The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  She had on a red flannel shirt over a ribbed tank top and what looked like men’s boxer shorts. Unlaced running shoes on her feet. Her short hair was tousled just the way he’d pictured it.

  “You didn’t have any coffee,” he said. “That put me over the edge.”

  “There’s coffee. There’s always coffee in my place.”

  “Where?”

  “The Vermont cracker tin in the fridge.”

  “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

  She hunched her shoulders. “It’s cooled off, hasn’t it? I can smell fall in the air. You want to tell me where you’re going?”

  “No.” He glanced at her strong legs. “You lift weights?”

  “Three times a week.”

  “Good. You can carry me if I pass out from all this walking.”

  “You’re Special Forces, Brooker. You can take on an army even with the shit knocked out of you.”

  He remembered how he’d found her in the cave in the bluff along the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Tied up, battered, worn out, keeping her eye out for snakes—and determined to help Sarah Dunnemore and Nate Winter no matter what condition she was in. Marshal Juliet. She’d tried to get his gun off him.

  She sighed, as if she knew what she was about to say wasn’t in her best interest. “There’s a place we can stop for coffee on the way. Just give me two secs to put on some clothes.”

  “On the way where?”

  “Ravenkill. That’s where you’re headed, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t respond.

  Her mouth was a straight, grim line. A cool breeze blew the ends of her short curls in every direction. “You were in the Netherlands last week. You flew in to New York on Monday.”

  “You searched my backpack,” Ethan said.

  “See? I learn from my mistakes.”

  “Juliet—”

  “You’re a very dangerous guy who can’t come to terms with your wife’s violent death.” She spoke quietly, sincerely. “You blame yourself. You torture yourself with guilt and regrets.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Longstreet.”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “It’ll destroy you if you don’t get a grip.”

  He stopped dead on the sidewalk. She didn’t flinch. He faced her squarely. “Here’s the thing. I don’t care.”

  “That would make you even more dangerous—if it were true.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” he said, turning around and starting back toward her apartment.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m taking you up on your offer to drive me to Ravenkill.” He glanced back at her, noticing she hadn’t made a move to follow him. “I hate subways.”

  “As I recall, you aren’t much on my truck, either.”

  She didn’t have the keys on her, and he didn’t want to go back up to her apartment with her. Speaking of dangerous, he thought. He leaned against the passenger door and pushed back the thready start of a headache, shutting his eyes against the bright hit of sunlight.

  He remembered the cool water running under him yesterday in Ravenkill Creek.

  The sun bearing down on him.

  Before that, he remembered the sensation of falling, an out-of-control sprawl down the steep riverbank.

  He’d hit a rock. More than one rock. He could feel the bruises on his hip and the small of his back, sharpening his memory.

  He went very still against Juliet’s truck. He kept his eyes shut but could hear the swish of New York’s morning rush-hour traffic.

  He could hear the sound behind him again, an intake of breath, as if someone were summoning the strength to—

  “To hurl a fucking rock at me.”

  Had he spoken out loud?

  Opening his eyes, he became aware of New Yorkers hurrying past him without making eye contact, which didn’t necessarily mean he’d been talking to himself.

  But he had it now. He remembered at least some of what had happened yesterday.

  Someone had beaned him with a goddamn rock and sent him sprawling, not giving a rat’s ass whether he broke into a million pieces or landed in the river and drowned.

  It wasn’t kids throwing rocks in the river for fun and hitting him by mistake. An accident. A kid might run off in a panic but wouldn’t have taken that measured breath. Ethan was sure he hadn’t made it up. He remembered.

  It could have been anyone. Raleigh. Maggie Spencer. Rob Dunnemore. The couple who owned the inn. Another guest.

  Ethan hadn’t thought of any suspects at the time. He’d gone into survival mode, doing what he could to limit damage to his head and internal organs even as he knew he was going to lose consciousness.

