Deal Breaker

by Patricia Rosemoor

  Avery checked his watch. “Probably only ten minutes ago. Don’t worry, if you hurry, you’ll catch up to them.” He opened a map and set it on the counter. “Mr. Croft said to send you this way.” He pointed to the farthest western route and traced it with his finger. “He also said not to worry, he has extra equipment for you to use.”

  As if! Hailey shuddered at the idea of killing any animal. “Thanks,” she said.

  She took the map from him and was getting a better look when he picked up the phone and punched in a number.

  A few seconds later, he said, “Mr. Croft, your guest is here. I’m sending her on the trail right now.” Then to Hailey, he said, “He’ll be watching for you.”

  “Good.” She forced a smile that wouldn’t convince anyone she was in a good mood.

  Pulse fluttering, she left the clubhouse. The wind had picked up and dark clouds were now crowding the sky. Not the best weather for hunting or any sport. Her purpose was not to appease Croft and hunt with him, however, but to find Bryce, so that she could tell him what she’d learned about his would-be business partner. She’d have to get him alone or, even better, find an excuse so they could leave together.

  If James Croft was capable of breaking and entering, what else might he be willing to do?

  For all she knew, they were dealing with a socio path.

  Following the route the manager pointed out on the map, she circled the edge of a small lake where men in boats ignored the impending weather and wielded fishing poles in a leisurely manner. Her breath quickened as she entered a gray wooded area of red oak with an occasional hickory or black cherry tree. Her presence flushed brightly colored birds from the branches and she heard small animals scurrying close to the ground. Once she even saw the back end of a deer as it bucked and fled.

  The forest was climbing uphill and so was she. The air was still, like nature was holding her breath. Hailey’s own breath came in short gasps as she hurried, the harsh sound bouncing from tree to tree.

  Why wasn’t she hearing anything else? Like voices? Where were Bryce and Croft? She’d been moving so fast that she should have caught up to them by now.

  To one side, she saw a clearing in the trees. She veered off toward the opening. Breaking from the forest, she noted an unobstructed expanse before and below her. She’d come out on a ridge that sloped down forty or fifty feet to a meadow below.

  All was silent.

  Wind whipped around her and sent a chill up her spine, and a frisson of fear skittered through her.

  Bryce…

  She pulled out her cell phone, but she couldn’t scare up a signal. The call kept dropping. Even as she slipped the phone back into her pocket, the short hairs at the back of her neck stood on end and she froze.

  Someone was watching her.

  Hailey peered into the nearby forest, moving her gaze from tree to bush to tree, but she saw nothing, not even a squirrel. Although the quiet was deafening, Hailey was certain she wasn’t alone. About to slip back into a stand of trees for protection, she heard the high, sharp thwang too late.

  Even though she bolted to the side, she couldn’t get out of the way of the blur coming for her fast enough.

  Hot pain seared her arm. The impact sent her flying backward.

  Her feet came out from under her and she hit the ground that sloped away from the ridge hard. Unable to stop herself, Hailey threw her arms up over her head for protection and rolled over and over, not stopping until she hit flat ground.

  For a moment, she couldn’t move. The breath was knocked out of her. Her arm was bleeding where an arrow had grazed it.

  Someone had tried to kill her!

  Again!

  She had to get out of there, had to get to cover. Forcing herself to sit up, she bit back a cry when pain shot along her arm. She took a deep breath and was about to get to her feet when footsteps thundered down the slope toward her. Looking up, she saw James Croft, bow in hand, quiver of arrows with bloodred feathers slung across his chest. He was heading for her fast.

  He’d known she was coming because the manager had called him.

  He’d said he’d be watching for her.

  So he could kill her? Why?

  Panic made her ignore the pain, and she somehow got her feet under her just as Croft reached out to grab her arm.

  Had he come to finish her off?

  Chapter Thirteen

  “No! Don’t touch me!” Hailey slapped at Croft’s hand.

