THIRTEEN
Jeffrey had never liked sleeping in strange places. In his wilder days, he'd been loath to spend the entire evening with a woman, and not just because her husband might come home. He liked being able to get up in the middle of the night and know where the bathroom was. He liked knowing where the light switches were and which cabinet the glasses were in.
What he didn't like was waking up in Jake Valentine's house.
He had easily found the sheriff in the parking lot of Hank's bar next door, though there wasn't much the sheriff could do but watch the building burn. Jeffrey had found him standing beside one of his deputies, thumbs hooked into the waist of his blue jeans as he watched the last of the fire burn itself out. Valentine was still wearing his ankle holster and smelled a lot like the beer he'd been drinking with Jeffrey the night before. When Jeffrey had asked the man to follow him back to the motel, he hadn't asked questions.
'That's Boyd Gibson,' Valentine had said when Jeffrey showed him the dead man lying on the floor of his and Sara's motel room. 'I went to school with him.'
Not, 'How the hell did this dead guy get in your room?' or 'Who stabbed him in the back?' Just, 'Damn, his daddy's gonna be heartbroken.'
Jeffrey supposed he should be thankful that Valentine had offered them his spare room for the night. Grant County was a long drive and Sara had turned quiet again – too quiet for Jeffrey's liking. When he asked if she minded sleeping at the sheriff's house, she'd merely nodded, silently tucking her clothes into the suitcase she'd brought from home. She hadn't spoken during the quick drive to Valentine's house, either. When Jeffrey climbed into bed beside her, she'd put her head on his chest, wrapped her arm around him.
Jeffrey found himself listening to see if Sara was crying again. Sara very seldom cried, and when she did, he felt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vise. She wasn't crying, though. She was thinking. That much was obvious when she leaned up on her elbow, her tone telling him she'd made up her mind when she said, 'I'm not leaving this place until you do.'
He'd opened his mouth to argue the point, but she put her fingers to his lips, shushed him. 'When I married you' – she allowed a smile – 'at least this last time, I knew you were the kind of man who runs toward trouble instead of running away from it.' She paused, her tone soft but firm. 'I can't stop you from trying to save the world, but I won't abandon you while you're doing it.'
He had felt like an absolute shit then – not because he still wanted her to go home, not because he'd put her in the line of fire, but because he had been lying to her face from the minute that dead body had been thrown into their room.
Jeffrey had seen the tattooed man on the floor, saw the dark, black blood flowering out from the pearl-handled folding knife in his back, and said nothing.
'I'm not leaving until you do,' Sara had told him.
There wasn't anything else to say after that. He closed his eyes but sleep wouldn't come so he found himself listening to Sara's breathing. She was obviously restless, and after a while she turned on her side, then laid flat on her stomach. At least a full hour passed before her breathing finally slowed and she fell asleep.
Jeffrey got out of bed and dressed, even though there was nowhere for him to go. He desperately wanted to take a shower, but there was only one bathroom in the house and he didn't want to wake anyone up. He didn't want to prowl around Valentine's home, either, so he pulled up a metal folding chair and sat by the window looking out at the street. He adjusted the blinds just enough to see outside. Like the guest bedroom, the living room was on the street side of the house, and Jeffrey imagined the sheriff had been looking at much the same view as Jeffrey was now when he noticed the fire coming from the football field. It would've taken him less than five minutes to jog over to see what happened. At least that part of the sheriff's story checked out.
Despite the modest house, Valentine, or maybe his wife, seemed to be quite the gardener. Tiny landscaping lights lining the front yard illuminated their handiwork: fall plantings and grass that was mowed neat like a green blanket. There were so many things a man did to make a house a home, whether it was replacing a rotted soffit or painting the walls or hanging some ugly floral wallpaper in the bathroom that your wife had picked out. Not that Sara was partial to large floral patterns, but judging from the Laura- Ashley-gone-wild scheme throughout the house, Jeffrey was guessing Mrs. Valentine was.
He tried to think of all the changes he and Sara had made to their home over the years. The only ones that came to mind were more recent. Before the woman from the adoption agency came for a home visit, Sara had convinced Jeffrey to get on his hands and knees with her and look at the house the way a baby might. He'd played along, laughing until they'd found a nail sticking out from the kitchen cabinet under the sink. By the time he spotted a finger-sized gap between an electrical socket and the Sheetrock in the laundry room, he was ready to tear down the house and start again from scratch.
Jeffrey found himself wondering what Al Pfeiffer's house had looked like before the firebomb had been thrown through his window. What had Pfeiffer been thinking as he watched his home burn down? Or had the old sheriff been too consumed by his own injuries to take much notice of what he was losing? Jesus, had he heard them nailing his front door shut and known what was about to happen?
Jeffrey glanced back at Sara lying in bed. What had he gotten her into? Or, worse yet, what had Lena gotten them into? Just yesterday, he had been looking for ways to tie together all the threads. Tonight, the solution had come flying through his window with a big bow tied around it. The pearl- handled knife jutting out of Boyd Gibson's back belonged to Lena.
Jeffrey sighed, slouching back in the uncomfortable metal chair. He stared out the window again, watching the empty street. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew, a hint of light was slanting in through the window. A car pulled up outside. The driver got out and stumbled toward the house across the street, dropping his keys twice before he managed to open the front door. Less than a minute later, he came back out of the house and walked in a drunken diagonal back toward his car. Jeffrey was wondering if he should intervene when the man fell into the backseat. The front door of the house opened a crack, a woman poked out her head to check on the man, then shut the door again.
Sara stirred and Jeffrey turned around to see if she was awake. She was still on her stomach, arms and legs spread as she took advantage of his empty side of the bed. There was enough light now so that he could see her face. He hated arguing with her, couldn't function when they were mad at each other. Watching her in the morgue, the careful, respectful way she handled that poor woman's body, had reminded him of all the reasons he needed Sara in his life. She was the one person who could cut through all the bullshit and show him what was important. She was his conscience.
When Jeffrey had initially met Cathy and Eddie Linton, his first thought was that they just didn't make marriages like that anymore. Now, being with Sara, he understood that they did.
The floor creaked outside the bedroom door as someone walked past. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, separating the two bedrooms, and Jeffrey listened as the footsteps softened, shuffling across the tile. The door clicked closed.
Seeing the house last night, Jeffrey had found himself thinking there was no way Jake Valentine was on the take – not unless he had a secret mansion somewhere out in the woods. The place was definitely a fixer-upper. Fake pine paneling lined the living room and the kitchen cupboards were original to the house – not a good thing when you lived in a 1960s ranch. If Jake was taking money to look the other way, the sheriff sure wasn't spending it on himself.
The shower turned on. Jeffrey wondered if it was the sheriff or his wife. Myra Valentine wasn't exactly friendly with them last night, but not many wives would be glad to welcome two strangers into their home at one in the morning. She was a short woman, maybe five feet tall in her socks, the top of her head not quite reaching Jake's chest. What she lacked in height she made up for in girth. Jeffrey
