In the dark of her car, Carly released a frustrated breath and shook her head. She knew so little about that time, about what had really happened. And now that Marguerite was dead, and they’d had no luck finding Joe or his colleague Vince, she wondered if she would ever know the truth about the events that had brought them all together.
But they had to find out. She and Marcus deserved to know the truth. So she’d given Naomi a physical description of Joe before she’d left and her friend had promised to keep looking. It was a long shot, but she hoped Naomi would find something. In the meantime, she at least had some reading material.
As she started to climb the gentle winding road into the Berkshires, Carly’s thoughts turned toward getting home, pouring a glass of whiskey, and sitting on her porch for a bit to peruse her files. It would be late by the time she arrived, after midnight, but it would give her some time to calm her brain before going to bed.
As the idea of curling up alone on her porch wended its way through her mind, thoughts of the night before crept in—of sitting there with Drew, talking about some things, but also not much of anything.
She still didn’t know what to make of him, but that shouldn’t be a surprise, since he didn’t seem sure about what to make of her either. She laughed quietly at that. Drew seemed like someone who knew exactly what he wanted at all times. She’d never seen him behave indecisively before. And she had a hard time dismissing that little bit of confusion she’d seen in his expression—it had made him more human and may have even been a bit endearing.
But despite that hint of boyish charm, there was still something about him, about his intensity, that left her feeling unsettled.
Then again, at this point, how she felt about him—how he made her feel—probably no longer mattered. With the investigation handed over, he had no reason to stay in Windsor.
Well, perhaps not no reason. She acknowledged that she might be a reason he’d stay. But since he didn’t seem to know what he wanted from her, she didn’t know what weight to give that possibility. Although a tiny part of her wondered what would happen if she asked him to stay. It wasn’t a good idea, of course, so as she pulled into her driveway, grateful to be home, she dismissed it from her mind.
But as she passed the main house, her headlights swept over a car parked by her front porch, then landed on Drew, sitting on her front step, forearms resting on his knees.
Waiting for her.
• • •
Drew felt a twinge of remorse for having put a tiny tracer on Carly’s car earlier that day when it had been parked in downtown Windsor. “Sneaky” and “beneath him” were two phrases that came to mind when he thought about his behavior. And if she ever found out, she’d have every right to go ballistic. But when she stepped safely from her car, bag in hand, the relief that flooded through him washed away any regret.
From his position on the porch, he watched her pause then walk with measured, but confident, strides toward him. The peace offering he held rocked slowly in his fingers. Neither of them said anything when she stopped in front of him and her gaze dropped to the bottle in his hand. He held it up for her to see more clearly. Her eyes came up with it, then moved farther up until they landed on his.
Without a word, she reached for the bottle with one hand and pulled her house key out with the other. Handing her the rare bottle of single malt whiskey he’d found at a shop in Great Barrington, he stood and stretched his legs as she opened her door. He walked in behind her as she tapped in the alarm code, then he turned to shut the door.
She’d left the heat on in the small house and after sitting outside for the past few minutes, the sudden change in temperature felt stifling to him. But since she hadn’t bothered taking her coat off, he didn’t either. He had an idea of where they were going.
Dropping her purse on the table, she made her way to the cabinets and pulled out two glasses. As she poured their drinks, his eyes drifted to her bag and the file he could see sticking out the top. He couldn’t read the papers inside, but he did see a URL address and in it the search criteria “Sophia Lamot Davidson” printed across the top of the page. He didn’t know the name but he filed it away.
He turned as Carly held out his drink. Without a word, he took it and followed her out the back door, grabbing a blanket for her on the way, and onto the same porch on which they’d sat the night before.
When she’d settled into one of the Adirondack chairs, he took her glass and held it while she wrapped herself in a blanket. He then handed her drink back to her, took his own seat beside her, and waited.
And waited.
“You make me uncomfortable, unsettled,” she said.
He was glad he’d swallowed the sip he’d just taken because her statement hit him straight in the gut. He glanced over, wondering what she’d meant. Was she afraid of him? Even the chance that she could be afraid of him caused something to sour in his stomach. But she shook her head and seemed to read his thoughts.
“Not in that way,” she said. “I’m not scared of you. I’m not worried you are going to do something to me without my consent or act violently.”
He let out a long breath and turned his eyes back to the blackened lake. Once the fog from his initial reaction had cleared from his mind, he let her statement sift through it. And he found he still didn’t like it—in a different way of course, but it still didn’t feel good.
“It’s because we’re attracted to each other,” he said, trying to give a simple answer to what they both knew wasn’t a simple situation. When she didn’t immediately respond, he turned to watch her profile. She appeared to be mulling the statement over.
“No,” she said. At the possibility that she would deny the attraction, he had to bite back a reaction. But then she corrected herself. “I mean, no, I don’t think that’s it,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m thirty years old, Drew, I’ve been attracted to other men and had other men attracted to me.”
