Dangerous Conditions
Dangerous Conditions
Jenna Kernan
It's a race against time to uncover the truth. Working as a sleepy town’s sheriff, Logan Lynch’s life turns upside down when a man is found dead. When biochemist Dr Paige Morris turns up, claiming her boss’s death isn’t what it seems, she becomes the victim of sabotage. Can Logan help… before it’s too late.
It’s a race against time
To uncover the truth.
Former soldier Logan Lynch has no memory of the past nine years of his life. Now working as a sleepy town’s constable, his life turns upside down when a man is found dead. Before long, microbiologist Dr. Paige Morris gets involved, claiming her boss’s death isn’t what it seems. But as Paige herself becomes the victim of sabotage, she needs Logan’s help…before it’s too late.
JENNA KERNAN has penned over two dozen novels and received two RITA® Award nominations. Jenna is every bit as adventurous as her heroines. Her hobbies include recreational gold prospecting, scuba diving and gem hunting. Jenna grew up in the Catskills and currently lives in the Hudson Valley in New York State with her husband. Follow Jenna on Twitter, @jennakernan (https://twitter.com/JennaKernan), on Facebook or at jennakernan.com (http://jennakernan.com).
Also by Jenna Kernan (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Defensive Action
Adirondack Attack
Warning Shot
Surrogate Escape
Tribal Blood
Undercover Scout
Black Rock Guardian
Turquoise Guardian
Eagle Warrior
Firewolf
The Warrior’s Way
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dangerous Conditions
Jenna Kernan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-09460-3
DANGEROUS CONDITIONS
© 2019 Jeannette H. Monaco
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Note to Readers (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
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For Jim, always.
Contents
Cover (#uf7ceb8a6-a5b7-5a31-b5f3-2d7e8cd7ad95)
Back Cover Text (#ue30050d0-a6a6-509f-9df1-09167ac88412)
About the Author (#u74c44217-98ec-572d-bfef-9b55536cf743)
Booklist (#u2cc1b25a-5087-5e6b-bfd0-4ed9562b6ae7)
Title Page (#u3c13e065-6505-55bf-bafa-e425aaca615c)
Copyright (#u4da54c5c-67aa-5961-b0ac-c9faa31d254f)
Note to Readers
Dedication (#uc670c5e1-c99a-5b8c-9d2e-13f88ee0d289)
Chapter One (#u33b93e47-25a6-5f3d-afc3-5505e16d994b)
Chapter Two (#uba948df0-960e-51ab-a9b9-bdfd8d91bf3d)
Chapter Three (#u1e4ee1f2-bed7-59f8-aab9-0003cdde8cb9)
Chapter Four (#u1c0d7b3d-fefa-5076-ae42-bd0603a7373b)
Chapter Five (#u0287e658-a5aa-5678-afba-30069964ffa2)
Chapter Six (#u5c6142a4-8ea5-5ef9-be1e-40eb6812a58c)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Constable Logan Lynch drew on the cowboy hat that had been given to him by his older brother Connor, a village supervisor, because he said it covered the scar on Logan’s forehead. Off-putting, Connor had said. “No need to frighten the kids and tourists.” Plus, the Stetson made him look more like a real lawman. The board had approved his position last September. He was a village constable with no law enforcement experience whatsoever. He seemed to be the only one bothered by that. Still, he needed a job. Not much work in his hometown of 429 for a veteran with a TBI—Traumatic Brain Injury.
Most folks here catered to weekend tourists or worked for Rathburn-Bramley Pharmaceuticals.
“Morning, Constable,” Paige called from across the main street.
She was so pretty and so darn smart. A real scientist, just like she always wanted to be. Meanwhile, he couldn’t distinguish between a rooster crow and a truck backfiring. He wondered if she knew that her hair turned red in the early-morning sunlight.
“Don’t you look spiffy. Where’s your star?”
“Under my coat,” he said. “It’s on a chain. Nobody asks to see it anymore but you.” Why had he added that?
Paige’s smile blinded him. He was a deer in the headlights.
“Big weekend coming up,” she said, still walking as he crossed the street. He couldn’t help it. These few minutes with Paige were the highlight of his entire day. He remembered that she had been his brother’s date at his senior prom during their sophomore year. He’d been told by his dad that he and Paige had dated, too. His dad said they’d been serious enough to be briefly engaged. But he didn’t remember any of that. He wished he might. If he could retrieve just one memory, it would be of them together. He and Paige were the same age, twenty-eight, and had graduated from the village’s central school together. He didn’t remember that either or what ended their engagement. All he knew for certain was that if she didn’t want him then, she sure wouldn’t want him now. She’d gone on to be a biochemist with a doctorate, paid for by her company and he was a constable who had only just regained his driver’s license. All that didn’t stop Logan from admiring her. She was Dr. Morris now, and a mom.
As her neighbor, he knew that she was great with her daughter, Lori. His brother and Paige were now just friends, though not from Connor’s lack of trying. Logan might have to settle for that because asking her out and being turned down would kill him. As it was, he feared her concern was spawned by pity. Somehow he’d become the community project.
“You all ready?” she asked, coming to a stop and allowing him to catch up with her. She was running late today so their conversation would be brief.
“Almost. We got those…” And the words left him. He pointed vaguely at the pile of orange cones and no-parking signs that he’d be stringing up on Main Street. The event shut down traffic for the entire day on Saturday.
Harvest Festival was a village-wide extravaganza that had everything from soapmaking to a turkey-call competition.
“Signage?” She offered the words to him as she often did. She was quick as a whip. Had three degrees in microbiology that she’d earned while he was getting blown up in Iraq.
“Yeah.” He felt deflated. He might be able to pick her up with one hand, but that skill wasn’t useful in conversation. His drill sergeant said his size just made him a bigger target.
Saturday, he’d be waving his big foam finger like the village idiot while parking cars in the empty lot behind the gas station and she’d be working in her research lab probably finding the cure for cancer.
“I hung that sign for Rathburn-Bramley—the company’s sponsoring a lot of the festival.” He pointed at his accomplishment.
Her brow wrinkled as she shielded her eyes to gaze into the early-morning sunlight at the vinyl sign strung above the street between two lampposts with nylon cording. He had learned to speak and read again but he’d never lost the ability to read emotion. Paige’s expression told him that she was worried.
“Was that wise? Being in a bucket truck? I mean, your injuries.”
“Damage done, my doctor says.”
“Still, another head injury…” Her words trailed off.
“Not good for anybody, I suppose.” He grinned and then stopped, fearing the dopey smile that always seemed to come to his face when he was around her made him look damaged. He adjusted his hat farther down his forehead.
They had been in the same class most of primary school. He remembered that with the clarity of a cloudless summer sky. But he couldn’t remember much past junior year. He’d lost the time between his junior year and when he woke up Stateside at Walter Reed about six years later, along with the part of his brain that allowed him to hear and talk and read. Reading came back first. Speaking more slowly. The hearing was improved, though the doctors said he still didn’t process sound correctly, might never process it as he had. He’d adjust, they’d said; he’d learn to speak more slowly to give him time to recall the words, but the memories were just gone.
He was glad the hat covered the worst of the scar. It kept Paige from staring at his forehead. Now she stared at his hat instead.
“You…ah…you be there on Saturday?” he asked.
Paige always made him more tongue-tied than usual.
“Planning on it,” she said.
“They’re bringing in a bouncy hut this year,” he said.
She turned from the street and faced him. “You looking forward to that?”
“No. Not me. The kids. I hope.” He sounded more like a guy without a brain than one with a brain injury. “Your girl might like it.”
Paige looked away. “Lori is too old for that, I’m afraid.”
Why would a woman with an eight-year-old daughter care about a bouncy hut? Lori was already on the youth soccer team and he noticed she was fixing her hair now instead of leaving it in a wild braid with strands flying everywhere. Unlike Paige’s hair, Lori’s was light brown and her eyes were amber. Like her father’s, he supposed. That thought brought a frown. He’d asked Paige once about the girl’s father and it had made her cry. He wasn’t doing that again.
He stared at those sympathetic blue eyes. Paige had skin that was rosy and perfect. She was taller than most women with a frame as willowy as a dancer’s. She’d been five feet eleven inches in eighth grade and gotten no taller. She’d even been taller than he’d been for a time. Until sophomore year when he’d shot up to six feet and one inch. Back then her red-blond hair had been to her waist. Now she wore it at chin length, letting the riot of curls just dance all around her pretty face.
He tried to ignore the smell of her skin and the urge to feel the soft texture of her spiraling curls. She stared at him with those bewitching blue eyes. He went still as his body galloped to life. He wanted to break their friendship by kissing her, really kissing her, and take this relationship back to what he’d been told it had once been. But he was equally terrified that doing so would ruin what they had. He lived on their friendship, tried to make it be enough. What if he told her how he felt and she laughed or avoided him?
Paige was a scientist. Educated. Pretty and a mother. While he was a brain-damaged vet who had gotten his head knocked in “engaging insurgents while simultaneously evacuating three wounded marines under fire.” That sounded cool and he surely wished he could remember doing that. But it wasn’t as cool as the fantasy of being Paige’s one and only again.
Why would she settle for a man like him? She wouldn’t. He knew it and that stopped him every time.
“Well, good luck setting up that bouncy hut,” she said.
He tipped his hat and she smiled, letting her go yet again.
And she was off, walking down Main Street from the home that she shared with her parents from the time they went to school together. Only now her dad was gone. So was his mom. Paige was a scientist at Rathburn-Bramley and yesterday he’d mistaken the church bells for the fire engine.
But he and Paige had always been close; he had looked out for her and now she looked out for him. She’d even helped his brother get the village council to approve his position, with some assistance from her new employer. She’d helped him get the necessary certificates and training to be a constable, too. He missed her helping him study. He wondered again if he should try to kiss her. Then he imagined making an unwelcome advance and decided it would be a great way to end their friendship permanently. She didn’t want a man like him. Who would?
“Have a great day, Dr. Morris,” he called.
She paused, half turned, glancing back over her shoulder at him. “And you have a great day, as well, Constable Lynch.”
PAIGE MORRIS HURRIED down the street, wishing she could go back in time and change things, knowing she could not. Each misstep along the way, each decision that seemed like the only option at the time, rose up to haunt her now.
For the best, her mother said. But was it really?
The stone in her heart ached as she reached the entrance to the manufacturing facility, waving at Lou Reber, who was the head of security. She registered her identification badge on the scanner as Lou watched the monitor for the green light.
Lou had the lined face and gravelly voice of a former smoker, a muscular build and the gray hairs to prove he’d worked as a police detective for twenty-some years before he earned his gold shield and took his early retirement from the force in Poughkeepsie, New York. Somewhere along the way his grown kids had stopped bringing the grandkids to visit each summer, but he had been married to the same woman for thirty-four years, so he was doing something right.
“How is Miriam?” His wife had suffered a fall on a ski slope a few years ago and had injured her back. Two surgeries later, she still couldn’t do any of the activities she once enjoyed like gardening, golf and skiing. As if that were not enough, she had been recently diagnosed with kidney failure and required biweekly dialysis down in Glens Falls.
Lou’s smile slipped. “Oh, about the same. Good days and bad days. She’s on the list for a new kidney now.” He exhaled, his expression glum but then he rallied. “You hear about the hunters up on the cutoff from Turax Hollow Road?”
“They shoot each other?” she guessed.
The location had a fair number of hunters from urban areas who did not quite seem to know the difference between Jersey cows and deer. They also sometimes shot at motion that could be a deer or their hunting partner.
“No, they ran into a bull moose.”
“With their car?” Paige knew that at 1,300 pounds, a bull moose stood six feet high on stilt-like legs and was the perfect height to sail over the hood of a car or truck before crashing through the windshield and crushing the driver. Everyone up in the Adirondacks had a healthy respect for moose.
“No,” said Lou. “They were chasing it down the road. Animal got tired and turned to fight. Guess they figured out how fast that truck could go backward!” He laughed. “The thing put his antlers through their windshield.”
“They’re big animals.”
“And meaner than all get-out in mating season, which it is.” Lou pulled out his phone. “State police asked me to tell everyone to be extra vigilant while driving. They also sent me photos. Want to see?”
She nodded, and Lou went to his texts. Up came an image of a blue pickup truck missing its passenger-side mirror, with deep gouges in the side panel. The windshield was caved in like an empty soda can and the glass showed a web of hairline cracks.
“Wow.”
Lou beamed, delighted at the damage. “Village supervisor voted to close that cutoff to traffic so folks avoid that moose’s territory.”
She approved of that solution. Calling animal control would mean that moose would be put down. The hunters had been in his territory. The long-time village supervisor and Logan’s older brother, Connor Lynch, was competent and respected, handling squabbles and avoiding small-town politics with the mastery of an experienced politician.
Paige wished Lou a good day and headed for the elevator. Once inside the compartment, she unbuttoned her wool coat. Today was one of those in-between days. Too hot for winter gear and too cool for a light jacket.
Leaving the elevator, she crossed the spotless hallway and tapped her card to the contactless entry system that allowed her access to her department. Two more such barriers and she was in the peace and quiet of her lab and hanging her coat beside her coworker’s. Jeremy Chen generally beat her in since he did not have a daughter to see off to school. Getting Lori out of bed was becoming a challenge that she suspected would get worse as middle school loomed.
“Where’s Ed?” she asked Jeremy, referring to Dr. Edward Sullivan. Her boss, and the head of product quality assurance, was generally here at six in the morning because he said that was the only time he could get anything done. Then he left at three so he could coach his son’s travel basketball team over in Mill Creek.
Jeremy glanced up from his computer. He was her height, ten pounds lighter and of Chinese descent. He wore his straight black hair short on the sides and long on the top. He had a habit of pushing his bangs back off his forehead when thinking, only to have them fall back in place the instant he removed his hand. Only his protective glasses ever managed to keep his hair back from his face.
Jeremy glanced at the clock on his computer screen. “Wow, he’s really late. I’m not sure where he is.”
“You got that report done?” she asked. The monthly quality control statistic compilation was Jeremy’s job.
“I need Ed’s results from the last round,” he said.
“Want me to get it?” They all knew each other’s login information as the company had yet to adopt a file-sharing system that worked. The bugs in the current one caused it to take forever to transfer data and, as flash drives were not allowed by company policy, they had resorted to this workaround.
“No. It can wait.”
Her department did all the quality assurance testing for all pharmaceuticals produced on site including liquids, gases and solid tablets.
Paige stowed her lunch in the mini fridge and her purse beneath her desk. It wasn’t like Ed to just not show up.
“Maybe I’ll call Lou.” She already had the handset to her ear. Lou confirmed that Ed had logged in at 5:37 a.m. and left at 6:00 a.m. to do his run. But he had not checked back in before Lou arrived at eight, and Lou had not seen him since arriving. She lowered the phone. “That’s odd.”
Paige relayed Lou’s information.
“Call Ursula?” Jeremy suggested, referring to Ed’s wife.
“Maybe.” Paige retrieved her mobile phone and considered her options. She didn’t want to worry Ursula unnecessarily. “I’ll try his cell.” She did and got his voice mail. “It’s Paige. Call me back when you have a chance.”
Something didn’t sit right. It was dark out when Ed ran and there was no shoulder on most of the county roads. He could be lying in a ditch right now. Then she thought of what Lou had told her just this morning and sucked in a breath.
“Does he run on the cutoff on Turax Hollow Road?”
Chapter Two (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Lou Reber showed up at the lab just before lunch wearing a long face and rubbing the back of his neck. There was no clearer indicator that he was the bearer of bad news.
“What’s happened?” asked Jeremy, meeting Lou halfway across the room.
Paige instantly thought something had happened to his wife, Miriam. The woman was so changed since that ski accident, distracted, disheveled and unfocused.
But then she realized as the pit of her stomach dropped like a broken elevator, the bad news was about Ed, her boss.
“We found Dr. Sullivan,” he said. “Constable Lynch drove his jogging route after we couldn’t find him. He’s…gone…dead. Looks like a hit-and-run.”
Paige sank to her seat on the high black stool beside the tall lab table, samples abandoned as she absorbed the blow.
“He’s got kids,” said Paige, her voice trembling as the shock of having this man so suddenly torn from her life met with denial. As if having kids somehow exempted him from premature death. Hadn’t her father’s fatal auto accident taught her that no one was immune from tragedy?
Jeremy picked up where she had dropped off. “His son’s team… He coaches for the Lions Club and Boy Scouts.” Jeremy’s head sank and he covered his face with both hands.
“Everyone… The whole village will be devastated,” said Paige as the denial gave way to grief.
“That’s certain,” said Lou. “Anyway. That’s all I know. Lynch is out there. He’s with the game warden who was in the area because of the moose. They’re waiting for the state police and the county coroner.”
