinis a little on the sweet side.”

  The radiator in Nick’s room clanked as if just to remind him he was out of his element, on Cameron turf. He didn’t have a radiator at home in Beverly Hills.

  After dinner, Rose had ventured off to another part of the lodge with Ranger, his dog dishes and a backpack. Nick kicked off his shoes and called Sean. “Where are you?”

  “Out by the pool. It’s sunny and warm today.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Okay,” Sean said. “I’m in my car, stuck in traffic, looking at smog on the horizon.”

  Nick grinned. “That’s better. I had dinner with your sister. She’s had to de
al with dead bodies in her work. That part she can handle, but this time she knew the victim.”

  “Training Ranger is repetitive and requires a lot of discipline. She loves it, but the Whittaker place was probably a welcome change of scenery. She’s always felt safe in Black Falls.”

  “Feeling safe’s an attitude. Anything can happen anytime, anywhere. How well did you know this guy Derek?”

  “Not well.”

  Curt answer. Nick looked out the window with the full moon casting shadows on the snow. He could make out groomed cross-country ski tracks. Black Falls Lodge seemed less dark and isolated tonight. Maybe he was seeing the nuances Lauren had implied he would if he looked. Or maybe he was experiencing the effects of jet lag, whiskey and Rose Cameron.

  “The bar fight last March,” he said. “What kinds of insults did Cutshaw and his friends hurl at Hannah?”

  “The personal kind,” Sean said. “Her mother waited tables at O’Rourke’s before her death seven years ago, and Hannah hasn’t had it easy, working herself through college, raising her two younger brothers on her own.”

  “So the insults were all about her?”

  “As far as I know.”

  That left a fair amount of wiggle room, Nick thought.

  Sean added, “Hannah hasn’t seen Derek since he, Robert Feehan and Brett Griffin stopped by the café last March to apologize for their behavior.”

  “Telling me to back off, Sean?”

  His friend sighed heavily, less defensive. “Derek said some fairly nasty things before Bowie O’Rourke intervened and prevented him from saying more.”

  “He wasn’t just talking about Hannah, was he?”

  Sean clearly didn’t want to answer, but he said, “That’s my guess.”

  Nick contemplated the moonlit landscape. “Hannah knows,” he said finally, certain he was right.

  “She and Rose have been friends for a long time. Hannah was in Black Falls all last year after Pop’s death while I was out here in California.” Sean let it go at that. “She’s here now. I’ll talk to her.”

  “If anything went on between Derek Cutshaw and Rose, this Bowie character knows, too.”

  “Bowie was willing to get into a fight and end up on probation to shut Derek up.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Nick said.

  The comment went right over Sean’s head. “Bowie wasn’t just defending Hannah’s honor, or Rose’s if you’re right. He has a hot temper. He likes a good fight.”

  “Used to be a bar was the perfect place for a good fight.”

  “Now you sound like my father,” Sean said, almost amused.

  “What about the two guys with Cutshaw that night?”

  “Robert Feehan said a few things. Brett Griffin was mostly quiet. They’re not local guys. I didn’t have anything to do with them after the fight. I doubt A.J. did, either. Elijah was on leave. He headed back the next day.”

  “Your father?”

  “He died a few weeks later. We never talked about the insults. You can ask A.J. He might know.”

  “You ask him.”

  “You managed to piss him off already?”

  “Scared to,” Nick said with a short laugh. He stepped back from the window, feeling his fatigue for the first time since he’d looked at the clock at four-thirty that morning. “Feehan and Cutshaw rented a house for the ski season up by Killington. Griffin’s in town—right up the road.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  Nick figured there was no point beating around the bush. “You and your brothers are in close touch. Maybe think about including Rose, too. Even with you three, she still seems isolated.”

  “Her choice,” Sean said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Sean, a fire killed this guy today.”

  “Lowell Whittaker could have turned a kerosene lamp into one of his homemade bombs.”

  “And investigators missed it?”

  “They might not have thought twice about seeing an old lamp in a shed.”

  “Where did Whittaker learn how to make bombs?”

  Sean didn’t respond. Lowell Whittaker had placed a crude pipe bomb in Hannah Shay’s heap of a car. She narrowly escaped when it exploded, then warned Bowie O’Rourke, who was with Vivian Whittaker at the farmhouse, that they were next.

  There was also the bomb Whittaker had used to kill Melanie Kendall, one of his hired assassins in November, as well as the unexplained fire at Myrtle Smith’s house in Washington.

  Nick sank onto the edge of his four-poster bed, the charm of the room bypassing him. “If Jasper was right, his firebug is still out there. What if he decided to get paid for his work and hooked up with Whittaker?”

  “So that’s why you’re in Vermont,” Sean said quietly. “I should have known. It doesn’t mean this match-happy idiot killed Derek Cutshaw.”

