“Excuse me,” Reese muttered, slipping in between two parties who were immersed in their own separate conversations. “Sorry. Excuse me.”
After repeating that mantra until the small hallway appeared in the back, Reese finally had a clear line of sight to the women’s restroom. This direction led her straight past the small table that housed Chad Schaeffer and Pete Anderson. Irish was nowhere to be found.
It wasn’t until she was a few feet away from the duo that she could see the anxiety and concern in Pete’s eyes as to what had transpired in the last few weeks.
Reese didn’t want to interrupt, so she nodded an acknowledgement to the men before continuing across the hardwood floor. The band started to play another song, this one even more popular, garnering cheers from the crowd. She had just finished crossing the dance area when a lot of the women had taken their positions to do some type of line dance.
It didn’t take her long to enter the narrow hallway where she could no longer distinguish between the bass of the music and the rumbling thunder outside. The back door was maybe ten feet from the two restrooms sitting opposite one another. She resisted the urge to look outside to see just how bad the weather had turned, her body signaling that hearing the rain would only make her troubles worse.
“Oh!”
Reese put a hand over her heart when the door to the women’s restroom opened. A pretty blonde stepped out with a friend, the two already singing along with the song. They looked to be barely twenty-one years old, and she hoped they lived in town. They had definitely had one too many.
She stepped inside the small restroom, noting that there was a stall. This allowed others to come in and wash their hands without having to wait for someone to use the toilet. Well, it was a good thing that stall was empty, because her bladder wasn’t going to hold itself much longer.
Reese flipped the latch on the door to the stall, grateful to find that the restroom was kept clean. She quickly relieved herself and was buttoning her jean shorts when the outer door opened and slowly closed behind whoever had entered. Reese would have stepped out had she not heard the sink start to flow with water.
Great.
She grimaced, recalling reading once about bathroom etiquette. Had there been three stalls, one should always use the outer ones for more privacy. The situation here was vastly different, but seeing as there was only one stall, the woman who entered should have wanted to use the toilet. Instead, whoever had entered clearly only intended to wash her hands.
Should she wait here until the woman was done?
“You can come out.”
Reese tilted her head back in disbelief, wondering what she’d done to deserve such a bad luck streak. She really wasn’t looking forward to having another confrontation with Whitney Bell.
She sighed in resignation and flipped the lever, allowing the stall door to gradually open.
Sure enough, Whitney stood at the sink. She shut off the water and reached for the brown paper towel contraption. She pulled a few out and wiped her hands as she met Reese’s gaze in the mirror.
This was not the Whitney she’d met at the beach, nor the Whitney she’d run into at the diner.
“I wanted to thank you for how you handled my dad at lunch today.” Whitney dropped her gaze to the brown paper towels as she finished drying off her hands. She then tossed the remnants into the trashcan beside the sink. “He’s made some mistakes in the past that he’s accepted he’ll never overcome. He acts a certain way, but he really has been a very good father to me.”
Which would explain why Whitney had felt the need to return home. She wanted to be there for her father in his time of need. It didn’t matter that she became frustrated with Jeremy Bell’s inability to stop drinking or the way he carried himself around town. The bottom line was that he was her father.
Reese had misjudged the woman.
“You’re welcome,” Reese replied in kind, thinking all the while it was only human decency to be kind to one another. While small towns were known for their tight-knit community, there were times when too much knowledge stained their opinions. “You shouldn’t worry about what others think, Whitney. I’ve been fighting against what people assumed about Sophia for most of my life.”
Whitney nodded her understanding, but she didn’t stay behind to listen to Reese’s advice or share her troubles any more than she already had. The blonde exited, leaving Reese alone in the small restroom. She made her way to the sink and washed her hands, using the pink soap from the dispenser attached to the wall.
Reese glanced at herself in the mirror and decided to take her scrunchy out so she could run her fingers through her hair, trying to look somewhat decent. Noah liked it when she wore her hair down. It was almost the end of June, meaning she had less than a month here in Blyth Lake. After that, she was due to visit Heartland for a week before heading back to Springfield to get ready for another school year.
The thing of it was…she wasn’t ready to leave this small town.
She wasn’t ready to leave Noah.
It was getting harder and harder not to call her mother for advice. Besides Sophia, Gail Woodward was the only one who wouldn’t cushion the truth.
Had Reese fallen for someone in the span of three weeks?
And what was the next step? Should she extend the invitation that he could visit her in Springfield when time allowed? Was it bad-mannered for her to invite herself back here on the weekends?
What if she was walking away from the one?
It wasn’t as if she needed to figure it all out tonight. There was still quite a bit time between now and then. He might be the first to bring it up, offering both of them a solution. That would certainly tell her they were on the same page.
As of right now, tonight was about forgetting responsibilities. It was a celebration for the town, for Brynn Mercer, for Tiny and Rose, and even for Reese and Noah. There were moments that everyone needed a break from reality, and this was one of those times.
Reese slid her hair scrunchy into the front pocket of her shorts. She’d leave her hair down, and a shiver of excitement ran over her spine in anticipation of seeing Noah’s blue eyes glisten with arousal when she finally returned to their table.
