Deadly Summer (Darling Investigations Book 1)

by Denise Grover Swank

The sirens were becoming louder. We didn’t have much time.

  “I found the bike over there,” I pointed in that direction, and Bill did a slow pan. “But then I heard a sound in the woods. While it could have been an animal, I just knew it was a person. I texted Dixie to bring Bill, the cameraman. But I couldn’t wait for them—I felt like I was in danger, so I started to run. I tripped and stumbled into the woods, still being chased. Then I fell. Everything went a little hazy after that. I vaguely remember finding Otto Olson’s body, I . . . I think someone hit my head from behind”—Dixie gasped, but Bill didn’t stop filming—“and the next thing I knew, I woke up. Dixie and Bill had found me, but the bike and my camera—which I’d used to take photos of the bike—were gone.”

  “How’d you know the bike was out here?” Bill asked.

  “I met the janitor at the First Baptist Church in Sweet Briar earlier, and he told me he’d seen Otto Olson’s bike off this path. He was here yesterday, fishing at the lake, when he spotted the bike. So when we broke for lunch, I decided to come check it out.” I paused. “I’m sorry, Bill.”

  We could hear the voices of the emergency personnel now. Bill pointed his camera at the ground and looked me in the face. “It’s okay. I believe you now.”

  “Believe what? That I wasn’t trying to trick you?”

  “That too, but also that you really want to do this . . . solve crimes, not just be on camera.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I’m all in.”

  I didn’t have time to ask him what he meant, because the sheriff’s deputies entered the clearing.

  “Where’s the victim?” one of the deputies asked. He was young and cute, and Dixie instantly perked up.

  I wondered how Bill was going to handle that.

  “Which victim?” Dixie asked. “The one with the concussion or the dead one?” Then she gave him a soft smile. “I bet you want the live one.” She wrapped an arm around my back. “She’s right here.”

  The deputy’s gaze shifted to Bill, who had just put his camera down.

  An older deputy followed behind him. “Hey, you’re that girl from Gotcha! Are you filming that show here?”

  Bill headed over to the other deputies, presumably to tell them about poor Otto.

  I grimaced. “Yes and no . . .”

  “Shouldn’t you pick her up and carry her to the ambulance?” Dixie asked the younger one, giving him a coy look.

  His mouth quivered with the hint of a grin. “That’s not how it’s typically done.”

  “She was passed out on the ground not more than ten minutes ago, and she was out for a good five minutes. I don’t think she should be standing around like this.”

  Concern washed over his face.

  “She has a point, Ms. . . .” The older deputy said, looking at me as though searching for my real name.

  “If either of you call me the Gotcha! girl, you’re the ones who are gonna need to be carried out of here.”

  The older deputy grinned. “You’re Summer Butler. And the fact you’re so feisty is a good sign. I’m Deputy Robinson, and this is Deputy Dixon.”

  Dixie beamed at the younger deputy.

  This hardly seemed like the time for matchmaking.

  Deputy Dixon moved closer and motioned to the side of the clearing. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No. Staying here is creeping me out. Can I go sit on the tail bed of my truck until the ambulance arrives?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding surprised. “I’ll walk with you.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I’m sure you have other things to take care of here.”

  “You were the one to find the body, right? The caller said you’d passed out after finding a body.”

  “I didn’t pass out. I was chased into the woods, and I think someone hit me in the back of the head and knocked me out.” My memories of what had happened between finding the bike and waking up were all fuzzy.

  Both deputies did a double take.

  “Someone attacked you?” Deputy Robinson asked.

  “Yeah, and before we leave the clearing, I need to point out that when I got here, there was a bike right here.” I gestured to where it had been. “Now it’s gone, and the camera I used to take photos of it is gone too.”

  Deputy Dixon turned serious. “Now I really need to stick with you.”