“Does his wife know yet?” asked Jeremy.
“Logan’s been to the Sullivans’ home and told Ursula. She is headed to the school to pick up her son and daughter.”
“Logan’s sure it’s Ed?” asked Jeremy. His voice was soft, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Neither could Paige.
“Listen, that boy might not be all there but he sure knows every family who lives in Hornbeck and a fair number that don’t.”
“He was always good with names,” said Paige and both men stared at her. She realized then that she’d spoken of Logan in the past tense as if he were the one who had died. Sometimes she felt like he had. Part of him, anyway, the part that loved her.
“Did he die right away?” asked Jeremy.
Lou shook his head. “Doesn’t look that way.”
Paige gasped. Could Edward have been saved if the driver had stopped or if help had reached him? If they had reached him, she thought, taking personal responsibility.
“I should have noticed that he was late,” said Jeremy, shouldering the guilt.
“I didn’t notice he had not checked back in,” said Lou.
Jeremy’s head hung and his gaze fixed on the floor. “But I did.”
“It’s not your fault, either of you,” said Paige. But she wondered if one of them could have saved him. If she, or either man, had noticed soon enough, called, checked and found Dr. Sullivan before the minutes of his life ticked away and he died, abandoned, on a lonely road.
IT WAS HARD not to notice when the village’s new EMS vehicle, carrying her boss’s body, made its way past the manufacturing plant. Paige’s lab was on the second floor and though the plant was three blocks off the main street and down the hill, she saw the flashing lights of the procession of the state police cruisers and EMS truck. The bright red and blue lights blinked in the twilight. Paige realized, grimly, that the ghastly parade would pass directly before Ed Sullivan’s home. Would his wife and two children be there to watch?
Her phone blipped, relaying a text. She had been getting texts and phone messages all day. She glanced at her mobile’s lock screen and saw that it was three in the afternoon and that she had received an incoming text.
She stared at the message as icy fingers danced up and down her spine. Dr. Sullivan wouldn’t have taken his phone on his run, but he’d have his smart watch. With no cell service, the text could not be sent until the watch returned to the area where internet service was available. Here, at the company, their Wi-Fi cast a net all the way past the volunteer fire department. So if the watch was still with his body, the message from him was being sent now. She shivered.
Paige watched the EMS truck, imagining Ed’s bloody corpse and the watch, still sending her his message.
She unlocked her phone and checked the message, which was a series of emojis. Easier to send than typing out words, even with phone prompts. Had he been injured, dying, when he wrote this or was this before his accident? She hoped, prayed, it was before as she stared at the three emojis and one typed word.
The message was composed in the following order: a green box with a white check-mark emoji, the word MY written in capital letters, the computer emoji and finally, the face with a zipper for a mouth.
That message was crystal clear. Ed wanted her to check his office computer and keep quiet about it.
For what?
The possibility that Edward’s death was no accident flashed in her mind as her skin stippled in fear. Each tiny hair on her arms lifted like a warning flag. They would check his watch. They would see the message. They would know she received it.
Paige dropped her phone as if she suddenly discovered a ticking time bomb in her palm, because she had. Ed had just died. He’d sent a message about something on his computer. Part of that message was to keep whatever she found quiet. She began to feel that text was as dangerous as any toxin they kept in the lab.
Ed had shown her that the watch did not lock until removed from his wrist, his corpse. If it were stolen, the watch would remain locked. But Ursula might know his passcode. The police would check his messages, at the very least. Would his killers?
She tried to calm herself. She was making a big leap here—from a possible hit-and-run to outright murder. And over what? Something on his computer?
Just what had Dr. Sullivan gotten himself into and why was he dragging her along? She glanced wildly about. Her gaze fixed on the flash outside her window. There, like a bright beacon against the gathering gloom of storm clouds, the EMS vehicle’s lights blinked as the van reached Main Street and turned toward the funeral home. That was where they’d take Ed before any autopsy. Inside the flashing truck, her supervisor’s body lay strapped to a gurney. She closed her eyes at the image.
Call the county sheriff or check Edward’s computer?
She reached for the phone to call security. Lou Reber had twenty-three years’ experience as a detective in Poughkeepsie, New York. He’d know what to do about this.
Paige had the receiver at her ear with the dial tone buzzing when she realized that was exactly the move that Ed Sullivan would have made if he found something illegal. He’d call security.
But now he was dead.
Lou had a staff of four. Any one or all of them might be involved. Involved in what? Was she crazy to blow this up to DEFCON 1?
Breathe. She tried but her lungs felt like someone was squeezing them.
You’re smart. Think.
It was hard to concentrate past the buzzing in her ears.
She lowered the phone to its cradle with a trembling hand. Balling her hand into a fist hid the tremor but not the aftershocks that rolled through her body.
The computer check came first. Her throat closed against the scream that turned to a squeak at the realization that she was going to check his computer.
“Paige?” Jeremy’s voice held concern. “Are you all right? You’ve gone pale.”
She’d worked with Jeremy for four years. He was her best friend here at work. But did she know him…really know him?
Her father used to say that you would be lucky to have maybe one friend you could call to help you move the body. Jeremy was not that friend. And what would she be dragging him into if she told him?
No one knew anyone that well. If her suspicions were correct, telling anyone might involve risk. Grave risk. But so would telling no one. That watch. The one with the messages was out there, linked to her.
“Just upset. You know. Trying to get my head around it all.”
“I know. I feel sick.”
Did he? He looked just fine.
What should she do? If she used Ed’s computer, Jeremy would notice, especially if she was on there for an extended period.
There was no if, she realized. Only when. She would check his computer and she would leave an electronic trail by doing so. There was no avoiding it. Her gut told her that Jeremy was not involved. With time speeding by, she made her move.
“I have to check something.” She walked as casually as she could to Sullivan’s computer on legs that seemed to have turned to chalk.
Once she had decided to do as Edward had asked, there was no turning back. She sat at his computer and opened File Explorer, scanning the list of recent files. She was aware of Jeremy’s gaze.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m doing it anyway,” she said.
His eyes rounded, but he said nothing more as he busied himself with the tasks before them, preparing the samples for quality testing.
Meanwhile, she wondered what Dr. Sullivan had been involved in and worried that, whatever it was, she was now also involved. That, alone, was reason enough to explain her trembling, bloodless fingers.
Dr. Sullivan had been a caring boss and a friend. He was…had been a good scientist. If he was the victim of a tragic accident, then none of this mattered. But if something nefarious was afoot, she had tied herself to the railroad tracks. She knew nothing about cloak-and-dagger affairs. She knew science.
And her hypothesis was that Dr. Sullivan had been murdered. Proving that theory might just get her killed.
She continued to scan the alphabetical list of files, fixing on one. A chill danced like a dropped ice cube down her spine, but she opened the file titled Testing Anomalies and scanned the contents.
Chapter Three (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
The state police had given Logan the terrible job of notifying Ursula Sullivan of her husband’s death. The man in charge, Detective Albritton, could not have been clearer that he did not want or need Logan’s help.
Logan had stayed with Mrs. Sullivan until her younger sister arrived and then headed to the office, leaving the two women to collect Ursula’s kids and tell them the terrible news. Logan covered the phones while the state police took care of securing the scene and began their investigation of the hit-and-run. They told him not to give out any information except that there had been a traffic fatality. But most folks calling already knew who and where and how.
No one knew who had hit Dr. Sullivan and left him in the muddy jeep track to bleed out.
And no one asked why. Except him. Why did such a good man have to leave his family?
There was a chiming sound like a child repeatedly hitting the metal panels of one of those rainbow-hued xylophones. His brain played tricks on him. Sound was the worst. The doctors explained that his hearing was perfect but the place where the sound was supposed to be sorted into useful categories was damaged. So he often couldn’t distinguish between a siren and a ringing phone.
He could tell the direction, and that helped. After that he just had to make his best guess. The office phone was easy as it had a flashing red light. His cell phone was more challenging. All the rings and dings and chirps sounded the same, so he didn’t know if he was answering a call, text or message.
He kept waiting to be what he was or what he thought he had been. His doctors said that wasn’t going to happen. There was no going back. Forward was the only option and finding what his doctors called “a new normal.”
But being the village mascot was demoralizing. He lifted his phone, saw nothing on the lock screen and then tried the office phone, which was flashing again.
“Hello. Constable’s office. This is Constable Lynch speaking.”
“Logan, what happened out there on Turax Hollow Road?”
Voices were another challenge. He could no longer distinguish male from female or familiar from stranger. It annoyed people, especially his father.
“There was an accident—” The caller cut him off.
“I know that part. Is Dr. Sullivan dead?”
“The names of those involved won’t be released until after the families are notified.”
“I’m your family, Logan. This is your brother, Connor, who is also village councilman. So tell me what happened.”
“Oh, sorry, Connor.” His problem caused some people to think he was no longer very bright, his brother included. He just wished he could get back to old normal.
“Okay. You’re sorry. Now, what happened?”
Connor was a village official, so he gave him the info. “Dr. Edward Sullivan was struck by a vehicle and died at the scene. Hit-and-run. That’s all I know.”
“Idiots,” muttered Connor, then to Logan, “Who is handling the investigation?”
Not me, thought Logan. “The state police, and I just saw the county sheriff’s vehicle drive past the window. So they’re all out there.” The light of the emergency vehicles drew his gaze from the desktop and the doodles on his blotter that looked like one of Paige’s pale blue eyes, framed with long, dark lashes. He stared through the storefront window of the former video rental place that had been turned hastily into the constable’s office here on Main Street after his position was approved. “EMS vehicle is coming up Raquette Road now.” He could see them reaching the junction of Main. “Seems like all the law enforcement vehicles, too, state police, and I think that’s the mayor’s Subaru. Guess they’re done at the scene.”
“Fabulous. Where are they going?”
“Owen’s,” he said, mentioning both the largest residence and only funeral home in the village.
There was a sound like a ringing or perhaps a song.
“Connor?” His brother did not answer.
Dial tone, he decided and returned the handset to the cradle. Then he stepped out of the office to watch the procession making the turn. The last vehicle was a white SUV driven by the sheriff of Onutake County, Axel Trace, who had not even bothered to check in with the village constable.
Logan stepped out to the street and removed his hat as they passed and came upon Paige’s daughter, Lori Morris, walking from school with her grandmother. With all the excitement, he’d lost track of time. He glanced at his watch and saw it was already a little after three in the afternoon.
He turned to Lori, dressed in a purple polar fleece jacket that added bulk to her thin frame. “How was school?”
Lori looked away from the retreating procession of official vehicles.
“Mr. Garrett got called away so we had Mrs. Unger,” she said and made a face.
Logan joined her, twisting his face as if he were poisoned. Mr. Garrett was Lori’s teacher, and a volunteer with the fire department. He was also a paramedic. And Mrs. Unger had been his primary school principal, as well. She had been universally disliked back then based mainly on her position of authority but also on her tendency to be nicer to her charges whenever a parent was around. Since leaving school, Logan had gotten to know Mrs. Unger, who also volunteered with the fire department, and had grown to admire her. She was silver-haired and tough as any US marine he had ever known.
“Still looking over her glasses at kids?”
“Yes!” said Lori and rolled her golden eyes and then did a fair imitation. “I don’t know what she was talking about. We’re studying plants and she was talking about comotosis and phototosis or something and I think that’s high school stuff. And she is so boring! She makes me comotosis!”
He laughed. Lori was funny.
“Mitosis and photosynthesis?” asked her grandmother, impatience making her voice tight.
“Maybe,” said Lori.
“And this—” she waved a finger at Lori before continuing “—is the sort of nonsense that caused me to have to speak to her after class.” Mrs. Morris turned to Logan. “I don’t see why I should be punished for my granddaughter’s disrespect.”
His brother’s new “dragon-orange metallic” Audi Q8 model SUV raced by, exceeding the speed limit. The color looked to Logan exactly like the orange flashing light on a snowplow. He frowned.
Mrs. Morris watched the SUV disappear after the procession. “You should give him a ticket.” Then she directed her cool gray eyes on Logan. “Shame about Dr. Sullivan.”
Word traveled fast.
“Did Paige call you, Mrs. Morris?”
“You can call me Beverly, Logan, as I’ve told you.”
He looked away, uncomfortable with that. He’d always think of her as Paige’s mom, Mrs. Morris, despite her insistence that he call her by her first name.
Mrs. Morris sighed. “Yes, she did call.”
“What happened to Dr. Sullivan?” asked Lori.
The two adults exchanged a look. Logan shook his head. He wasn’t speaking about this before an eight-year-old. The world had too many monsters, but the ones under her bed would do for now.
Mrs. Morris clearly felt differently for she answered the question.
“Your mother’s supervisor has been in an accident.”
“Is he okay?”
“No, I don’t think he is.”
“What kind of accident?” asked Lori.
“I’ll tell you on the way home.” Mrs. Morris set them in motion. Lori remembered to say goodbye and waved a hand sheathed in a mitten fashioned to look like a zebra puppet complete with a braided tail and pink lolling tongue. The googly eyes rolled, making it look as if it also had a head injury. Logan waved back. Then he replaced his hat and returned inside to the phones.
He made it only to the new wheelchair ramp and paused at the sound, unsure what it was. He could identify where it came from, toward the village library, on the corner of Raquette and Main, in the former home of the Hornbeck family. The village’s namesake had founded the bank back when the railroad stopped in this village. The sound reminded him of a fish thrashing in the river after it was hooked. But it turned out to be Paige Morris, hurrying along Main, passing the autobody shop and the antiquarian bookstore.
She wiped her face every few seconds with her gloved hands. Today was cold and windy, and Paige had a blocked tear duct. He remembered with perfect clarity in the winters of their childhood that the tears rolled down her left cheek and froze on the collar of her maroon nylon snow coat. Funny how he could remember that but not a minute of his time in the US Marines or a minute of his engagement to Paige.
But Paige’s tear duct dripping did not make a noise and she was making a noise. Was that pain? He crossed Main Street to intercept her. She usually walked home after five but was early today.
It wasn’t until he was nearly before her that she noticed him. The noise she was now making was obvious. Paige was crying.
Chapter Four (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Paige hurried up Main Street with her head down against the wind and her shoulders bent by the weight of her troubles. Someone stepped directly into her path, bringing her up short. She startled, glancing up. Instinctively, her hand went to her shoulder bag and the printed copy of the file she had found on Dr. Sullivan’s computer.
Logan stood before her.
For just a moment he looked as he always had, back when her family had been in trouble and he’d done the wrong thing for the right reason. One look into Logan’s sympathetic eyes and she fell to pieces.
The years of his absence disappeared. Pain and fear lowered her resistance and she stepped into his arms, sobbing. He was just the right height to cradle her against his chest and rest his chin on the top of her head. His familiar scent comforted her as tears rolled down her cheeks like raindrops down a windowpane.
“Why are you crying?” he said. “Is it Dr. Sullivan?”
She couldn’t have answered if she had wanted to. And she couldn’t tell him what had happened. But she wasn’t sure who to tell about the text message or what she had found afterward. She wasn’t even sure what the document meant, just that it highlighted an inconsistency. Inconsistencies were the enemies of quality assurance.
Dr. Sullivan had found something. She suspected he reported his concerns to the head of security or to his supervisor, Sinclair Park, or even the CFO, Veronica Vitale, and then he had died.
A correlational relationship. Not necessarily causal. But she could not eliminate, out of hand, the possibility of causality.
“Is this about Dr. Sullivan?” Logan asked again.
Paige nodded, snuggling closer to the canvas jacket supplied to Logan by the village.
Logan cradled her against him. “I’m sorry about Dr. Sullivan, Paige.”
Nodding, she managed to rein in the sobs. Logan helped coach Ed’s son on basketball. He’d lost a friend, as well. Her coworker’s death would leave such a hole in the community. And his kids…his wife…
Her ragged breath and a hum in the back of her throat was all the sound emerging from her.
“He was a good man,” said Logan.
“He was.”
“They had the state police up there. County sheriff, too.”
Since they were a village of only a little over four hundred residents, they could not afford a police force. But after Logan had come home, his brother, then newly appointed to the village council, raised concerns that traffic had increased with the arrival of the pharmaceutical company two years before, the company that Connor himself had helped advocate for. Rathburn-Bramley expected the village to manage the increased traffic flow and issues arising from the daily commute of the workforce of two hundred employees, nearly all of which lived outside their community. The taxes they paid more than covered the cost of the salary of the new village constable, the hiring of whom had caused debate in the village, narrowly winning out over the placement of a traffic light on Main. Rathburn-Bramley also covered the cost of a new hook-and-ladder fire truck, EMS vehicle and emergency equipment for the volunteer fire department, continuing to make yearly donations. The company seemed interested in a good public image, and they were willing to pay for it.
