Sweet Dreams Boxed Set

by Brenda Novak

  “How much does this guy hate you?”

  “A lot, but it comes with the territory as a prosecutor, even a junior prosecutor. You get some who don’t take our role personally and realize we’re doing our jobs, and you get some who want to mop the floor with us. You know how it is.”

  “I like my role in enforcing the law,” Luke said in that subtle-yet-not-subtle way he had.

  “I bet you do,” Ellen said. “I can’t see anyone mopping the floor with you.”

  He winked. “That’s good.”

  He grabbed a small plate and helped himself to cubes of cheese and sliced fruit from a tray on the table. He offered Ellen some, but she shook her head. She wasn’t hungry. She was still thrown off by his presence and Maggie’s retreat. Her sister’s emotions seemed downright erratic, especially for someone who usually kept her emotions hidden even from those closest to her. Now they seemed all over the place.

  Luke tackled his plate of fruit and cheese. He didn’t appear to have any trouble eating, but Ellen knew he was watching her, studying her—deliberately creating a void of silence. If she was hiding anything, he meant to find out. That was the clear message she got from him.

  Either that, or he was just enjoying the reception.

  An attractive, well-dressed older woman approached them and introduced herself as the wife of the couple who owned the cabin Maggie was borrowing for a few days. She handed Ellen a folded piece of notebook paper. “Maggie asked me to give this to you.”

  Ellen felt Luke go on alert, straightening as he set his plate on a side table and stood close to her. “Where is Maggie now?” she asked.

  “I saw her heading out. I assumed she wasn’t feeling well.”

  Her hands shaking, Ellen unfolded the paper, which looked as if it had been torn out of one of her sister’s ubiquitous Moleskine notebooks. She half expected Luke to read it over her shoulder, but he gave her enough space—barely—to read the note on her own.

  Dear Maggie,

  I decided to leave for the cabin early. I thought this might happen once I finished my talk. I got a late checkout at the hotel and put my bag in the trunk before we met in the lobby. I need this time. Please don’t worry. I don’t know if I’ll have cell phone service at the lake, but I’ll be fine, regardless. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. Have champagne tonight with Luke instead!

  xoxo

  Maggie

  Ellen resisted crumpling the note. Had Maggie’s trip to the ladies’ room been a ruse—a cover for her exit from the reception and from her sister’s and Luke’s scrutiny? Had she had the note written already when she and Ellen had talked a few minutes ago?

  Had her sister engineered her exit so Ellen could be alone with Luke tonight?

  Stifling her emotions—an unhealthy mix of anger, frustration and worry—she shoved the note at Luke.

  He scanned it and handed it back. “Do you know where this cabin is located?”

  She shook her head.

  “We need to find it,” he said. “And we need someone to lay eyes on Hugh Parker.”

  ***

  Ellen rolled down the passenger window in Luke’s rental car, breathing in the cool afternoon air. She got directions to the cabin from the professor who had given her Maggie’s note. No sign of concern. None. There was no landline at the cabin and only spotty cell coverage, she’d explained. But Ellen didn’t plan to call, anyway. She wanted to see her sister face-to-face. Eye to eye. Ask her what was going on. No excuses now not to explain. Her talk was done, and it had been a success.

  It did occur to Ellen that she was overreacting in part because of Luke. His presence always super-charged her emotions. She’d gone back to the hotel with him. They’d grabbed their bags and she’d checked out. With a little luck, they’d find Maggie, and she’d prove to them nothing was going with her on other than a preoccupied, stressed-out academic needing time to herself and not quite knowing how to tell her sister and a Texas Ranger to buzz off.

  And someone would find Hugh Parker nowhere near Saratoga Springs.

  Then Ellen would have to find a place to spend the night, or catch a late-evening flight back to Austin—but she would cross that bridge when she got to it.

  Luke surprised her by not wanting to talk about Parker, at least not right now. “Hugh Parker is your basic manipulator.” He continued another half mile, silent, one hand on the wheel, before he continued. “Tell me about your trip to the Adirondacks when you and Maggie were eighteen.”

