Uncovered: A Hearts of the South story

by Linda Winfree

  Agony shot through him. Holy fuck, the drugs had worn off. Sweat beaded on his upper lip, and he breathed through the waves of nausea gripping his gut.

  “Ash?” Concern filled her shaking voice and gentle hands smoothed his hair and over his nape. “What do you need? Let me—”

  “Got to take a leak.” Eyes clenched shut, he dragged in a couple more deep breaths. “Hand me my crutches, would you, babe?”

  “When you are well, we’re having one serious discussion about that endearment.”

  Aluminum clanked, and he opened his eyes to find her holding the crutches before him. Dreading the movement, he took hold of them and lurched to his feet, grateful for her steadying hands. “Thanks.”

  “Do you need me to—”

  “No.” He still had some pride. “I think I can manage.”

  She nodded, hazel gaze calling him a liar. She motioned over her shoulder. “I’m going to fix you something to eat and get you a couple of those painkillers. Holler if you need help.”

  It was slow going, taking him long minutes, but he made it down the hallway to the bathroom and back under his own power.

  In the living room, she waited, the coffee table laid out with plates and bowls for two. Steam wafted lazily from tomato soup and what looked like thick Reuben sandwiches waited alongside. His mouth watered. Damn, he was hungrier than he’d thought.

  She came forward to assist him on his way to the couch, one palm pressed to his chest, the other to his back.

  “See?” The teasing note in her voice didn’t quite cover a strain that set the hair at his nape on end. “I’m not completely useless in the kitchen.”

  “Looks great.” He let her help him settle on the couch. She handed him a glass and two white tablets. He tossed them off and hoped they were fast-acting. Hell, Mackey had said the surgery would make his knee feel better, not worse. Right now, it hurt like a son of a bitch.

  She folded her legs to sit on the floor across from him. They ate in silence, although he didn’t miss the inscrutable looks she kept darting in his direction. Foreboding settled over him. Was she getting ready to run again? Talking herself out of loving him before they’d even begun?

  Finally, when he’d devoured everything on his plate, and she’d pushed half her sandwich in his direction, she stopped fiddling with her napkin and looked up to focus her shuttered gaze on his.

  “If I did love you…I don’t know how to do that, Ash. I mean, I don’t even know what that entails, what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never loved a man before.”

  He caught his breath, staring at her, trying to get his damn brain in the right gear so he didn’t screw this to hell.

  “You don’t have to do anything.” He cleared his throat because, damn, his voice wanted to come out as a shaky whisper. “You just have to be you and be with me.”

  She puffed out an exasperated sigh and rolled her eyes. “You make it sound so simple. It can’t be like that. There have to be rules, things you’d expect—”

  “No.” He shook his head, afraid even to take his eyes off her. “You’re already more than I ever expected to find.”

  Tears washed her eyes with a crystalline sheen. “You can’t say that. I’m not—”

  “You’re everything I want, just as you are.” He swallowed against the lump that had taken up residence in the back of his throat and went for broke. “I love you, Madeline. I know it’s too damn soon, I know you don’t know what to do with that, but God help me, I do.”

  She brushed at the tears spilling off her lashes. “I’m scared, Ash.”

  “I know, baby. So am I.”

  Her face crumpled, tears falling harder. “I can’t love you and then fuck this up, and I always do that.”

  “I think the only way you could mess this up now is by walking away, going back to that life you don’t live. I want you to live with me, Mad. Live with me and be my love.”

  She laughed through her tears and swiped the back of her wrist across her nose. “You’re quoting poetry at me.”

  “Marlowe.” His own eyes burned, nothing to do with his pain, everything to do with hers. “But that’s all I want you to do, Madeline, all I expect from you. ‘Come live with me and be my love’.”

  She blinked hard, looked away, then turned wet, fierce eyes in his direction. She bit her lip and Ash’s stomach plummeted.

  “I don’t know if I can.” A tremor hovered in the words, enough to give him hope.

