Myrtle waved her red nails at him in dismissal. “I like how you say ‘we,’ Trooper Thorne. You mean the rest of us. I’m just saying if these two bastards were in D.C. in the hours before my house caught fire, it’s a cinch. If not, we still don’t have all of Lowell’s contract killers.”
Scott eyed her. “We might never be able to prove who started the fire in your house.”
“I refuse to accept that,” she countered.
Nick leaned back, appreciating Myrtle’s determination. “You don’t want to go back to your house until you know what happened,” he said.
She raised her lavender eyes. “Unlike some of us, fires scare the hell out of me.”
Lauren, looking drawn and tired, changed the subject to plans for winter fest and an uptick in bookings at the lodge for that weekend. Nick sat back, observing the interplay among people who’d known one another all their lives and newcomers to Black Falls. He’d been Sean’s friend for ten years but understood him better now. Sean was a part of this. He thought he’d left, but he still had a place here with his family, his hometown. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had never bought property in Black Falls.
Nick ate another cucumber, not really hungry.
What if one of these people was a killer?
What if he ended up being the one to point that out?
Everything would change. Better that two ski bums had unraveled over drugs and one had set the other on fire and then killed himself, whether on purpose or by accident.
Better, even, that Robert Feehan was a skilled arsonist who’d worked for Lowell Whittaker and now was dead and out of the picture.
Nick didn’t think either was the case, and he doubted Rose or anyone else in the room did, either.
Rose was quiet on the drive back to her house. Nick could guess why. “You don’t want me near you tonight,” he said as he turned off the engine.
“Are you reading my mind or warning me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I can’t keep worrying that some masked man might come through my window. Derek and Robert were around long before this week, and now neither one is a threat.”
“They’re not why you want to kick me out.”
“I’m not kicking you out. You’re staying at the lodge. I live here. If you were my guest, that’d be different. Besides, my couch is lumpy and short.”
“I managed fine.”
“I haven’t vacuumed in days. The dog hair’s piling up.”
“Keep talking. Maybe you’ll convince yourself.”
She sat next to him in the dark. The car hadn’t had a chance to warm up on the short drive back from her brother’s house. “You think this is about you?”
“No,” Nick said. “It’s about you. You’re not sure you want a man in your life right now. You like living alone on your hill with a dog.”
“Dogs are easier than men.”
But he was serious and so was she. She was distancing herself, and he thought she knew it. She stared at her house, dark but for a light in the entry.
“I have to regroup,” she said.
“At least let me check inside first,” Nick said.
She nodded. “Sure.”
He followed her up the front steps, noting the shape of her hips, remembering her legs wrapped around him as she’d pulled him deeper into her, clawed at him in the throes of her climax.
Not good, he thought. He should do some distancing of his own.
Ranger barely stirred from his bed by the fire when Rose entered the house. He certainly wasn’t alarmed at Nick’s presence.
She went to the stove, grabbed the poker and stirred the fire. “Nick.” Her voice was hoarse, soft. “I’m used to being around intense, masculine men, but you—damn. Now it does feel as if I’m kicking you out.”
He slipped an arm around her and turned her to him. “I’ll take the poker,” he said with a smile, setting it on the hearth. He kissed her on the forehead. “It’s been a long day. Neither of us wants a repeat of last June. That worked out great on some levels but not others.”
“I’m as attracted to you as I was then. I can’t help myself.”
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He tucked his finger under her chin and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Sleep well.” He winked at her. “Lock your doors.”
Headlights shone down on the driveway. Rose frowned and went to the window. “It’s Jo and Elijah.” She glanced back at Nick. “You knew. That’s why you’re being so cooperative.”
Nick was amused. “A.J. might have said something to me.”
“Coconspirators,” she muttered.
She opened the front door for her brother and his fiancée. Elijah struck Nick as being more like Rose than either A.J. or Sean, but the Camerons were all down-to-earth hard-asses who loved the mountains and their small hometown.
