“He’d know.”
“Victor said you reminded him of an impressionist painting of a rogue wolf in human form. I think Costello’s bent for classical music brought out his artistic side.”
“It gave the rest of us headaches.”
“You have no poetry in your soul, Rogan. And apparently no rhythm.”
“You think?”
The sexual gleam came through even though she could see only half his face and nothing of his eyes.
In an effort to keep the mood level, Jasmine bumped his shoulder. “Carla liked you.” She made another casual three-sixty. “Did she ever say anything?”
“I don’t invite that kind of admission.”
“You’d rather keep it at raw sex and a predawn vanishing act.”
Now he regarded her. “Are you still angry with me for leaving after Ballard’s service?”
“I was never angry, and it was after sex after the service.”
He stopped, cupped her chin and tipped her head up. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. My life’s complicated. And dangerous.”
“Yes, I got that part the moment I met you. According to Victor, there was a rumor floating around that you had a twin brother, which explained how you could pull off such radically different personas. Then he told me he had a twin brother himself, and our conversation sidetracked because my mother has twin sisters—Aunt Bridget and Aunt Kathleen—who are freakily alike. In Victor’s case, he and his twin only look freakily alike. They’re actually polar opposites. He said that Cyrus—his brother—isn’t just older by three minutes but meaner to the nth degree.”
“Good twin balances bad twin?”
“More like good twin balances less-good twin, I think. Cyrus is a cop, too. I’m not sure where. Boxman came in while Victor and I were talking and started shouting at Dukes for not having dinner ready. He got really belligerent—Boxman did—which surprised me, because I thought they were good friends. Boxman accused Dukes of spending too much time playing computer solitaire. He said Dukes needed to get with the safe-house program. Dukes told him if he wanted to be nagged, he could go into town and phone his wife.”
“That’s called family dynamics.” Keeping her hand firmly in his, Rogan resumed the downward trek. “And before you ask, my family was normal. Not emotionally close, but not dysfunctional, either. Easier just to go our separate ways.”
She wasn’t sure that sounded normal. However, the fact that he’d spoken of his childhood at all surprised her enough that she left it alone.
A faint grin appeared as the silence stretched out. “It’s not like you to wind down, Jasmine. I can’t believe you don’t have a thousand questions or comments racing around in that beautiful head of yours.”
“Many thousands,” she agreed. “But I was trying to remember what we were talking about that led us to our brief discourse on the structure of families.”
It was a lie, outright and absolute. What she’d really been thinking about was the night they’d spent together six weeks ago and whether or not she would magic it out of her memory if she could. Probably not, but knowing his thoughts on family life made being with him here in Raven’s Cove a struggle. In so many ways, their needs and wants continued to be worlds apart.
“You were telling me about life at the safe house,” he told her, and she smiled.
“That’s right, Carla liked you. But you, being you and totally focused, managed not to notice.”
“Not totally focused, love.” His head-to-toe gaze was hot enough to leave scorch marks on her skin. “I have occasional moments of distraction. Anyway, Carla’s married to a guy I work with from time to time.”
Jasmine rubbed at the heat in her midsection. “Married, separated, reunited, separated again, pregnant—wonder who the baby looks like?—and last I heard from Costello, thinking about filing for divorce.”
“The good lieutenant seems to have kept you better informed than the rest of us.”
“Than you, Rogan. You don’t invite gossip any more than you do admissions of love. Or in Carla’s case, lust, because I also heard she slept with one of the other cops at the safe house during our confinement.”
“Dukes?”
“Could be. I gather his wife has had—control issues. And more than a few affairs. From what Dukes and Boxman told me, I don’t envision a particularly pleasant woman.”
“I’ve met her.” He studied the street names. “Your vision’s dead-on.”
Jasmine regarded the shop they were passing. A hand-painted sign in the window boasted that all things raven, from lip balm to tattoos, were available inside.
