“You managed to piss him off already?”
“Scared to,” Nick said with a short laugh. He stepped back from the window, feeling his fatigue for the first time since he’d looked at the clock at four-thirty that morning. “Feehan and Cutshaw rented a house for the ski season up by Killington. Griffin’s in town—right up the road.”
“You’ve been doing your homework.”
Nick figured there was no point beating around the bush. “You and your brothers are in close touch. Maybe think about including Rose, too. Even with you three, she still seems isolated.”
“Her choice,” Sean said.
“Doesn’t matter. Sean, a fire killed this guy today.”
“Lowell Whittaker could have turned a kerosene lamp into one of his homemade bombs.”
“And investigators missed it?”
“They might not have thought twice about seeing an old lamp in a shed.”
“Where did Whittaker learn how to make bombs?”
Sean didn’t respond. Lowell Whittaker had placed a crude pipe bomb in Hannah Shay’s heap of a car. She narrowly escaped when it exploded, then warned Bowie O’Rourke, who was with Vivian Whittaker at the farmhouse, that they were next.
There was also the bomb Whittaker had used to kill Melanie Kendall, one of his hired assassins in November, as well as the unexplained fire at Myrtle Smith’s house in Washington.
Nick sank onto the edge of his four-poster bed, the charm of the room bypassing him. “If Jasper was right, his firebug is still out there. What if he decided to get paid for his work and hooked up with Whittaker?”
“So that’s why you’re in Vermont,” Sean said quietly. “I should have known. It doesn’t mean this match-happy idiot killed Derek Cutshaw.”
“I show up and someone dies in a fire? That’s too much of a coincidence for me.”
Nick had observed his friend under stress countless times on the fire line. Sean was levelheaded, committed, careful—not a reckless, glory-seeking yahoo. That didn’t work in the wildland fires they fought or the business they were in. It got people killed. Nick was more likely to leap without looking, but he’d learned to rely on his training and experience and to calculate and mitigate his risk-taking nature.
Eliminating risks altogether wasn’t possible.
If he thought his presence wasn’t a coincidence, the police would be thinking the same thing. Nick had answered their questions and provided them with contact information. They could find him if they wanted to talk to him again.
“Yeah,” Sean said finally. “For me, too. I’ll talk to Hannah.”
He disconnected, and Nick tossed his phone onto the side table.
The radiator again clanked loudly as heat surged into the room.
It’d be a long night. He checked the room service menu. He could order hot cocoa for two and go find Rose’s room.
He raked a hand through his hair.
“No, you moron,” he muttered. “Are you out of your damn mind?”
No hot cocoa for two, and definitely no finding Rose’s room.
Instead Nick stripped to his shorts, dropped onto the sunflower carpet and burned off his energy and frustration with a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.
Six
R yan “Grit” Taylor had dreamed about tupelo honey, which he didn’t think was crazy or anything, since that was his family’s business. Still, it had been a long time since he’d dreamed about honey, or growing up on the Florida Panhandle. He sat up in his bed in Myrtle Smith’s first-floor guest room at her home just off Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.
Less than a year ago, he’d been a Navy SEAL searching for enemy weapon caches in Afghanistan. Now he was waking up under a fluffy peach-colored blanket and watching sunlight stream through lacy shear panels on a tall window overlooking a dormant flower garden.
Myrtle’s house was more traditional and girly than Grit would have expected. She’d probably threaten something untoward if she knew what he was thinking, but he hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. She was still up in Vermont, bitching about the cold and snow and baking cookies and scones and such. The front of her house— especially her office—had burned in a suspicious fire in November, but the back was in good shape.
Grit went through his routine to put on his prosthesis, a new one, his left leg having adapted and adjusted to the mechanics of prosthetic use. The procedure was automatic now, at least most days. He seldom experienced phantom pain anymore, either. The nerves in his residual limb were learning a new way to communicate to his brain.
Not that he’d forgotten he’d had his left leg amputated below the knee in a remote Afghan mountain pass, after he’d been shot in an ambush.
A Special Forces master sergeant who’d been with him that day was camped out down the hall in Myrtle’s second guest room. Elijah Cameron had taken a near-fatal gunshot wound to the femoral artery and nearly bled out. Only his own quick action to tie a belt around his thigh, creating a tourniquet, had saved him. He was now fully recovered.
Grit didn’t know why things had worked out the way they did.
He put on his service uniform and headed to the kitchen. Elijah was at the little round table with his size- twelve feet up on the rattan-seated chair across from him as he cradled a flowered mug of coffee. He nodded out the French doors at the patio. “Do you think we ought to fill Myrtle’s bird feeders?”
“They’re the wrong kind. She’s only feeding squirrels with those things.” Grit got down another flowered mug and poured himself coffee. The kitchen had dark cherry cabinets and a collection of delicate china teacups and saucers—more flowers—displayed on a shelf. “A badass Washington reporter like Myrtle and look at this place. Reminds me of my grandmother’s house by the Apalachicola River. Myrtle even knows what tupelo honey is.”
“So do I,” Elijah said.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. You told me after we were shot up. In the helicopter. White tupelo trees. Bees. Only honey that doesn’t crystallize.”
“No kidding. I said all that? You remember?”
Elijah shrugged. “It was something else to think about.”
Besides dying. Besides the dead.
Grit sat with his coffee. “Moose’s widow sent me a picture of the baby. You get one?”
“Yeah.” Elijah kept staring at the half-dozen empty feeders. “Cute kid. Ryan Cameron Ferrerra. I didn’t even know Moose that well. I couldn’t keep him alive. I get why his wife named a baby after you. Not after me.”
“We were with him when the Grim Reaper came for him.”
Elijah nodded. “We were.”
“I remember the two of you talking about why he was called Moose but grew up in Arizona and had never seen a moose, and you this Vermont mountain man.”
Grit glanced out the window, no sign of spring yet out in Myrtle’s backyard. He half expected Michael “Moose” Ferrerra to be on the patio. Moose had liked to joke about wanting to go back to Southern California and grill hot dogs on his patio. Instead he’d died in Afghanistan, doing the job he’d trained to do, made the commitment to do.
Half to himself, Grit said, “Doesn’t seem like almost a year.”
“Nope,” Elijah said, “seems like ten years.”
Grit almost laughed as he turned back to his friend. “What’re you up to today?”
“Painting Myrtle’s woodwork.”
“She won’t say so, but she’s afraid to come back here. She almost got her butt burned up in her own damn house. If I hadn’t come along and saved her, who knows.”
“That’s not her version,” Elijah said.
“She’s a reporter. You trust her version?”
