by Bush, Nancy
“So far, my sister, Kara, and I seem fine, but there’s no telling when that shoe will drop. It could happen anytime, or not at all. My Aunt Evelyn escaped it.”
“Who else has it?”
Jordanna considered, then said, “Well, no one, really. We’re the last of the Treadwells, so I guess it ends with us. There were some Benchleys that married Treadwells,” she remembered.
“Would your dad know?”
Her lips tightened. “Probably.”
“You should ask him. Get all the data you can. There might be something you don’t know about it.”
“Yes, yes . . .” The journalistic approach. Why did it make her feel so weary?
Because you don’t want to know. You don’t want it confirmed. Because if it’s true, you’re doomed.
She could feel tears burn at the back of her throat. She’d just told him her big secret, and it was a thousand times worse because it had effectively slammed, bolted, and sealed the door shut on anything lasting between them. Sure, he didn’t think of her that way. She understood that. But she’d allowed herself to dream, and now that dream was dust.
“I don’t visit Rock Springs all that often,” she said unevenly. “My mother’s gone, and so’s Emily. My other sister’s a vagabond, although she did say she would be in the area this weekend—I assume that means Portland—and I don’t get along with my father for all the reasons I’ve just named.”
“You brought me here,” he pointed out quietly.
She shivered. He was being understanding and that made things a thousand times worse. “I knew the house was empty. I didn’t know it was in such bad shape, though.” She looked around. “Anyway, now you know,” she added lightly.
“You mind a few questions?” he asked.
She laughed silently. “Fire away.”
“You said your sister died in a car accident?”
“On Summit Ridge Road, the switchback road that leads to Fool’s Falls. You can access it by driving farther south from here on Wilhoit about three or four miles. It leads into the mountains and cuts close to the back of our property.”
“Did you think your sister was exhibiting signs of this disease?”
“Emily? No. She was a sleepwalker, but she . . . wasn’t sick. She was beautiful. Everyone liked her.” Recalling Kara saying Emily was a “ho,” she added for honesty’s sake, “I think she had a few boyfriends, and there might have been some jealousy from other girls.”
“Mind if I play devil’s advocate for a minute?” He’d shifted position and she could see his jaw tighten.
“Okay . . .” she said carefully.
“You said your sister was a sleepwalker.”
“Yes. She walked into my father’s room without realizing it.”
“Did she blame your father?”
“No. She was angry with me for accusing him. And for shooting at him,” she admitted. “She was right on that, of course. I was reckless, and it was . . . out of control. The big reason people think I have the Treadwell Curse.”
“Is there any chance she was telling the truth?”
Another knife to the gut. Jordanna looked away. Why did she keep believing someone would actually hear her, for once? “She called out my father’s name when I walked in on them. Screamed it. Dayton! She was horrified by what was happening.” Something about that bothered Jordanna, just like it always did, some little kernel digging at her brain, but it slipped away before she could figure out what it was.
“She blamed the whole thing on sleepwalking,” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
“And everyone blamed you because you were a Treadwell and Treadwells are crazy.”
“Right again,” she said bitterly.
“What do you think now?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If it happened the same way, would you do it again? Would you shoot him?”
“Of course not!”
“Why not?”
“Because it was a big mistake. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have reported him. I could have hit my sister!”
Jordanna drained her glass of wine and Dance took a long swallow, too. “Well, that sounds pretty sane to me,” he pointed out. “Whatever you think about your father, you were a kid and you reacted in the moment. You’d lost your mother and you thought your father was doing something terrible to your family. You wanted to protect your sister.”
Jordanna stared at him. It was the first time anyone had ever defended her.
“And I don’t know how much I believe in this Treadwell Curse,” he added. “Maybe there’s a rogue gene . . . something. What I would do if I were you, I’d research the hell out of it, find out every last detail. Don’t accept ideas and impressions from a terrible accident to color the truth.” His lips quirked. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
Jordanna could scarcely breathe. She felt giddy with relief, in some weird way. She also felt like she should say something. Thank you, at the very least, but she was completely bereft of words. She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.
She shocked herself and would have pulled back, but his lips pressed back against hers, hot and fierce, at the same moment he slipped a hand around the back of her neck. She could feel his tension, or maybe it was her own. Neither of them moved for a moment. Maybe he was as surprised as she was. Then he slipped his tongue into her mouth, and her body responded as if ignited. She wanted to drag him to her, fall down on the couch and pull him atop her. She might have done just that if she hadn’t heard his intake of breath as he shifted position.
His leg . . . his injury . . .
Her eyes fluttered open. He was kissing her throat, not backing off, but she knew they were teetering on a delicate balance. Nothing could happen that wouldn’t hurt like hell for him. And well, nothing could happen if she wanted to keep some kind of sane level of existence between them.
“I didn’t mean to . . . start this,” she gasped.
“You want to quit?”
She paused. “No . . .”
His tongue drew hot circles on the skin beneath her left ear. She was leaning back and he was half atop her. If it weren’t for his leg, they would be lying down flat on the couch. A part of her yearned for that so much that she tentatively shifted position.