Peering past Rogan down a misty side road, she let a shiver ripple through her. “Why do I feel like no matter where we go, how fast or how far, that we’re being watched?”
“Because we are.”
“Do you realize we haven’t seen a single person since we started down? It’s 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday, the stores are open and the storm’s moved on. Whether visible or not, nine hundred and seventy-six souls live in Raven’s Cove. It stands to reason that more than one of them would be watching a pair of strangers navigate the stairs that appear to constitute the main sidewalk of their cliffside town. My question is, why aren’t we seeing any of them back? What?” she asked when he drew her to the left. “We’re not going all the way to the dock?”
“Not unless you want to buy lunch right off the boat. Police station’s on this street.”
“So you did accomplish something on your sojourn last night.”
“We’ll find out” was all he said.
Since pulling teeth wasn’t her best skill, she decided to wait him out. Or better yet, let Boxman do the extracting.
The police station possessed the air of a quaint New England shop. It sat slightly apart from its neighbors and had a waist-high fence surrounding it. Ravens perched on every third post. Most of them were fake. Two of them weren’t. Their black eyes trailed them through the gate and up five short stairs to the door.
“It’s like we’re passing through an Alfred Hitchcock movie,” Jasmine remarked. “No background music, only footsteps and the eerie rustle of feathers.”
A second later, Rogan opened the door, and the illusion vanished.
“I swear to heaven and hell, Wesley, I’d do better having old Rooney Blume for a deputy.”
The police chief, a solidly built man in his late fifties, pivoted away from a younger, beefier male currently hunched next to a dented filing cabinet.
“You told me not to let anyone in.” Wesley trained his eyes on the floor. “I did what you said and stayed put all night.”
“Sawing enough damn logs to build the new station house we need but I’ll never see, if you don’t start doing your damn job and stop making me look like a baboon with a gun. With you in a minute,” he fired over his shoulder at the new arrivals. “Now I want you to tell me what you did after—” Halting, he swung slowly on his heel to stare. Then held out his arms and gave an incredulous laugh. “Rogan? Is that you? My God, it is. Still alive and breathing without a respirator. Last time I saw you, four of us were taking on ten in a New York City alley. Three of us lived to limp away. Only one of the ten survived, and he had to be stretchered out.” He clapped Rogan soundly on both arms. “I never figured on seeing you again, and here you’ve turned up in my windy speck of a town.”
“He’s like a bad penny that way,” Jasmine remarked.
His brows lifting in speculation, the chief moved a finger between them. “You’re with him?” Then to Rogan. “She’s with you?”
“For a few more revolutions,” Jasmine said.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Should I know what you’re talking about?”
“Only if you live on a carousel.”
“In other words, no.” Rogan flicked a look at the deputy, who seemed to want the shadows to swallow him up.
The tension returned. The chief’s lips thinned. “Right. Back to business. Except…” With a subtle head motion at Jasmin
e, he aimed a questioning look at Rogan.
Intercepting it, Jasmine held out her hand. “Elizabeth McCabe. My friends call me Jasmine Ellis. Michael here still prefers the name Rogan.”
“Cover story?” the chief assumed.
Rogan moved a shoulder. “That was the plan.”
“Life’s all about plans. Ian Cutless,” he said to Jasmine. Then he made a showcase gesture. “And this, my friends, is the nephew of the woman I’m currently seeing. His name’s Wesley Hamilton-Blume. His favorite pastimes are eating, sleeping and blowing up bad guys on his iPhone. Sound impressive? Well, let’s see. He can outgun any gaming adversary online, and eat more blueberry pies than the three of us combined.” His expression hardened. “He can also lose prisoners like nobody’s business.”
“I didn’t lose him,” the deputy defended. His gaze dropped back to the floor. “He escaped.”
“Escaped,” the chief repeated. “While you slept off a massive dinner in your—no, my—chair.” He held up a finger to count. “I leave town at 3:00 p.m. Deputy collects the prisoner’s meal tray at five-thirty. Then deputy lumbers off and doesn’t check the cells again until I get back at—” he regarded his watch “—ten forty-five the following day. I go in, and what do I find? Fresh scratch marks around the lock, a lump of nothing under the blanket and two black feathers lying on the pillow.”
