“I haven’t been up here in years. Too bad, too. Sure is beautiful.”
Gill’s eyes were on the holes, ruts, and rocks that had slid down to make the path to the Ward hunting cabin nearly impassable.
“Jo said she doesn’t come up here.”
“She doesn’t. After Joseph’s death, once we had it all cleaned up, she did. And a few times once she became our sheriff.” Miss Gina looked out the window. “Too many memories for her.”
“Her dad dying up here can’t help.”
“See those trees?” She pointed to a patch of maples. “Turn right.”
Gill slowed down. “Is this a road?”
“More or less.”
More like less. Gill turned right, managed to get through a thicket of trees and then out into an open field of green and wildflowers. Jo’s Jeep laughed at the excuse of a driveway as they inched closer to the lone house that overlooked the small thicket below.
Gill stopped the car at the base of the stairs and looked through the window. “Wow.”
“It’s a man’s cabin. Off the grid one hundred percent,” Miss Gina told him. She swung the door open before he managed to turn off the engine. Outside, the woman lifted both arms to the open air as if sucking it in. “I could use a joint,” she said, tossing her head back.
Gill couldn’t help but laugh. “The sixties were good to you?”
“The best days ever.” She opened one eye to regard him. “No joint?”
“Fresh out,” he told her.
“Shit. Okay.” Her arms fell to her sides and she took the steps one at a time.
The log cabin was made from real logs and not some facade that mimicked the real thing. From the outside, it looked like the entire place was less than six hundred square feet. The outside had a small deck, one that ran the length of the home, with a two-person swing that filled the majority of the porch. Gill found the faded statue Jo had told him about and then the key.
Miss Gina leaned on the rail and looked below. “I keep waiting for Jo to have an easier time with her father’s death to ask if I can get up here once in a while.”
“She’d probably be okay with it.” From what Gill had learned about the woman, she wasn’t attached to the place but couldn’t bear to part with it either.
“Not until she finds her father’s killer. Then she’ll be ready.”
Gill hesitated before twisting the key in the lock. “She told you her theory about her dad?”
Miss Gina shook her head. “No. I know she’s mentioned it to Mel and Zoe. Not a word to me.”
“It could have been an accident,” he said.
The humor faded from Miss Gina’s face. “Joseph Ward was murdered.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Same way Jo is so sure. The man was meticulous about his weapons, anal about how he cared for them. Borderline OCD when it came to that stuff. Him accidentally shooting himself would be like me accidentally lighting my inn on fire with a blowtorch and gasoline.”
“If you were so sure, why not make people listen back when he died?”
Miss Gina looked at him like he was a little short on brain cells. “Look at me.”
She wore loose pants, a top that hid her aging belly, and that same long, gray-streaked hair blew in the breeze. She looked like a woman who never left the sixties. “Half this town thinks I’m a little crazy. The kids in this town have always used my place as a safe haven when they had nowhere to go. Put those things together and then have me crying foul when Sheriff Ward ended up with a hole in his head, and something tells me I’d find myself in all kinds of trouble. Besides, I did smoke pot back then. And it wasn’t legal.”
“Not every questionable character is a bad reference.”
“If an agency had come around, asked the right questions, I would have made sure they knew my feelings. But they didn’t. And when Jo returned and took over for her dad, I knew she was looking. I figured it was only a matter of time before she found something.”
“Only she hasn’t found anything.”
“That’s cuz she’s too close. There are things about her father she doesn’t know and might not be receptive to hear if they came out.”
Gill stared at Miss Gina. “What kinds of things?”
She smirked. “I’ll tell you, but I’d like to see just how good of an FBI agent you are, Mr. McHottie.”
He laughed. “McHottie?”
“That’s what the girls call you.” She swept his frame with a smile.
He was more than a little creeped out.
“I’m going inside,” he said, twisting the door handle.
Miss Gina laughed.
Jo glanced at her watch. They’d be up at the cabin by now. Walking on the memories of her father’s life. She should be there, with them.
The place tore her up. Letting Gill see her like that would open her in a way she wasn’t ready for. No, it was best he was there without her bias, the one thing she couldn’t remove from her sideline investigation into her father’s death.
While Gill and Miss Gina climbed the mountain, Jo drove the short street over and one block down to speak with Karl and Caroline while Drew was in school.
She should have called Karl the second she left the school. If it were her son, she’d have asked for the same courtesy. Having Gill in town was a distraction, proven by her lack of thought. Even if Karl was continually making her job harder, Drew was his son, and he had the right to be pissed at her actions.
Jo knocked on the Emerys’ door, stood back, and waited.
Caroline answered. In her midfifties, she could have passed for her early forties. She had the gift of good genes and an organic diet, according to the things Glynis had told Jo over the years. At five foot five the woman didn’t have the history of walking a runway of America’s Next Top Model, but she was known to turn heads. Unlike Karl, Caroline had a kind face that the people in town loved and respected. Not that the town didn’t respect Karl . . . but in his case, they had no choice but to.
“Hi, Caroline,” Jo said when the woman answered the door.