  He stood up from Juliet’s truck. Either someone had deliberately hit him, or he’d just dreamed up the whole scenario and he’d simply lost his footing.

  His marshal rescuer came out of her building, dressed and armed.

  He didn’t know how he’d kept his hands off her.

  Rescuer. Juliet wouldn’t see herself that way. He’d played on her good instincts—her natural desire to trust and help a former army major who just wanted to find answers to his wife’s murder.

  Char. She’d want him to get on with his life.

  But how the hell could he be thinking about taking Juliet Longstreet to bed when he didn’t have all the answers to Char’s death? When yesterday had raised fresh questions?

  He shook off his guilt and misgivings and smiled at Juliet. “Ready to roll?”

  “As ready as I’m going to be.”

  Ethan didn’t ask her if she’d called her chief deputy before she’d headed back downstairs. Either way, she wouldn’t want to tell him.

  And somehow he knew she hadn’t, and that she wouldn’t want him to remind her she should have.

  They got into the truck and Juliet started the engine with a rattle and roar. Ethan rolled down his window and smelled the soot and the cool late-summer air.

  “You’re taking a risk driving me to Ravenkill,” he said.

  “Hell, Brooker.” She looked over at him and grinned. “I took a risk not shooting you on sight the day I met you on President Poe’s front lawn.”

  Ethan didn’t know if he’d tell her someone had tried to kill him yesterday.

  But he might. They had at least an hour’s drive ahead of them. There was time.

  “That’s all you marshals needed in May. One more body.”

  “Yeah,” she said, screeching up the block. “It’s all we need now, too. You’re up to this drive?”

  “Once you find me some coffee, I’ll be up to anything.”

  She managed a smile. “That probably should worry me.”

  And he grinned back at her, as sexily as he could. “Probably should.”

  But she just made a hiss of mock disgust and reminded him she had five brothers.

  Char had a younger sister who still hated him. So did her parents. None of them, Ethan thought, without reason.

  Eighteen

  Rob ran one finger through a thin film of dust on a rustic pine chest in the Franconias’ antiques shop. They didn’t rely on walk-in customers, which, he figured, was probably a good thing. There was no one to mind the store. A small sign urged shoppers to browse on their own and check at the inn if they needed help.

  Trusting.

  He’d knocked on the door to the Franconias’ second-floor residence, but got no answer. On his way over to the barn, Star had waved to him from a tall blueberry bush. For all he knew, Andrew was off picking beans.

  Maggie had to be up by now.

  Rob shook off any thought of her and threaded his way through the furniture and glassware. His own place back in Brooklyn was a mix of hand-me-down furniture from friends and a few odd pieces he’d picked up out of necessity. He wasn’t putting down roots in Brooklyn. Even in Night’s Landing, his family had never been into antiques and fine furnishings—they bought what worked for the place, what was comfortable, what would last.

  He supposed, by definition, antiq
ues lasted.

  He swore under his breath and stood on the wood ramp that led into the barn.

  What the hell was he doing in Ravenkill?

  The clear morning air, at least, provided a welcome contrast to the dust.

  He’d gone to The Hague partly because of Nick Janssen’s arrest, but it’d boiled down to reporters—to escaping the reverberations of his family’s long friendship with John Wesley Poe. For the first time since the Central Park shooting, Rob was up against the full impact of his relationship with the president on his work as a marshal. They’d both treated their friendship with discretion, especially once Wes entered presidential politics.

  But the anonymity they’d enjoyed was shattered now. Everyone knew he was President Poe’s surrogate son. There was no changing it. It was a fact.

  Nick Janssen’s arrest had renewed public interest in the Poe-Janssen-Dunnemore connection. If it turned out Janssen had hired his own private assassin—someone who’d killed at least two people already—the media would have a feeding frenzy.