  He moistened dry lips and pushed out a single syllable.

  “Try.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rousing from a half-remembered nightmare, Tick rolled over and flung an arm across Caitlin’s side of the bed. His hand encountered cool sheets and he cracked one eyelid. Darkness hovered outside and he was alone in bed. He rubbed his face and sat up with a quick glance at the clock. Three forty-three.

  With the quilt tossed aside, he rose and padded into the keeping room. The kitchen light cast soft illumination over the area, and he found Lee asleep in the portable crib and Caitlin in the armchair, laptop open, a legal pad balanced next to it.

  “What are you doing up?” he whispered.

  “I nursed Lee and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’ve been doing some research.”

  “It’s not even four and it’s cold.” He dropped a kiss on the side of her neck. “Come back to bed.”

  She rubbed a palm down his bare arm. “Look at this.”

  His cheek close to hers, he blinked still-bleary eyes and focused on the laptop screen. An earnest young man grinned at him, a driver’s license shot, faintly familiar. “Who’s that?”

  “Jamie Turner, Allison Barnett’s first husband.”

  “Really.” He frowned and took a closer look. “He seems familiar.”

  Caitlin turned her head and graced him with her I-don’t-believe-this look. “He looks like you.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” The scoffing words trailed away. Yeah, the long-dead young man had dark hair and eyes like his own, but… “You think?”

  “I think. This”—she opened a new tab and a prison-intake photo popped onto the screen—“is the second husband, Mike Brinson.”

  “Mr. Southern Brotherhood.” Tick squinted at the photo. No resemblance here, except maybe another set of brown eyes. Brinson, bald and brawny, stared into the lenses with a coldness Tick had seen more than once on any number of suspects.

  “That would be him.”

  Tick rested his hand on her shoulder and rubbed the edges of her hair between his fingers. “Why, exactly, are you researching Allison’s former husbands in the middle of the night?”

  “Probably the same reason you’ve been having trouble sleeping for the past week.” She lifted her shoulder to capture his hand against her cheek. “Because it looks like she’s going to get away with the part she played in Kelly Coker’s death and it makes me crazy.”

  “I’ve looked at this thing six ways to Sunday and nothing I can come up with is enough to charge her yet.” He moved to sit on the ottoman before her. “You think she killed him?”

  “I’d lay money on it.” She closed the laptop and set it aside. “Only a few problems with that. One, as you pointed out, it’s a closed case with a natural-causes death.”

  “Two, the FBI doesn’t investigate murder, and FBI profilers on maternity leave don’t do lone gunman investigations.” He reached for her legal pad.

  “And three, it’s not in your jurisdiction, either.” Caitlin wiggled deeper into the chair.

  He tapped his finger against her notes. “You think she’s a sociopath?”

  “Narcissistic at the least. Just long-distance diagnosing based on what I know.”

  He flapped the pad against his leg. “Why kill him?”

  “Money. Maybe to get him out of the way if she was already involved with Brinson. You could even theorize, if that resemblance between you and Turner isn’t a coincidence, that in killing him, she was exorcising you, although that’s really stretching it, I thin
k.” She rested her chin on her hand. “Maybe just to get out of the marriage because she was tired of it.”

  Nodding, he traced his thumb over the dark question mark she’d written behind the word “sociopath”. “You know, I went to high school with the investigator over at Cressley. I could talk to him… What could it hurt?”

  She smiled and nudged his thigh with her toe. “Is there anyone you didn’t go to high school with?”

  “It’s southwest Georgia. Not too many people around here I don’t know, precious.” He caught her ankle and tugged her toward him, leaning in to kiss her. Pulling back, he sobered. “But if she did kill him and someone can make that case, then maybe that’s another way to get justice for Kelly.”

  ***

  Slumped in her desk chair, Madeline pressed a finger to her aching temple and tried to ignore the sounds of seven a.m. shift change drifting up the stairs.

