Detective on the Hunt

by Marilyn Pappano

  It wasn’t a totally unreasonable request. People grew up and away from their family and friends. It happened all the time. Not to JJ, of course, but others. Sometimes the family got to know why; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes, like now, maybe the kid couldn’t even verbalize why.

  As long as she was doing it of her own volition, as long as JJ was comfortable that there was no coercion involved and that Maura was as stable as she’d ever been, it was okay. Her choice. A bad one, but still hers.

  But JJ wasn’t comfortable with anything, most of all Maura’s sudden insistence that she needed all her money now, when she’d grown up knowing the terms, and her anger toward Mr. Winchester. JJ knew he and his wife were good people. She knew how close they’d been to the Evanses, all three of them. She’d heard the pain in his voice, deep and abiding...letting Maura go...almost killed us.

  Travis and Kate Winchester deserved more than a perfunctory She’s okay, leave her alone.

  Hearing footsteps on the stairs, JJ got to her feet. “Listen, I feel bad about upsetting you. Let me take you to lunch tomorrow. We’ll have a girls’ afternoon out.” Because the steps were getting closer and Maura was looking reluctant, she rushed on. “I’ll pick you up at eleven. Sound good?”

  After a sigh and a roll of her eyes, Maura said, “You can meet me here at twelve. I’ll drive.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then.” JJ met Zander at the door, ducked around him and headed down the stairs.

  * * *

  Quint walked into his house after work Wednesday half expecting a disaster scene. Chica could have managed to undo the simple latch and opened the door, or she could have squeezed out between the bars. She was awfully scrawny. Brutus had once turned his kennel, minus the plastic tray, upside down, then wiggled out through the larger squares the tray was supposed to conceal. Another time sans tray, he’d turned the kennel over and walked/carried it to a sunny section of the floor for a cozy nap.

  Quint never underestimated the intelligence of dogs. People, yes. Canines, no.

  The house was quiet, though, and the only new sound was the deep rhythmic breathing of a sleepy dog. Chica curled in the middle of her bed, the hoodie scooped up to form a pillow, her paws pressed together.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, he closed the door quietly and headed upstairs. After a shower and shave, he dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, pulled on a well-worn pair of boots, and returned to the stairs. Halfway down, he became aware of an intense gaze locked on him. “You’re awake.”

  Chica lay in the same position, but there was no avoiding her sharp look. Only her eyes moved as he continued down the stairs, then stopped at the front of the kennel. When he bent, the muscles in her jaw, shoulders and chest tightened, and her stare took on a razor edge.

  Cautiously he slid the latch loose and pulled the door open an inch. Then he went on to the kitchen, trusting she would come out when she was ready.

  He had invited JJ over for dinner. Standing in front of the refrigerator, both doors open, he wondered how that had happened. He didn’t invite people to his house. Not anymore. But somehow her concern and desire for a thrown-away pup had gotten inside his head, and he’d let her bring Chica here, and he couldn’t very well refuse to let her visit her own dog. Especially since there might be cleaning and definitely would be bathing and leash walking and probably snuggling.

  But only with the dog, damn it.

  He’d told JJ that he cooked, and he did, though not every day, like he used to, or even every week. Once in a while, he spent an entire day shopping, peeling, chopping and cooking, then freezing all of it. If he was going to eat alone, he was going to eat good food.

  He’d had three lunches and tonight would make two dinners with JJ in the days since she’d arrived. It was a routine that had become familiar and comfortable really fast. And really easy.

  Really hopeful.

  Becoming aware of the chill radiating from the freezer and the refrigerator, he grabbed a gallon bag of Italian sausage and bean soup and left it on the island to thaw. He filled a cup with warm water, stirred in sugar and yeast, and while the yeast fed, he measured the rest of the ingredients for a rustic loaf of bread.

  Little claws clicked across the wood, stopped in the doorway, then trotted over to where he stood. Chica tilted her head back and gave him a long, solemn look.