He turned away. At least she hadn’t denied their attraction to each other—only that it wasn’t the cause of her discomfort. “Then why do you think it is that I make you uncomfortable?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the age difference.”
Great, he thought. Something he couldn’t change.
“No,” she sighed, “that’s not really it either. Or it’s not entirely that, anyway. The truth is, more often than not, I can’t tell what you’re thinking. Some of that is probably just a part of who you are, but now that I know what you do for a living, I think some of it is due to the training and years of practice you’ve had too. I can feel the way you watch me. I know there’s chemistry between us, maybe even something more, but I can’t tell how you feel about it—if you welcome it or just wish it would go away. And to be fair, I’m not really sure where I stand, either.”
When her voice trailed off, he didn’t rush to fill the silence. She sounded more curious about the situation than anything else. And though he hadn’t ever intended to hide his thoughts from her, he could see how she might have ended up feeling that way—he was a master at holding things close to the vest, sometimes to a fault.
He could tell her that he liked her, respected her, and found himself more drawn to her than any other woman he’d ever met. He could say a lot of things. But saying them didn’t mean she’d believe him. No, in order for her to believe him, she needed the same thing he had already decided he wanted.
“Time,” he said.
He felt her gaze turn to him.
“Last night you asked me what I want from you. I want time.”
“Time?” she repeated.
“Yes. Time with you,” he clarified to be sure she understood.
“Uh, why?”
He turned a somewhat disbelieving look on her. “You really need to ask why?”
She looked a little chagrined at his comment. Running a hand over her face and through her hair, she let out a deep breath. “No,” she admitted, much to his relief.
&n
bsp; “Will you give me that much? Will you give yourself that much?” He felt her eyes on him but he kept his gaze forward. His heart rate kicked up with every second that passed.
Finally she spoke. “Yes,” she answered, quietly. “Yes, I’ll give you time.”
He let out a long breath. It certainly wasn’t as though he didn’t want the rest of things that came with a relationship, but wanting and needing were two different things. And right now, he knew that what they both needed was simply time.
“How was your trip tonight?” he asked, purposefully changing the subject. They could beat a dead horse, or they could move on to what it meant to spend time together.
She paused before answering. “It was good. I went to Boston to see a friend.”
“A long trip for one evening.”
She shrugged. “It was. But I wanted to talk to her about Marguerite.”
That surprised him. He hadn’t thought she would talk about her real reason for going. “I guess you decided not to leave it alone. Did you learn anything?”
“The marshals aren’t as invested as Marcus and I are in making sure there aren’t repercussions on Windsor from Marguerite’s death, but I didn’t want to go bungling into an investigation, so I went to talk to my friend who is a computer expert.”
“Seems you’d need to be more of an expert to know what to look for, and look out for, in this situation.”
“Naomi and her brother are computer security experts. Really good at what they do.”
As she spoke, as they began to have a relatively “normal” conversation, Drew began to relax.
“And did she find anything?”
Carly nodded slowly. “She did. A lot of things that don’t give me the warm fuzzies.”
“Like what?” he asked, taking another sip of his drink.
For the next half hour they talked about the kind of electronic surveillance Naomi had found and what it might mean. They discussed the reports Carly had brought home and how she intended to study them and look for patterns. The conversation was flowing almost like it would between good friends, until he asked how she thought what she might find was connected to Windsor. He suspected that she already knew the answer, but she only lifted a shoulder in response. “I’ll have to see where the paper trail leads and take it from there. Mostly I want to figure out if Marguerite did anything unusual before her death. If I find that she did, then I’ll try to figure out if it means anything.”
Sensing she had kept quite a bit to herself, at least on that last point, Drew took the last sip of his drink, swallowing his disappointment in the fact that she hadn’t shared everything.
“Well,” he said, rising from his seat with her eyes tracking him. “I’ll let you get to it then.”
She rose as well. The blanket she’d wrapped around her fell when she stood and he reached out to catch it. Warm from her body, the blanket’s heat curled around his hand. He stilled, watching her watch him, not eighteen inches away. Her eyes darted to his lips.
He could have leaned down and kissed her.
He thought about it, he did. But he forced himself to step back. He’d asked for time and that was all he was going to ask of her until she felt comfortable enough to take the first step further. He moved toward the door, away from her warmth. Without a word, she followed, took his glass with hers, then placed them both in the sink.
“This is a nice bottle,” she said, picking up the whiskey he’d brought and handing it back to him.
He shook his head. “It’s yours, keep it. I kept you up tonight and, who knows, maybe we can share another drink tomorrow night.”
She didn’t say yes but she didn’t say no either. He took that as a good sign and his cue to leave.
“Sleep well,” he said as he stepped off her porch a minute later. “And don’t forget to put the alarm on.”
She didn’t answer immediately, but he thought he heard a quiet “good night” before she shut the door.