Her sheepish smile and quick study of the ground told Jo her presence there made Caroline uncomfortable. “Hi, Jo.”
“Is Karl here? I’d like to talk with you both about what happened yesterday.”
“C’mon in.”
Jo followed her into the house, her belt making noise as she walked.
Caroline yelled Karl’s name before turning to her. “I’m sorry Karl bothered you last night. I told him it could wait, that if anything terrible had happened you would have come to us right away.”
“Thank you for that, Caroline, but I should have come to you anyway.”
“Damn right.” Karl stood behind her, leaning against the door frame leading into the family room.
“Karl!” Caroline’s voice held a friendly warning.
“Can we sit down?” Jo asked.
“Of course.” Caroline switched into hostess mode, asked if Jo wanted something to drink, sat when she declined.
“I need to apologize,” Jo started, staring directly at her deputy.
He waited.
“I’m sorry. I should have called you when I left the school.”
Karl stared.
Jo kept the conversation going. She explained what Richard had told her, what Drew confirmed. “. . . outside of Betty believing there are ghosts at the high school, there really wasn’t any harm done. Mason pointed out that Betty isn’t in the best of health, and that was the concern that should have been thought of.”
Caroline tilted her head to the side and placed her hand over Karl’s. “It’s not a big deal.”
Karl and she exchanged glances, and some of the edge over his features softened. “That was for us to decide.”
The man wasn’t letting Jo off the hook. “It won’t happen again,” she assured him.
He conceded with a nod and Jo left without another word.
Running Lob Hill sucked ass. Drew’s dad wasn
’t talking to him, and Coach Ward drilled him hard with extra laps and zero sense of humor.
Drew knew the sheriff had been hiding a smirk at least once during the confrontation in Principal Mason’s office the day before, but today it was narrow lines on her face and attitude. You’d think he’d been found getting stoned in the gym bathroom.
He hated River Bend more every day. How his parents had landed in such a small town and stayed there wasn’t something Drew could find a logical reason for. Maybe if his dad was together enough to have been elected sheriff, his desire to live there would make sense. But his dad wasn’t the sheriff, he was the deputy. And hell, his dad could be a deputy anywhere.
Drew pushed through the remaining three hundred meters of the Lob Hill climb, tagged the tree that had been touched by hundreds of teenage hands in the past, and made his way back to the school. His thoughts shifted to the weekend. A weekend free of a track meet, which meant he could party. He could really use a break. Adults weren’t the only ones to have stress. Between school, track, his parents, Tina being entirely too hard to get, and constantly having the question “What’s going to be your major in college?” thrown out at him . . . Drew was a walking nerve. The only stress relief was rigging the TV in Mrs. Walters’s room. That shit had made him this side of famous for the senior class at school. The CIA should be hooking him up, he decided.
Drew slowed his pace as he ended the hill run and found Coach Gibson.
He rested his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “I’m done,” Drew told his coach.
Coach Gibson stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his eye following the sprinters as they ran their drills. “Coach Ward has you running that hill for the next week.”
Drew rolled his eyes. “I know.” And mowing lawns. Good thing Mrs. Walters liked her flower garden, so the lawn he needed to mow this weekend wasn’t that big.
From the corner of Coach Gibson’s mouth he heard, “So that app you used to turn on the TV . . . what was that?”
Drew took a moment for the question to register. “Uhm, there are a few of them. Depends on your phone. I used Gizmode.”
Coach Gibson’s head nodded a couple of times. “On the app store?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good to know.” The coach glanced at the stopwatch in his hands and walked away without more questions.
Chapter Nineteen
Nerves swam like a school of fish chasing the leader in circles. Jo left the station early, made sure Glynis had the calls forwarded to her for the night.
Gill had dropped Miss Gina off and pulled in the driveway shortly after Jo.
Jo grilled, she didn’t cook. Outside of a couple of steaks and some vegetables she could toss on the barbeque, they’d have to do without. Doing the whole domestic thing was like trying to wear two left shoes. Uncomfortable.
“I have beer, water, or milk,” Jo announced once Gill had returned from her backyard, where he had heated up the grill.
“Milk is for breakfast.”
Jo handed him a beer, twisted the cap off of one for herself.
“Your dad’s cabin is every hunter’s dream.”
“Are you a hunter?” she asked, wanting to get the pleasantries of his trip out of the way so she could determine what he’d learned.
“No. From what I saw, your dad didn’t dedicate all his time up there to searching for venison.”
“He’d bring back a deer once in a while. It wasn’t a big priority for him. The cabin was more a place to get away without going too far.”
“Because he was married to his work.” Gill’s statement made her pause.
“After my mom, yeah.”
Jo seasoned the steaks while they spoke.
“Does everyone in town know about the cabin?”
She nodded.
“Even the kids?”
“Not sure about those that have grown into their teenage years since his death, but yeah. Growing up, everyone I hung out with knew about the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was used by kids hooking up.”
Gill looked at her over the neck of his beer. “But not you?”