  When he saw the red splotch on the arm of her sweater, Bryce’s heart almost stopped but his legs sped up.

  “Hailey, please!” Croft protested. “I’m just trying to help you.”

  His gut clenching, Bryce yelled, “Hailey, I’m coming!”

  He raced down the incline as Hailey scrambled away from Croft.

  “She’s hysterical,” Croft told him. “Apparently some careless hunter let go an arrow without being certain he was shooting at a deer. I’m simply trying to help her.”

  “You tried to kill me!”

  “I did no such thing!” Croft protested. “I heard a noise and thought maybe a deer was foraging around. I came into the clearing to check it out and you were already rolling down the hill!” He looked around. “No sign of whoever did this.”

  Feeling sick inside, not knowing what to believe, Bryce reached down and pulled Hailey up into the shelter of his body. Taking care of her now was his chief concern.

  He could have lost her…

  No matter who had tried to shoot her, in the end, he was to blame. He checked her arm. It was still oozing blood, and the sleeve of her sweater was ruined, but the wound itself didn’t look serious. Thankfully, she’d only been grazed by an arrow.

  It could have been so much worse.

  “Can you stand on your own?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.” Hailey stared at Croft as if to make certain the man didn’t try to come near her.

  Bryce took off his shirt and tied a sleeve around her arm, then placed the bulk of the material over the wound. This was his fault. He never should have married her. Never should have given in to his physical needs the night before. Hailey was lucky she hadn’t been hurt worse.

  Or killed.

  “Give it as much pressure as you can to stop the bleeding.” He hooked an arm across her and curled his fingers around her waist.

  As if that could protect her.

  “I can help,” Croft said, stepping toward them.

  Hailey flinched.

  “Leave her be!”

  Croft backed off and threw his hands up in the air. “All right, but I’m telling you I didn’t shoot that arrow.”

  After that, Croft fell silent, but Hailey kept darting looks at him all the way back to the clubhouse, where Bryce filled out an accident report while an in-house medic took a look at her arm. Fortunately, it had stopped bleeding. The medic cleaned and bandaged the wound, which he declared was little more than a bad scrape. He said she needed a tetanus shot and an antibiotic as soon as possible, however, and gave them the name and address of a local clinic.

  When they came out of the medic’s room, Croft was nowhere in sight. Now where the hell had he gone? Bryce wondered as he handed the report to Herman Avery, the manager.

  “Where’s Croft?” Bryce asked.

  “Mr. Croft took a call and said he had to leave. He asked me to tell you he was sorry.”

  “He targeted me purposely and you just let him leave?” Hailey sounded outraged.

  “I’m sure that’s not true!” Avery cut in. “Mr. Croft said he had nothing to do with the incident, and that you were simply hysterical.”

  Wanting to keep her calm, Bryce placed a hand in the small of her back. “And yet we’d like an official investigation.” His protective instincts were fully aroused.

  Despite his vehement protestations, Croft could have shot Hailey, but surely if he had, it really had been an accident. Although how an investigation could prove that, he didn’t know.

  “Yes,
of course.” The manager looked at the report. “Okay, I know where this is. I’ll call the sheriff and see if someone can come out here this afternoon to take a look.”

  “How generous of you,” Bryce said, not bothering to temper the sarcasm in his tone. “Someone will have to drive my wife’s car back to our home.”

  “I’m sorry.” The manager looked at him as if he were an alien. “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “If you don’t want a lawsuit on your hands, find someone who does.”

  The manager choked and then said, “Yes, of course.”

  Bryce wrote down directions to the house. “Hailey, give the man your keys.”

  Hailey did as he asked, and then said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Above her protests that she would be fine by morning, Bryce got her to the nearby clinic where a doctor checked and rebandaged her wound, then gave her a tetanus shot and a prescription for the antibiotic and another for painkillers, which Hailey said she didn’t need. Nevertheless, Bryce stopped at a pharmacy in town and filled both prescriptions just in case she was in pain later.