Chapter Eight
Carly managed to haul herself out of bed and into work by eight the next morning. When she arrived, she was surprised to find that Vic, closeted away in his office, had already started his day. Coffee in hand, she sat down at her desk, pulled up the incident reports from the night before, and started going through them. With Windsor’s low crime rate, her review never took too long, but she liked to do it as soon as she came on shift in order to stay up-to-date on the goings on in her town.
Vic knocked on the frame of her door twenty minutes later, just as she finished logging the reports into the computer system. Behind him stood a woman wearing a suit, her dark hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her serious expression gave Carly pause. Had someone caught Naomi? The woman looked to be all business and not afraid of a little confrontation.
Carly’s heart sank.
“Carly,” Vic said, stepping into her office. The woman trailed behind him, her eyes darting around the room, taking it all in. “This is Josie Webb. She’s a recent graduate of the police academy and here to interview for one of our open spots.”
Carly felt a smile disproportionate with the information she’d just been given spread across her face. “Hi Josie, I’m Carly Drummond, Deputy Chief of Police,” she said as she stood and shook the woman’s hand.
“I know I didn’t give you any notice,” Vic said, “But I was hoping you wouldn’t mind spending a little time with Josie?”
“Of course not,” she answered as her phone rang. “Excuse me first though, if you don’t mind?”
Josie shook her head and stepped back in to the main office area with Vic, giving her just a little space.
Carly was thankful for the privacy, but once she’d hung up, she didn’t bother to stifle the several curses that formed in her mind and flew from her mouth.
“There a problem?” Vic asked, popping his head back in.
Carly let out a long breath. “Mary Hanson is in the ER again down in Riverside. The nurses are trying to get her to talk to the sheriff’s deputy, but she says she won’t talk to anyone but me,” she answered as she stood and began pulling on her jacket.
“What is it this time?” Vic asked.
“Broken wrist and nose.” She zipped her coat and reached for her keys.
“Mary’s husband isn’t a nice drunk,” Vic said to Josie.
“Or generally nice at all,” Carly added. “But we do what we can. How do you feel about a ride-along?” she asked Josie.
A flash of excitement and surprise crossed the young woman’s face as she darted a look at Vic for approval. He nodded and three minutes later, Carly and Josie were in one of the police cruisers headed down to Riverside.
The two women spent the drive down to the hospital chatting about Josie’s brief military career, her short-lived marriage to a man with political ambitions, and her decision to leave him and enter the police academy so that both he and she could lead the lives they truly wanted.
Carly learned that, much like her, Josie was a small-town girl and had only applied for positions in towns like Windsor. By the time they reached Riverside, Carly found herself selling Windsor, the community, and the department to the young woman.
On their trip back forty-five minutes later, however, the optimism she had felt at a potential new colleague was dampened by the frustration that crawled through her. Mary Hanson had had to leave her daughter with a neighbor that morning in order to take herself to the ER. But, once again, she had refused to press charges or even consider leaving her husband. The only reason she’d asked for Carly at all was because the well-meaning sheriff’s deputy had kept pushing her to press charges.
Mary’s situation seemed to weigh on both Carly and Josie as they made their way north. The potential recruit asked a few questions about Vic and the other officers, but other than that, their ride back to Windsor was silent.
After arriving at the station and sending Josie on her way, Carly stopped by Vic’s office to give her report. Leaning against the doorframe, she said,
“I like her.”
“I do too.”
“She told me some of what she accomplished at the academy, she’s a bit of a go-getter, assuming it’s all true.”
“It’s all true,” Vic said. “I talked to a couple of her instructors and even some of her classmates. She was clear about wanting to be in a small town, so none of her classmates felt competitive with her and were willing to talk.”
“And I assume the references align with her résumé?”
Vic nodded.
“I say hire her then, before some other town does. I think she’d be a good fit.”
“Good, I agree.”
Carly turned to head back to her office, but Vic called her back.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a day off?”
“I don’t know, three or four weeks, maybe. Maybe a bit longer.”
Vic’s eyes narrowed. “Go. Take the rest of the week and weekend off,” he ordered. “Then Monday and Tuesday too, since those are supposed to be your regular days off anyway.”
She shook her head. “I appreciate it, but then I’d have to reschedule everyone, and it’s not worth the effort.” While the idea of having five-and-a-half days off appealed to her, having to adjust the schedule, one of her least favorite jobs, did not.
“I can do it.”
That brought her up short. She eyed her boss, looking for any sign that something might be wrong. He hadn’t done scheduling in well over a year.
He sighed. “Don’t look at me like that. I know I haven’t been much of a chief lately, and I’m not going to bother making excuses. The least I can do is pick up some scheduling duties. I do know how, you know.”
Again, she eyed him. He seemed utterly serious. Maybe even like he needed to do it, like he needed to get back to something familiar. The idea of a few days off began hold more appeal. Not only would she be free to focus on Marguerite, she might even be able to finish unpacking.
“You sure?”
He waved her off. “Yes, I’m sure, go. Go home and nap or unpack or whatever it is you do on your albeit limited free time.”
An Inarticulate Sea Page 10