Jo’s skin crawled. “That place was always my dad’s. The idea of getting naked there with a boyfriend was about as appealing as having sex at the station.”
She lifted the platter with the food and encouraged Gill to follow her outside. Once there, Gill took the food from her and proceeded to take over the cooking detail.
Jo let him.
“On the report from your dad’s file, it listed more than a dozen names of men he’d been known to go up to the cabin with to hunt.”
“My guess is the list is short. Just about everyone with a shotgun went up there with my dad at one time or another. There were a few regulars, which is what the list is referring to.”
“His death was ruled accidental from the start.”
She nodded. “I made a stink, and because he was the sheriff, they made a second pass at the cabin, but by then there had been so many hands and eyes going through the place the prints they found were all accounted for.”
“Was your father a clean freak?”
“Define freak.”
“Everything has its place, spit shine and polish everything after it’s used?”
“He was neat,” Jo said. “Bleach clean . . . no. Not completely. He hated clutter but wasn’t big on using the vacuum obsessively.”
Gill flipped the steaks, lowered the flame on the gas grill. “That weekend he was up there alone, no visitors?”
“I was living in Waterville at the time. But that’s what Karl gave in his report. He’d asked Luke’s father to join him, but the garage was unusually busy, probably because of the class reunion.”
Gill tilted his beer back and then asked, “Class reunion?”
“Yeah, every year, within a couple weeks of my father’s death, there is a River Bend High class reunion. The ten-year reunions are always at the school gym.”
“What about a twenty-year, or thirty-year?”
Jo shook her head. “The school makes the effort for ten years, it’s up to the alumni to manage anything beyond that.”
“Was there a twenty that year?”
Jo scratched her head. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask.”
“Miss Gina didn’t know of a back way in and out from the cabin, do you know of any?”
Jo shook her head.
Gill shuffled the veggies on the grill a few times, kept his eye on their steaks. “At face value, I would have to agree with the original investigation, Jo.”
Her nose flared. “Face value?”
“Yeah. But there is something that bugs me about the whole thing.”
That, she wanted to hear. “Which is?”
“It was too easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone knew when your father took time off, right?”
“Right.”
“And most knew exactly where he was going to go during his time off.”
“Yep.”
“So if your father had an enemy, they’d know where to find him alone and have an easy explanation for his death unless there was a struggle.”
Jo didn’t like the sound of it, but yes.
“There wasn’t a struggle,” Gill said as he removed their dinner from the grill.
“Which means the person who murdered him knew him.” Jo had already come up with that conclusion. “My dad didn’t have enemies.”
Gill gave her a sideways glance. “Everyone has enemies.”
A lack of outside furniture moved them both inside, where they dished up their food and sat at the small kitchen table. “Ask around town, Gill. Everyone loved my dad. Pillar of the community, respected.”
Gill cut into his steak, pointed a piece of meat at her with his fork. “If you believe he was murdered, he must have had an enemy.”
“I haven’t figured out who that is,” she said.
“Someone familiar with that cabin. Some
one he trusted completely.”
“That would be just about everyone. Sure, there are a few people in town that stepped out of line over the years that needed my dad to reel them in. Zoe’s father was one of them, but he was in jail at the time of my dad’s death, and he wouldn’t have trusted Ziggy with a second of his time.”
Gill paused, started to laugh. “Zoe’s father’s name was Ziggy?”
Jo waved him off. “Long story.”
He spoke around his food. “What about Zoe’s mom, was she upset about her husband’s arrest?”
“The arrest happened long before my dad died. From what Zoe tells me, right after Ziggy went to jail, her family finally relaxed and learned to smile once in a while. The man was a real dirtbag,” Jo informed him. She took the first bite of her steak, hardly realizing that she wasn’t eating. “You grill a good steak.”
“Meat is my only cooking talent.”
“Great, mine, too. Malnourishment might be in our futures.”
That didn’t stop him from putting more in his mouth.
“I’ll continue looking, Jo. I’m not sure I’ll find anything.”
The fact that he looked was enough for her. “Thank you.”
Gill’s cell phone rang in his back pocket. He swallowed his food with a swig from his bottle and answered. “Hey, Shauna.”
Jo listened to the one-way conversation between Agent Burton and Gill, watched Gill’s body language. His smile moved to a frown, his brows pinched together, and he looked at his watch.
“When is this starting?” he asked.
Jo took another bite.
Gill pushed back from the table.
“I’ll be there.”
The steak in Jo’s throat went cold. As would Gill’s dinner, if she wasn’t mistaken.
He released a sigh as he placed his phone in his back pocket. “I have to go.”
“I thought as much. What’s going on?”
“The kids we’ve had our eye on have organized a rave-style party.”
“So you’re crashing a rave.”
He laughed, looked down at his broad chest. “I don’t blend, JoAnne. But surveillance will give us something, with any luck.”
Jo followed him into her bedroom, where he gathered the small bag he’d brought with him holding a change of clothes and a toothbrush.
Making It Right (A Most Likely To Novel Book 3) Page 19