  “I show up and someone dies in a fire? That’s too much of a coincidence for me.”

  Nick had observed his friend under stress countless times on the fire line. Sean was levelheaded, committed, careful—not a reckless, glory-seeking yahoo. That didn’t work in the wildland fires they fought or the business they were in. It got people killed. Nick was more likely to leap without looking, but he’d learned to rely on his training and experience and to calculate and mitigate his risk-taking nature.

  Eliminating risks altogether wasn’t possible.

  If he thought his presence wasn’t a coincidence, the police would be thinking the same thing. Nick had answered their questions and provided them with contact information. They could find him if they wanted to talk to him again.

  “Yeah,” Sean said finally. “For me, too. I’ll talk to Hannah.”

  He disconnected, and Nick tossed his phone onto the side table.

  The radiator again clanked loudly as heat surged into the room.

  It’d be a long night. He checked the room service menu. He could order hot cocoa for two and go find Rose’s room.

  He raked a hand through his hair.

  “No, you moron,” he muttered. “Are you out of your damn mind?”

  No hot cocoa for two, and definitely no finding Rose’s room.

  Instead Nick stripped to his shorts, dropped onto the sunflower carpet and burned off his energy and frustration with a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.

  Six

  Washington, D.C.

  Ryan “Grit” Taylor had dreamed about tupelo honey, which he didn’t think was crazy or anything, since that was his family’s business. Still, it had been a long time since he’d dreamed about honey, or growing up on the Florida Panhandle. He sat up in his bed in Myrtle Smith’s first-floor guest room at her home just off Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

  Less than a year ago, he’d been a Navy SEAL searching for enemy weapon caches in Afghanistan. Now he was waking up under a fluffy peach-colored blanket and watching sunlight stream through lacy shear panels on a tall window overlooking a dormant flower garden.

  Myrtle’s house was more traditional and girly than Grit would have expected. She’d probably threaten something untoward if she knew what he was thinking, but he hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. She was still up in Vermont, bitching about the cold and snow and baking cookies and scones and such. The front of her house—especially her office—had burned in a suspicious fire in November, but the back was in good shape.

  Grit went through his routine to put on his prosthesis, a new one, his left leg having adapted and adjusted to the mechanics of prosthetic use. The procedure was automatic now, at least most days. He seldom experienced phantom pain anymore, either. The nerves in his residual limb were learning a new way to communicate to his brain.

  Not that he’d forgotten he’d had his left leg amputated below the knee in a remote Afghan mountain pass, after he’d been shot in an ambush.

  A Special Forces master sergeant who’d been with him that day was camped out down the hall in Myrtle’s second guest room. Elijah Cameron had taken a near-fatal gunshot wound to the fe
moral artery and nearly bled out. Only his own quick action to tie a belt around his thigh, creating a tourniquet, had saved him. He was now fully recovered.

  Grit didn’t know why things had worked out the way they did.

  He put on his service uniform and headed to the kitchen. Elijah was at the little round table with his size-twelve feet up on the rattan-seated chair across from him as he cradled a flowered mug of coffee. He nodded out the French doors at the patio. “Do you think we ought to fill Myrtle’s bird feeders?”

  “They’re the wrong kind. She’s only feeding squirrels with those things.” Grit got down another flowered mug and poured himself coffee. The kitchen had dark cherry cabinets and a collection of delicate china teacups and saucers—more flowers—displayed on a shelf. “A badass Washington reporter like Myrtle and look at this place. Reminds me of my grandmother’s house by the Apalachicola River. Myrtle even knows what tupelo honey is.”

  “So do I,” Elijah said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. You told me after we were shot up. In the helicopter. White tupelo trees. Bees. Only honey that doesn’t crystallize.”

  “No kidding. I said all that? You remember?”

  Elijah shrugged. “It was something else to think about.”

  Besides dying. Besides the dead.

  Grit sat with his coffee. “Moose’s widow sent me a picture of the baby. You get one?”

  “Yeah.” Elijah kept staring at the half-dozen empty feeders. “Cute kid. Ryan Cameron Ferrerra. I didn’t even know Moose that well. I couldn’t keep him alive. I get why his wife named a baby after you. Not after me.”

  “We were with him when the Grim Reaper came for him.”

  Elijah nodded. “We were.”

  “I remember the two of you talking about why he was called Moose but grew up in Arizona and had never seen a moose, and you this Vermont mountain man.”

  Grit glanced out the window, no sign of spring yet out in Myrtle’s backyard. He half expected Michael “Moose” Ferrerra to be on the patio. Moose had liked to joke about wanting to go back to Southern California and grill hot dogs on his patio. Instead he’d died in Afghanistan, doing the job he’d trained to do, made the commitment to do.