Now the village had both a well-equipped volunteer fire department and a constable, who was fully trained according to New York State law. Finding a doctor to pass Logan on the medical exam had been a challenge, but Connor had managed that, too. His brother had wisely ridden the wave of pride generated by Logan’s heroism. As a Silver Star recipient, Lance Corporal Logan Lynch made his hometown proud. Because of his accident, no one expected him to do much but direct traffic every afternoon and march in the village parades.
“They’ll find who did this,” said Logan.
“I doubt it,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He drew back and dropped a kiss on her forehead, then drew back again, his face registering worry. Perhaps he thought he had overstepped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.” She’d enjoyed his tender touch, a reminder of his protective care of her at a time long ago.
He looked relieved. “I’m glad you walked this way.”
This route was slightly longer than cutting across Railroad Avenue and then turning up Turkey Hollow Road to Main. But she walked it daily so she could see him. He’d often walk her home, then return to the office next to the hair salon or, on evenings when she was running late and he’d finished directing traffic, he’d simply walk her home and then head to the house next door to hers. Like her, Logan had never moved out of his childhood home. He and his dad, now a widower, lived in the big yellow farmhouse north of her mother’s place, a white, two-story home that had been there for a hundred and fifty years. Both farms had barns large enough to hold a few cows and a plot of pastureland behind that was big enough to keep them fed summer and winter. The cows had been moved out long ago, before Paige or Logan’s parents purchased their houses. Paige’s dad had been a dentist until his death in an automobile accident during her junior year in college. Logan had lost his mom just after he had turned eleven.
How old were Steven and Valerie Sullivan? Paige tried to remember Ed talking about their birthdays. Steven would turn fourteen this December, old enough to try out for the JV team next year. That made Valerie…eleven. The same age Logan had been.
The ache in her heart pulsed with every beat.
Those poor kids. She was glad they had Ursula. Their mom was strong and capable. She’d be there for her children.
Paige rested her head on Logan’s shoulder and her arms hung at her sides. He patted her back while she tried and failed not to long for more than comfort from him. She lifted her head to gaze up at his big brown eyes, looking again for a flicker of recognition. She went still as her body galloped to life. Everything inside her wanted him to kiss her. Except he didn’t. He never did. The top of her head did not count.
“Why don’t you think they’ll catch who did this?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the faith in the system that you did. Do,” she corrected. “Never have.”
“If you hear anything, Paige, you should tell me.”
“I should,” said Paige. But she wouldn’t.
She felt she couldn’t rely on Logan anymore, ever since he’d left for Iraq years ago, not telling her he was reenlisting until it was too late.
Now all memory of her as the love of his life had been blown out of his thick skull.
After her dad died, she and her mom struggled financially, and she really didn’t know if she could finish her undergraduate degree. With no life insurance and in deep debt, her father had left her mother and Paige in dire straits, with only bankruptcy protecting their home.
Even so, it was her father and mother’s mess. Not hers; certainly not Logan’s. She’d told him that and that she’d figure it out. But Logan had done what he thought best. Without consulting her. Reenlisted and volunteered for the higher-paying combat duty. She could have strangled him then and now.
She had told him, at the time, that she believed life decisions that affected them both should be discussed. He thought her ungrateful. He said he was taking care of things. The disagreement that ensued had turned ugly and he’d asked for his ring back.
She’d been so shocked that he would break their engagement especially after her father had just passed away, but she had done as he asked and returned the diamond solitaire. Logan had left for Iraq and she had not seen him again until after his accident.
“You can trust me, Paige.”
“I do trust you.” But inside, she just didn’t count on him anymore. He had improved. Was it enough to try again? She gazed up at him, wondering what he’d do if she just kissed him already. Maybe that would jog something loose inside that brain. Like the reverse of the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty.
She reminded herself how grateful she was he’d come home at all. When she’d first learned of his injuries, though, she thought he was gone in a different way, never to return. His doctors told his family that Logan would probably not be capable of caring for himself. But she had disagreed. She’d gone to him at Walter Reed and stayed right up until her due date.
When he’d finally come home, Paige had been there. But after Lori’s injury, people who knew they’d been together urged her to move on, not to burden him or herself with trying to recover memories of a relationship that had broken up anyway.
She’d tried. She still did. Until moments like this when she wanted him to remember everything, to be awakened by her touch, her kiss. But that wasn’t how brain injury and recovery worked. Some things were just gone forever. She had to accept that.
Sleeping Beauty, she thought and smiled. Logan was still beautiful. The scar didn’t change that. His dark, fathomless eyes and crisp, thick hair still tempted. Even that stupid cowboy hat made him look as handsome as any Western hero of movie or television.
She paused to face him. He pushed back the brim of his hat. She used her teeth to tug off one glove and then used her index finger to trace the hard line of his jaw. His coarse whiskers gently scraped her finger pad. She gave him her best seductive smile.
And for an instant, he was back. His eyes went wide with speculation and then came that easy, slow smile.
A familiar garish, orange Audi SUV raced by them and made an illegal U-turn right on Main. Connor Lynch pulled to a halt at the curb, and the passenger window whisked down. Logan’s brother leaned across the seat to peer at them.
As if caught doing something illegal, Paige jumped back from Logan and now glowered at Connor. He used to make a habit of interrupting them whenever he thought they might be…occupied. Some things never changed.
“Paige, you need a lift home?”
She stiffened and narrowed her eyes at Connor. This was yet another attempt to keep her away from his little brother. He’d made his feelings crystal clear after Logan finally came home. Logan was not capable of that sort of relationship, Connor had told her in no uncertain terms. And she should not burden him with trying to have one. Connor had been adamant, she’d ignored him and Lori had suffered as a result.
She’d backed off, but stayed close, watching his gradual improvement. He might not remember her, but his accident had not reduced his intelligence. Even his doctors said so. The slow speech and hearing trouble were results of brain injury. The part of his brain that handled cognitive function had been unharmed. Most people around here forgot that. Spoke to him more slowly than necessary and as if they were dealing with a child or a pet monkey. It infuriated her.
But was that indignation on his behalf or fury over what she had lost? She didn’t know, and sometimes her disappointment over Logan reenlisting blended into a general anger at the universe for stealing something precious from them both.
“I can walk her home,” said Logan to his big brother, his speech slow by comparison.
“Aren’t you supposed to be directing traffic at five?” he asked his kid brother.
“Yes. But I have time to walk her home and get back.”
“Today we need you in your office to cover phones. We had a traffic fatality. You still have a job, bud. Don’t blow it on me.”
“I can walk her and then come back. I didn’t take a lunch today.”
Connor ignored him. “Paige. Get in the car.”
Her home was half a mile east on Route 10, but she wasn’t sure she could make it, even leaning on Logan. She was equally sure that she didn’t want to ride with Connor. Ever since his little brother came back from Iraq, Connor had been trying to move in on her. Not that his little brother noticed because he’d forgotten her with the rest. Logan might not remember what they were together, but she did. And Connor was not Logan’s replacement. She’d told him so, more than once. All the cars and boats and fancy houses in the world wouldn’t change that.
Logan drew back as if anxious to put her aside again.
“It’s getting cold. Windy,” he said and glanced toward his brother’s car. Logan could drive, but his truck was parked back beside the office.
She stared up at him, willing him to recall something, anything, as she had so many times before. The betrayal of his forgetting them as a couple, as an engaged couple, of him forgetting he told her that he loved her forever and would make this all right, hurt in her bones. That betrayal had mellowed into a pervasive longing and soul-deep aching sadness. It hurt to look at him sometimes, especially when she was remembering, and he was just giving her that congenial smile.
Still, she had to wonder, who did she seek out when she was in trouble? Not Connor, the village councilman with a successful business in real estate and a large empty house of his own.
She’d come to Logan.
“Paige, I have to talk to you,” said Connor.
Her radar engaged. What did a village councilman have to talk to her about? She decided right then that she was not speaking to him or anyone else about what she had found until after she had reread the document from Dr. Ed’s folder.
Logan opened the passenger-side door, and Paige reluctantly slipped inside. She gave his free hand a squeeze, but he didn’t return it as he once would have.
Connor took his foot off the brake, and she waved to Logan, whose brow knit as he lifted a hand in farewell.
And then she was being whisked down Main Street, toward her mother’s home, her home again, too.
She still couldn’t believe she was back here in Hornbeck. That had never been her intention. Neither had getting pregnant her senior year of college. Her mother disapproved of Paige’s decision to keep the baby and stay close to help with Logan’s recovery. But Lori’s accident forced Paige to face facts. What choice did she have? She’d needed to earn a living and care for her daughter, so she’d accepted the fellowship at Cornell and earned her master’s degree in only one year. Next came an opportunity in Arlington, Virginia. But when her mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer, Paige had come home to find Logan much improved, a fact that no one in his family or her mother had shared with her. The job at Rathburn-Bramley allowed her to stay. That had been four years ago. They had even paid for her doctorate. And here she was, still, close to Logan and waiting for him to come back to her.
“What are you doing, Paige?” Connor asked.
She gave him a blank stare.
“You tried this. We all were against it, but you told Logan everything and he forgot it as soon as you told him. How many times?”
“Six,” she lied.
“More like ten.”
“He’s doing better,” she insisted. “No lapses in short-term memory.”
“Great. So what if your daughter calls for help and Logan thinks it’s the television again?”
The memory made her stomach clench. Shortly after he returned to his father’s home, Paige had been visiting with Lori, then ten months old. Paige had stepped out to retrieve a package from the mailbox, leaving Lori happily perched on Logan’s lap. When she returned, she heard her daughter wailing from outside and ran into the house to find Lori on the floor, a gash on her chin. Logan stood before the lounge chair pointing the remote at the television as he vainly tried to turn off the volume. He thought their baby’s howls of pain were on the television.
“It was too soon,” she said.
“It always will be,” Connor replied. “You should listen to us this time.”
Before they reached the old white farmhouse, they passed the funeral home where Dr. Sullivan’s body likely now lay in the basement on an aluminum table. He should be finishing up at the lab and heading home for supper. She shook her head in despair. The authorities would have to do an autopsy. That thought gave her the shivers. She checked the connection on her safety belt again.
“What did you tell Logan about today?”
“Tell him? Nothing.”
“That’s good. Just upset him.”
While she appreciated his concern for his little brother, Connor was the one who seemed upset. His face was red and he kept dragging his fingers through the hair on the top of his head. Connor looked much like Logan with just a little thickening at his waist and hair that was lighter and noticeably thinner. His skin was ruddy, and tiny burst blood vessels in his cheeks pointed to a drinking problem. Too many meals alone at the pub and too many evenings alone in his big, empty house, he had once told her. If that was supposed to make her feel guilty, it didn’t. No one told him to buy that B and B.
“How did you hear about Dr. Sullivan?” Connor asked.
“Lou told us.”
“Lou Reber?”
She nodded.
“I heard from Freda. We were going over the agenda for the board meeting when Ursula called.”
Freda Kubr was Ursula Sullivan’s sister, a village councilor and the administrative assistant to Principal Unger.
“And Lou told you how he died?” he asked.
“Hit-and-run.”
“Did you see Dr. Sullivan today?” he asked.
“Not today.”
This began to feel like an interrogation, as if Connor was constable, and it made her uneasy. Why was he so interested in these details?
“I’m sure the state police will want to speak to you. They told me they’ll be interviewing all his coworkers.”
“Why? Wasn’t it an accident?” she asked. She had her suspicions, but she wanted to see his reaction.
“That hasn’t been determined yet.”
How did he know that?
He swiped a hand over his mouth and then returned his hand to the wheel. She’d never seen him this jumpy.
“Did he say anything to you or was he behaving strangely?”
“Not as strangely as you’re behaving.” She twisted in her seat to face him. “What is this about, Connor?”
“We’ve never had a case of manslaughter in Hornbeck before. It is going to be in the papers. Most people who live in this county don’t even know we exist, and the village likes it that way. I know Rathburn-Bramley does. It’s why they picked us for the plant.”
It was true, Paige knew, that even people living in the same county didn’t know that this little turn in the highway was a village. Both the railroads and the major highways had left them behind years ago. This was an advantage to a company who produced controlled substances. Hiding in among the farms and hills made perfect sense.
Connor banged his hand on the steering wheel. “They’ll mention where he works.”
“No secret where he works. Is there?”
“Your company prefers a very low profile. Can’t see it from the road, so the tourists and visitors certainly don’t know it’s here. Draw the wrong people, it gets out what you all are cookin’ down there.” He glanced at her. “You know exactly what they produce.”
“I should. I test every product on every run.”
“Well, then you also know that opiates are a target. They don’t want to be on the map.”
Her company also produced fentanyl and a variety of intravenous drugs and gases used by anesthesiologists. Most had a high black-market value and were favorites of some addicts. Ironically, they also produced innocuous medical supplies like aerosol disinfectant spray and gel hand sanitizer.
“Well, they can’t just pretend he wasn’t killed,” said Paige, addressing Connor’s concerns with sarcasm.
“Your employer is requesting he be listed as unemployed. His widow has agreed.”
“That’s sick.” And a shock. She could understand the company’s desire for a low profile, but this seemed to take it too far.
“They offered her money. A lot of it, above and beyond what she’d get with the company’s life insurance.”
“But they think this was an accident? Right?”
“Maybe. But his ID tags are missing.”
Her eyes widened. Had he been killed for his access key?
“But they can’t get to the manufacturing area with that and they can’t get past security. They check our photo against the tag.”
“What about after hours?”
“Tag is time sensitive. Six a.m. to six p.m. Plus, you need a special card to access the finished goods area. After hours you need an escort. One of the security team. They’ll deactivate his access. I’m sure they already have done so.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She shouldn’t be revealing security measures, even to Logan’s brother.
“Sheriff and the state police are looking for his tags and the vehicle that hit him. Anyone you know want to hurt Dr. Sullivan?”
“No! Of course not. Everybody loved him.” She felt a jab in her belly as she recognized that she was already referring to her friend in the past tense.
Connor made a face.
“What?”
“I overheard Lou speaking to Dale Owens at the funeral home. Lou told him that your firm was investigating Sullivan. Something out at the plant was going missing. They were getting ready to fire him.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She again peered at Connor. He seemed to have done a fair amount of nosing around already. Why was he so interested in this? Was it just because he was concerned for the town’s reputation?
“They were onto him.”
“He’d never steal from his employer.”
“Maybe it was intellectual property. Like a process or formula. Could he have known they were onto him?”
“Are you suggesting he stepped in front of a vehicle and then stole his own ID tag as a cover-up?”
“Of course not.” His hand raked his hair again. “It’s just, we’ve never had a thing like this happen here. I helped bring that plant here, Paige, and I feel responsible for it and any trouble that comes because of this sort of industry. Could have been a bad drug deal or something.”
“Nonsense.”
“We are a peaceful village, Paige. Cows, cornfields and…”
“Opiates,” she finished.
Chapter Five (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Paige got home to find her mother cooking dinner, which was unusual. Her mom had made it very clear when Paige moved back in with her that she was going to raise her own daughter and that meant housework, errands and making her child’s meals. Her only concession had been picking up Lori after school because Hornbeck Central School did not have an after-hours keeper program.
“Where’s Lori?” asked Paige.
Her mother continued stirring white sauce on the stovetop as she half turned to speak to Paige.
“She’s out back making a leaf pile and then jumping into it. Malory is watching her from the porch.”
Paige did not think that Malory, her mother’s long-haired cat, was an adequate babysitter, but a glance out the side window showed her daughter tunneling through dry leaves in the spotlight of the backyard floodlight.
Paige set her satchel on a chair at the breakfast table and removed her coat and scarf. Then she folded into the adjoining chair. Her mother brought her a bottle of scotch and a small juice glass and set it before her.
She gaped and then met her mother’s serious gaze.
“You heard?”
“Whole village heard. That ogre of a company let you go a few minutes early today?”
Paige lifted the glass. The strong, distinctive aroma reached her before she took a sip and grimaced. The liquid burned all the way down.
“I took some personal time.”
“You should take tomorrow. Those pills can wait a day.”
“I don’t make pills.” She set the scotch aside and wiped her watering eyes.
“I know what you do. I paid for some of that fancy education, remember?”
It was impossible to forget.
“Though I expect our constable will have the culprit arrested in no time. That is if he doesn’t mistake the church bell for the fire truck again.”
One of Logan’s early blunders was to head over to the fire station at noon his first day when he thought he heard the siren. It had turned out to be the bells that the Methodist church rang every weekday at noon and at ten a.m. on Sundays.
Paige ignored her mother’s jab at Logan. She was used to them.