“Feathers?” Slithery knots formed in Jasmine’s stomach. “Why feathers?”
“Because my now-gone prisoner likes to thumb his nose at the law. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice enough fellow most days. Eccentric, but that’s normal in this town. Teaches at the local school.”
Oh, damn, Jasmine thought. “What did your prisoner do to get arrested?”
“He broke in here and started diddling with my office computer. I caught him doing the same thing earlier and warned him, but did he listen? No. Yesterday afternoon he was back doing it again. So I invited him to spend the night in one of our cells. Evidently—” he shot the deputy a virulent look “—he chose not to accept.”
“What’s his name?” Jasmine hated to ask.
“Mud when I get hold of him. But in the day to day, he goes by Grant, Lenny Grant.”
Chapter Seven
“I knew this would happen.” Jasmine stormed into Daniel’s cottage, mindless of the magazines that swayed in her wake. “Daniel’s gone, we’re here, and so is the legend that got him two death feathers and me one. I can’t believe I was worried about him. He’s a cat with nine hundred lives. Okay, maybe you didn’t know your friend Ian Cutless was the police chief here when we were in Salem, but all you had to do was call. We could have saved ourselves a long trip and the thrill of spending the night in a paper jungle.”
Rogan leaned a shoulder on the door frame. “You’re forgetting, Cutless was in Portland last night. And Daniel escaped from his cell sometime between when the chief left and when he returned.”
“Are you telling me that Wesley is the only deputy this town has?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Her lips tipped into a false smile. “In that case, your old friend’s an idiot.”
“Wesley’s father is the mayor.”
“And his aunt’s dating the chief. Still an idiot.”
“Doesn’t alter the fact that we had to come.”
“No? Huh.” When Boris poked his nose into her leg, she bent to pet him. “So tell me again, Rogan—or maybe it’s for the first time—how do you expect to catch a murderer into whose hands we appear to be playing?”
Although he found this side of her strangely arousing, Rogan knew better than to mention it. Or get too close to her right now. Pushing off, he headed for the nearest window. “We let the killer think we’re playing by his rules. Then we slip our own cards into the mix and hopefully control the outcome.”
She swiped a line with her hand. “Forget cards and who’s playing by whose rules. Do you think we’re dealing—don’t say it—with Malcolm Wainwright or not?”
“I think Wainwright’s dead.” Unable to fully shake the sensation of being watched that had been plaguing him for most of the day, Rogan eased the blind aside. “I also don’t believe his death’s being avenged. That could be wishful thinking on my part, but I still wouldn’t put it at the top of the list.”
She watched him as he moved from window to window. “What would you put there? A big question mark?”
“For the moment, yes.”
“But there is a connection to Daniel.”
“And the trial and the safe house. I just haven’t figured out where the lines intersect.” His eyes traveled over mist-covered bushes to the dense stand of trees behind them. “Tell me, Jasmine, how did Daniel take your divorce?”
“Excuse me?”
Rogan’s lips curved. “Was he okay with it, or, like most red-blooded males would have done, did he try to win you back?”
She knocked one of the stacks with her hip and had to make a quick grab to save it. “I’m not a poker chip. Our marriage didn’t work out. We grew apart rather than together. And if you’re suggesting that Daniel might be behind these murders or my feather, you’re wrong.”
“Only a question.”
“There you go. Question answered. Next suspect.”
“I’ll let you know when I have one.” His gaze cruised over a fog-shrouded rowboat trapped in the underbrush. “Did you still feel like we were being watched after we left Cutless’s office?”
“Are you kidding?” She headed for the kitchen with Boris trotting along behind her. “I’m feeling it now, and we’re inside. Uh…”
He knew what the look she shot him meant and grinned as he surveyed a clump of wild berry bushes. “There’s no one inside with us. Ask Boris.”