  Because of Rob’s injuries and Sarah’s near death at the hands of a madman, their mother had been spared some of the ordeal of being hounded to explain her past, her connections to both the criminal mastermind now sitting in a Dutch jail and the self-made millionaire and dedicated public servant now in the White House. Nick Janssen, Wes Poe and Betsy Dunnemore had all gone to Vanderbilt together. Thirty years later, Janssen had tried to use that connection to get himself a pardon, a wild flight of fantasy that had resulted in violence, death and his own exposure as something more than a tax evader.

  In a candid press conference not long after the foiled pardon-extortion scheme, President Poe had admitted he barely remembered Janssen, who’d transferred after his freshman year because of money problems.

  Rob still had a hard time fathoming that his mother and Wes had been an item in college, their brief romance long in the past. Both were happy in their subsequent marriages. Wes and his wife hadn’t let the tragedy of losing four babies rip them apart. Instead, they’d become even tighter.

  The events of the past were facts none of them could escape, Rob thought.

  He couldn’t just turn the page on his own past and have it all be different.

  As he walked back out to the stone path, Rob could see himself back in Night’s Landing, sitting on the dock with Wes as they’d dangled their feet in the Cumberland and talked fishing and snakes and baseball.

  Wes. Why couldn’t you have stayed home and become a damn banker?

  It was what the Poe sisters had wanted for the boy they’d found on their doorstep as a baby and raised. Roots, home, continuity, a simple life. Those were their values. Even Nashville was a long way from what Leola and Violet knew. They were suspicious of politicians and ambition, rigid in their belief that all the good life Wes could ever want—all the contribution he needed to make—could be realized on their quiet stretch of the Cumberland River.

  Yet, they’d have applauded his inauguration as president in January. They’d have dressed up and gone to the balls and had a grand time, because they’d come to understand, finally, that Wes was doing what he was meant to do.

  When he went home to recuperate in May, Rob had paid more attention to the nuances of the relationships among his family and neighbors. For long weeks, he’d sat on the porch, taken the boat out on the river, explored the caves and sinkholes and trails of his home—and he’d tried to figure out what he’d missed by insisting that Night’s Landing didn’t matter to him. He’d never had the firm, clear connection to family and home that Sarah did. He didn’t have her ability to whip up one of Granny Dunnemore’s old casserole recipes and have it conjure up memory and meaning.

  He saw Maggie coming toward him, the sunlight on her red hair, and shook off the assault of introspection.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “No wonder Wes worries.”

  He suddenly wished he could whisk Agent Spencer away from Ravenkill and her own memories, her own questions and doubts.

  “Have you seen Andrew Franconia?” she asked, squinting at him, all professional this morning. Only the hint of color in her cheeks, the way she didn’t quite look him in the eye, told Rob that last night just might be on her mind.

  He shook his head. “Maybe he’s gone fishing. What’re you up to?”

  In a carefully neutral tone, she repeated her conversation with Star Franconia, describing Star’s shattered state of mind, her recollections about Philip Spencer and Charlene Brooker. Rob knew Maggie had to be reeling from the information, but she kept her reactions to herself, under rigid control.

  They continued on the path toward the inn. “I’ve never heard a hint that Char Brooker had anything to do with your father or William Raleigh, but that’s not necessarily something I’d know. You? Do you think she could she have worked on your father’s murder case?”

  Maggie gave a tight shake of the head. “No idea.”

  “What about your pal Raleigh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “From what I gather from Nate, whatever the two of them did is closely held.” Rob gestured back toward the Franconias’ barn shop. “Did your father have an interest in antiques?”

  “Not that I knew of. An Austrian crystal vase…” She looked skeptical. “It wasn’t in his personal effects, not that I ever saw. Libby was the one who found the vase. We could ask her if she knows anything. Maybe he bought it as a gift—maybe it’s got nothing to do with anything. He, Char Brooker and Tom Kopac could all have ended up sharing information on an antiques dealer and a beautiful Hudson River Valley inn. Then we got hold of bits and pieces and put them together all wrong.”

  “You believe in that kind of coincidence?”