“I’ve been over to see Ursula this afternoon,” said her mother.
“How is she?”
“She looks terrible. But her sister is there, and Freda told me that they are accepting callers tonight and tomorrow.”
“Tonight?”
She was surprised. They’d only just learned, and Paige thought they’d still be processing the shock.
“Freda said that Ursula does not want to be alone. The church is organizing casseroles to be delivered each day. Mine is tomorrow, chicken tetrazzini casserole. I think I won’t add the cayenne. I don’t know if the Sullivans like spicy food.”
Paige’s hopes of dinner vanished.
“I’m making enough for us, too. I should bring some to Albert, feeding that man-child.” Albert Lynch was the widower father of Connor and Logan. And the man-child, she assumed, was his brain-damaged son.
“Logan is not a man-child.” Paige’s voice was sharp. “He is just as smart as before.”
“Hmm. Then why does he talk so s-l-o-w?” she asked, drawing out the last word.
Paige knew exactly how smart she and Logan both were, with her breakup with Logan after she discovered he’d reenlisted and then sleeping with him again her senior year in college before he’d shipped out. Nobody in Hornbeck knew he’d been to see her at school. She’d been so angry at him and scared for him and it had just happened.
Nine months later Lori had happened. She’d picked the name to honor Logan. Hoped they’d have a chance at a second start after she finished her undergraduate schooling. His plan had not included being wounded and nearly dying. And hers didn’t include giving up on him. Their families had convinced her to stop telling Logan about Lori’s paternity when he couldn’t remember anything new past a few hours back then. She’d agreed, but she had continued to bring Lori for visits. Seeing their baby brightened Logan. Only she believed that Logan could handle the responsibility of caring for a daughter. As it turned out, she’d been wrong.
She’d ignored them and Lori now had a scar on her chin that served as a constant reminder that Paige was not always the best judge where Logan was concerned. Her emotions and hopes were too tied up in his being able to love her and their daughter to allow her to be unbiased. Now she feared trying and failing again with him. She’d given him time, years to recover. He didn’t forget things anymore. His speech had improved, and he was working now. It seemed dishonest not to again tell Logan about their relationship and his daughter. She’d have to tell them both eventually, especially when it seemed Logan no longer forgot things. She’d been waiting for Lori to be old enough to understand that her father had a TBI. Was an eight-year-old capable of comprehending this?
Maybe his father would agree with her that it was time.
“If you weren’t so stubborn, you’d…” Her mother’s words trailed off.
Paige tried to ignore the urge to ask her mother to finish her sentence, knowing that she wouldn’t like what she had to say, and failed.
“I’d what?”
“You would stop following Logan like a puppy and pay a little more attention to Logan’s older brother. Connor’s been sweet on you for ages and he’s asked you, I don’t know how many times, to go out with him. He’s got a thriving business and a political position. He has that big house that I’m sure he bought because he knows you love it.”
“That isn’t true.” But even as she said it, Paige suddenly feared it was true. “Logan is Lori’s father.”
Her mother sniffed. “Who can’t tell a baby from a remote control,” she muttered as she continued the rhythmic stirring.
Connor was the smart choice; any of the single, employed professional men at Rathburn-Bramley would be. She’d been asked. She’d said no.
Because she was an idiot. Because she didn’t love Connor. She loved the man who had left her behind. That man had not come back. As for Connor, fondness and guilt were poor foundations for a relationship.
Paige thumped her elbows on the table and cradled her forehead in her hands.
“Lori deserves a father, Paige. One qualified to care for her.”
She pressed her mouth closed to keep from lashing out. Her daughter did deserve a father and had one. It was Paige’s decision to keep them apart. And it was a decision she reconsidered daily as Logan improved.
“He’s not going to remember you, Paige. He’s just not and he never will. And even if he did, do you want to be married to a man who earns his living at the benevolence of others? He’s the village idiot.”
Paige pressed her hands flat on the table and rose to her feet.
“Mother, if you ever call him that again, I will take Lori and that job offer in South Carolina.”
“Might be better for you if you did. Better than seeing you mooning around after that boy.”
Paige gaped. She’d never expected her mother to call her bluff.
“Mom, is that what you want? For us to go?”
“I want what I’ve always wanted—what is best for you. And that boy never was and never will be.”
LOGAN FINISHED DIRECTING the rush of vehicles leaving the company lot and funneling up to Main to then head toward Mill Creek to the east or Ouleout to the west. After he stopped back in his office to lock up, he headed toward his blue 2004 Ford pickup. Then he made his way home. The temperature had dropped, and he worried that it might rain on Saturday. That would put a damper on the Harvest Festival. If this kept up, they could even have snow on their big day.
Instead of stopping at his home, he passed it and turned down Cemetery Road, crossing the West Branch of the Raquette River and then heading along River Street. Dr. Sullivan had lived in a Dutch Colonial home just outside the village. He had planned to only drive by but found cars and trucks parked in the drive and on the lawn. The porch was lit up and callers spilled across the porch and down the steps.
He parked across the road, off the shoulder, and headed over to the property. Logan tipped his hat and murmured hellos to the familiar faces and didn’t even try to focus on one speaker or another. With so many folks conversing at once, he just couldn’t identify who was talking. He passed Mr. Sinclair Park, who stood on the steps. He knew that Paige’s department reported to him, because she’d once pointed him out as her boss’s boss. He worked at the plant, something in production, and had moved to Hornbeck soon after being hired about the same time Logan started as a constable.
“Logan,” said Mr. Park. “Paying your respects?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a good man.” Park slapped him on the upper arm as if he were a draft horse.
Logan stepped in from the cold and into the bright hallway. He removed his hat and gave it a spin before unzipping his constable jacket. He had intended to find Mrs. Sullivan, seeing her in deep conversation with her sister, Freda, in the living room, but then he spotted both Sullivan’s fourteen-year-old son, Steven, and eleven-year-old daughter, Valerie, sitting with their chins on their knees on the steps leading to the second floor. Instead of the familiar basketball shorts and sneakers, Steven wore gray slacks and a black shirt, and Valerie was wearing a forest-green skirt and white blouse. He’d never seen them in this sort of attire.
Steven’s chin lifted when he spotted Logan, assistant coach of his travel basketball team.
“Coach,” he said, his expression hopeful.
Logan changed direction and headed up the stairs, pausing to sit two steps below the kids. He placed his hat on the same step.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Steven, Valerie. He was a really good coach.”
Valerie didn’t make a sound, but tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“You going to be our coach now?” asked Steven.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Everyone keeps hugging me,” said Steven, his expression now cross. His lower lip and the break in his voice told Logan that Steven was on the verge of tears. A swipe of his sleeve across his eyes confirmed Logan’s guess.
“It’s okay to cry, Steven. When my mom died, I cried for months. Not all the time but a lot and sometimes when I didn’t expect it. I’d just start crying.”
“How’d she die?” asked Steven.
“It was an aneurysm in her aorta.” He pointed to his heart. “That’s like a bubble in the artery. The wall of that blood vessel is thick and tough, but my mom’s was thin there and when it let go she died very fast.” Right beside him at the grocery store just after he turned eleven. He remembered the way she’d fallen, as if she had been a marionette with all the strings cut at once. The grapefruit in her hand had rolled straight down the aisle in the produce section like a bowling ball. He’d hit his knees beside her and stared at her face. She’d looked so surprised. But she’d already been gone.
“Where is my dad now?” asked Valerie, shaking him from his dark memories. He wondered if the child meant metaphorically or physically. As he pondered how to answer, Steven cut in.
“Nobody will tell us,” said Steven. “They just say he’s in heaven. Or with God. But where is he really?”
“Do you mean his remains?”
They nodded in unison, eyes wide.
“They took your father’s body to Owen’s funeral home. They have beds there for folks who have passed. And since it was an accident, the state police need to have a look at him for clues to help them catch whoever did this.”
“And put him in jail,” said Valerie.
“Might be a him,” said Logan. “Might be a her. But we’re trying every way we know to catch them.”
“Is he cold?” asked Valerie.
“No. Definitely not.”
“I’ve only ever seen dead animals. They get all stiff and swollen,” said Steven.
“No, that won’t happen. The people at the funeral home will wash him and dress him and treat his body respectfully.”
“Why?” asked Steven. “He can’t feel anything now. Can he?”
“It’s more for the family. Rituals to take care of our dead. It’s a last act of love.”
“You ever seen a dead body?” asked the boy.
Logan had seen many, according to his military record, but he remembered only one. “My mother, when she died and then again the day of her funeral.”
“What about at war?” asked Valerie. “Dad said you were in combat and that some of the other soldiers with you died.”
He’d been awarded the Silver Star for valor after half the roof had caved in on him and his men in a building in Fallujah.
“I heard that, too. But I don’t remember any of those deaths because I got hit in the head,” he said as he pointed at the scar on his forehead as evidence.
Both the Sullivan children regarded the scar with serious concentration.
“Kids in my class say you got a metal plate in your skull and you can stick a magnet on your head and it just stays there.”
“No plate, so a magnet wouldn’t stick.”
“Steven, Valerie?” Mrs. Sullivan stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding the newel post and looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes. Their gazes met. “Mr. Lynch, I didn’t know you were here.”
He retrieved his hat and placed it over his heart as he stood. “I’m really sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sullivan. I had great respect for your husband.”
“Thank you, Logan.”
“He’ll be missed.” He descended the stairs, and she extended her hand. The circles under her eyes and the red, puffy eyelids made her look years older. He kissed her offered cheek and drew back.
“Thank you for coming. Have you had your supper? We have too much food.” She took hold of his hand and led him toward the dining room, but paused in the hallway to stare at him. “My husband was having some trouble at work this week. He told me that he was worried about something. Running helped him relax.” She spoke quickly as if she’d been bursting to share the information with the right person.
“What?”
“Anomalies. Missing samples. That’s what he said.”
Someone stepped up behind them.
Lou Reber, the plant’s head of security, moved from the living room into the hallway, and Mrs. Sullivan’s eyes widened. She spoke to Logan without looking at him.
“Go and fix a plate for yourself, Logan, and please take something back for your father.”
Reber came up to her and took her hand, expressing his condolences. Logan hesitated a moment and then stepped into the dining room where callers mingled around the overladen table in quiet conversation.
In the hallway, Reber moved toward the front door. Mrs. Sullivan glanced to Logan and then approached.
“Would you ask the sheriff to come see me tomorrow?”
“I can call him right now.”
Mrs. Sullivan glanced about the house, filled up with friends and members of the community.
“Tomorrow is soon enough.” She left him, returning to the living area through the arched opening connecting the two rooms.
Logan filled his plate and sat on a folding chair beside Donavan Bacon, a cook at the Lunch Box who had no shutoff switch when it came to alcohol. Bacon didn’t drink regularly but when he did, usually on Wednesday after his bowling league, Logan was often called to bring him home because drinking made him want to fight. Donavan greeted Logan warmly. He was such a nice man when he was sober.
After emptying his plate, Logan headed to the kitchen to deposit his glass in the sink. From the doorway he spotted Lou Reber in the hallway, heading up the stairs. He thought he’d left.
Likely to speak to the children who were sitting on the stairs, as he had done. But when Logan returned to the hall it was to see the children were not there and Lou was descending the empty staircase from the second floor.
Logan scowled, wondering why the man had gone upstairs when there was a powder room off the hallway.
“Hey, Logan. Rough day today, huh?”
“Sure was. Why were you upstairs?”
“Bathroom,” said Reber.
“There’s one down here.”
“Occupied.” He looped a thumb over his belt. “Did you know Sullivan?”
“Coached at the school with him.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Reber. “I knew that. Dangerous to run on our roads. No shoulder.”
“He was on the cutoff. Wide dirt road. Shouldn’t be any vehicles back there.”
“Hunters use it.” He glanced toward the door. “I’ve got to go. You need a lift home?”
“Got my truck.”
“That’s right. You drive now. See you around, Logan.”
Logan watched him go, unsure what bothered him about Reber’s going upstairs.
He let himself out a few minutes later, but not before one of the ladies made him a plate for his father. In his truck, the aroma of food tempting his taste buds, Logan headed back up River Street to the steep incline on Cemetery Road. Ed would be buried there, probably next Saturday.
On Main he turned toward home, knowing that just beyond lay the funeral home and Ed Sullivan’s body. The autopsy was scheduled for the morning down in Albany, New York. The county had a contract with the medical center to perform such duties, and Dr. Brock Koutier, their coroner, had ordered it be done. As a result, the funeral would not be until next Saturday, giving the county enough time to transport Sullivan to and from Albany and then back up here to Owen’s for final preparation.
He slowed before the three large maple trees that stood as sentries between the road and Paige’s mother’s home. He pulled into the driveway between his dad’s and her mom’s properties, parked and then headed toward the kitchen door, but paused to breathe the cold air and glance toward his neighbor’s place.
The lights of the Morrises’ upstairs were all on and the porch light was off. Paige was home safe. He knew her bedroom sat on the west side of the house up front nearest the road, her daughter on the east and Mrs. Morris in the back near the stairs. There was a wide, flat roof that stretched over the ground-floor porch from the back of the house to the front, under Lori’s window. On the porch below, the rocking chairs creaked and rocked in the November wind. Paige’s bedroom had no roof beneath either of its two windows. He knew because there was a time when he’d thought about seeing if he could climb that big old maple tree out in front to her window and throw rocks at the glass. He’d decided against it. He wondered what would have happened if he had tried?
Movement caught his eye and he stepped off the road into the driveway. Something big moved down along the side of the house and into the shed that led to the backyard.
Was that Mrs. Morris? The figure had been too large to be Paige.
Propelled by an uncomfortable feeling, Logan walked to the shed, but found no one there or in the backyard. He knew their kitchen door was locked and the light off. The front door was also locked. He circled the entire house twice more and saw no one.
Had he seen anyone in the first place?
Chapter Six (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Logan stood in the Morrises’ yard, staring at the house. Then he retrieved his phone and dialed Paige. She answered on the first ring.
“You home?” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
“Everything all right?”
“Logan, what’s wrong?”
“Thought I saw someone in your yard. I’m out here but there’s no one now.”
“Just a minute.”
He heard Paige moving, rustling and a squeaking like a kitten looking for its mother. Several minutes later the light in the living room flicked on. He watched Paige, dressed in a lavender polar fleece robe, move from the living to dining room and then through the kitchen. Finally, she returned to the living room and opened the door, the phone disconnecting.
She called to him from the front porch, half in and half out of the screen door. “I just checked on Lori and on Mom. They’re both in their rooms. Everything is fine down here.”
“Call if you need me,” he said.
“Thank you, Logan.” She closed the door and he heard her throw the bolt.
He walked across the yard to his truck and retrieved the plate of food that Mrs. Sullivan had sent home with him, and carried it to his dad’s place. The sweet odor of decaying leaves filled the air, but there was no rustle as the leaves had been pulverized by his dad’s mower since he had left for work this morning.
The only light on in his house was the one in the hall and the bluish glow from the television as his father watched a talent show on cable.
“Hey, son. You’re home late.” His father didn’t know. All this had happened, and his dad had likely been mulching leaves.
Logan offered the plate.
“What’s this?” The way his dad blinked his eyes told Logan that he’d dozed off in his recliner.
Logan told him everything as his father held the plate before him, still covered in plastic wrap.
He sat with his father a while, but, restless, Logan drew the blanket off the back of the couch to go outside and look at the moon.
Who was he kidding? He was going to stare at Paige’s window and watch to see if anything moved on the Morris property.
“Going out to listen to that hoot owl?” asked his dad, referring to the great horned owl that lived up the hillside.
Logan couldn’t tell the difference between an owl and the wind chime on the Morrises’ porch.
“Yeah. Getting some air,” he said and headed out to sit on the porch steps.
The brown bats no longer darted across the sky. They lived up in the barn on the hill. Too cold, he decided, and the insects were all gone. They’d be hibernating now. He missed them flitting and darting overhead. The November air felt bracing as he sat on the porch, facing Paige’s window, which had gone dark.
He wondered why Paige and his brother didn’t make a go of it. He knew they had attended his brother’s senior prom. Paige had been excited to attend. Sophomores were only permitted to the school’s biggest event if they were invited by a senior. He remembered her dress and her mother taking photos of the couple right there on the steps of her home while he sat here watching. She wore a gown of mint green and her hair up with a few tendrils of curls floating about her shoulders. The color of the dress, her red hair up and festooned with fresh flowers and her translucent skin all combined so that, to Logan, she looked like the queen of the fairies.
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Jenna Kernan
It's a race against time to uncover the truth. Working as a sleepy town’s sheriff, Logan Lynch’s life turns upside down when a man is found dead. When biochemist Dr Paige Morris turns up, claiming her boss’s death isn’t what it seems, she becomes the victim of sabotage. Can Logan help… before it’s too late.