  “Luke…” Ellen breathed in more of the clean, beautiful mountain air. “What do you know?”

  “What I read in the file.”

  Bad guy came after estranged wife of a Texas Ranger and their twin teenage daughters. Bad guy lost. Twins survived. Texas Ranger and wife reconciled.

  What else was there for Luke to know?

  But Ellen thought she understood what he was getting at. “It was scary. Frightening.” Her voice sounded distant to her—almost as if she were talking about someone else. “It was winter. My mother, Maggie and I were at a cabin in the Adirondacks. My dad was on the way but we didn’t know that. This man kidnapped Maggie and me and left us out in the snow and the cold. But we always knew our parents would find us. Always.”

  “Are you sure Maggie knew?”

  “Yes,” Ellen said without hesitation.

  “You’re a prosecutor, Ellen. Pretend you’re a witness and you’re deciding if you’re going to put yourself on the stand to help your case. Let me ask the question again. Are you sure Maggie knew you two would be all right?”

  “She mostly knew. She could have had moments of doubt.”

  “And you?”

  “I didn’t allow doubt to enter my mind.”

  “Maggie’s more…” He eased in to the right lane of the interstate. “More contemplative.”

  “Contemplative, Luke?’

  He glanced at her. Ellen could see he wasn’t going to let her change the subject or the mood. “Maggie looks at every angle, every possibility, every piece of evidence—whether it’s research into Jane Austen or whether it’s proof she’s not going to freeze to death tied to a rock with her twin sister. That’s one reason she’s a good academic. You don’t look at every angle, Ellen. You see the prize and go for it. That’s one reason you make a good prosecutor.”

  “I have to consider every angle,” Ellen said, trying to keep any defensiveness out of her tone.

  Luke shook his head. “Not like Maggie does. It’s not as natural for you as it is for her. I just listened to her presentation on Jane Austen. You tell me you’ve ever considered even one-tenth of what she talked about.”

  “But that was the point.”

  He drove on. Traffic was sparse and the scenery was breathtaking. “What if your experience eight years ago is haunting Maggie? What if the invitation to speak at Skidmore stirred up memories she’s buried all this time?”

  “We’re not the type to bury memories. We get things out in the open.”

  “Were you and Maggie together the whole time after you were kidnapped?”

  Ellen nodded. “The whole time.”

  “Bet not,” Luke said, matter-of-fact.

  “Look, I get your point,” Ellen said. “Something could have happened to Maggie that didn’t happen to me, and she’s never told anyone.”

  “Do you think that’s the case?”

  She stared straight ahead at the interstate, flanked by wooded hills. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Chapter 4

  Maggie Galway unlocked the front door to the small two-bedroom cabin. She used the key the owners had given to her, and she was already in love with the place. If not for her guilt at cutting out on her sister and Luke Jackson, she would have squealed with pleasure at the cabin’s sheer perfection. Its location, its size, its homey décor, its stunning setting on a crystal-clear Adirondack lake. Even the choice of the locally made soap and shampoo in the bathroom was perfect.

  This would work, Maggie thought as sh
e set her suitcase on the floor by the kitchen table. She would finish the rewrite on the introduction to her dissertation, and she would put her demons to rest.

  She couldn’t tell Ellen.

  Good-hearted, can-do Ellen would want to come up here and fix things, and that was part of the problem. Soft-spoken and more introverted than anyone else in her family, Maggie had been letting her sister and parents and even her aunt and uncle do the hard work of fighting her demons for her. She needed to deal with them herself.

  What she regretted most right now was having let a strange man get to her—to the point that she’d gone straight to Luke. Finding herself standing in front of him, saying too much, she’d realized her mistake and made a few lame excuses and left. She was sure that encounter had contributed to Luke’s presence now.

  The man had done nothing. He’d shown up after one of her classes, told her that he found Jane Austen fascinating and wished her well in Saratoga. She didn’t recognize him as a student or faculty, but so what?