For a moment she thought he was going to go ahead, whether it pained him or not. But then he simply buried his face in her neck and inhaled deeply, slowly expelling his breath on a hard sigh . . . and silent laughter.
She didn’t know what to make of that as he slowly shifted back into a sitting position. Jordanna did the same. His hair had fallen over his forehead and he pushed it back and regarded her ruefully. “I’d like to keep going. I really would.”
Her own mouth slowly curved into a smile. “The situation isn’t ideal.”
“I could go there.” There was a challenge in his tone. He was leaving the decision to her.
She was aware how sensitive she felt in her nether regions. Good God. She ached to kiss him, hold him, make love to him. “Maybe we should wait until . . . you’re better?”
“Don’t look at me that way,” he warned.
“Where’s that wine bottle?” she expelled.
He reached for it and refilled her glass and his own. “So?” he asked huskily, looking at her intently.
The room had grown dark and only the light from the kitchen threw illumination on them, a square of soft yellow that darkened the planes of his face. She was living her fantasy and it felt dangerous.
“We wait,” she said reluctantly.
He drank heavily from his glass. “Okay.” Then she saw him sober and he said, “I’ve wanted to tell you something for a while. I know the Saldanos are dirty, at least some of them. There’s smuggling involved. Drugs, maybe. Stolen artifacts? I don’t know exactly what, but I have some proof, an audiotape. I don’t know which members of the family it implicates.”
“You didn’t tell me,�
� she said, knowing as she spoke the words that it was because he barely knew her, didn’t trust her.
“After I see your father tomorrow, I’ll know more about when I can physically face them again. You want to help, you’re in.”
But he trusted her now, even after everything she’d revealed. “I’m in,” she told him, happier than she’d been in a long while.
Chapter Fourteen
On Saturday morning, Auggie met with Agents Bethwick and Donley at a café in downtown Portland near the station. When cases were hot, he worked them all hours. He had no gripe with meeting the two FBI agents, but it was going to be on his terms. They wanted to hash over the case, pick his brain, and that was all fine and good, but he didn’t feel like telling them everything. He’d known too many good cops who’d been run over by the feds. He didn’t plan on that happening to him.
Bethwick started, taking him through his investigation so far, but offering nothing in return about what they’d learned from the Saldanos. This was no two-way street, but Auggie meant to appear more cooperative than he was. Bethwick was tough and bullying, a bad-cop persona, while Donley tended to step in and smooth over rough spots. Auggie told him his own impressions about Max and Victor Saldano, but kept information about Carmen to himself. As if she were aware of what he was doing, he got a call on his cell from an unidentified number, which he decided to answer as a matter of course to give himself a break from the two agents, only to realize it was Carmen herself. When that happened, he cut the phone conversation short in a hurry, hoping they didn’t pick up on the identity of the caller. Luckily, they were more interested in him getting off the phone so that they could ask more questions. He hung up and let them go on awhile until their questions ran in circles, then he made it clear he was tapped out of information.
The two of them reluctantly left him at the café, where he drank black coffee and pretended to peruse a newspaper until they were out of sight. Then he pulled out his cell phone again and looked at Carmen Danziger’s number.
A moment later he was out of the café and heading for his Jeep, which he noted could use a wash, the color more light gray than dark beneath the road dust. He climbed behind the wheel, then pulled from his pocket the piece of paper on which he’d jotted down Jordanna Winters’s information. Before he talked to Carmen, he wanted to know everything he could about Jordanna. He’d driven into her apartment complex the day before, knocked on her door, but no one had answered. He’d also put in a call to her cell, but when it had gone to voice mail, he’d hung up without leaving a message. He didn’t want to give away that he was looking for her unless he had to.
Now he drove back to her apartment complex, but her place seemed just as deserted as it had the day before. Back in the Jeep, he placed a call to Diane, one of the data researchers at the department. “Diane,” he said congenially when she answered. “I wondered if you could look something up for me.”
“Of course you do.” Diane was a smoker and her voice was dry and raspy from years of the habit. Middle-aged, gray-haired, and thin as a reed, she had that “seen it all” attitude like so many other long-term members of the force.
“Some history on a Jordanna Winters. Twenty-six. Freelance reporter. Lives in an apartment on Beverly Drive in Laurelton.”
“You want to be her Facebook friend, or something?”
“That would be cool,” he said, ignoring her sarcasm. She was a good researcher but there was always a price to pay, as she felt underpaid and overused. “I want to know where she comes from. Anything about her. If you find some intersection with Jay Danziger, also a reporter, mainly for The Oregonian, all the better.”
“I know Danziger,” she said, then, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks.”
He hung up, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He wanted Diane to phone right back, but since this wasn’t an emergency, that was supremely unlikely. Biting the bullet, he called Carmen Danziger back, but this time her phone went to voice mail, so he left his name and told her he’d be on his cell. Then, with time on his hands, he aimed the Jeep in the direction of the house he shared with Liv Dugan. Thinking of her, he smiled. Nine was right. Though he could appreciate Carmen Danziger’s smoldering sensuality, there was no woman like Liv.