  She scowled. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. My father—” But she broke off, refusing to go on. “Never mind. That doesn’t matter, either.”

  There was the slightest edge to her voice, a hint of the anger she had to feel at having lost a father she’d never really had a chance to know. But she didn’t want to face her resentment, her own guilt at missed opportunities—something Rob could understand.

  He found himself accepting her natural reserve instead of trying to fix it. “Janssen thought my mother would leave my father when he got old. Then he’d be there. For all I know, it’s still what he thinks. It’s tough to know what goes on between two people, but I don’t see my parents splitting up.”

  “My parents had been divorced for years when my father was killed.” Maggie spoke quietly but not easily, without that urge to blurt out everything that Rob so often encountered. “But my mother still felt guilty. I think she believed his death was partly her fault.”

  “She’s never said?”

  “We don’t have those kinds of talks. She didn’t drive my father away. He had a bad case of wanderlust from as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t a surprise to her. I guess she accepted it at first. But then, she just got sick of his long absences. I don’t think she meant to.”

  “They say Charlene and Ethan Brooker spent less than a month together in the last two years of their marriage.”

  Maggie nodded. “Part of Brooker’s drive to get all the answers to his wife’s murder could be guilt. They drifted. He had his work, she had her work.”

  “She was killed and he wasn’t there.”

  And she’d told everyone she was in Amsterdam on holiday, Rob recalled from his briefings. Alone.

  “The Franconias’ marriage is stressed,” Maggie said. “For all we know, Char Brooker told my father they were a good source for a nice antique. Who knows? They got together, Libby Smith showed up in Prague. None of it could mean anything.”

  “People’s relationships sometimes are complicated.”

  But Maggie wasn’t touching that one. “Do we know where Major Brooker is?”

  Rob didn’t push her. “Probably still with Longstreet. The FBI is going to want to talk to these guys. Raleigh and Brooker, the Franconias and Libby Smith. You.”

/>   She nodded. “I’ll fill George Bremmerton in when I get a chance. We need to find out if my father ever met Char Brooker—and Tom. My God. Tom was just a dedicated foreign service officer.”

  “Maggie—”

  She held up a hand. “It’s okay. I just have to accept this awful sense of impotence, that I could have and should have done more. What happened on Saturday—” She turned away, as if she needed to make herself look at the flowers and the morning sun instead of whatever images were flooding her mind. “I want whoever killed Tom caught. I want to make sure nobody else dies.”

  Rob touched her shoulder, remembered the feel of her skin under his hands last night. “I’ll find Andrew. Then I’ll call Chief Rivera and let him know what’s going on.”

  “Can you reach Deputy Longstreet and have her sit on Brooker?”

  Rob smiled. “I imagine she’s not letting him out of her sight.”

  “I’ll find Libby and hang on to her and Star.” Maggie paused, her expression serious, the raw emotion of just a minute ago gone now. “We need to find Raleigh, too. I doubt he’s told me everything.”

  Rob decided this wasn’t the time to agree with her. They split up at the porch steps, Maggie heading back inside while he veered off to check around outside for the inn’s co-owner.

  A quick look into the vegetable and herb gardens turned up nothing.

  Nobody at the fairy statue or in the gazebo.

  But when he reached the side of the house, Rob saw that the cellar door was ajar and eased down the slope to it, the grass slippery from last night’s rain. He had to put his shoulder into the effort to push the door open wider, its rusted hinges creaking from lack of use. He wasn’t exactly making a stealthy entrance.

  “Ms. Smith?” he called. “Mr. Franconia? Anyone down here?”

  His eyes had to adjust after being out in the bright sun. The cellar was cool, dark and damp. He felt along the wall for a light switch, trying to remember what kind of light had been in the hall.

  But he heard a moan and turned sharply.

  In the dim light, he made out the silhouette of a man in the wine cellar, sunk against the wooden shelves and racks, the door wide open.