Yes, she would forget about everything tonight and just enjoy his company.
Reese opened the door, allowing the muffled sounds of the bar to become somewhat deafening. She stepped out and was about to make her way back to her table when she froze.
At the end of the hallway stood a man…the imposing man she’d seen at the beach. He had the same build as the one she’d seen in the woods that night.
And he was blocking her way back to Noah.
The man took a step forward, his words muffled by the booming bass coming from the band. At least, she thought that was why she couldn’t hear him. It might also have to do with the fact that her heartrate had accelerated to the point of physical pain in her chest.
Blood rushed through her ears and perspiration instantly coated her body as she struggled with her fight or flight instinct.
Flight won out, this time around.
Reese spun around and headed for the exit. In the back of her mind, she was telling herself to take this route around to the front, where she could reach Noah. It never occurred to her that the man might reach her before she made it that far.
Her palms hit the silver bar in the middle of the door, causing her body to spill out into the night. Rain was coming down in torrents, hitting the pavement in a unified sheet of water. She was soaked to the skin before she even took one step forward.
She didn’t have to look behind her to know that he’d decided to follow, closing the distance between them.
Thunder rolled across the darkened sky above while lightning streaked through the blackness. The pelting and tinging sounds of the rain striking the blacktop were diminished by the smacking of her flip flops.
“Hey!”
Reese could sense him closing in on her before she had a chan
ce to exit the alleyway onto Main Street. His fingers slipped off her shoulder, though she wasn’t sure it was due to the slickness of the rain or the fact that she forced her legs to run faster.
Her attempt at reaching Main Street came to an end when she stumbled forward due to the front of her flip flop catching on something and folding underneath her foot. She instinctively shielded the fall with her hands.
She experienced no pain as the rocks and gravel dug into the skin of her palms. All she could think of was that she couldn’t allow this man to kill her in a dark alleyway during a thunderstorm. No one could hear her scream, and no one was coming to her rescue.
Reese could see the man’s hands coming toward her as she flipped over so she could keep him in her line of sight. She blinked away the rain to focus, only to then have a sheet of lightning illuminate the sky above them.
“You don’t—”
The crack of thunder surprised them both, but it gave her the advantage in addition to the surge of adrenaline rushing through her bloodstream. Her flip flop had come off somewhere between falling and her shifting over so that she could face him, so it was the heel of her foot that she used to bring the man to his knees.
Reese kicked him in the groin as hard as she could and then waited for her next opportunity. She then instinctively landed another kick to his jaw the second he leaned over in pain, allowing her heel to connect with his jaw.
Hell, it might have been his nose, but she was too busy trying to stand up to take stock. She hadn’t even taken a step backward when the side exit of the bar flung open to reveal Noah. The street lamp provided enough clarification that she could make out his features. He was by her side before she ever said his name.
“Darcy!”
Cassie and a few of the other patrons had followed Noah outside, though it was Gus who was holding his cell phone to his ear. Everyone else looked on in shock as Cassie hovered over the man who was still huddled on the ground with blood trailing down his face.
A rage unlike anything Reese had ever experienced flooded her body, but Noah maintained his hold on her.
“Darcy? This is Darcy? The man who takes care of your mother?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Noah rubbed his hands up and down Reese’s arms in an effort to keep her warm. The first towel Brynn had given her to dry off had been soaked by the time she’d wiped the water off her exposed skin. The one she currently had around her shoulders was now damp from collecting the moisture from her clothes. It didn’t help that the central air of the bar was cooling the place even more now that the majority of the town had been told to vacate the premises.
“I’m so sorry, Reese,” Cassie barely managed to whisper through the hoarseness she’d acquired from crying for the last hour. “I tried to explain everything to you at the diner earlier this evening, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you what I’d done.”
“You hired Darcy to attack Reese, Cassie.” Noah wasn’t in the forgiving frame of mind. Sheriff Percy needed to put this woman in cuffs and take her away before Noah decided to do it for him. “Reese was physically assaulted and had to be treated by paramedics. What if she’d suffered a concussion or worse? Did you ever think of that?”
“Noah, d-don’t.” Reese was having some minor trouble keeping her teeth from chattering, but Noah couldn’t take her home quite yet. The sheriff was still trying to piece together what was related to the actual events compared to the body they’d discovered in his home. “Cassie, I still d-don’t understand why you tried to s-scare me away.”
“You came to town asking all these questions about Emma. I didn’t think anything of it until I heard that you were really trying to find out what happened to Sophia.” Cassie wiped away her tears with a couple of white napkins she’d taken from one of the tables. “It was only a matter of time before you figured out that she snuck out of camp to talk to my mom. I didn’t want those damned nude photographs from so many years ago making my mother’s life impossible back here in our hometown, especially when it was so hard to make them disappear in the first place.”
“And this is when you asked Darcy to attack Ms. Woodward?”
Sheriff Percy shook his head in disappointment. Noah was also in disbelief that one of their own could resort to such heinous measures.
“You don’t have to stay here for this,” Noah whispered, deciding it might be better take Reese home while the sheriff sorted this out.