  Rain splashed the windshield, but Bryce knew that nature was holding back for the moment, that they were in for a big storm later that night. He turned the wipers on low.

  He waited until they were halfway back to McKenna Ridge before asking Hailey, “Why is it you think Croft aimed for you on purpose?”

  “I’m not sure, but maybe it has something to do with my ability to contact the spirits at Widow’s Peak. Croft has asked me about it more than once. Maybe he has reason to not want me to hear what they have to say.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I believe a woman died there, Bryce, and not of natural causes.”

  A frisson of discomfort skittered up his spine. “You think someone had a fatal accident?”

  “Or she was murdered.”

  “Hailey…aren’t you being a little…dramatic?” At least he hoped she was.

  “I’m telling you what I felt. And saw.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought you didn’t see ghosts.”

  “The other night was the exception,” she said. “I saw her just for a few seconds. She was bleeding from her forehead, Bryce. It looked like someone had hit her in the forehead with some heavy object. The whole side of her face and neck were covered with blood.”

  Bryce’s discomfort deepened, but he didn’t want to further investigate the feeling, so he ignored it. “I don’t ever remember hearing of a murder at Widow’s Peak,” he said, realizing he had the steering wheel in a death grip.

  “Maybe the death was never reported.”

  “How could that be?”

  “What if her body wasn’t found there?”

  “If she was dumped in the lake—”

  “No. I mean, what if her body is still on the grounds somewhere?”

  Hailey’s voice was strained, making Bryce wonder what she wasn’t saying. “You think whoever killed the woman buried her on the property?”

  “It’s possible.”

  The idea gnawed at him. As much as he wanted to dismiss it, he couldn’t. “What did this woman look like?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at her face, not with all that blood. All I know for certain is that she had long dark hair and that she was dressed in fairly modern clothes, which leads me to think she died in the last twenty years.”

  Although he believed in Hailey’s ability to sense spirits in a house, Bryce was having difficulty making the connection she had. “So what does this have to do with James Croft?”

  “When he was a teenager, his family used to rent a lake house for the summer. There were several break-ins that year, and Croft and Mike Anderson were caught inside Frank Bell’s home in the middle of the night. That property adjoins Widow’s Peak,” she reminded him. “What if they broke in there, too, and the woman saw them?”

  He took his eyes off the road just for a second, long enough to see that she was absolutely serious. “You think they killed her to keep her quiet?”

  “I don’t want to think it…”

  Bryce felt as if his mind was scrambled. He’d always thought Mike was a decent guy, and while he had his issues with Croft, he just couldn’t imagine the man committing such a heinous crime. His mind went around and around with the possibility as he pulled in the drive and parked next to Hailey’s car. Apparently, the manager of the hunt club had been able to find someone to return it after all.

  “Bryce, I have something else to tell you.”

  “About Danny? I saw Ray earlier. He told me he’s giving your brother a job.”

  “I know. It’s not a great opportunity for the future, but it’s a start. Now if only Iceman will stay away from him.”

  Bryce shrugged. “As long as Danny remains in Lake Geneva, that doesn’t seem like a problem.”

  He got out of the car and walked around to her side, then, despite her protests, helped her out. When she almost stepped into him, his gut tightened and he had to fight from putting his arms around her.

  Lightning lit her beautiful face for a few seconds. Thunder rumbled, the rough sound making him want to act. Rain droplets danced along her forehead and cheeks, but she didn’t seem to mind. And the way she was looking at him, eyes wide, lips parted, made him want to take her in his arms…

  C’mon, Bryce, loosen up. I know you want to. I want it, too, so kiss me already.

  Hailey’s thoughts set Bryce on fire. But after what had happened at the hunt club, he couldn’t indulge himself again. Couldn’t take any more chances with her life. Holding himself in tight control, he backed away from her.

  She blinked and her hopeful expression closed.