  “Okay, Chica.” He gave her a small portion of nuggets, maybe a third what she would normally get, and she wolfed them down while he refilled her water dish. She needed a bath, and who knew? She might be that rare dog who sat serenely like the princess she thought she was while the lesser human attended her.

  But he had no intention of depriving JJ of the experience. Instead, he got the leash and half coaxed, half dragged Chica through the laundry room and down the back steps.

  She walked stiffly across the yard, as if she had no intention of loosening up. Recognizing a bit of himself in her actions, Quint wavered between empathy and playing the firm alpha. Before he had to admit that empathy would win out, his cell rang.

  A glance at caller ID tempted him to let it go to voice mail. Rhonda, Linny’s mother, had moved to south Texas last summer, but she kept in touch with him. Once, he’d asked if it bothered her, seeing and talking to him when Linny was gone, and she’d given him a tight hug. You’re family, she’d said. With or without her.

  Now, interrupting preparations for dinner with another woman to take out that woman’s dog made him feel like guilty family. Rhonda would never put that kind of burden on him; she’d told him a dozen times that Linny wouldn’t want him to be alone forever. Still, that had been his intent. His expectation. The reality of his new life.

  Chica had stopped moving and was staring at him, seeking the source of the noise. With a sigh, he pulled out the phone and greeted his almost mother-in-law. “Hey, Rhonda, how are you?”

  “I thought I was freezing until I saw online that it snowed in Cedar Creek. I’m good now. How about you?”

  “I’m okay.” He said it a lot when it wasn’t true, but this afternoon, standing in the yard where patches of green were interspersed with slushy snow, where weeds were already starting to thrive and where a puppy whose luck had turned was giving him a calculated, searching look far too old for her few months on this earth, he found a little truth in the words. Okay wasn’t good or fine, but it was better than lost, hopeless or filled with despair. It promised that things had improved and that there was room for even more improvement. It suggested that he might actually reach good or fine.

  “How’s Darryl?” he asked. Linny’s stepfather was from the Texas coast, so when Rhonda had decided she needed to get away, his home had seemed the natural choice. Linny’s brother and his wife had followed a few months later. They’d done their best to persuade Rhonda’s mother—the resident of room 318 at the assisted-living facility—to move, too, but NeNe Caulfield had insisted she was going to die in Cedar Creek, where she’d been born.

  A new source of guilt pricked at him, that he hadn’t stopped in to see NeNe when he and JJ visited Georgie. He saw her every weekend, so it wasn’t as if he was past due. But if the old lady knew he’d sneaked right past her door without even saying hello...

  “Darryl’s good. The kids are good. We’re coming up to see Mom for Easter. Can we see you then, too?”

  “Sure.” They hadn’t been in town since Christmas, and he realized, possibly for the first time, that he missed them. Even if he hadn’t genuinely liked them, being Linny’s family had made them a constant in his life practically forever, and then they weren’t.

  “Hey, Quint—”

  The new voice startled him, his muscles twitching as he turned to face JJ. He hadn’t heard her pull into the driveway, hadn’t heard her car door close or any sound at all as she’d made her way across the sodden ground, until she was practically close enough to touch. When she saw his cell, she mouthed, Sorry, t
hen gestured for Chica’s leash.

  His fingers clenched tighter on the phone as he handed the black nylon to her. With a few words of encouragement, she got the dog moving again, walking toward the distant fence to give him privacy.

  There was a moment’s silence on the other end. When Rhonda broke it, her tone was careful, measured. “You have company.”

  “Yeah. She, uh, just got here.”

  Another silence. He could imagine her trying on the idea for size: he’d invited a woman to his house. He, who had zealously avoided a social life since Linny died, who had wished he could avoid life, period, had invited a woman who wasn’t Rhonda’s daughter into the home he’d shared with her daughter.

  “Oh, Quint, I’m glad. Tell me about her.”