Jo looked every inch the Secret Service agent she was. She and Elijah were grim and circumspect. “We thought we’d stay here tonight,” Jo said to Rose. “It still smells like smoke down at the lake.”
Elijah patted Ranger and looked at his only sister. “I’ll sleep out here on the couch. Jo can take the futon in your office.”
Nick smiled to himself. No way were Jo and Elijah sharing a bedroom under Rose’s nose. It was a question of sensibility and nothing else—Nick was sure of that much.
Elijah went with him down to the driveway. “You want to give me your gut on what’s going on?” he asked, his tone a sharp reminder of his experience as a Special Forces soldier.
He was falling in love with Rose? Nick smiled to himself, imagining where that would get him. He pulled open his car door, the lights of the lodge visible in the distance. “Jasper Vanderhorn was on the right trail. He wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t wrong.”
“You think whoever he was after hooked up with Lowell Whittaker.”
“A paid assassin who is also a firebug,” Nick said. “Not a good combination.”
Elijah was silent a moment, thoughtful. “All right. See you in the morning.” His eyes narrowed on Nick. “Jo and I will take good care of Rose.”
“Just don’t tell her that,” Nick said with a small grin, and climbed into his car.
Twenty-Two
Jo and Elijah were up early. Rose didn’t have to tiptoe past her brother. He hadn’t lasted on the couch and had moved to the floor. She had no doubt he’d slept fine. He was a Special Forces soldier and could sleep anywhere. Jo ducked in the shower while Rose made coffee. “You two—”
“We’re not talking about Jo and me,” Elijah said.
Rose smiled, filling the pot with water. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m not a ‘sir.’” Her brother moved out of her way as she turned from the sink. “Rose, what’s with Nick Martini? He’s a rich smoke jumper. What the hell’s he doing here? With you?”
“We’re not talking about Nick and me,” she said lightly, throwing his own words back at him.
Elijah scowled at her.
She dumped the water in the coffeemaker. “He and Sean have been friends for ten years. Sean trusts him.”
“With you?”
“Just because I messed up with Derek doesn’t mean I can’t be trusted to make up my own mind about men.”
“Who are you trying to convince?”
“No one. I imagine Nick will be heading back to California soon, so you can forget what you’re thinking.” She opened a cupboard, remembered she was out of coffee, and shut the cupboard again, abandoning her task. “I don’t have anything for breakfast. I meant to go grocery shopping yesterday.”
“A.J. can feed us at the lodge.”
Jo joined them in the kitchen, showered and dressed. From the way she and Elijah looked at each other, Rose had no doubt they were fine as a couple. They’d come together again in November in a mad rush of adrenaline, but they’d known each other all their lives. They’d loved each other, run away with each other, as teenagers.
Unlike her and Nick, Rose thought.
Elijah
drove by himself to the lodge. Rose went in her Jeep, with Jo up front and Ranger in back.
“I’m sorry about your cabins,” Rose said.
Jo shrugged. “Now I can’t keep pretending I can renovate them. The two best ones burned.”
“Have you decided what to do with the land yet?”
“Give Elijah some waterfront,” she said with a smile. But she was clearly in a serious mood.
“You’re here on official business,” Rose said, pulling into the lodge. “You’re working.”
Jo smiled. “I’m here for buckwheat pancakes.”
Nick was in the dining room, seated at a table by the fireplace, not looking at all like a guest enjoying a few days at a Vermont mountain resort.
Elijah and A.J. fell in on either side of Rose. “Not that there’s anything between Nick and me,” she said, “but has it ever occurred to you two that you scare guys out of my life? Now that you’re back in town for the most part, Elijah, it’s worse. All I need is for Sean to move back to Vermont. The three of you, glowering every time a guy looks at me.”
Elijah was mystified. “Are you blaming your messed-up love life on us? Hell, Rose, you scare guys off all by yourself. You don’t need us.”