  “Hey, Chris, I brought breakfast. You want the grilled PBJ, or egg and cheese biscuit?” Troy Lee’s raised voice competed with slamming doors and jailers doing head counts.

  Madeline scratched a note in the margin of the incident report she was reviewing. Geez, he was loud. Parker’s reply, muffled and indistinct, followed. At her elbow, her cell phone buzzed. She stiffened and cast a cautious glance at the screen before opening it. “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself.” Ash’s drowsy voice flowed over her, warm and appealing. “What time did you leave?”

  “About five.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose and yawned. “I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to bother you, so I came on in. You were still sleeping the sleep of the drugged.”

  His harrumph came clearly across the connection. “I’m not taking any more of those things at night.”

  “You will if it makes you feel better.” She leaned back in her chair. In the past week, she’d discovered he was a horrible patient, and while she understood his caution with the painkillers, hurting just because he was stubborn didn’t make much sense either. “I should be home a little after five. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid around the farm while I’m gone.”

  “Define stupid.”

  She ground her teeth. The man was incorrigible, and if she didn’t lo—like—him so much, she’d kill him. “Like work. I don’t want you doing anything more strenuous than sitting in the office, working on that ‘system’ of yours.”

  “Have I ever mentioned I like it when you’re bossy?”

  “Your knee needs time to heal. I want you to take it easy.” She swallowed hard. “Please?”

  Silence trembled between them. He cleared his throat. “Whatever you want, babe.”

  “I’ll, um…” She pushed her hair away from her face, her own throat tight for some God-only-knew reason. “I’ll see you later.”

  After his quiet goodbye, she closed the phone and laid it aside. With a quiet exhale, she rested her face in her hands for a moment.

  “Looks like deep thought.” Tick dropped into the chair next to her desk.

  She lifted her head. “You’re early.”

  “So are you.” He traced a scar on the chair’s wooden arm. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “Yeah.” She tapped a restless tattoo atop the desk. “I always turn into an insomniac when a case isn’t going well.”

  He tossed a photograph on the blotter. “How would you feel about taking a little ride over to Cressley?”

  “Why?” She lifted the picture of the young dark-eyed, dark-haired man. “Who is this?”

  “Allison’s first husband. He died of a sudden heart attack at age twenty-one. Cait thinks”—one corner of his mouth hitched in a self-derisive smile—“if we follow up on that, we might find out it wasn’t a heart attack.”

  A little flutter of excitement came to life at Madeline’s pulse. “I really like the way Cait thinks. But why go over there? Why not just phone?”

  “I know the investigator. I’m thinking an in-person visit might make it harder for him to blow us off.”

  She pushed up from the chair and shrugged into her jacket. “Let’s go then.”

  A slow smile crossed his face. “There’s that enthusiasm I like.”

  Flipping her hair over her collar, she gave him a look. “Listen, having you treat me like a human being is weird enough. No being nice to me on a regular basis, Calvert.”

  He pulled his keys from his pocket. “All right. I can handle that.”

  Early-morning traffic surrounding Moultrie slowed them, so they approached Cressley’s city limits just before nine. Madeline stretched stiff legs, pointing her toes. “Where do you know the investigator from?”

  “High school.” He checked his rearview mirror as the four-lane narrowed to single-lane traffic. “Football, baseball. That kind of stuff.”

  “So who is it? If you know him, I might as well.”

  “Bobby Wentworth.”

  The name dropped between them like a bomb. Madeline gaped at him a moment, then snapped her mouth shut. A harsh laugh bubbled in her throat and she covered her eyes. “Fuck, no.”

  The words came out louder, slightly more hysterical than she meant them to. The truck swerved slightly and Tick glanced at her. “What?”

  “I don’t believe this.” She laughed at a situation far from funny. Damn karma. Just her fucking luck. “You’re kidding me.”

  “What?” Tick looked at her again and slowed for a stoplight. “Holton, what is wrong?”

  “Bobby Wentworth is the investigator we’re going to see.”