It’s a race against time
To uncover the truth.
Former soldier Logan Lynch has no memory of the past nine years of his life. Now working as a sleepy town’s constable, his life turns upside down when a man is found dead. Before long, microbiologist Dr. Paige Morris gets involved, claiming her boss’s death isn’t what it seems. But as Paige herself becomes the victim of sabotage, she needs Logan’s help…before it’s too late.
JENNA KERNAN has penned over two dozen novels and received two RITA® Award nominations. Jenna is every bit as adventurous as her heroines. Her hobbies include recreational gold prospecting, scuba diving and gem hunting. Jenna grew up in the Catskills and currently lives in the Hudson Valley in New York State with her husband. Follow Jenna on Twitter, @jennakernan (https://twitter.com/JennaKernan), on Facebook or at jennakernan.com (http://jennakernan.com).
Also by Jenna Kernan (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Defensive Action
Adirondack Attack
Warning Shot
Surrogate Escape
Tribal Blood
Undercover Scout
Black Rock Guardian
Turquoise Guardian
Eagle Warrior
Firewolf
The Warrior’s Way
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dangerous Conditions
Jenna Kernan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-09460-3
DANGEROUS CONDITIONS
© 2019 Jeannette H. Monaco
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Note to Readers (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
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For Jim, always.
Contents
Cover (#uf7ceb8a6-a5b7-5a31-b5f3-2d7e8cd7ad95)
Back Cover Text (#ue30050d0-a6a6-509f-9df1-09167ac88412)
About the Author (#u74c44217-98ec-572d-bfef-9b55536cf743)
Booklist (#u2cc1b25a-5087-5e6b-bfd0-4ed9562b6ae7)
Title Page (#u3c13e065-6505-55bf-bafa-e425aaca615c)
Copyright (#u4da54c5c-67aa-5961-b0ac-c9faa31d254f)
Note to Readers
Dedication (#uc670c5e1-c99a-5b8c-9d2e-13f88ee0d289)
Chapter One (#u33b93e47-25a6-5f3d-afc3-5505e16d994b)
Chapter Two (#uba948df0-960e-51ab-a9b9-bdfd8d91bf3d)
Chapter Three (#u1e4ee1f2-bed7-59f8-aab9-0003cdde8cb9)
Chapter Four (#u1c0d7b3d-fefa-5076-ae42-bd0603a7373b)
Chapter Five (#u0287e658-a5aa-5678-afba-30069964ffa2)
Chapter Six (#u5c6142a4-8ea5-5ef9-be1e-40eb6812a58c)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Constable Logan Lynch drew on the cowboy hat that had been given to him by his older brother Connor, a village supervisor, because he said it covered the scar on Logan’s forehead. Off-putting, Connor had said. “No need to frighten the kids and tourists.” Plus, the Stetson made him look more like a real lawman. The board had approved his position last September. He was a village constable with no law enforcement experience whatsoever. He seemed to be the only one bothered by that. Still, he needed a job. Not much work in his hometown of 429 for a veteran with a TBI—Traumatic Brain Injury.
Most folks here catered to weekend tourists or worked for Rathburn-Bramley Pharmaceuticals.
“Morning, Constable,” Paige called from across the main street.
She was so pretty and so darn smart. A real scientist, just like she always wanted to be. Meanwhile, he couldn’t distinguish between a rooster crow and a truck backfiring. He wondered if she knew that her hair turned red in the early-morning sunlight.
“Don’t you look spiffy. Where’s your star?”
“Under my coat,” he said. “It’s on a chain. Nobody asks to see it anymore but you.” Why had he added that?
Paige’s smile blinded him. He was a deer in the headlights.
“Big weekend coming up,” she said, still walking as he crossed the street. He couldn’t help it. These few minutes with Paige were the highlight of his entire day. He remembered that she had been his brother’s date at his senior prom during their sophomore year. He’d been told by his dad that he and Paige had dated, too. His dad said they’d been serious enough to be briefly engaged. But he didn’t remember any of that. He wished he might. If he could retrieve just one memory, it would be of them together. He and Paige were the same age, twenty-eight, and had graduated from the village’s central school together. He didn’t remember that either or what ended their engagement. All he knew for certain was that if she didn’t want him then, she sure wouldn’t want him now. She’d gone on to be a biochemist with a doctorate, paid for by her company and he was a constable who had only just regained his driver’s license. All that didn’t stop Logan from admiring her. She was Dr. Morris now, and a mom.
As her neighbor, he knew that she was great with her daughter, Lori. His brother and Paige were now just friends, though not from Connor’s lack of trying. Logan might have to settle for that because asking her out and being turned down would kill him. As it was, he feared her concern was spawned by pity. Somehow he’d become the community project.
“You all ready?” she asked, coming to a stop and allowing him to catch up with her. She was running late today so their conversation would be brief.
“Almost. We got those…” And the words left him. He pointed vaguely at the pile of orange cones and no-parking signs that he’d be stringing up on Main Street. The event shut down traffic for the entire day on Saturday.
Harvest Festival was a village-wide extravaganza that had everything from soapmaking to a turkey-call competition.
“Signage?” She offered the words to him as she often did. She was quick as a whip. Had three degrees in microbiology that she’d earned while he was getting blown up in Iraq.
“Yeah.” He felt deflated. He might be able to pick her up with one hand, but that skill wasn’t useful in conversation. His drill sergeant said his size just made him a bigger target.
Saturday, he’d be waving his big foam finger like the village idiot while parking cars in the empty lot behind the gas station and she’d be working in her research lab probably finding the cure for cancer.
“I hung that sign for Rathburn-Bramley—the company’s sponsoring a lot of the festival.” He pointed at his accomplishment.
Her brow wrinkled as she shielded her eyes to gaze into the early-morning sunlight at the vinyl sign strung above the street between two lampposts with nylon cording. He had learned to speak and read again but he’d never lost the ability to read emotion. Paige’s expression told him that she was worried.
“Was that wise? Being in a bucket truck? I mean, your injuries.”
“Damage done, my doctor says.”
“Still, another head injury…” Her words trailed off.
“Not good for anybody, I suppose.” He grinned and then stopped, fearing the dopey smile that always seemed to come to his face when he was around her made him look damaged. He adjusted his hat farther down his forehead.
They had been in the same class most of primary school. He remembered that with the clarity of a cloudless summer sky. But he couldn’t remember much past junior year. He’d lost the time between his junior year and when he woke up Stateside at Walter Reed about six years later, along with the part of his brain that allowed him to hear and talk and read. Reading came back first. Speaking more slowly. The hearing was improved, though the doctors said he still didn’t process sound correctly, might never process it as he had. He’d adjust, they’d said; he’d learn to speak more slowly to give him time to recall the words, but the memories were just gone.
He was glad the hat covered the worst of the scar. It kept Paige from staring at his forehead. Now she stared at his hat instead.
“You…ah…you be there on Saturday?” he asked.
Paige always made him more tongue-tied than usual.
“Planning on it,” she said.
“They’re bringing in a bouncy hut this year,” he said.
She turned from the street and faced him. “You looking forward to that?”
“No. Not me. The kids. I hope.” He sounded more like a guy without a brain than one with a brain injury. “Your girl might like it.”
Paige looked away. “Lori is too old for that, I’m afraid.”
Why would a woman with an eight-year-old daughter care about a bouncy hut? Lori was already on the youth soccer team and he noticed she was fixing her hair now instead of leaving it in a wild braid with strands flying everywhere. Unlike Paige’s hair, Lori’s was light brown and her eyes were amber. Like her father’s, he supposed. That thought brought a frown. He’d asked Paige once about the girl’s father and it had made her cry. He wasn’t doing that again.
He stared at those sympathetic blue eyes. Paige had skin that was rosy and perfect. She was taller than most women with a frame as willowy as a dancer’s. She’d been five feet eleven inches in eighth grade and gotten no taller. She’d even been taller than he’d been for a time. Until sophomore year when he’d shot up to six feet and one inch. Back then her red-blond hair had been to her waist. Now she wore it at chin length, letting the riot of curls just dance all around her pretty face.
He tried to ignore the smell of her skin and the urge to feel the soft texture of her spiraling curls. She stared at him with those bewitching blue eyes. He went still as his body galloped to life. He wanted to break their friendship by kissing her, really kissing her, and take this relationship back to what he’d been told it had once been. But he was equally terrified that doing so would ruin what they had. He lived on their friendship, tried to make it be enough. What if he told her how he felt and she laughed or avoided him?
Paige was a scientist. Educated. Pretty and a mother. While he was a brain-damaged vet who had gotten his head knocked in “engaging insurgents while simultaneously evacuating three wounded marines under fire.” That sounded cool and he surely wished he could remember doing that. But it wasn’t as cool as the fantasy of being Paige’s one and only again.
Why would she settle for a man like him? She wouldn’t. He knew it and that stopped him every time.
“Well, good luck setting up that bouncy hut,” she said.
He tipped his hat and she smiled, letting her go yet again.
And she was off, walking down Main Street from the home that she shared with her parents from the time they went to school together. Only now her dad was gone. So was his mom. Paige was a scientist at Rathburn-Bramley and yesterday he’d mistaken the church bells for the fire engine.
But he and Paige had always been close; he had looked out for her and now she looked out for him. She’d even helped his brother get the village council to approve his position, with some assistance from her new employer. She’d helped him get the necessary certificates and training to be a constable, too. He missed her helping him study. He wondered again if he should try to kiss her. Then he imagined making an unwelcome advance and decided it would be a great way to end their friendship permanently. She didn’t want a man like him. Who would?
“Have a great day, Dr. Morris,” he called.
She paused, half turned, glancing back over her shoulder at him. “And you have a great day, as well, Constable Lynch.”
PAIGE MORRIS HURRIED down the street, wishing she could go back in time and change things, knowing she could not. Each misstep along the way, each decision that seemed like the only option at the time, rose up to haunt her now.
For the best, her mother said. But was it really?
The stone in her heart ached as she reached the entrance to the manufacturing facility, waving at Lou Reber, who was the head of security. She registered her identification badge on the scanner as Lou watched the monitor for the green light.
Lou had the lined face and gravelly voice of a former smoker, a muscular build and the gray hairs to prove he’d worked as a police detective for twenty-some years before he earned his gold shield and took his early retirement from the force in Poughkeepsie, New York. Somewhere along the way his grown kids had stopped bringing the grandkids to visit each summer, but he had been married to the same woman for thirty-four years, so he was doing something right.
“How is Miriam?” His wife had suffered a fall on a ski slope a few years ago and had injured her back. Two surgeries later, she still couldn’t do any of the activities she once enjoyed like gardening, golf and skiing. As if that were not enough, she had been recently diagnosed with kidney failure and required biweekly dialysis down in Glens Falls.
Lou’s smile slipped. “Oh, about the same. Good days and bad days. She’s on the list for a new kidney now.” He exhaled, his expression glum but then he rallied. “You hear about the hunters up on the cutoff from Turax Hollow Road?”
“They shoot each other?” she guessed.
The location had a fair number of hunters from urban areas who did not quite seem to know the difference between Jersey cows and deer. They also sometimes shot at motion that could be a deer or their hunting partner.
“No, they ran into a bull moose.”
“With their car?” Paige knew that at 1,300 pounds, a bull moose stood six feet high on stilt-like legs and was the perfect height to sail over the hood of a car or truck before crashing through the windshield and crushing the driver. Everyone up in the Adirondacks had a healthy respect for moose.
“No,” said Lou. “They were chasing it down the road. Animal got tired and turned to fight. Guess they figured out how fast that truck could go backward!” He laughed. “The thing put his antlers through their windshield.”
“They’re big animals.”
“And meaner than all get-out in mating season, which it is.” Lou pulled out his phone. “State police asked me to tell everyone to be extra vigilant while driving. They also sent me photos. Want to see?”
She nodded, and Lou went to his texts. Up came an image of a blue pickup truck missing its passenger-side mirror, with deep gouges in the side panel. The windshield was caved in like an empty soda can and the glass showed a web of hairline cracks.
“Wow.”
Lou beamed, delighted at the damage. “Village supervisor voted to close that cutoff to traffic so folks avoid that moose’s territory.”
She approved of that solution. Calling animal control would mean that moose would be put down. The hunters had been in his territory. The long-time village supervisor and Logan’s older brother, Connor Lynch, was competent and respected, handling squabbles and avoiding small-town politics with the mastery of an experienced politician.
Paige wished Lou a good day and headed for the elevator. Once inside the compartment, she unbuttoned her wool coat. Today was one of those in-between days. Too hot for winter gear and too cool for a light jacket.
Leaving the elevator, she crossed the spotless hallway and tapped her card to the contactless entry system that allowed her access to her department. Two more such barriers and she was in the peace and quiet of her lab and hanging her coat beside her coworker’s. Jeremy Chen generally beat her in since he did not have a daughter to see off to school. Getting Lori out of bed was becoming a challenge that she suspected would get worse as middle school loomed.
“Where’s Ed?” she asked Jeremy, referring to Dr. Edward Sullivan. Her boss, and the head of product quality assurance, was generally here at six in the morning because he said that was the only time he could get anything done. Then he left at three so he could coach his son’s travel basketball team over in Mill Creek.
Jeremy glanced up from his computer. He was her height, ten pounds lighter and of Chinese descent. He wore his straight black hair short on the sides and long on the top. He had a habit of pushing his bangs back off his forehead when thinking, only to have them fall back in place the instant he removed his hand. Only his protective glasses ever managed to keep his hair back from his face.
Jeremy glanced at the clock on his computer screen. “Wow, he’s really late. I’m not sure where he is.”
“You got that report done?” she asked. The monthly quality control statistic compilation was Jeremy’s job.
“I need Ed’s results from the last round,” he said.
“Want me to get it?” They all knew each other’s login information as the company had yet to adopt a file-sharing system that worked. The bugs in the current one caused it to take forever to transfer data and, as flash drives were not allowed by company policy, they had resorted to this workaround.
“No. It can wait.”
Her department did all the quality assurance testing for all pharmaceuticals produced on site including liquids, gases and solid tablets.
Paige stowed her lunch in the mini fridge and her purse beneath her desk. It wasn’t like Ed to just not show up.
“Maybe I’ll call Lou.” She already had the handset to her ear. Lou confirmed that Ed had logged in at 5:37 a.m. and left at 6:00 a.m. to do his run. But he had not checked back in before Lou arrived at eight, and Lou had not seen him since arriving. She lowered the phone. “That’s odd.”
Paige relayed Lou’s information.
“Call Ursula?” Jeremy suggested, referring to Ed’s wife.
“Maybe.” Paige retrieved her mobile phone and considered her options. She didn’t want to worry Ursula unnecessarily. “I’ll try his cell.” She did and got his voice mail. “It’s Paige. Call me back when you have a chance.”
Something didn’t sit right. It was dark out when Ed ran and there was no shoulder on most of the county roads. He could be lying in a ditch right now. Then she thought of what Lou had told her just this morning and sucked in a breath.
“Does he run on the cutoff on Turax Hollow Road?”
Chapter Two (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Lou Reber showed up at the lab just before lunch wearing a long face and rubbing the back of his neck. There was no clearer indicator that he was the bearer of bad news.
“What’s happened?” asked Jeremy, meeting Lou halfway across the room.
Paige instantly thought something had happened to his wife, Miriam. The woman was so changed since that ski accident, distracted, disheveled and unfocused.
But then she realized as the pit of her stomach dropped like a broken elevator, the bad news was about Ed, her boss.
“We found Dr. Sullivan,” he said. “Constable Lynch drove his jogging route after we couldn’t find him. He’s…gone…dead. Looks like a hit-and-run.”
Paige sank to her seat on the high black stool beside the tall lab table, samples abandoned as she absorbed the blow.
“He’s got kids,” said Paige, her voice trembling as the shock of having this man so suddenly torn from her life met with denial. As if having kids somehow exempted him from premature death. Hadn’t her father’s fatal auto accident taught her that no one was immune from tragedy?
Jeremy picked up where she had dropped off. “His son’s team… He coaches for the Lions Club and Boy Scouts.” Jeremy’s head sank and he covered his face with both hands.
“Everyone… The whole village will be devastated,” said Paige as the denial gave way to grief.
“That’s certain,” said Lou. “Anyway. That’s all I know. Lynch is out there. He’s with the game warden who was in the area because of the moose. They’re waiting for the state police and the county coroner.”
“Does his wife know yet?” asked Jeremy.
“Logan’s been to the Sullivans’ home and told Ursula. She is headed to the school to pick up her son and daughter.”