  The ambulance arrived moments after I sat on the tailgate. Deputy Dixon talked to the EMTs for a while and then returned to me. “I need to go check on what’s going on in the clearing, but you’ll be in the EMTs’ capable hands.”

  “Thank you, Deputy.”

  He nodded, then headed off.

  The EMTs gave me a quick evaluation and said I needed to go to the hospital in Sweet Briar to be seen by a doctor.

  “I need to tell my cousin Dixie first,” I said. “She’ll be worried if I just leave.” I pulled out my phone and sent her a text to meet me at the hospital.

  Just as I got into the back of the ambulance, I was certain I saw a white van driving off.

  Where had I seen one before? My head was too muddled to figure it out.

  A half hour later, I was in the Sweet Briar Hospital ER, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and what little was left of my dignity. But Lauren quickly dispatched of the latter after she and Karen walked into my exam room.

  “If you’re going to cause drama, couldn’t you have the good sense to get it on camera?” my producer demanded.

  “Lauren . . .”

  “Don’t Lauren me. You ruined everything!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Finding Otto Olson was our entire season!”

  I couldn’t believe her. A man was dead, and she was pissed that she’d lost her overarching story. “But we don’t know how he died, Lauren. We can find out who killed him.”

  “No,” she said. A blood vessel throbbed on her forehead. “You will do absolutely nothing unless I tell you to.” She pointed her finger at me. “You don’t even shit unless you have permission from me.”

  “Lauren . . .”

  “Do you understand?” she forced through gritted teeth.

  “We can use this,” Karen interrupted with a fearful look.

  Lauren turned toward her, some of her anger fading. “Go on.”

  “Obviously we need a new, big mystery, but this is going to create a huge buzz. People are going to want to see the episode where she finds the body. Besides,” Karen added, “people are already talking about her rift with her mother. This could make national headlines.”

  “We don’t have any film of it,” Lauren said, her brow furrowed.

  “Bill’s still out there. We can have him get a bunch of footage and then have Summer do a voice-over of what happened.”

  Lauren threw up her hands in excitement. “Oh, my God. You’re brilliant.”

  The door opened and a nurse forced her way around Karen. “What in the Sam Hill is going on in here?”

  Neither of them said anything.

  “Ms. Butler has a concussion,” the nurse said. “This shoutin’ could be causin’ her harm, not to mention you’re disturbin’ the other patients.”

  “How soon until she can get out of here and get back to work?” Lauren asked.

  “She’s had a concussion, ma’am. Do you realize how serious that is?”

  “She’s talking and sitting,” Lauren said. “That’s all I need. Ticktock. Time’s wasting. Where are her clothes?”

  The nurse gasped in shock, then said, “The doctor is considerin’ keepin’ her overnight.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Lauren shook her head. “Nope. That won’t work with her schedule.”

  “Even if she wanted to leave without the doctor’s permission, we aren’t allowed to let her go until the deputy takes her statement.”

  “Because she found a body?” Lauren asked in disbelief. “Surely they don’t think she killed him.”

  “Not just that, ma’am,” the nurse said, starting to get pissed. “She
was attacked.”

  I’d hoped for more sympathy from Lauren at the mention of my attack, but I wasn’t prepared for the gleam of excitement in her eyes.

  “Really?” she asked me.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Bill said you got the concussion from running into a tree just before you saw the body.”

  “Well, that was the first one,” I reluctantly conceded. Why hadn’t he told her the whole story? Maybe he’d texted her while I was passed out. “I was running from whoever was stalking me in the woods. After I found Otto, I think someone hit me on the back of the head and took my camera.”

  Lauren turned to the nurse. “She can’t leave, but can she have visitors?”

  The nurse narrowed her eyes. “Within reason.”

  Lauren’s grin turned wicked. “I’ll be right back.”

  The nurse watched her leave and said, “We can ban her from your room, you know.”

  I sighed. “That will only make it worse. Maybe she’ll get it out of her system.”

  The pitying look the nurse gave me confirmed it was wishful thinking.