  “Yeah. He went through the academy the year after I did.” The light turned green and a horn beeped behind them. He hit the accelerator. “What is the big deal?”

  She sighed. “When I was a junior, I cut class and blew him behind the weight room because Allison dared me to.”

  “Holy hell…” He shook his head. “Well, this is going to be awkward.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  He laughed, damn him, his shoulders shaking with quiet guffaws. “Shit, Madeline, that was a stupid-ass thing to do on a dare.”

  “Hey.” She resisted the urge to punch him in the arm to shut him up, the way she would have with Jack. “At least I was only stupid with him once. How many times were you stupid with your psycho girlfriend?”

  “That is not nice.” He took a right off the main drag.

  She did cuff his arm then. “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Well, it’s funny.” He draped his wrists on the steering wheel and spread his hands. “This wouldn’t happen to anybody but you.”

  “Oh, thank you very much.” Her mouth twitched. Shit, he was right. Who else would this happen to?

  “If it makes you feel any better, Cait once jumped me on the couch while I was still wearing my gear. We managed to key my radio and treat half the department to about thirty seconds of us hot and heavy.” He pulled into the gravel lot fronting the small Cressley city hall.

  “Nope, sorry, not the same thing, Calvert.” She released her seatbelt and pushed the door open. No sense in dragging her feet. The reality wasn’t going away anytime soon.

  As they walked up the sidewalk to the neat brick building that housed both the city offices and the small police department, she threw back her shoulders and envisioned for a moment relating this whole story to Ash. He’d probably laugh his ass off. Oh hell, maybe she’d laugh with him, once this was over and done.

  Tick held the door and they entered a tiny foyer. The young blonde at the city clerk’s desk looked up and smiled. “Good morning. May I help you?”

  “Investigator Calvert, Chandler County Sheriff’s Department.” Tick held his ID aloft. “Is Investigator Wentworth available?”

  She pointed down the hall to the left. “Third office on the right.”

  “Thank you.” He ushered Madeline before him. Her stomach twisted and she sucked in a couple of deep breaths. At the partially open door, Madeline rapped sharply.

  “Come in.” The voice was no longer familiar, not that she’d known him that
well to begin with.

  With Tick on her heels, she pushed the door open. Bobby looked up from the file on his desk, but recognition didn’t light his eyes until he caught sight of Tick. He rose to proffer a hand. “Well, hey, boy, what are you doing down here?”

  “Need to talk to you about an old death.” Tick took his hand in a hard shake. “Good to see you, Bobby.”

  Bobby’s blue gaze tracked to Madeline with polite expectation. Tick cleared his throat. “You remember Madeline Holton. She’s serving as our interim investigator.”

  Recollection dawned on his face and he stuck out his hand. “Madeline Holton? Well, I swear. Good to see you, girl.”

  “You too.” She found her own hand engulfed in a firm grip and then he stepped back, gesturing.

  “Y’all come sit down. You said something about a death?” Bobby settled behind his desk again.

  “The coroner called it a heart attack, but an autopsy was never completed.” Tick handed over the manila folder he’d brought with them. “We’ve uncovered some unrelated information concerning a cold case in our jurisdiction that makes us think maybe his death wasn’t so natural.”

  “A heart attack, huh? At twenty-one?” Bobby glanced up, askance. “I mean, it happens, but a lot of times it don’t happen, right?”

  “Right.” Tick dragged out the monosyllable.

  Bobby lifted a couple of papers, his gaze on the folder’s contents. “Any family left?”

  “Nope, not locally. His parents both died a few years ago; he was an only child. An aunt who used to live in Alabama, but no recent address.”

  “Wait. His wife was Allison Barnett.” Bobby lifted his eyebrows. “That’s some shit. You thinking she might have had something to do with his ‘heart attack’?”

  “We do.”

  “Huh.” Bobby paged through the rest of the file. “She always was a little off. No offense, Tick.”

  “None taken.” He rested his elbow on the chair arm and rubbed his jaw. “She’s a lot off now.”