The growl he heard in response didn’t come from the dog.
When the bushes revealed nothing, he followed her to the kitchen. And almost bowled her over in the doorway.
“What?” he said, then lowered his gaze to the table, where Boxman sat crunching cornflakes, drinking beer and wearing nothing but his underwear.
At their combined stare, the big man glanced down at his striped boxers. “I got wet tromping through the woods looking for Daniel’s bod— Looking for Daniel.”
“We, uh, hmm…” Jasmine drummed up a smile. “No idea what to say.”
Rogan had a few ideas, but none worth uttering.
A thought had been nagging him since last night, and it had nothing to do with being watched. Or maybe it did, but only in a roundabout way.
Drawing Jasmine back to the main room, he said, “The guy on the phone yesterday—you heard him more clearly than I did. Can you remember his exact words?”
She glanced away. “He said he was my nemesis, my fate, and I should look for the feathery token he’d left on my front door. He mentioned a bird and death. Then he told me I was going to suffer the way he’d suffered before he died.”
The words came back, and with them the altered voice. The tone.
“He’s angry.” Rogan ran it again to be sure. “He was trying to taunt you while he frightened you.”
“News flash. He succeeded.”
“Only on your end. On his, the intonation changed. He tightened up when he said you were going to suffer.”
“That makes two of us.
A smile touched Rogan’s mouth, but there was no humor in it. “When he told you he’d suffered, he got even tighter. By the time he reached the last three words, his teeth were clenched.”
“And that means?”
Rogan let grim purpose blend with the darkness that had lived inside him for more than half his life. “It’s personal, Jasmine. He sees you as having killed him in some way. And whatever the cost, he’s determined to make you pay.”
* * *
RATHER THAN LIFT, THE FOG actually sank by midafternoon. Jasmine knew Rogan hadn’t meant to make things worse for her by saying what he had. She also understood he wanted to ease her mind when, during lunch, he suggeste
d a change of sleeping accommodations. What he came up with was an enormous cliffside mansion called Blume House. She suspected it was the place Boxman had mentioned last night. The Blumes being the source of the local legend, Jasmine wasn’t entirely convinced that the mansion-turned-inn could do much to settle her nerves, but as she climbed from Rogan’s truck late that afternoon, she had to admit the place impressed.
Like everything else in and around Raven’s Cove, Blume House might have been plucked from another era. Another world, actually, the kind where darkness was both a state of mind and a state of existence.
The faded gray structure wrapped around a massive courtyard like a gothic fortress. Within the courtyard stood a fountain, twenty-five feet across and shaped like a bird’s nest. Two enormous stone ravens spouted water from their beaks. Gnarled branches with pointed tips stretched to the top of the second-floor windows and cradled both the birds and their nest.
The house itself had an air of despair. Like the man who’d been transformed into a raven, it seemed to be waiting for some kind of elusive miracle to occur.
Given the nature of the tale, Jasmine thought it might have a very long wait.
On the porch, she and Rogan opened the creaking entry doors.
“Better than a bell,” she remarked and let the combined smells of fall flowers, must and furniture polish wash over her.
The bloodred carpet was ancient, the ebony banister scarred, and somewhere, someone was playing Hayden on a raspy organ.
She tested the newel post for strength. “For what it’s worth, this would make a fantastic museum.”
“Try mausoleum or funeral parlor.” Rogan looked around. “As hotels go, it lacks a certain ambience.”
“It wouldn’t if we were in the Black Forest.” She walked ahead of him. “The cashier at the general store told me the place was shipped across the Atlantic piece by piece from Germany in the late 1600s and jigsawed back together over the next decade.”
Rogan raised his eyes to rafters so heavily shadowed they quite literally disappeared. “I believe it.”
Jasmine peered into the first of many rooms that branched off from the great hall.
Raven's Cove - Jenna Ryan Page 6