  Lauren and Karen were back about five minutes later with Tony, Chuck, and Troy the lighting guy in tow.

  “I suspect the nurse will try to kick us out,” Lauren told them as they entered the room, “but let’s get what we can.”

  Chuck quickly hooked me up with a new mike since my other one was in the truck, while Tony and Troy talked about camera angles and lighting.

  “I want you to look more injured,” Lauren said as she squinted at me. “It’s too bad we don’t have a makeup artist to give your bruises more definition.”

  “What?”

  “We can get that tomorrow,” Karen said. “Plus, they’ll naturally look worse anyway.”

  “Good thinking,” Lauren told her. Turning to me, she said, “We’re going to play up the angle that you were out there working on the case. You got attacked because you got too close to the murderer.”

  “Or a rapist,” Karen added, sounding a little too hopeful for my liking.

  My shudder sent a new wave of pain through my brain. “I’m not going to suggest either of those things. We don’t know what happened yet.”

  “The truth is what we present,” Lauren said. “And if we repeat it enough, people will believe it.”

  “That’s wrong.”

  “And yet it’s what you signed up for,” she said in a short tone.

  “I’ll tell you what happened, but I won’t say the person who attacked me was a murderer for certain.”

  Lauren remained surprisingly quiet.

  A few minutes later, Tony and Troy were ready, and Chuck said the sound was good. I felt exhausted. I eased myself down on the gurney—the back semireclined—suddenly feeling every ache and pain in my body.

  “Summer,” Lauren said, her voice full of sympathy, “tell us about your vicious attack.”

  “I was chased through the woods, and then I found poor Otto. I . . . I was looking at him when I think someone hit me on the head and stole my camera,” I said, pretty much repeating what I’d just said to her off camera.

  “Cut!” Lauren shouted. “What the hell, Summer? You know how this goes. You need to drag the story out and play it up for the camera.”

  “So that’s how it’s done,” I heard Luke say in a dry voice.

  I instantly shot upright. The room spun and a strong wave of nausea rolled through me. I swallowed the taste of bile. “I need a bowl.”

  Lauren looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but Karen’s eyes filled with horror. She clearly knew why I needed the bowl, but that hadn’t translated to her getting it for me. She seemed frozen in place.

  Luke had entered the room, and he was casting a contemptuous gaze on the crew.

  “What are you doing here, Officer?” Lauren asked. “I thought this incident was being handled by the sheriff’s department.”

  “It is, but it involves the death of one of my residents, so I thought I’d check in with the person who stumbled upon his body.”

  The room was spinning and my stomach was churning. I closed my eyes, hoping everything would settle down, but after two seconds it was only getting worse. “I need a bowl,” I repeated in a strained voice.

  No one paid me any attention, though Karen was still looking at me like I was about to explode.

  “That’s so sweet of you, Officer,” Lauren said.

  “That’s chief,” Luke said, his tone so cold I could feel the bite several feet away. “Chief Montgomery. I’m the police chief in this town.”

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Lauren said in a low, sexy tone I wasn’t used to hearing from her.

  I cracked an eye, surprised to see her trying to give him a come-hither look. Apparently, even Lauren Chapman wasn’t immune to Luke’s questionable charm. But opening my eyes only made the nausea situation worse. At this point, I was positive I was going to barf; it was only a matter of how quickly it occurred.

  “Let’s not beat around the bush,” Luke said. “Your entire production is disrupting my town. I haven’t had a murder in three years, and now there have been two within a twenty-four-hour period. Don’t think it’s lost on me that they both happened after you and your circus came to town.”

  I had to admit he had a point, and I might have said so, but I was too busy trying not to vomit. I was past the point of repeating my request for a bowl. I slid off the gurney to find one myself.

  “Are you insinuating this is my fault?” Lauren asked in disbelief. “Let me remind you that Otto Olson was found out by the lake, which is out of your jurisdiction.”