Jordanna drove Dance to her father’s clinic and felt herself tighten up more and more as she neared it. She pulled up in front of the gray batten-and-board building with its overhanging porch and split rail fence. It was a block and a half off the main street, but it was clearly constructed with the same architectural design in mind. Western, western, western, and Victorian. Rock Springs had a purposeful quaintness about it that she’d never really appreciated. As she cut the engine, she said, “When I lived here, this clinic was cinder block, like City Hall.”
“This is an improvement,” Dance said.
“A small one.” As he shouldered open the passenger door, she asked, “You want some help?”
“No. Thanks.” He wrangled the crutches, sticking them under his arms as he climbed from the RAV.
They’d been very careful with each other since the kiss the night before. Though she’d been happy that he’d admitted the Saldanos weren’t the upstanding citizens he’d pretended they were, and that she could help him in his investigation, her brain kept going back to the kiss, and the feel of his hard body pressed to hers, the way her hands had rested on the hard muscles of his arms.
I could go there....
Her heart lurched at the memory. She slammed the driver’s door and hurried ahead of him to the clinic’s front door, pushing it open to reveal a waiting room with gray carpet and wooden chairs whose cushions were needlepoint depictions of rodeo riders.
“I’m going to run over to the Green Pastures Church and see if I can find the reverend,” she said. “If you get done sooner than I think you will, call me from the clinic phone.”
“Be careful,” he said, and the words seemed ripped out of him as he levered himself into one of the chairs.
It did her heart good to know that he worried for her. “They’re churchgoers. I’m not walking alone down a deserted street at two A.M.”
“Even a rabbit’ll bite you if you corner it.” His hair had flopped forward again, giving him an unkempt, rakish air that thrummed something deep inside her.
“You sound like you aren’t sure about Green Pastures, either. And I’m not cornering anyone.” She drove north out of town a little faster than the speed limit allowed, and after nearly missing a turn, she eased off the accelerator. The road she was driving would take her to Green Pastures Church and beyond. It was the main access to Malone, edging east past Everhardt Cemetery, where both her mother and sister were buried, and then on past the expansive Calverson Ranch with the high, white entry arch at the ranch entrance that bore its name, before dancing through the lower foothills on its way to Rock Springs’s sister city of about the same size.
The sign for Green Pastures Church, and a distant steeple she could see over rolling fields of spring green grass, appeared on her left at the same moment her cell phone rang. She slowed to make the turn into the long drive with its painted white fence, reaching a hand into her purse to blindly search for her phone. Getting a grip on it, she gave it a quick glance, half-expecting another strange number, and was a bit shocked to see Kara’s name appear. Screw the rules. She held the phone to her ear as she continued down the wide asphalt drive that meandered over a slow rise. “Kara,” she greeted her sister, smiling.
“I’m at your apartment. Where are you?” her sister asked.
“Umm . . . not home.”
“Well, get back. I’m only going to be around for a little while and I still have to go out to Rock Springs to see Dad. Don’t be mad,” she added quickly. “It’s what I do.”
“I know,” Jordanna said. “It’s just that . . . I’m out of town.”
“You are? You knew I was coming this weekend.” Kara sounded perturbed.
It was so like her s
ister to blow in and expect everyone to drop everything to be with her. “I sort of knew,” she defended herself. “Your plans aren’t always rock solid.”
“Well, are you coming back? Soon, I mean?”
“Not till next week, I think.”
“Jesus, Jordanna.”
The asphalt drive looped over the hill and around the side of the church, ending in a parking lot at the back of the building sprinkled with a number of cars. Jordanna weighed whether she wanted Kara to know where she was, but since Dance was already at the clinic, it wasn’t like they were staying deeply under the radar. “Kara, you won’t believe this, but I’m actually in Rock Springs already.”
“What? You’re kidding. Why? You didn’t even go to the wedding!”
If one more person brought that up, Jordanna was pretty sure she would just lose it. “I’m staying at the homestead . . . with a friend. It’s a long story.”
“Does Dad know?”
“Yes, Dad knows. And my friend’s been injured and he’s actually at Dad’s clinic right now.”
“He?” she breathed, scandalized. “Dad knows you’re staying with a man? He’s generally so . . . particular about that kind of thing, y’know.”
“Oh, because he’s a member of Green Pastures Church? The epitome of propriety?” Jordanna asked coolly.
“Dad’s not the bastard you think he is. You have all that stuff about Emily screwed up in your head, but I’m not going to argue about this again,” Kara said, sounding weary.
“I’m the last person who wants to go into it again,” Jordanna returned.
“Yeah, but you’re there. In Rock Springs. Wow. I’ll just come that way earlier. I can be there in a few hours, and I’ll come straight to the homestead.”
“The less people who know about my friend, the better,” Jordanna said, feeling a stab of remorse. “So, don’t say anything to anyone.”
“Who would I say something to?” Kara was faintly amused. “Jordanna, Jordanna . . . you’re more like Emily than I thought.”
“Huh.” Jordanna wasn’t certain what to make of Kara’s implications. Nothing good.