  She didn’t sound glad—or suspicious, accusatory, hostile or even regretful. She sounded the way his own mother would. Stunned. Relieved. A little cautious.

  He, who had become the master of one-, two-or three-word responses over the last sixteen months, took a deep breath. “Her name is JJ. She’s a cop from South Carolina, and she’s here on a case. Sam assigned me to help out, to introduce her to folks and drive her around. She’s never driven on snow before. And she adopted a puppy this morning that someone threw out.”

  And she’s funny. Bubbling over with life. Pretty. She reminds me that there were good times in the past and there can be good ones in the future, and she makes me want to smile and laugh and touch her and kiss her and connect with her and be a real person again and not just a sulking lump of sorrow.

  Watching the woman’s and the dog’s halting movements across the yard, he wasn’t sure Chica understood yet that she was JJ’s dog. The puppy dragged and scuffed, turning every few feet to give him a reproving look.

  “Oh well, that makes her one of God’s gifts, doesn’t it?” Rhonda said. “Darryl and I are fostering a mama collie and her four puppies. Just got them over the weekend. The chaos twins went to their new home Friday. I’ll miss them, but I’m ready for some peace.”

  “With four new puppies in the house?”

  Rhonda snorted. “That’s how chaotic the twins were. I sent you pictures. You saw the gleam in their eyes.”

  He had seen the gleam. He’d also seen that one twin was a full-grown shepherd and the other a young terrier.

  “So, tell me more. What are you fixing her for dinner?”

  “Italian sausage soup and peasant bre—Who said I’m fixing dinner?”

  “Because that’s what you do when you invite a woman to your house around dinnertime. You have dinner and dessert, and if it’s a cold night, you light a fire, and you talk, and you get to know all the important things about each other, and you... Well, you know where it goes from there.”

  There was a hiccup at the end, with her head turned away or her hand clamped over her mouth, but he heard it, and it sent a flutter of panic through him. “Rhonda—”

  “It’s okay, Quint. Honey, it’s okay.” Her laugh was mostly forced, but it held the promise of real laughter. As long as I can laugh, she’d say, I’ll know I’m alive.

  He hadn’t laughed in a very long time, but he knew he was alive. He had suspected it before he’d met JJ, but he knew it for a fact now.

  “Sweetie, Belinda is gone, and you and me doing nothing but missing her is disrespectful to her. No one loved life more than she did, and no one hated wasting it more than her. If you love anyone half as well as you did Belinda, she’ll be a very lucky woman. Every day I’ve prayed that you would meet that woman and that your heart would heal and that you would find pleasure in life again. Do I wish Belinda was still here? You bet. Do I want you to be happy even if it’s with someone else’s daughter? Absolutely. I’ll dance with joy and love her like she’s my own. You got that?”

  JJ and Chica had reached the fence and were now turning back. At least, JJ was turning back. Chica, her interest caught by something on the other side, dug her feet in and refused to move. JJ appeared to be talking to the dog, who appeared to have suddenly gone deaf. After a moment, JJ tugged on the leash. Tugged harder. And harder. Then Chica leaped into the air, twisting while all four feet were off the ground, and came running toward him at top speed, little more than a tan blur while her new owner—he snorted silently—chased after her. They both looked so exuberant and full of delight and sheer pleasure at racing across the grass in the twilight that it hurt his heart.

  A new set of chaos twins. Running to him.

  “I got it, Rhonda,” he said quietly. Healing heart, pleasure, dancing with joy. He got every word.

  Chapter 8

  “Bath time is not fun time.”

  JJ muttered the words from behind the towel Quint had handed over without a single smirk or smart-ass remark. Trust Chica to feel a sudden surge of emotion for JJ that must be expressed at that very moment, while she was dripping wet and covered with doggie shampoo. The dog had plastered herself to JJ’s front and enthusiastically licked most of her face before Quint wrestled her back into the laundry room’s utility sink.