“Yes, I do.” Reese pasted a smile on her face as Brynn brought her yet another towel, though this time it was accompanied by a blanket. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s no problem,” Brynn said with a side-eye toward Cassie in disgust. “You just let me know if you need anything else.”
“Darcy didn’t mean to hurt you, Reese.” Cassie pressed the back of her hand to her trembling lips, trying to maintain her composure. “He only meant to scare you. We just wanted you to leave town, Reese. That’s all. He was horrified when he’d heard just how badly you’d been injured when pushed you against the tiled wall. He didn’t mean to do it so hard.
Reese. And then he was afraid you’d recognize him. He’s always in and out of the diner with my mom.”
“He did hurt me, Cassie.” Reese handed Noah the damp towel and then wrapped herself in the warmth of the soft blanket. A little color was coming back into her cheeks, but that might have had to do with the shot of whiskey Rose had brought over from the bar. “And everything you’ve done has made me question the good intentions of everyone I’ve met in Blyth Lake. They didn’t deserve my suspicion, and what you’ve done could very well have kept others from telling me about Sophia. They believed it was too dangerous to talk to me.”
“Don’t you understand,” Cassie practically begged, leaning forward with the napkins wadded up inside her fingers, “what those photographs would have done to my mother, the diner, and even me had they been rediscovered? Those pictures weren’t just nude photographs, Reese. They were pornography in the worst way, because my mother made a mistake that she shouldn’t have to suffer for over and over. These people would have crucified her. They aren’t going to tolerate her past mistakes.”
“You didn’t give the people of this town a chance to prove you otherwise, Cassie,” Noah answered in a hardened tone, not even attempting to hide his disgust. “You and Darcy went too far with this cover-up over something you thought might hurt your business. It had nothing to do with your mom’s reputation.”
“I’m inclined to agree with Noah,” Sheriff Percy said in disappointment as he nodded toward one of the younger deputies who had stayed behind while Deputy Foster had accompanied Darcy to the hospital. The deputy stepped forward. “It also has me wondering if it wasn’t Darcy out in those woods that night when Deputy Wallace was killed. Did Wallace recognize Darcy? Was he using the shortcut to walk toward Ms. Woodward’s residence and then panicked when he saw my deputy standing guard out at the old Yoder place?”
“You think—” Cassie cheeks had been rather flushed from all the tears she’d cried this evening, but every bit of color drained from her face at the sheriff’s implication. “No. No, no, no. Darcy didn’t kill Deputy Wallace, Sheriff. He didn’t. After things started getting out of hand is when Darcy tried to warn Reese away. After that, he stayed far away from her, because he feared she would recognize him. He wasn’t near her house that night, Sheriff. I promise you.”
“I guess we’ll have to find that out on our own now, won’t we?” Sheriff Percy gestured toward the deputy to take Cassie into custody. “You took matters into your own hands and created a hell of a mess here. You’re just as guilty as Darcy, Cassie. You’re under arrest for—”
“Wait.” Reese held up her hand as if she could stop what was about to happen. “This is getting—”
“Cassie?”
All eyes turned toward the entrance of the bar. Annie Osburn stood there in all her glory using a cane to help her slowly advance toward her daughter.
“Mama?”
Cassie’s eyes filled with even more tears as she practically broke down in the chair. “I’m so sorry. You weren’t ever supposed to—”
“I wasn’t supposed to know that you hired Darcy to scare off this poor woman?” Annie Osburn wasn’t one to take any prisoners. She was a woman in her own right, but she was also a mother whose every decision had been based on ensuring her daughter was raised properly. “I figured something was up between the two of you with all those secret conversations in the kitchen. I could hear you two whispering like you were a couple of teenagers. I might be old, Cassandra Mae, but I’m not deaf. But to do something so awful?”
Noah had been standing over Reese this entire time, but he pulled up a chair so that he could sit next to her. What he had to say, no one else needed to hear. Cassie was too busy trying to condone her choices and actions, so he used this time to see what was on Reese’s mind.
“What were you going to say before Annie walked in the door?” Noah asked softly, tucking some damp strands of hair behind her ear. It irritated him that she was still shivering on and off, when he could have her home on the couch with dry clothes. “Cassie and Darcy committed a crime, sweetheart. That can’t go unanswered.”
“Do you really believe that they had anything to do with the body we found?” Reese grabbed Noah’s hands and held them close, leaning into him for support. She wasn’t looking for him to agree with her, because it appeared she’d already made up her mind. He’d have to change it, because the bulky bandages on her hands reminded him of how severe her injuries could have been had she not fought as hard as she had. “I’m positive that when Sheriff Percy or Detective Kendrick investigate Darcy, they will find that he didn’t kill Deputy Wallace. All this is doing is muddying the water, and potentially allowing whoever was responsible for Emma’s death to remain free.”
“Do you forget what took place an hour ago?” Noah reminded Reese, needing her to see what she was suggesting wasn’t the wisest call to make right this moment. “Darcy was going to physically attack you again. He—”
Unlocking Fear Page 18