“Logan’s sure it’s Ed?” asked Jeremy. His voice was soft, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Neither could Paige.
“Listen, that boy might not be all there but he sure knows every family who lives in Hornbeck and a fair number that don’t.”
“He was always good with names,” said Paige and both men stared at her. She realized then that she’d spoken of Logan in the past tense as if he were the one who had died. Sometimes she felt like he had. Part of him, anyway, the part that loved her.
“Did he die right away?” asked Jeremy.
Lou shook his head. “Doesn’t look that way.”
Paige gasped. Could Edward have been saved if the driver had stopped or if help had reached him? If they had reached him, she thought, taking personal responsibility.
“I should have noticed that he was late,” said Jeremy, shouldering the guilt.
“I didn’t notice he had not checked back in,” said Lou.
Jeremy’s head hung and his gaze fixed on the floor. “But I did.”
“It’s not your fault, either of you,” said Paige. But she wondered if one of them could have saved him. If she, or either man, had noticed soon enough, called, checked and found Dr. Sullivan before the minutes of his life ticked away and he died, abandoned, on a lonely road.
IT WAS HARD not to notice when the village’s new EMS vehicle, carrying her boss’s body, made its way past the manufacturing plant. Paige’s lab was on the second floor and though the plant was three blocks off the main street and down the hill, she saw the flashing lights of the procession of the state police cruisers and EMS truck. The bright red and blue lights blinked in the twilight. Paige realized, grimly, that the ghastly parade would pass directly before Ed Sullivan’s home. Would his wife and two children be there to watch?
Her phone blipped, relaying a text. She had been getting texts and phone messages all day. She glanced at her mobile’s lock screen and saw that it was three in the afternoon and that she had received an incoming text.
She stared at the message as icy fingers danced up and down her spine. Dr. Sullivan wouldn’t have taken his phone on his run, but he’d have his smart watch. With no cell service, the text could not be sent until the watch returned to the area where internet service was available. Here, at the company, their Wi-Fi cast a net all the way past the volunteer fire department. So if the watch was still with his body, the message from him was being sent now. She shivered.
Paige watched the EMS truck, imagining Ed’s bloody corpse and the watch, still sending her his message.
She unlocked her phone and checked the message, which was a series of emojis. Easier to send than typing out words, even with phone prompts. Had he been injured, dying, when he wrote this or was this before his accident? She hoped, prayed, it was before as she stared at the three emojis and one typed word.
The message was composed in the following order: a green box with a white check-mark emoji, the word MY written in capital letters, the computer emoji and finally, the face with a zipper for a mouth.
That message was crystal clear. Ed wanted her to check his office computer and keep quiet about it.
For what?
The possibility that Edward’s death was no accident flashed in her mind as her skin stippled in fear. Each tiny hair on her arms lifted like a warning flag. They would check his watch. They would see the message. They would know she received it.
Paige dropped her phone as if she suddenly discovered a ticking time bomb in her palm, because she had. Ed had just died. He’d sent a message about something on his computer. Part of that message was to keep whatever she found quiet. She began to feel that text was as dangerous as any toxin they kept in the lab.
Ed had shown her that the watch did not lock until removed from his wrist, his corpse. If it were stolen, the watch would remain locked. But Ursula might know his passcode. The police would check his messages, at the very least. Would his killers?
She tried to calm herself. She was making a big leap here—from a possible hit-and-run to outright murder. And over what? Something on his computer?
Just what had Dr. Sullivan gotten himself into and why was he dragging her along? She glanced wildly about. Her gaze fixed on the flash outside her window. There, like a bright beacon against the gathering gloom of storm clouds, the EMS vehicle’s lights blinked as the van reached Main Street and turned toward the funeral home. That was where they’d take Ed before any autopsy. Inside the flashing truck, her supervisor’s body lay strapped to a gurney. She closed her eyes at the image.
Call the county sheriff or check Edward’s computer?
She reached for the phone to call security. Lou Reber had twenty-three years’ experience as a detective in Poughkeepsie, New York. He’d know what to do about this.
Paige had the receiver at her ear with the dial tone buzzing when she realized that was exactly the move that Ed Sullivan would have made if he found something illegal. He’d call security.
But now he was dead.
Lou had a staff of four. Any one or all of them might be involved. Involved in what? Was she crazy to blow this up to DEFCON 1?
Breathe. She tried but her lungs felt like someone was squeezing them.
You’re smart. Think.
It was hard to concentrate past the buzzing in her ears.
She lowered the phone to its cradle with a trembling hand. Balling her hand into a fist hid the tremor but not the aftershocks that rolled through her body.
The computer check came first. Her throat closed against the scream that turned to a squeak at the realization that she was going to check his computer.
“Paige?” Jeremy’s voice held concern. “Are you all right? You’ve gone pale.”
She’d worked with Jeremy for four years. He was her best friend here at work. But did she know him…really know him?
Her father used to say that you would be lucky to have maybe one friend you could call to help you move the body. Jeremy was not that friend. And what would she be dragging him into if she told him?
No one knew anyone that well. If her suspicions were correct, telling anyone might involve risk. Grave risk. But so would telling no one. That watch. The one with the messages was out there, linked to her.
“Just upset. You know. Trying to get my head around it all.”
“I know. I feel sick.”
Did he? He looked just fine.
What should she do? If she used Ed’s computer, Jeremy would notice, especially if she was on there for an extended period.
There was no if, she realized. Only when. She would check his computer and she would leave an electronic trail by doing so. There was no avoiding it. Her gut told her that Jeremy was not involved. With time speeding by, she made her move.
“I have to check something.” She walked as casually as she could to Sullivan’s computer on legs that seemed to have turned to chalk.
Once she had decided to do as Edward had asked, there was no turning back. She sat at his computer and opened File Explorer, scanning the list of recent files. She was aware of Jeremy’s gaze.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m doing it anyway,” she said.
His eyes rounded, but he said nothing more as he busied himself with the tasks before them, preparing the samples for quality testing.
Meanwhile, she wondered what Dr. Sullivan had been involved in and worried that, whatever it was, she was now also involved. That, alone, was reason enough to explain her trembling, bloodless fingers.
Dr. Sullivan had been a caring boss and a friend. He was…had been a good scientist. If he was the victim of a tragic accident, then none of this mattered. But if something nefarious was afoot, she had tied herself to the railroad tracks. She knew nothing about cloak-and-dagger affairs. She knew science.
And her hypothesis was that Dr. Sullivan had been murdered. Proving that theory might just get her killed.
She continued to scan the alphabetical list of files, fixing on one. A chill danced like a dropped ice cube down her spine, but she opened the file titled Testing Anomalies and scanned the contents.
Chapter Three (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
The state police had given Logan the terrible job of notifying Ursula Sullivan of her husband’s death. The man in charge, Detective Albritton, could not have been clearer that he did not want or need Logan’s help.
Logan had stayed with Mrs. Sullivan until her younger sister arrived and then headed to the office, leaving the two women to collect Ursula’s kids and tell them the terrible news. Logan covered the phones while the state police took care of securing the scene and began their investigation of the hit-and-run. They told him not to give out any information except that there had been a traffic fatality. But most folks calling already knew who and where and how.
No one knew who had hit Dr. Sullivan and left him in the muddy jeep track to bleed out.
And no one asked why. Except him. Why did such a good man have to leave his family?
There was a chiming sound like a child repeatedly hitting the metal panels of one of those rainbow-hued xylophones. His brain played tricks on him. Sound was the worst. The doctors explained that his hearing was perfect but the place where the sound was supposed to be sorted into useful categories was damaged. So he often couldn’t distinguish between a siren and a ringing phone.
He could tell the direction, and that helped. After that he just had to make his best guess. The office phone was easy as it had a flashing red light. His cell phone was more challenging. All the rings and dings and chirps sounded the same, so he didn’t know if he was answering a call, text or message.
He kept waiting to be what he was or what he thought he had been. His doctors said that wasn’t going to happen. There was no going back. Forward was the only option and finding what his doctors called “a new normal.”
But being the village mascot was demoralizing. He lifted his phone, saw nothing on the lock screen and then tried the office phone, which was flashing again.
“Hello. Constable’s office. This is Constable Lynch speaking.”
“Logan, what happened out there on Turax Hollow Road?”
Voices were another challenge. He could no longer distinguish male from female or familiar from stranger. It annoyed people, especially his father.
“There was an accident—” The caller cut him off.
“I know that part. Is Dr. Sullivan dead?”
“The names of those involved won’t be released until after the families are notified.”
“I’m your family, Logan. This is your brother, Connor, who is also village councilman. So tell me what happened.”
“Oh, sorry, Connor.” His problem caused some people to think he was no longer very bright, his brother included. He just wished he could get back to old normal.
“Okay. You’re sorry. Now, what happened?”
Connor was a village official, so he gave him the info. “Dr. Edward Sullivan was struck by a vehicle and died at the scene. Hit-and-run. That’s all I know.”
“Idiots,” muttered Connor, then to Logan, “Who is handling the investigation?”
Not me, thought Logan. “The state police, and I just saw the county sheriff’s vehicle drive past the window. So they’re all out there.” The light of the emergency vehicles drew his gaze from the desktop and the doodles on his blotter that looked like one of Paige’s pale blue eyes, framed with long, dark lashes. He stared through the storefront window of the former video rental place that had been turned hastily into the constable’s office here on Main Street after his position was approved. “EMS vehicle is coming up Raquette Road now.” He could see them reaching the junction of Main. “Seems like all the law enforcement vehicles, too, state police, and I think that’s the mayor’s Subaru. Guess they’re done at the scene.”
“Fabulous. Where are they going?”
“Owen’s,” he said, mentioning both the largest residence and only funeral home in the village.
There was a sound like a ringing or perhaps a song.
“Connor?” His brother did not answer.
Dial tone, he decided and returned the handset to the cradle. Then he stepped out of the office to watch the procession making the turn. The last vehicle was a white SUV driven by the sheriff of Onutake County, Axel Trace, who had not even bothered to check in with the village constable.
Logan stepped out to the street and removed his hat as they passed and came upon Paige’s daughter, Lori Morris, walking from school with her grandmother. With all the excitement, he’d lost track of time. He glanced at his watch and saw it was already a little after three in the afternoon.
He turned to Lori, dressed in a purple polar fleece jacket that added bulk to her thin frame. “How was school?”
Lori looked away from the retreating procession of official vehicles.
“Mr. Garrett got called away so we had Mrs. Unger,” she said and made a face.
Logan joined her, twisting his face as if he were poisoned. Mr. Garrett was Lori’s teacher, and a volunteer with the fire department. He was also a paramedic. And Mrs. Unger had been his primary school principal, as well. She had been universally disliked back then based mainly on her position of authority but also on her tendency to be nicer to her charges whenever a parent was around. Since leaving school, Logan had gotten to know Mrs. Unger, who also volunteered with the fire department, and had grown to admire her. She was silver-haired and tough as any US marine he had ever known.
“Still looking over her glasses at kids?”
“Yes!” said Lori and rolled her golden eyes and then did a fair imitation. “I don’t know what she was talking about. We’re studying plants and she was talking about comotosis and phototosis or something and I think that’s high school stuff. And she is so boring! She makes me comotosis!”
He laughed. Lori was funny.
“Mitosis and photosynthesis?” asked her grandmother, impatience making her voice tight.
“Maybe,” said Lori.
“And this—” she waved a finger at Lori before continuing “—is the sort of nonsense that caused me to have to speak to her after class.” Mrs. Morris turned to Logan. “I don’t see why I should be punished for my granddaughter’s disrespect.”
His brother’s new “dragon-orange metallic” Audi Q8 model SUV raced by, exceeding the speed limit. The color looked to Logan exactly like the orange flashing light on a snowplow. He frowned.
Mrs. Morris watched the SUV disappear after the procession. “You should give him a ticket.” Then she directed her cool gray eyes on Logan. “Shame about Dr. Sullivan.”
Word traveled fast.
“Did Paige call you, Mrs. Morris?”
“You can call me Beverly, Logan, as I’ve told you.”
He looked away, uncomfortable with that. He’d always think of her as Paige’s mom, Mrs. Morris, despite her insistence that he call her by her first name.
Mrs. Morris sighed. “Yes, she did call.”
“What happened to Dr. Sullivan?” asked Lori.
The two adults exchanged a look. Logan shook his head. He wasn’t speaking about this before an eight-year-old. The world had too many monsters, but the ones under her bed would do for now.
Mrs. Morris clearly felt differently for she answered the question.
“Your mother’s supervisor has been in an accident.”
“Is he okay?”
“No, I don’t think he is.”
“What kind of accident?” asked Lori.
“I’ll tell you on the way home.” Mrs. Morris set them in motion. Lori remembered to say goodbye and waved a hand sheathed in a mitten fashioned to look like a zebra puppet complete with a braided tail and pink lolling tongue. The googly eyes rolled, making it look as if it also had a head injury. Logan waved back. Then he replaced his hat and returned inside to the phones.
He made it only to the new wheelchair ramp and paused at the sound, unsure what it was. He could identify where it came from, toward the village library, on the corner of Raquette and Main, in the former home of the Hornbeck family. The village’s namesake had founded the bank back when the railroad stopped in this village. The sound reminded him of a fish thrashing in the river after it was hooked. But it turned out to be Paige Morris, hurrying along Main, passing the autobody shop and the antiquarian bookstore.
She wiped her face every few seconds with her gloved hands. Today was cold and windy, and Paige had a blocked tear duct. He remembered with perfect clarity in the winters of their childhood that the tears rolled down her left cheek and froze on the collar of her maroon nylon snow coat. Funny how he could remember that but not a minute of his time in the US Marines or a minute of his engagement to Paige.
But Paige’s tear duct dripping did not make a noise and she was making a noise. Was that pain? He crossed Main Street to intercept her. She usually walked home after five but was early today.
It wasn’t until he was nearly before her that she noticed him. The noise she was now making was obvious. Paige was crying.
Chapter Four (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Paige hurried up Main Street with her head down against the wind and her shoulders bent by the weight of her troubles. Someone stepped directly into her path, bringing her up short. She startled, glancing up. Instinctively, her hand went to her shoulder bag and the printed copy of the file she had found on Dr. Sullivan’s computer.
Logan stood before her.
For just a moment he looked as he always had, back when her family had been in trouble and he’d done the wrong thing for the right reason. One look into Logan’s sympathetic eyes and she fell to pieces.
The years of his absence disappeared. Pain and fear lowered her resistance and she stepped into his arms, sobbing. He was just the right height to cradle her against his chest and rest his chin on the top of her head. His familiar scent comforted her as tears rolled down her cheeks like raindrops down a windowpane.
“Why are you crying?” he said. “Is it Dr. Sullivan?”
She couldn’t have answered if she had wanted to. And she couldn’t tell him what had happened. But she wasn’t sure who to tell about the text message or what she had found afterward. She wasn’t even sure what the document meant, just that it highlighted an inconsistency. Inconsistencies were the enemies of quality assurance.
Dr. Sullivan had found something. She suspected he reported his concerns to the head of security or to his supervisor, Sinclair Park, or even the CFO, Veronica Vitale, and then he had died.
A correlational relationship. Not necessarily causal. But she could not eliminate, out of hand, the possibility of causality.
“Is this about Dr. Sullivan?” Logan asked again.
Paige nodded, snuggling closer to the canvas jacket supplied to Logan by the village.
Logan cradled her against him. “I’m sorry about Dr. Sullivan, Paige.”
Nodding, she managed to rein in the sobs. Logan helped coach Ed’s son on basketball. He’d lost a friend, as well. Her coworker’s death would leave such a hole in the community. And his kids…his wife…
Her ragged breath and a hum in the back of her throat was all the sound emerging from her.
“He was a good man,” said Logan.
“He was.”
“They had the state police up there. County sheriff, too.”
Since they were a village of only a little over four hundred residents, they could not afford a police force. But after Logan had come home, his brother, then newly appointed to the village council, raised concerns that traffic had increased with the arrival of the pharmaceutical company two years before, the company that Connor himself had helped advocate for. Rathburn-Bramley expected the village to manage the increased traffic flow and issues arising from the daily commute of the workforce of two hundred employees, nearly all of which lived outside their community. The taxes they paid more than covered the cost of the salary of the new village constable, the hiring of whom had caused debate in the village, narrowly winning out over the placement of a traffic light on Main. Rathburn-Bramley also covered the cost of a new hook-and-ladder fire truck, EMS vehicle and emergency equipment for the volunteer fire department, continuing to make yearly donations. The company seemed interested in a good public image, and they were willing to pay for it.
