“I don’t know. I just know I found a dead woman today.”
“Marissa…Grit, she’d fall for you if she got to know you.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“I’m serious,” Charlie said.
“Hell, so am I. Hang in there, kid. You can’t have everything. You have to live in the world as it is, not as you want it to be.”
“Are we talking about your leg?”
Grit gripped the phone. “No, we’re talking about you.”
“Oh.” Charlie seemed oblivious. “Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
He was gone. Grit sighed. In some ways, Charlie Neal was thirty. In other ways, he was twelve. Rarely was he a regular sixteen-year-old. He had a good family, tight-knit and strong, but they were in the limelight, which was difficult enough without adding a genius IQ and four older sisters to the mix. Marissa was attractive and intelligent, but she wasn’t getting involved with a disabled SEAL from the Florida Panhandle.
Grit looked over at Beth Harper, still under her towels. “Getting back in the pool?”
“Not right away.”
“Have you talked to Special Agent Harper?”
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me what she said?”
Beth pulled the towels off her upper body and her long, strong legs. “She said you’re trouble.”
“Ah.”
“I came out here to relax. Everything was supposed to be over. Then you show up.”
“That woman was dead before my flight was even in the air.”
“But we found her, not the neighbors, not her family, not her friends.”
“Just as well, don’t you think? Someone had to find her, and we’ve both seen dead bodies before. You’re just out of your element and you’re here to swim and buy shoes.”
“I’m not buying shoes.” She sighed at the slowly darkening sky. “I’m taking my emotions out on you. I’m scared, Grit. If one of these killers slipped through the cracks or some other killer’s attracted to Black Falls because of Lowell Whittaker and what he’s done…”
“Don’t do that to yourself. We have to deal with the facts as they are.”
She shivered as a breeze hit her wet swimsuit. Grit figured she thought of him as a brother. He wasn’t sure he liked that. It was one thing to think of her as a sister, another for her not to even consider that he might be checking her out.
It was Thorne, Grit decided. Beth was preoccupied with their romantic issues, on top of the murder scene they’d walked into and the goings-on in her hometown.
“Have you always been a one-thing-at-a-time, let’s-not-jump-ahead type?” she asked. “Or did your injury force you to take things a day at a time?”
“I move forward. I don’t dwell on what I can’t control. It gets me nowhere. You’re the same, or you couldn’t do the work you do.”
“I’m resentful because I don’t want any more violence,” Beth said.
“Trooper Thorne resentful, too?”
“I wouldn’t know. Are you trying to counsel me, Grit? Because you don’t have to. I’m fine. If Scott wants to check in with me, he knows how to reach me.”
“Think you’ll quit as a paramedic?”
“And do what?”
“Help Myrtle Smith open a dinner service at the cafe.”
Beth’s laughter seemed to catch her by surprise as much as it did Grit. “We’d kill each other within two weeks,” she said. “Myrtle’s not staying in Black Falls no matter what she’s telling herself right now, and I’m not cut out to run a restaurant. I like the mix of what I do at the cafe and as a medic. I often know the people I respond to, but I’m not burned out.”
“If you’d been in Black Falls, you could have ended up checking out Derek Cutshaw.”
“Possibly. Anyway, this isn’t about me.” She directed her attention to Sean at the table next to her. “Do you trust Nick Martini with your sister?”
“Nick’s solid.”
“Rose has—”
“Rose is solid, too,” Sean said. “Whatever they have to work out between them is none of my business.”
“Ha,” Beth said.
“Do you think Martini told you the whole story about why he picked now to go to Vermont?” Grit asked, not for the first time.
Sean leaned back, his gaze on the clear, heated water of his pool. “There was no precipitating incident that I knew of, not a recent one, anyway.”
“It’s Jasper Vanderhorn, isn’t it?”
“It’s a lot of things.” Sean got up abruptly. “Let’s have dinner and give what happened today a chance to simmer.”
Hannah paced at the side of the pool. She was reserved but visibly shaken by recent events. Beth was surly, but their emotions felt the same. Grit wished he hadn’t come to see them. He had to be on Coronado tomorrow morning. He could leave now, but Sean had offered him the small guest room for the night. He probably wanted Grit and Beth both to clear out so that he and Hannah could have time together.
But they would, Grit thought. They’d have a lifetime together.
“I’m not hungry,” Beth said. “I’m going for another swim.”
Sean grimaced but made no comment. Grit saw a little of Elijah in him. From what he’d observed over the past few months, Rose was the same—which boded well for her. The Camerons were pure granite.
But they’d bleed if cut, Grit thought. Everyone did.
Beth swam until she thought she’d drown if she took another stroke, then bundled up in a dry towel and headed for a long, hot shower in her private bathroom.
She wanted to be back in Vermont, cleaning the cafe with her friends on a dark, cold winter night. She’d checked the weather. It was snowing in Black Falls.
“Damn you, Scott,” she muttered, slipping into a soft, fluffy robe and pacing in her spacious room. “Why don’t you call?”
She finally dialed Jo’s cell phone. “There’s no emergency,” Beth said as her sister picked up.
“Good. I can’t talk right now,” Jo said. “Give me an hour, okay?”
Beth disconnected, feeling agitated, ready to put on a dry swimsuit and go back outside for more laps. The temperature was dropping, but she didn’t care. She just couldn’t stand being still, obsessing, waiting.
She hit Scott’s number on her cell phone but didn’t let it dial. Where would he be now? What would he be doing? What did he know about Portia Martinez?
She could call her father, the Black Falls retired police chief. The Harpers were solid, predictable types. Wasn’t that what Scott wanted?
It was what he was. Was it what
Finally she let Scott’s number ring. She realized her hand was shaking and her eyes were filling up with tears. There’d go her reputation with Grit Taylor as a rock-ribbed New Englander, an experienced paramedic who’d seen it all.
The call went right to Scott’s voice mail.
Beth didn’t leave a message.
Eighteen
R ose ducked into the woods on the edge of the meadow behind the lodge, moving well on her snowshoes, avoiding the cross-country ski trails. Ranger, accustomed to searching out ahead of her, was up by a large boulder. He, too, steered clear of the groomed tracks.
Nick was a few yards behind her. He was smooth and strong on snowshoes he’d borrowed from A.J. Several