  Just then, Bryce’s cell phone rang. Fetching it, he checked the caller I.D. “Mr. Avery, did the authorities come out to investigate?”

  “They did, Mr. McKenna, and they found the arrow with your wife’s blood.”

  “And?”

  “And the feathers were blue and gold. Not Mr. Croft’s color.”

  Bryce remembered Croft’s arrows had red feathers. His own had been green. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing decisive. They found several sets of footprints in the area. A party of five was on that route this morning.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Avery. If anything else comes of it, please keep me informed.”

  “Very well, sir. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from someone in the police department as well. We did return your wife’s car as requested.”

  “So I see.”

  When the manager hung up, Bryce related the news to Hailey.

  “So it wasn’t Croft after all,” she said. “Unless…he could have found someone else’s arrow and used it.”

  “But that doesn’t seem likely.”

  He didn’t like Croft, wished he’d never had to court the man, but that didn’t make him a potential killer.

  Hailey ducked her head and swept by him and raced up the few steps to the walk while Bryce closed the passenger door and set the car alarm.

  “Back to Iceman,” she said. “Avery called before I could tell you that Iceman was here today.”

  Catching up to her, he asked, “In Lake Geneva?”

  She nodded. “He tried to get Danny into a high-stakes game. Danny told him to get lost. I told him to get lost.”

  “What do you mean you did?” The drizzle turned to rain as he unlocked the door.

  “I ran into Iceman on Main Street. I couldn’t help myself. He said I wasn’t going to stop him from coming to Lake Geneva and collecting from the deep pockets living around the lake. I don’t remember seeing him before, but he said he’s been coming here to see clients for years.”

  Hailey went inside and Bryce followed, trying to remember if he’d ever seen anyone who looked like Iceman in town. Not that he knew everyone who vacationed or visited here. Then again, maybe the loan shark didn’t hang out in town but merely came to the lake houses to collect, then left once he had his money.

&nbs
p; “When did all this happen?” he asked, following her into the family room.

  “About a half hour before I left for the hunt club.”

  “Wait a minute.” Bryce quickly put two and two together. “You had a public argument with him and an hour later someone aimed an arrow at your back.”

  “You don’t really think it could have been Ice man?”

  “Why not?”

  “Where would he learn to use a bow and arrow?”

  “Maybe he never did,” Bryce said, walking to the windows and staring out at the lake. The storm had already kicked up. Rain deluged the area. “That would explain why a supposed hunter barely grazed you. That’s twice now that you told Iceman off and then something happened to you right afterward. First you almost drowned and then you were almost shot. I’m going to call Reilly, see if he can’t find a reason to get that man off the street.”

  “That’s a good idea just in general. Even if he didn’t try to hurt me, remember he threatened to kill Danny.” Thinking of Hailey’s well-being, Bryce couldn’t wait any longer. He couldn’t wait until after she was killed. He turned to face her. “This is my fault, Hailey.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sheelin O’Keefe’s curse on the McKennas. Since you got involved with me, you came close to being killed. Twice.”

  “But how could it be the family curse when you don’t love me?”

  Those words twisted his insides. He didn’t know how he felt about her. Certainly not neutral. Certainly more than he had going into the marriage. But he couldn’t love her. Wouldn’t. Because if he did love Hailey, he would be condemning her, and he wanted to believe he could still let her go and she would be safe.

  “How I feel doesn’t matter, Hailey.”

  “Apparently it does.”

  Her wistful tone was like a punch to the gut. “Look,” he said, “I vowed years ago never to fall in love.”

  “Because of your mother?”

  “And because of the other McKennas who have lost the women and men they loved.”

  Too many to count. He’d heard the stories all his life, but he hadn’t really believed until the prophecy had struck his own family. Losing his mother had changed him.

  “Grania told me you feel guilty about your mom’s disappearance,” Hailey said, “but I don’t understand. What did that have to do with you?”