Now the village had both a well-equipped volunteer fire department and a constable, who was fully trained according to New York State law. Finding a doctor to pass Logan on the medical exam had been a challenge, but Connor had managed that, too. His brother had wisely ridden the wave of pride generated by Logan’s heroism. As a Silver Star recipient, Lance Corporal Logan Lynch made his hometown proud. Because of his accident, no one expected him to do much but direct traffic every afternoon and march in the village parades.
“They’ll find who did this,” said Logan.
“I doubt it,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He drew back and dropped a kiss on her forehead, then drew back again, his face registering worry. Perhaps he thought he had overstepped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.” She’d enjoyed his tender touch, a reminder of his protective care of her at a time long ago.
He looked relieved. “I’m glad you walked this way.”
This route was slightly longer than cutting across Railroad Avenue and then turning up Turkey Hollow Road to Main. But she walked it daily so she could see him. He’d often walk her home, then return to the office next to the hair salon or, on evenings when she was running late and he’d finished directing traffic, he’d simply walk her home and then head to the house next door to hers. Like her, Logan had never moved out of his childhood home. He and his dad, now a widower, lived in the big yellow farmhouse north of her mother’s place, a white, two-story home that had been there for a hundred and fifty years. Both farms had barns large enough to hold a few cows and a plot of pastureland behind that was big enough to keep them fed summer and winter. The cows had been moved out long ago, before Paige or Logan’s parents purchased their houses. Paige’s dad had been a dentist until his death in an automobile accident during her junior year in college. Logan had lost his mom just after he had turned eleven.
How old were Steven and Valerie Sullivan? Paige tried to remember Ed talking about their birthdays. Steven would turn fourteen this December, old enough to try out for the JV team next year. That made Valerie…eleven. The same age Logan had been.
The ache in her heart pulsed with every beat.
Those poor kids. She was glad they had Ursula. Their mom was strong and capable. She’d be there for her children.
Paige rested her head on Logan’s shoulder and her arms hung at her sides. He patted her back while she tried and failed not to long for more than comfort from him. She lifted her head to gaze up at his big brown eyes, looking again for a flicker of recognition. She went still as her body galloped to life. Everything inside her wanted him to kiss her. Except he didn’t. He never did. The top of her head did not count.
“Why don’t you think they’ll catch who did this?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the faith in the system that you did. Do,” she corrected. “Never have.”
“If you hear anything, Paige, you should tell me.”
“I should,” said Paige. But she wouldn’t.
She felt she couldn’t rely on Logan anymore, ever since he’d left for Iraq years ago, not telling her he was reenlisting until it was too late.
Now all memory of her as the love of his life had been blown out of his thick skull.
After her dad died, she and her mom struggled financially, and she really didn’t know if she could finish her undergraduate degree. With no life insurance and in deep debt, her father had left her mother and Paige in dire straits, with only bankruptcy protecting their home.
Even so, it was her father and mother’s mess. Not hers; certainly not Logan’s. She’d told him that and that she’d figure it out. But Logan had done what he thought best. Without consulting her. Reenlisted and volunteered for the higher-paying combat duty. She could have strangled him then and now.
She had told him, at the time, that she believed life decisions that affected them both should be discussed. He thought her ungrateful. He said he was taking care of things. The disagreement that ensued had turned ugly and he’d asked for his ring back.
She’d been so shocked that he would break their engagement especially after her father had just passed away, but she had done as he asked and returned the diamond solitaire. Logan had left for Iraq and she had not seen him again until after his accident.
“You can trust me, Paige.”
“I do trust you.” But inside, she just didn’t count on him anymore. He had improved. Was it enough to try again? She gazed up at him, wondering what he’d do if she just kissed him already. Maybe that would jog something loose inside that brain. Like the reverse of the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty.
She reminded herself how grateful she was he’d come home at all. When she’d first learned of his injuries, though, she thought he was gone in a different way, never to return. His doctors told his family that Logan would probably not be capable of caring for himself. But she had disagreed. She’d gone to him at Walter Reed and stayed right up until her due date.
When he’d finally come home, Paige had been there. But after Lori’s injury, people who knew they’d been together urged her to move on, not to burden him or herself with trying to recover memories of a relationship that had broken up anyway.
She’d tried. She still did. Until moments like this when she wanted him to remember everything, to be awakened by her touch, her kiss. But that wasn’t how brain injury and recovery worked. Some things were just gone forever. She had to accept that.
Sleeping Beauty, she thought and smiled. Logan was still beautiful. The scar didn’t change that. His dark, fathomless eyes and crisp, thick hair still tempted. Even that stupid cowboy hat made him look as handsome as any Western hero of movie or television.
She paused to face him. He pushed back the brim of his hat. She used her teeth to tug off one glove and then used her index finger to trace the hard line of his jaw. His coarse whiskers gently scraped her finger pad. She gave him her best seductive smile.
And for an instant, he was back. His eyes went wide with speculation and then came that easy, slow smile.
A familiar garish, orange Audi SUV raced by them and made an illegal U-turn right on Main. Connor Lynch pulled to a halt at the curb, and the passenger window whisked down. Logan’s brother leaned across the seat to peer at them.
As if caught doing something illegal, Paige jumped back from Logan and now glowered at Connor. He used to make a habit of interrupting them whenever he thought they might be…occupied. Some things never changed.
“Paige, you need a lift home?”
She stiffened and narrowed her eyes at Connor. This was yet another attempt to keep her away from his little brother. He’d made his feelings crystal clear after Logan finally came home. Logan was not capable of that sort of relationship, Connor had told her in no uncertain terms. And she should not burden him with trying to have one. Connor had been adamant, she’d ignored him and Lori had suffered as a result.
She’d backed off, but stayed close, watching his gradual improvement. He might not remember her, but his accident had not reduced his intelligence. Even his doctors said so. The slow speech and hearing trouble were results of brain injury. The part of his brain that handled cognitive function had been unharmed. Most people around here forgot that. Spoke to him more slowly than necessary and as if they were dealing with a child or a pet monkey. It infuriated her.
But was that indignation on his behalf or fury over what she had lost? She didn’t know, and sometimes her disappointment over Logan reenlisting blended into a general anger at the universe for stealing something precious from them both.
“I can walk her home,” said Logan to his big brother, his speech slow by comparison.
“Aren’t you supposed to be directing traffic at five?” he asked his kid brother.
“Yes. But I have time to walk her home and get back.”
“Today we need you in your office to cover phones. We had a traffic fatality. You still have a job, bud. Don’t blow it on me.”
“I can walk her and then come back. I didn’t take a lunch today.”
Connor ignored him. “Paige. Get in the car.”
Her home was half a mile east on Route 10, but she wasn’t sure she could make it, even leaning on Logan. She was equally sure that she didn’t want to ride with Connor. Ever since his little brother came back from Iraq, Connor had been trying to move in on her. Not that his little brother noticed because he’d forgotten her with the rest. Logan might not remember what they were together, but she did. And Connor was not Logan’s replacement. She’d told him so, more than once. All the cars and boats and fancy houses in the world wouldn’t change that.
Logan drew back as if anxious to put her aside again.
“It’s getting cold. Windy,” he said and glanced toward his brother’s car. Logan could drive, but his truck was parked back beside the office.
She stared up at him, willing him to recall something, anything, as she had so many times before. The betrayal of his forgetting them as a couple, as an engaged couple, of him forgetting he told her that he loved her forever and would make this all right, hurt in her bones. That betrayal had mellowed into a pervasive longing and soul-deep aching sadness. It hurt to look at him sometimes, especially when she was remembering, and he was just giving her that congenial smile.
Still, she had to wonder, who did she seek out when she was in trouble? Not Connor, the village councilman with a successful business in real estate and a large empty house of his own.
She’d come to Logan.
“Paige, I have to talk to you,” said Connor.
Her radar engaged. What did a village councilman have to talk to her about? She decided right then that she was not speaking to him or anyone else about what she had found until after she had reread the document from Dr. Ed’s folder.
Logan opened the passenger-side door, and Paige reluctantly slipped inside. She gave his free hand a squeeze, but he didn’t return it as he once would have.
Connor took his foot off the brake, and she waved to Logan, whose brow knit as he lifted a hand in farewell.
And then she was being whisked down Main Street, toward her mother’s home, her home again, too.
She still couldn’t believe she was back here in Hornbeck. That had never been her intention. Neither had getting pregnant her senior year of college. Her mother disapproved of Paige’s decision to keep the baby and stay close to help with Logan’s recovery. But Lori’s accident forced Paige to face facts. What choice did she have? She’d needed to earn a living and care for her daughter, so she’d accepted the fellowship at Cornell and earned her master’s degree in only one year. Next came an opportunity in Arlington, Virginia. But when her mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer, Paige had come home to find Logan much improved, a fact that no one in his family or her mother had shared with her. The job at Rathburn-Bramley allowed her to stay. That had been four years ago. They had even paid for her doctorate. And here she was, still, close to Logan and waiting for him to come back to her.
“What are you doing, Paige?” Connor asked.
She gave him a blank stare.
“You tried this. We all were against it, but you told Logan everything and he forgot it as soon as you told him. How many times?”
“Six,” she lied.
“More like ten.”
“He’s doing better,” she insisted. “No lapses in short-term memory.”
“Great. So what if your daughter calls for help and Logan thinks it’s the television again?”
The memory made her stomach clench. Shortly after he returned to his father’s home, Paige had been visiting with Lori, then ten months old. Paige had stepped out to retrieve a package from the mailbox, leaving Lori happily perched on Logan’s lap. When she returned, she heard her daughter wailing from outside and ran into the house to find Lori on the floor, a gash on her chin. Logan stood before the lounge chair pointing the remote at the television as he vainly tried to turn off the volume. He thought their baby’s howls of pain were on the television.
“It was too soon,” she said.
“It always will be,” Connor replied. “You should listen to us this time.”
Before they reached the old white farmhouse, they passed the funeral home where Dr. Sullivan’s body likely now lay in the basement on an aluminum table. He should be finishing up at the lab and heading home for supper. She shook her head in despair. The authorities would have to do an autopsy. That thought gave her the shivers. She checked the connection on her safety belt again.
“What did you tell Logan about today?”
“Tell him? Nothing.”
“That’s good. Just upset him.”
While she appreciated his concern for his little brother, Connor was the one who seemed upset. His face was red and he kept dragging his fingers through the hair on the top of his head. Connor looked much like Logan with just a little thickening at his waist and hair that was lighter and noticeably thinner. His skin was ruddy, and tiny burst blood vessels in his cheeks pointed to a drinking problem. Too many meals alone at the pub and too many evenings alone in his big, empty house, he had once told her. If that was supposed to make her feel guilty, it didn’t. No one told him to buy that B and B.
“How did you hear about Dr. Sullivan?” Connor asked.
“Lou told us.”
“Lou Reber?”
She nodded.
“I heard from Freda. We were going over the agenda for the board meeting when Ursula called.”
Freda Kubr was Ursula Sullivan’s sister, a village councilor and the administrative assistant to Principal Unger.
“And Lou told you how he died?” he asked.
“Hit-and-run.”
“Did you see Dr. Sullivan today?” he asked.
“Not today.”
This began to feel like an interrogation, as if Connor was constable, and it made her uneasy. Why was he so interested in these details?
“I’m sure the state police will want to speak to you. They told me they’ll be interviewing all his coworkers.”
“Why? Wasn’t it an accident?” she asked. She had her suspicions, but she wanted to see his reaction.
“That hasn’t been determined yet.”
How did he know that?
He swiped a hand over his mouth and then returned his hand to the wheel. She’d never seen him this jumpy.
“Did he say anything to you or was he behaving strangely?”
“Not as strangely as you’re behaving.” She twisted in her seat to face him. “What is this about, Connor?”
“We’ve never had a case of manslaughter in Hornbeck before. It is going to be in the papers. Most people who live in this county don’t even know we exist, and the village likes it that way. I know Rathburn-Bramley does. It’s why they picked us for the plant.”
It was true, Paige knew, that even people living in the same county didn’t know that this little turn in the highway was a village. Both the railroads and the major highways had left them behind years ago. This was an advantage to a company who produced controlled substances. Hiding in among the farms and hills made perfect sense.
Connor banged his hand on the steering wheel. “They’ll mention where he works.”
“No secret where he works. Is there?”
“Your company prefers a very low profile. Can’t see it from the road, so the tourists and visitors certainly don’t know it’s here. Draw the wrong people, it gets out what you all are cookin’ down there.” He glanced at her. “You know exactly what they produce.”
“I should. I test every product on every run.”
“Well, then you also know that opiates are a target. They don’t want to be on the map.”
Her company also produced fentanyl and a variety of intravenous drugs and gases used by anesthesiologists. Most had a high black-market value and were favorites of some addicts. Ironically, they also produced innocuous medical supplies like aerosol disinfectant spray and gel hand sanitizer.
“Well, they can’t just pretend he wasn’t killed,” said Paige, addressing Connor’s concerns with sarcasm.
“Your employer is requesting he be listed as unemployed. His widow has agreed.”
“That’s sick.” And a shock. She could understand the company’s desire for a low profile, but this seemed to take it too far.
“They offered her money. A lot of it, above and beyond what she’d get with the company’s life insurance.”
“But they think this was an accident? Right?”
“Maybe. But his ID tags are missing.”
Her eyes widened. Had he been killed for his access key?
“But they can’t get to the manufacturing area with that and they can’t get past security. They check our photo against the tag.”
“What about after hours?”
“Tag is time sensitive. Six a.m. to six p.m. Plus, you need a special card to access the finished goods area. After hours you need an escort. One of the security team. They’ll deactivate his access. I’m sure they already have done so.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She shouldn’t be revealing security measures, even to Logan’s brother.
“Sheriff and the state police are looking for his tags and the vehicle that hit him. Anyone you know want to hurt Dr. Sullivan?”
“No! Of course not. Everybody loved him.” She felt a jab in her belly as she recognized that she was already referring to her friend in the past tense.
Connor made a face.
“What?”
“I overheard Lou speaking to Dale Owens at the funeral home. Lou told him that your firm was investigating Sullivan. Something out at the plant was going missing. They were getting ready to fire him.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She again peered at Connor. He seemed to have done a fair amount of nosing around already. Why was he so interested in this? Was it just because he was concerned for the town’s reputation?
“They were onto him.”
“He’d never steal from his employer.”
“Maybe it was intellectual property. Like a process or formula. Could he have known they were onto him?”
“Are you suggesting he stepped in front of a vehicle and then stole his own ID tag as a cover-up?”
“Of course not.” His hand raked his hair again. “It’s just, we’ve never had a thing like this happen here. I helped bring that plant here, Paige, and I feel responsible for it and any trouble that comes because of this sort of industry. Could have been a bad drug deal or something.”
“Nonsense.”
“We are a peaceful village, Paige. Cows, cornfields and…”
“Opiates,” she finished.
Chapter Five (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Paige got home to find her mother cooking dinner, which was unusual. Her mom had made it very clear when Paige moved back in with her that she was going to raise her own daughter and that meant housework, errands and making her child’s meals. Her only concession had been picking up Lori after school because Hornbeck Central School did not have an after-hours keeper program.
“Where’s Lori?” asked Paige.
Her mother continued stirring white sauce on the stovetop as she half turned to speak to Paige.
“She’s out back making a leaf pile and then jumping into it. Malory is watching her from the porch.”
Paige did not think that Malory, her mother’s long-haired cat, was an adequate babysitter, but a glance out the side window showed her daughter tunneling through dry leaves in the spotlight of the backyard floodlight.
Paige set her satchel on a chair at the breakfast table and removed her coat and scarf. Then she folded into the adjoining chair. Her mother brought her a bottle of scotch and a small juice glass and set it before her.
She gaped and then met her mother’s serious gaze.
“You heard?”
“Whole village heard. That ogre of a company let you go a few minutes early today?”
Paige lifted the glass. The strong, distinctive aroma reached her before she took a sip and grimaced. The liquid burned all the way down.
“I took some personal time.”
“You should take tomorrow. Those pills can wait a day.”
“I don’t make pills.” She set the scotch aside and wiped her watering eyes.
“I know what you do. I paid for some of that fancy education, remember?”
It was impossible to forget.
“Though I expect our constable will have the culprit arrested in no time. That is if he doesn’t mistake the church bell for the fire truck again.”
One of Logan’s early blunders was to head over to the fire station at noon his first day when he thought he heard the siren. It had turned out to be the bells that the Methodist church rang every weekday at noon and at ten a.m. on Sundays.
Paige ignored her mother’s jab at Logan. She was used to them.
“I’ve been over to see Ursula this afternoon,” said her mother.
“How is she?”
“She looks terrible. But her sister is there, and Freda told me that they are accepting callers tonight and tomorrow.”
“Tonight?”