Jo groaned. “They don’t get it, Rose. They never will. It’s a good thing you’re a Cameron yourself.”
They invited Nick over to their larger table. Lauren arrived, subdued but resilient. A.J. looked agonized as he watched her go about her normal routines. Rose knew he hated his helplessness. Everything he and Lauren had worked for, the life they’d created together, had now been touched by violence and more fear. Luckily, the guests seemed to regard yesterday as a local matter that had no impact on their Vermont getaway. A local matter that was over.
Rose got up and joined her sister-in-law by the windows that looked out on the meadow and the surrounding mountains. Lauren glanced back at the table. “Is it over, Rose, finally?”
“We all want it to be over.”
“But you don’t believe it is. I don’t, either.”
Rose was spared having to respond when Myrtle arrived to help sort items that were coming in for the silent auction. Lauren withdrew to set up in the ballroom.
Myrtle helped herself to coffee and a muffin and came over to the windows. “Bowie’s helping Dominique with the morning rush. I think he’s just worried about her after yesterday.” She sighed at the view, the meadow quiet now, not a soul visible between where she stood and the edge of the woods. “Scott Thorne stopped by the café first thing this morning and tried to tell me it feels like spring today. This is not spring.”
“Welcome to northern New England,” Rose said with a laugh.
“I have a feeling it won’t feel like spring when it is spring. I think Scott misses Beth. You can see it in his eyes, but he won’t talk about it.”
Scott’s reticence, Rose thought, was something she could understand. “Some great items are coming in for the auction. The quilt came out even better than I thought it would. It’s beautiful.”
“Every stitch reminds me of home. I tell myself it’s soul work, but it’s more like torture.” Myrtle glanced back at the dining room. “Where’s your dog?”
“Asleep by the fire. He’s tired today.”
“I had a cat, but I haven’t gotten another. It’s just as well. A cat would have been in my office when the fire started. I’d have stayed behind looking for her. We’d both have burned up. Grit Taylor saved me. I tell him I’d have saved myself, but I don’t know. I don’t like being saved. I mean, the guy’s sexy as hell—a Navy SEAL, never mind the leg—and there he was, carrying me out of a burning house. All that damsel-in-distress stuff isn’t for me.”
“You legitimately needed help,” Rose said.
“Maybe, but I think my work’s made me believe that most people end up in trouble because they screw up. That’s harsh, don’t you think?”
“My job is search and rescue. I leave judging to others.”
“Doesn’t it annoy you when some idiot bungee jumps off a bridge into a ravine, doesn’t calculate the pendulum effect of his little bungee cord, slams into a rock wall and you have to go rescue him?”
“That’s a technical rescue. It’s not what I do.”
“A lost hiker, then. Some idiot in the wrong clothes, with no compass, no plan, out alone. I’ll bet you’ve rescued a ton of hikers like that.”
“Yes, I have, but you can also do everything right—do your best—and you still can end up in trouble.”
“I had no idea Andrei—Andrei Petrov, my Russian friend who was killed by Lowell Whittaker’s assassins.” Myrtle paused, her lavender eyes distant as she stared out at the meadow. “I had no idea he was a target until he died on the bathroom floor after those idiots poisoned his toothpaste. But I knew I was onto them when they targeted me. I’d been researching similar unexplained deaths. My notes were in my office. That’s what burned.”
“You did the best you could,” Rose said.
“Did I?” Myrtle turned from the window and fixed her gaze on Nick, Jo and Elijah at their table. “What if Grit Taylor had been killed that day? What if some firefighter had had to scrape my remains off the walls and then live with that image?”
“Myrtle, what if the police never know for sure who set your house on fire?”
She smiled knowingly. “Ask Nick Martini the same question. Ask yourself.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m off to help Lauren. I hope you have a chance to enjoy the springlike air.”