  When she lowered the towel, Quint still wasn’t smirking, but only because he’d curled his lips in so tightly that they’d almost disappeared. Chica, on the other hand, was very openly smirking.

  “I thought rescue dogs were supposed to be grateful.”

  “She’s grateful. She’s filled with gratitude.”

  “She’s filled with attitude.”

  “So you two are a good match.” He picked up the sprayer and tested the temperature before directing it to the now perfectly well-behaved pup. “Why don’t you grab something dry from my closet?”

  She eyed him a moment. Granted, she couldn’t sit around in a shirt that was soaked all the way to the skin, but he made the suggestion so casually, when it was anything but casual to her. Being invited to the house he’d shared with Belinda seemed a big deal. Being given free rein to go into his bedroom, the room he’d most intimately shared with Belinda, and to rummage through his closet for something to wear seemed a very big deal. Maybe he could run up and grab her a T-shirt and she could change in the bathroom down the hall.

  While she watched Princess Chica. The schemer would probably give Quint time to get upstairs, then leap out of the tub and race through the house, shaking water everywhere.

  Tako the sheepdog, the only canine JJ had ever owned entirely by herself, had been a lazy, loving sweetheart. Being his mama had been so easy, even a teenager could do it. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for a bitch with an attitude. Which was funny, considering that some people considered her a bitch with an attitude.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried up the stairs, though the photographs there were so tempting that she had to avert her eyes. There were three doors on the second level, but only one was open. She went inside, flipping the light switch, and stopped short.

  She hadn’t imagined Quint in any bedroom but the room she was currently occupying at the inn, but if she’d given any thought to where he spent much of his life, she was pretty sure this never would have crossed her mind.

  It was large, spacious, airy and bright, even though night had fallen outside the big windows on three walls. Like downstairs, the hardwood floor was dark, but that and the wood furniture were the only things. The rest—walls, ceiling, bedding, chairs, curtains—were shades of cream and white. It was a room that made her think of islands, from the coast of Maine all the way down to the Caribbean. The woven rugs on the floor were soft in texture and subdued in color, with the only real hue present a sapphire-blue throw on each chair and a couple of small pillows to match on the bed.

  It was peaceful. Serene. Quiet. Calm.

  It was Belinda.

  JJ hovered there, just inside the door, before inhaling for courage and walking purposefully across the room to the closet door. She expected a normal closet, something like the long narrow slot her condo
people called a walk-in, but the door opened to a large space. More than half the rods and shelves were empty; the rest contained men’s clothing. Quint’s clothing.

  She hated to admit relief that Belinda’s things weren’t still occupying all that empty space. None of her business, right? A person never knew how they would react to the death of a loved one until it actually happened, and if it had given Quint comfort to keep Belinda’s clothes hanging with his own, where he could see them and touch them and smell her perfume on them every day, that was totally his right.

  But she felt less guilty for wanting to have steamy sex with the woman’s fiancé in the woman’s house in her own bed with the clothes gone.

  Grabbing a T-shirt from the stack on a shelf, she tugged off her shirt and bra, shivered in the sudden chill of bare skin, and pulled on his shirt. It was old and soft, a mottled shade of well-washed black, and even though it smelled of laundry products, she fancied she could catch a faint whiff of him on it.

  Back downstairs, she got a plastic bag from a kitchen drawer, stuffed her clothes inside and wandered into the laundry room. Chica was out of the tub, looking bonier than ever, her tan fur ruffled all over from the vigorous drying Quint had given her. He was crouched beside her, lifting each paw and rubbing it gently. “She smells better. Looks more pitiful.”

  Quint grunted. The dog, bless her heart, lifted her head and very slightly bared her teeth at JJ.

  “There’s an old saying. Don’t adopt the puppy that even the mama and daddy are scared of. I think that’s exactly what I’ve done here.”

  Quint unfolded easily to his full height and hung the wet towel over a bar with several others. “Aw, come on, look at that little face. How can you say that?”