  She put him out of her mind. She’d overreacted. All there was to it. Her parents had encouraged her and Ellen to trust their instincts, but sometimes they were wrong. In this case, hers had been corrupted by her nervousness over her talk and her obsession with her and Ellen’s kidnapping and near-death eight years ago.

  By now, Ellen had received the note and knew the score—knew why, in fact, Maggie had opted out of their celebratory champagne dinner that evening. With Luke in Saratoga, Ellen had her hands full. She would understand Maggie’s thinking, or at least forgive her. They’d been through hell together eight years ago. Maggie didn’t know why her experience had bubbled up all of a sudden, but it had.

  And it was up to her to deal with it.

  This retreat would make a positive difference in her life, she thought as she crossed the worn wood floor to a large window overlooking the lake and surrounding hills. Returning to the Adirondacks was like climbing back on a horse after being thrown—even if it had taken her eight years.

  There were other cabins on the lake, and a few year-round houses. The location wasn’t as remote as it felt. Not like the cabin where she and Ellen had run with their mother—only to be discovered by a killer. That one was deeper in the Adirondack Park, a vast tract of protected land encompassing six million acres in northeast New York.

  Breathe.

  A snowstorm. Two teenagers dragged out of their warm cabin, tied to a boulder…

  “Finish the story,” Maggie whispered. “It didn’t end there. Finish it.”

  She could feel the cold as if she were back in that frigid Adirondack winter, dressed in vintage clothes. She remembered she’d lost a sequined shoe from the ’70s.

  Their mother had found her daughters, putting herself at greater risk.

  Maggie smiled, ignoring tears rising in her eyes. Her intrepid mom who’d made millions in a series of clever investments that had worked out better than she’d ever imagined. The money hadn’t thrown off her parents’ marriage as much as the doubts and challenges her mother faced being married to a dedicated Texas Ranger. Maggie had assumed divorce was a certainty, but the killer who’d nearly dispatched his family had prompted Jack and Susanna Galway to make a real effort to prove how much they mattered to each other.

  Maggie wasn’t sure what all had been involved in their reconciliation, but she was glad her parents had worked through their problems, in spite of the hurdles and the long odds. They’d agreed from the start their daughters weren’t to be asked to take sides. Who was the bad guy, Susanna Galway or Jack Galway? There was no bad guy.

  Spent from giving her talk and slipping out on her sister and her own Texas Ranger, Maggie fixed herself some peppermint tea and inspected the refrigerator, stocked with basic provisions ahead of her expected arrival tomorrow. Milk, cheese, eggs, apples, a container of soup and olives. She smiled. Yes, a proper academic retreat was impossible without olives. She’d have them later with the bottle of merlot her hosts had left on the counter.

  She sat at the table with her tea. A large bird swooped down from a wooded hillside and landed on the water. A loon? A duck? She couldn’t make out its features. This is what she would do, she thought. She would drink tea and look at the lake between revisions and reading.

  There was Wi-Fi at the cabin, and adequate if not great cell phone coverage that she doubted extended into the farther reaches of the quiet lake. She could call Ellen, but she didn’t want to talk to her sister. Ellen was in prosecutor mode, and Luke’s presence would only make it worse. Luke was tight with Sam Temple, and Sam had been shot in the leg that horrible day in the Adirondacks.

  Maggie shook her head. “No. Don’t say ‘horrible’ day. Keep it neutral. That day in the Adirondacks.” She smiled. “There.”

  She felt better already. Now that she was here, her cabin retreat didn’t feel so provocative and nutty. She knew the note she’d left for Ellen wouldn’t be sufficient, but calling her sister didn’t seem right even if she wasn’t in prosecutor mode—it would be intrusive, a distraction. She and Ellen were close, but Ellen wasn’t having the difficulties eight years after their ordeal that Maggie was.

  Ordeal. Another loaded word. Incident would do.

  The point being, she didn’t want Ellen to rescue her or try to fix her, and she didn’t want to explain herself.

  Maggie decided at least to text her sister. It was more personal than an email but not as intrusive as a call. I’m at the cabin. It’s perfect. Thank you for understanding.

  Ellen responded immediately: I don’t understand.