After breakfast, Rose went down to the maintenance shed with Jo and Elijah and collected drills, mallets, taps and measuring sticks and threw them in the back of her Jeep. They wanted to capitalize on the above-freezing temperatures and tap trees for maple sugaring. Rose knew, too, that it was a chance for her brother and future sister-in-law to take another look out by the sugar shack. They would snowshoe across the meadow while she drove the equipment.
As she stuck her key in the ignition, Nick jumped into the passenger seat and grinned at her. “Tapping trees for maple sugaring?”
“You’ll love it.”
She headed down Ridge Road to the dead-end lane. Jo and Elijah met them and they went in search of appropriate sugar maples to tap. Rose had to admit Nick didn’t seem intimidated at all by Elijah, or Jo, for that matter. In fact, the opposite. He was natural, at ease with them and his surroundings. As they plunged through the snow to a trio of old maples, Rose noticed he didn’t make an effort to distance himself from her. He also didn’t do anything provocative, like put an arm around her or wink at her.
Not that he had a chance.
Jo dived in with questions. “Tell me about Jasper Vanderhorn,” she said as she adjusted the strap on one of her snowshoes. “How convinced was he that he was after a serial arsonist? How’d you two meet?”
Nick rubbed the rough bark of an old maple with a gloved hand. “This guy must have been here when Lincoln was president,” he said. “I ran into Jasper a few times smoke jumping, but I got to know him better when he looked into a fire at one of our buildings.”
“What was he like?” Jo asked.
Rose made her way to the middle of the three maples, which she remembered tapping with her father as a child. Elijah looked up at its bare limbs, and she wondered if he were remembering, too.
Nick continued. “Jasper was quiet, measured, systematic.”
Jo pulled a metal tap from her pocket. “Obsessed?”
“He was trying to connect the dots on a number of different fires. He believed a clever killer was at work, not some yahoo.”
Elijah eyed Nick, but it was Jo who spoke. “Some of his fellow arson investigators thought he was a little wacky, creating a mythical bogeyman instead of following the evidence. There’s a reason half of all arson cases are never solved. It’s tricky. He didn’t have what he needed to make his case that there even was a firebug at work, never mind who it might be.”
“He’d been a firefighter,�
�� Nick said calmly. “He’d caught arsonists before. He said this one was different. He was working on a profile.”
“Did he share any details with you?” Jo asked.
“Someone very skilled, not impulsive or purely opportunistic—not just about wildland fires and massive conflagrations, or structural fires, or murder. Someone who did it all.”
“A hybrid,” Elijah said.
“Man, woman?” Jo asked.
“He didn’t know. He was convinced he was after a cold-blooded killer who wouldn’t stop until he was captured or dead. Jasper wasn’t given to hyperbole. That doesn’t mean he was right.”
Rose realized she had gone still. Elijah had, too, and she was aware of him watching her, gauging her reaction to Nick, to what he was saying.
Jo closed her fingers around the metal tap. “Do you think Vanderhorn was targeted by this guy? Was he the victim of premeditated murder?”
Nick gave her an unflinching look. “Yes.”
“This all has to be hard for you.” Jo’s tone softened slightly. “You were friends, and you knew he believed he was after what amounted to a serial killer. But you couldn’t protect him. You couldn’t save him.”
“We tried. Sean and I both did. We weren’t the only ones, either.” Nick glanced at Rose, his expression giving nothing away, then added, “It was a bad day.”
Jo turned to Rose. “You were in L.A. then. What all were you up to?”
She’d been anticipating the question. “I was training firefighters in advanced dog handling techniques. I’d been there several days.”
“Were you staying with Sean?” Jo asked.
“Yes.” She carefully avoided meeting Nick’s eye, knowing Jo as well as Elijah would notice. “I had Ranger with me. I volunteered to help search for a boy who’d gone missing during a mandatory evacuation because of the wildfire.”
Jo leveled her gaze back on Nick. “You and Sean were in big trouble out there, weren’t you?”
“It was a close call, but we were prepared to handle the conditions.” Nick shrugged. “We had backup.”
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