She was surprised. They’d only just learned, and Paige thought they’d still be processing the shock.
“Freda said that Ursula does not want to be alone. The church is organizing casseroles to be delivered each day. Mine is tomorrow, chicken tetrazzini casserole. I think I won’t add the cayenne. I don’t know if the Sullivans like spicy food.”
Paige’s hopes of dinner vanished.
“I’m making enough for us, too. I should bring some to Albert, feeding that man-child.” Albert Lynch was the widower father of Connor and Logan. And the man-child, she assumed, was his brain-damaged son.
“Logan is not a man-child.” Paige’s voice was sharp. “He is just as smart as before.”
“Hmm. Then why does he talk so s-l-o-w?” she asked, drawing out the last word.
Paige knew exactly how smart she and Logan both were, with her breakup with Logan after she discovered he’d reenlisted and then sleeping with him again her senior year in college before he’d shipped out. Nobody in Hornbeck knew he’d been to see her at school. She’d been so angry at him and scared for him and it had just happened.
Nine months later Lori had happened. She’d picked the name to honor Logan. Hoped they’d have a chance at a second start after she finished her undergraduate schooling. His plan had not included being wounded and nearly dying. And hers didn’t include giving up on him. Their families had convinced her to stop telling Logan about Lori’s paternity when he couldn’t remember anything new past a few hours back then. She’d agreed, but she had continued to bring Lori for visits. Seeing their baby brightened Logan. Only she believed that Logan could handle the responsibility of caring for a daughter. As it turned out, she’d been wrong.
She’d ignored them and Lori now had a scar on her chin that served as a constant reminder that Paige was not always the best judge where Logan was concerned. Her emotions and hopes were too tied up in his being able to love her and their daughter to allow her to be unbiased. Now she feared trying and failing again with him. She’d given him time, years to recover. He didn’t forget things anymore. His speech had improved, and he was working now. It seemed dishonest not to again tell Logan about their relationship and his daughter. She’d have to tell them both eventually, especially when it seemed Logan no longer forgot things. She’d been waiting for Lori to be old enough to understand that her father had a TBI. Was an eight-year-old capable of comprehending this?
Maybe his father would agree with her that it was time.
“If you weren’t so stubborn, you’d…” Her mother’s words trailed off.
Paige tried to ignore the urge to ask her mother to finish her sentence, knowing that she wouldn’t like what she had to say, and failed.
“I’d what?”
“You would stop following Logan like a puppy and pay a little more attention to Logan’s older brother. Connor’s been sweet on you for ages and he’s asked you, I don’t know how many times, to go out with him. He’s got a thriving business and a political position. He has that big house that I’m sure he bought because he knows you love it.”
“That isn’t true.” But even as she said it, Paige suddenly feared it was true. “Logan is Lori’s father.”
Her mother sniffed. “Who can’t tell a baby from a remote control,” she muttered as she continued the rhythmic stirring.
Connor was the smart choice; any of the single, employed professional men at Rathburn-Bramley would be. She’d been asked. She’d said no.
Because she was an idiot. Because she didn’t love Connor. She loved the man who had left her behind. That man had not come back. As for Connor, fondness and guilt were poor foundations for a relationship.
Paige thumped her elbows on the table and cradled her forehead in her hands.
“Lori deserves a father, Paige. One qualified to care for her.”
She pressed her mouth closed to keep from lashing out. Her daughter did deserve a father and had one. It was Paige’s decision to keep them apart. And it was a decision she reconsidered daily as Logan improved.
“He’s not going to remember you, Paige. He’s just not and he never will. And even if he did, do you want to be married to a man who earns his living at the benevolence of others? He’s the village idiot.”
Paige pressed her hands flat on the table and rose to her feet.
“Mother, if you ever call him that again, I will take Lori and that job offer in South Carolina.”
“Might be better for you if you did. Better than seeing you mooning around after that boy.”
Paige gaped. She’d never expected her mother to call her bluff.
“Mom, is that what you want? For us to go?”
“I want what I’ve always wanted—what is best for you. And that boy never was and never will be.”
LOGAN FINISHED DIRECTING the rush of vehicles leaving the company lot and funneling up to Main to then head toward Mill Creek to the east or Ouleout to the west. After he stopped back in his office to lock up, he headed toward his blue 2004 Ford pickup. Then he made his way home. The temperature had dropped, and he worried that it might rain on Saturday. That would put a damper on the Harvest Festival. If this kept up, they could even have snow on their big day.
Instead of stopping at his home, he passed it and turned down Cemetery Road, crossing the West Branch of the Raquette River and then heading along River Street. Dr. Sullivan had lived in a Dutch Colonial home just outside the village. He had planned to only drive by but found cars and trucks parked in the drive and on the lawn. The porch was lit up and callers spilled across the porch and down the steps.
He parked across the road, off the shoulder, and headed over to the property. Logan tipped his hat and murmured hellos to the familiar faces and didn’t even try to focus on one speaker or another. With so many folks conversing at once, he just couldn’t identify who was talking. He passed Mr. Sinclair Park, who stood on the steps. He knew that Paige’s department reported to him, because she’d once pointed him out as her boss’s boss. He worked at the plant, something in production, and had moved to Hornbeck soon after being hired about the same time Logan started as a constable.
“Logan,” said Mr. Park. “Paying your respects?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a good man.” Park slapped him on the upper arm as if he were a draft horse.
Logan stepped in from the cold and into the bright hallway. He removed his hat and gave it a spin before unzipping his constable jacket. He had intended to find Mrs. Sullivan, seeing her in deep conversation with her sister, Freda, in the living room, but then he spotted both Sullivan’s fourteen-year-old son, Steven, and eleven-year-old daughter, Valerie, sitting with their chins on their knees on the steps leading to the second floor. Instead of the familiar basketball shorts and sneakers, Steven wore gray slacks and a black shirt, and Valerie was wearing a forest-green skirt and white blouse. He’d never seen them in this sort of attire.
Steven’s chin lifted when he spotted Logan, assistant coach of his travel basketball team.
“Coach,” he said, his expression hopeful.
Logan changed direction and headed up the stairs, pausing to sit two steps below the kids. He placed his hat on the same step.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Steven, Valerie. He was a really good coach.”
Valerie didn’t make a sound, but tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“You going to be our coach now?” asked Steven.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Everyone keeps hugging me,” said Steven, his expression now cross. His lower lip and the break in his voice told Logan that Steven was on the verge of tears. A swipe of his sleeve across his eyes confirmed Logan’s guess.
“It’s okay to cry, Steven. When my mom died, I cried for months. Not all the time but a lot and sometimes when I didn’t expect it. I’d just start crying.”
“How’d she die?” asked Steven.
“It was an aneurysm in her aorta.” He pointed to his heart. “That’s like a bubble in the artery. The wall of that blood vessel is thick and tough, but my mom’s was thin there and when it let go she died very fast.” Right beside him at the grocery store just after he turned eleven. He remembered the way she’d fallen, as if she had been a marionette with all the strings cut at once. The grapefruit in her hand had rolled straight down the aisle in the produce section like a bowling ball. He’d hit his knees beside her and stared at her face. She’d looked so surprised. But she’d already been gone.
“Where is my dad now?” asked Valerie, shaking him from his dark memories. He wondered if the child meant metaphorically or physically. As he pondered how to answer, Steven cut in.
“Nobody will tell us,” said Steven. “They just say he’s in heaven. Or with God. But where is he really?”
“Do you mean his remains?”
They nodded in unison, eyes wide.
“They took your father’s body to Owen’s funeral home. They have beds there for folks who have passed. And since it was an accident, the state police need to have a look at him for clues to help them catch whoever did this.”
“And put him in jail,” said Valerie.
“Might be a him,” said Logan. “Might be a her. But we’re trying every way we know to catch them.”
“Is he cold?” asked Valerie.
“No. Definitely not.”
“I’ve only ever seen dead animals. They get all stiff and swollen,” said Steven.
“No, that won’t happen. The people at the funeral home will wash him and dress him and treat his body respectfully.”
“Why?” asked Steven. “He can’t feel anything now. Can he?”
“It’s more for the family. Rituals to take care of our dead. It’s a last act of love.”
“You ever seen a dead body?” asked the boy.
Logan had seen many, according to his military record, but he remembered only one. “My mother, when she died and then again the day of her funeral.”
“What about at war?” asked Valerie. “Dad said you were in combat and that some of the other soldiers with you died.”
He’d been awarded the Silver Star for valor after half the roof had caved in on him and his men in a building in Fallujah.
“I heard that, too. But I don’t remember any of those deaths because I got hit in the head,” he said as he pointed at the scar on his forehead as evidence.
Both the Sullivan children regarded the scar with serious concentration.
“Kids in my class say you got a metal plate in your skull and you can stick a magnet on your head and it just stays there.”
“No plate, so a magnet wouldn’t stick.”
“Steven, Valerie?” Mrs. Sullivan stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding the newel post and looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes. Their gazes met. “Mr. Lynch, I didn’t know you were here.”
He retrieved his hat and placed it over his heart as he stood. “I’m really sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sullivan. I had great respect for your husband.”
“Thank you, Logan.”
“He’ll be missed.” He descended the stairs, and she extended her hand. The circles under her eyes and the red, puffy eyelids made her look years older. He kissed her offered cheek and drew back.
“Thank you for coming. Have you had your supper? We have too much food.” She took hold of his hand and led him toward the dining room, but paused in the hallway to stare at him. “My husband was having some trouble at work this week. He told me that he was worried about something. Running helped him relax.” She spoke quickly as if she’d been bursting to share the information with the right person.
“What?”
“Anomalies. Missing samples. That’s what he said.”
Someone stepped up behind them.
Lou Reber, the plant’s head of security, moved from the living room into the hallway, and Mrs. Sullivan’s eyes widened. She spoke to Logan without looking at him.
“Go and fix a plate for yourself, Logan, and please take something back for your father.”
Reber came up to her and took her hand, expressing his condolences. Logan hesitated a moment and then stepped into the dining room where callers mingled around the overladen table in quiet conversation.
In the hallway, Reber moved toward the front door. Mrs. Sullivan glanced to Logan and then approached.
“Would you ask the sheriff to come see me tomorrow?”
“I can call him right now.”
Mrs. Sullivan glanced about the house, filled up with friends and members of the community.
“Tomorrow is soon enough.” She left him, returning to the living area through the arched opening connecting the two rooms.
Logan filled his plate and sat on a folding chair beside Donavan Bacon, a cook at the Lunch Box who had no shutoff switch when it came to alcohol. Bacon didn’t drink regularly but when he did, usually on Wednesday after his bowling league, Logan was often called to bring him home because drinking made him want to fight. Donavan greeted Logan warmly. He was such a nice man when he was sober.
After emptying his plate, Logan headed to the kitchen to deposit his glass in the sink. From the doorway he spotted Lou Reber in the hallway, heading up the stairs. He thought he’d left.
Likely to speak to the children who were sitting on the stairs, as he had done. But when Logan returned to the hall it was to see the children were not there and Lou was descending the empty staircase from the second floor.
Logan scowled, wondering why the man had gone upstairs when there was a powder room off the hallway.
“Hey, Logan. Rough day today, huh?”
“Sure was. Why were you upstairs?”
“Bathroom,” said Reber.
“There’s one down here.”
“Occupied.” He looped a thumb over his belt. “Did you know Sullivan?”
“Coached at the school with him.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Reber. “I knew that. Dangerous to run on our roads. No shoulder.”
“He was on the cutoff. Wide dirt road. Shouldn’t be any vehicles back there.”
“Hunters use it.” He glanced toward the door. “I’ve got to go. You need a lift home?”
“Got my truck.”
“That’s right. You drive now. See you around, Logan.”
Logan watched him go, unsure what bothered him about Reber’s going upstairs.
He let himself out a few minutes later, but not before one of the ladies made him a plate for his father. In his truck, the aroma of food tempting his taste buds, Logan headed back up River Street to the steep incline on Cemetery Road. Ed would be buried there, probably next Saturday.
On Main he turned toward home, knowing that just beyond lay the funeral home and Ed Sullivan’s body. The autopsy was scheduled for the morning down in Albany, New York. The county had a contract with the medical center to perform such duties, and Dr. Brock Koutier, their coroner, had ordered it be done. As a result, the funeral would not be until next Saturday, giving the county enough time to transport Sullivan to and from Albany and then back up here to Owen’s for final preparation.
He slowed before the three large maple trees that stood as sentries between the road and Paige’s mother’s home. He pulled into the driveway between his dad’s and her mom’s properties, parked and then headed toward the kitchen door, but paused to breathe the cold air and glance toward his neighbor’s place.
The lights of the Morrises’ upstairs were all on and the porch light was off. Paige was home safe. He knew her bedroom sat on the west side of the house up front nearest the road, her daughter on the east and Mrs. Morris in the back near the stairs. There was a wide, flat roof that stretched over the ground-floor porch from the back of the house to the front, under Lori’s window. On the porch below, the rocking chairs creaked and rocked in the November wind. Paige’s bedroom had no roof beneath either of its two windows. He knew because there was a time when he’d thought about seeing if he could climb that big old maple tree out in front to her window and throw rocks at the glass. He’d decided against it. He wondered what would have happened if he had tried?
Movement caught his eye and he stepped off the road into the driveway. Something big moved down along the side of the house and into the shed that led to the backyard.
Was that Mrs. Morris? The figure had been too large to be Paige.
Propelled by an uncomfortable feeling, Logan walked to the shed, but found no one there or in the backyard. He knew their kitchen door was locked and the light off. The front door was also locked. He circled the entire house twice more and saw no one.
Had he seen anyone in the first place?
Chapter Six (#u553d1668-fb5e-5481-855f-ae2f636d1ced)
Logan stood in the Morrises’ yard, staring at the house. Then he retrieved his phone and dialed Paige. She answered on the first ring.
“You home?” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
“Everything all right?”
“Logan, what’s wrong?”
“Thought I saw someone in your yard. I’m out here but there’s no one now.”
“Just a minute.”
He heard Paige moving, rustling and a squeaking like a kitten looking for its mother. Several minutes later the light in the living room flicked on. He watched Paige, dressed in a lavender polar fleece robe, move from the living to dining room and then through the kitchen. Finally, she returned to the living room and opened the door, the phone disconnecting.
She called to him from the front porch, half in and half out of the screen door. “I just checked on Lori and on Mom. They’re both in their rooms. Everything is fine down here.”
“Call if you need me,” he said.
“Thank you, Logan.” She closed the door and he heard her throw the bolt.
He walked across the yard to his truck and retrieved the plate of food that Mrs. Sullivan had sent home with him, and carried it to his dad’s place. The sweet odor of decaying leaves filled the air, but there was no rustle as the leaves had been pulverized by his dad’s mower since he had left for work this morning.
The only light on in his house was the one in the hall and the bluish glow from the television as his father watched a talent show on cable.
“Hey, son. You’re home late.” His father didn’t know. All this had happened, and his dad had likely been mulching leaves.
Logan offered the plate.
“What’s this?” The way his dad blinked his eyes told Logan that he’d dozed off in his recliner.
Logan told him everything as his father held the plate before him, still covered in plastic wrap.
He sat with his father a while, but, restless, Logan drew the blanket off the back of the couch to go outside and look at the moon.
Who was he kidding? He was going to stare at Paige’s window and watch to see if anything moved on the Morris property.
“Going out to listen to that hoot owl?” asked his dad, referring to the great horned owl that lived up the hillside.
Logan couldn’t tell the difference between an owl and the wind chime on the Morrises’ porch.
“Yeah. Getting some air,” he said and headed out to sit on the porch steps.
The brown bats no longer darted across the sky. They lived up in the barn on the hill. Too cold, he decided, and the insects were all gone. They’d be hibernating now. He missed them flitting and darting overhead. The November air felt bracing as he sat on the porch, facing Paige’s window, which had gone dark.
He wondered why Paige and his brother didn’t make a go of it. He knew they had attended his brother’s senior prom. Paige had been excited to attend. Sophomores were only permitted to the school’s biggest event if they were invited by a senior. He remembered her dress and her mother taking photos of the couple right there on the steps of her home while he sat here watching. She wore a gown of mint green and her hair up with a few tendrils of curls floating about her shoulders. The color of the dress, her red hair up and festooned with fresh flowers and her translucent skin all combined so that, to Logan, she looked like the queen of the fairies.
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Jenna Kernan
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 23.04.2024
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О книге: It′s a race against time to uncover the truth. Working as a sleepy town’s sheriff, Logan Lynch’s life turns upside down when a man is found dead. When biochemist Dr Paige Morris turns up, claiming her boss’s death isn’t what it seems, she becomes the victim of sabotage. Can Logan help… before it’s too late.