Get a Clue

At her nod, he slid open the door, and together they stepped out.

'I'm starving,' she admitted. 'I need something before digging.'

He followed her down the maze of hallways to the kitchen. At least she was no longer getting lost. She figured if she didn't get lost, she couldn't find another dead body.

In the kitchen, she beelined directly to the refrigerator.

Cooper grabbed a glass from a cupboard and moved to thl sink for water. Hands wet, he looked around for a towel, then finally opened the door beneath the sink. 'You need to think, too,' he said. 'Before you get dehydrated-'

When he broke off so suddenly, Breanne turned from the drawers to look at him.

He was hunkered before the open cupboard, mouth tight, body tense. Absolutely still.

'Cooper?'

Turning only his head, he looked at her from eyes that were no longer lit with sexual prowess or good humor, but flat with concentration.

A cop's eyes.

'What is it?' she whispered.

'Beneath the bathroom sink in the foyer there's a brand new pair of rubber gloves, still in their packaging. I saw them yesterday when Lariana was in there cleaning. Can you go get them for me?'

She was so startled by the odd request, not to mention his cool, calm but utterly badass expression, she simply nodded and turned on her heels to do just that.

She encountered no one in the hallway on the way there or back, and when she re-entered the kitchen, Cooper was no longer by the sink.

'Here,' he said from behind her, startling her into a gasp as she whirled to face him, a hand to her chest as he took the gloves from her. 'What-'

His finger went to her lips. Then he pulled a chair in from of the double doors, so no one could come in on them unannounced.

She could only stare into his extremely tense face. ”What’s going on?'

He looked at her for a long moment, and she knew she wasn’t going to like it. 'Cooper, you're scaring me.'

'Not as much as this is going to.' He put an arm around her shoulders and walked her toward the kitchen sink. 'Take a deep breath, but don't scream. Promise me you're not going to scream.'

'Okay.' She gulped in a deep breath, then crouched down with him and looked beneath the sink. At the towel shoved behind the pile, covered in something dried a brownish color. They both stared at it for the longest moment of Breanne's life.

'Fuck,' Cooper finally said on a sigh.

Yeah. Her thoughts exactly.

Chapter 24

I suppose the word 'calm' would lose its meaning if it wasn't sandwiched between moments of terror.

– Breanne Mooreland's Journal Entry

'Gee, that's funny,' Breanne heard herself say. 'It almost looks like a bloody towel.'

Cooper didn't say a word, just began to put on the rubber gloves.

'Shelly probably cut herself chopping vegetables,' she said through the roaring in her ears. 'You should see how fast she chops. And then she probably shoved the towel down there and forgot about it. Probably.'

Cooper flicked on his flashlight and stuck his head in the cupboard, carefully not touching the towel but trying to see around it.

'Or it could be ketchup,' she said inanely, her mouth running away with her thoughts. 'Maybe she spilled ketchup. That could have happened, right?'

Cooper pulled his head back out of the cupboard and looked at her. 'Are you breathing? Because you don't look like you're breathing.'

'Oh.' She gulped in a few breaths and tried a smile, which quickly wobbled. That's not ketchup, is it?'

Cooper slowly shook his head.

'Something really bad happened here.'

'Something,' he agreed. He turned off the flashlight and shut the cupboard door. Then he removed the rubber gloves and reached for her hand.

'What are we going to do?' she whispered.

'Shovel. Shovel like hell.'

***

They 'd found the towel.

That was bad. They shouldn't have found the towel.

What would happen now?

If only it would stop snowing. If only they could all get out, get away from here.

If only, if only, if only…

***

For Breanne, getting outside felt like a culture shock, not to mention an actual physical punch to the chest. Her poor lungs weren't adapted to the altitude, much less this biting cold.

At least inside the house, though sometimes equally icy, she'd been in somewhat of a cocoon. There she could see the snow, but had been distanced from it by the huge, frosted windows, buffered by the warm fires.

But standing on the front porch, the ramifications of their situation, with the storm still dumping more precipitation every passing minute, hit her hard. Twelve feet of snow had fallen, setting records, shutting down airports and businesses, closing roads, breaking electrical and phone lines.

The Sierra mountain range, spanning some two million acres of national forests and wilderness land, had come to a screeching halt.

Terrific time to almost honeymoon.

Way out on the outskirts of civilization as they were, this unbelievable storm was apparently accepted as a part of the life here. People were prepared for it with extra food, water, and gasoline for their generators and snowblowers. They'd become an independent entity.

Everything had taken on a whole new meaning these past few days, and it wouldn't have been a problem but for two things. One, the occupants of