  I couldn’t figure out where I was going, but opening my eyes made everything worse. I cracked them slightly, and my stomach churned in protest. Oh, Lord. If I could make it to the sink on the other side of Lauren and Luke . . . But everything was spinning, and I was weaving like a drunk person.

  “Summer,” Karen said from the other side of the room, “maybe you should sit down. You’re about to fall.”

  Luke’s eyes widened slightly when he saw me. He rushed over and grabbed my arm to steady me, but the sudden change in my balance released the tenuous hold I had on my stomach.

  I barfed all over his shirt.

  The entire room gasped in horror, but I was too busy falling to the ground to care. Luke’s grip on my arm tightened, and his free arm slid around my back, the only thing holding me up.

  “Summer!” Lauren cried out, stepping back from the puddle on the floor, but when I turned to face her, I threw up again, hitting from her thighs to her shoes.

  Lauren screamed.

  The sound split my head, and everything went black again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There was a cold rag pressed to my head when I woke up, but my eyelids felt too heavy to open. My head was still killing me, and the smell of vomit made me nauseated all over again. I released a moan and tried to sit up.

  “Whoa,” Luke said in a soothing tone as he gently pushed me back down. “You need to lie still.”

  “What happened?” I croaked out.

  “After your amazing reenactment of Linda Blair’s scene in The Exorcist, you passed out.” The amused tone in his voice made me feel more relieved. He didn’t hate me.

  “And Lauren?”

  “She ran out screaming, and the rest of them ran with her.”

  “That almost makes it worth it.” I cracked an eye, relieved to see he’d changed into a scrub shirt. “You should let your momma see you wearing that,” I said. “She always wanted you to be a doctor instead of a cop.”

  “Momma died a couple of years ago.”

  I cringed. “Luke, I’m so sorry. I know how close you were to her.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I could tell his guard was back up.

  “And your dad?”

  “Still as ornery as ever.” He paused. “But Momma got her doctor. Levi graduated from med school a couple of months before she died.”

  “Was it an accident
?” I asked.

  He cracked a grin. “We all think he paid someone to take all his exams, so you could say it was an accident.” Then his grin faded. “Pancreatic cancer. By the time she found out, it was too late. It all happened fast.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  He remained silent, then after several seconds he asked, “What happened out there, Summer?”

  “I was lookin’ for Otto,” I said, feeling defeated. Sure, I’d found him, but I hadn’t found him in the way I’d hoped. “I have to tell poor Gretchen. She’s going to be so upset.” My voice broke. I’d failed her, just like I’d failed everything else in my life.

  “You really care about her,” he said more to himself than to me. “Don’t worry about tellin’ Gretchen. I went to see her as soon as I got the news.”

  “Thank you. How’s she doin’?”

  “She’s upset . . . and grateful to you for finding him. He could have been out there for a while before someone stumbled upon him.”

  I may have found him, but I hadn’t found him alive. It seemed like a hollow consolation.

  I turned to look up at him, surprised to see the worry on his face. When his brown eyes caught mine, an electrical current flowed through my veins, filling me with a yearning I hadn’t felt in years. We’d built separate lives, but all it took was standing in his orbit for me to realize no man had ever come close to making me feel what I’d felt with him years ago. Still, I couldn’t ignore that we’d been kids then. What if I’d idealized our connection? And even if I hadn’t, there was no denying we were different people now.

  His hand lifted to my face, tenderly caressing my cheek as his eyes searched mine. “Who attacked you, Summer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I tried to hold his gaze, but my eyelids felt like they had tiny weights on them. I told him everything, including someone chasing me in the woods, then looked up at him, finding it difficult to open my eyes enough to see him. “When I came to, my camera was gone and so was the bike.”

  His hand now rested on my arm, and he squeezed it slightly. “What camera? What bike?”

  I explained it to him, and his face was so unreadable, I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. “I still need to give Deputy Dixon my statement.”