  Maggie smiled. Of course her sister didn’t understand.

  We can talk when I get back to Texas.

  That wasn’t too subtle, was it? Maggie set her phone on the table. She did a few slow, deep, calming breaths. Later in the season, the lake would no doubt be crowded with canoes and kayaks, but no motorized boats were permitted. Swimming was, but the water would be cold by her standards straight through the summer. She liked being here now, with spring blossoming in this beautiful part of the northeast. She wasn’t an outdoorsy type, but she appreciated the incredible scenery.

  She heard birds, the breeze soughing in the trees and the ticking of a clock somewhere inside the cabin.

  A man came from behind a spruce tree down by the cabin’s small dock, startling her. But she didn't make a sound as he turned, facing the cabin.

  Maggie shrank low in her chair. Did he think the place was empty?

  “Hello.” He started onto the yard below the deck, in front of the cabin. “It’s Maggie, isn’t it? Maggie Galway. Nice name.”

  She held her breath. She didn’t recognize this man. Was he one of Ellen’s friends? A friend of the owners? Did he own a second home on the lake? Did he live there?

  He continued toward the cabin. He wore a black baseball cap that covered most of his hair and cast shadows on his features. “It’s okay. I know your friends.”

  Maggie swore she heard a Texas twang in this voice. Her imagination or not, she jumped to her feet, grabbed her phone and raced for the back door, leaving her suitcase.

  She pushed open the screen door, leaped down the back steps and ran.

  Chapter 5

  “I considered trying to become a Ranger,” Ellen said as Luke turned onto a narrow, rock-pitted road that wound downhill toward a sparkling lake nestled in the hills north of Saratoga. “There are more women Rangers than there used to be, but I was drawn to the law. I’m one of the few I graduated with who actually loved law school.”

  “Lawyers,” Luke said.

  “Do I detect a note of disdain in your voice, Luke Jackson?”

  “What you detect and what’s there might be two different things.” He kept his eyes on the road, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble with its driving challenges. “Your friends are all lawyers.”

  “Not everyone who graduates from law school ends up practicing law, and not all my friends are lawyers. Are all your friends Rangers?”

  “Who
says I have friends?”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. Luke grinned at her, then turned his attention back to the road. It turned sharply to the right, down a steep hill through tall, impenetrable evergreens. She wouldn’t want to navigate such a road in winter, but the cabins at least on this part of the lake appeared to be seasonal. She wondered how many were winterized. Nights still could be cool in May. She didn’t know how Maggie would react if she had to light a wood stove or fireplace to stay warm.

  The lake came into view again, the water rippling in a breeze, glistening under the afternoon sun. “Maggie lucked out,” Ellen said. “This is gorgeous.”

  “Could you see yourself staying here for a week on your own?” Luke asked.

  “Maybe not on my own, although I suppose if I had a reason I could. Studying for the bar, writing a dissertation.” She paused, not looking at him. “Getting over a man.”

  “Figuring out if you wanted to be with a man,” he added. “You could chew on that one for a whole week up here, couldn’t you?”

  “An hour, maybe,” Ellen said lightly. “An hour to figure out being with him would be pure insanity, then a week to breathe a sigh of relief and relax.”

  “Breathe a sigh of relief because the decision’s made or because he’s out of your life?”

  “Both. One leads to the other.”

  “So it does,” Luke said, pulling in behind a cabin. “This should be the right place.”

  Speaking of relief, Ellen thought. She was relieved to put an end to that conversation. The cabin looked adorable, and it was the right one. She recognized Maggie’s rental car parked in the gravel driveway, next to the cabin’s back steps. Three steps led to a landing and the back door—a screen door and regular door. The regular door stood open. Ellen felt slightly guilty at interrupting her sister’s retreat, but she was confident Maggie would understand her overreaction. Once reassured, she and Luke would be on their way.

  Ellen unfastened her seatbelt and got out of the car. The air was noticeably cooler than in Saratoga Springs—cooler than she preferred, but it would feel like heaven in mid-summer, when Austin would be blistering hot.