For the first time since stepping into the hospital room, Rivers believed James Cahill was actually telling the truth.
And if he were actually being released, then Rivers was going to make certain he was followed.
Maybe then this case would break wide open.
CHAPTER 9
Sometimes you just get lucky.
Sometimes a story falls in your lap.
Sometimes it just screams to be written.
Today was Charity Spritz’s lucky day.
And about damned time.
She was thirty-three, for God’s sake, and not getting any younger. A glance in her rearview mirror confirmed it. Frowning, driving through this cold-as-an-iceberg town, she thought of her life.
Unmarried.
No children.
A dead-end job.
Until today.
Because she’d gotten lucky.
She actually allowed herself a smile.
All the hard work and sacrifice had been worth it. Finally. She even noticed the sparkling Christmas lights strung across the streets, the painted snowmen and women on storefront windows, the Salvation Army volunteer, all bundled up and ringing his bell as shoppers in heavy coats, gloves, boots, and caps hurried past.
Maybe Riggs Crossing wasn’t so bad after all, because it was going to give her the biggest story of her life. “Thank you, James Cahill,” she said to the empty car as the town in its fake Christmas glory became a sparkle of lights in her rearview. She had to concentrate on the road ahead. Her fourteen-year-old Hyundai minivan slid a bit; it was not an ideal snow vehicle—well, not an ideal vehicle for her, period. But she’d bought it for a song from her older half-sister, whose kids had basically lived in it. The stains on the carpet and an ancient nest of forgotten french fries she’d recently discovered under the passenger seat only gave testament to the fact that this vehicle was not for her. Not for the long game. She was definitely more of a Cadillac or Mercedes or BMW girl. Someday. But for now, the paid-for van was like her mobile office, complete with computer, cameras, Wi-Fi, sleeping bag, and change of clothes—just in case she needed them.
Or in case she couldn’t make the rent.
She shuddered at the thought and remembered that today her luck had changed.
And a good thing. She was sick to her back teeth of being assigned to some stupid-ass local-interest story. Who gave a rat’s ass about the new agenda for the school board, or what new taxes were about to be levied, or who won the best pie contest at the local fair, or, God help us all, who was voted the sexiest bachelor in Riggs Crossing?
Save me!
She’d been pushed from one boring story to another, though once in a while she was actually on television, when statewide news developed near Riggs Crossing. There was a chance that she’d be able to parlay this story into something on camera, and she was ready. Unlike Seamus O’Day, the lead reporter on the missing-woman story. She let out a disgusted snort. O’Day should be put out to pasture. Over sixty and once a sports reporter for the Seattle Times, he’d been shit-canned from that position. Instead of working the Megan Travers story, O’Day would rather be watching a ball game, any effin’ game, while sitting on a bar stool at the local watering hole, the Brass Bullet.
Not Charity.
Uh-uh.
She was on this one.
She smelled a mystery and a scandal, the kind of story that could garner statewide, if not national, attention and just could land her, if not on the television news cycle, then on her own videotaped version. This was just the kind of racy article that could catapult her out of this podunk Nothingsville town with its tiny rag of a newspaper and into something much, much bigger.
If not the New York Times or Washington Post or Chicago Tribune, then one of the national tabloids, anything to get out of Riggs Crossing, Washington!
This story could be her ticket out.
She’d make sure of it.
She drove past snowy fields with sagging fences and stands of fir trees until she spied the inn, an old hotel that James Cahill had brought back to life. Oh, he’d had a vision, she thought, pulling into the gravel-strewn lot and waiting for an elderly couple to back s-l-ow-l-y out of a parking spot.
But then he was a Cahill.
Growing up with the proverbial silver spoon stuck firmly between his teeth.
The rich get richer.
“Ain’t it the truth?” she said to herself as she zipped into the parking slot. She was already working on the story behind her editor’s and sports nut O’Day’s backs, and she’d done some digging on the Cahill family in San Francisco. If she were lucky—and she was today—she’d be able to wangle herself a ticket to the City by the Bay and get some backstory and dirt on the Cahill family.
Wouldn’t that just be the best?
Smiling, she cut the engine, checked her look in the mirror, and added a touch of lip gloss to her naturally pink lips. Dark bangs poked out of her red ski hat; her eyes, smoky gray, were bright, and her skin was a little rosier than usual, but she looked good, and she knew it. She woke up looking good. Lucky that way.
There was that word again.
She locked the minivan before heading inside the quaint building with its stained cedar siding and thick plank-covered porch. God, enough with the Western motif! She half-expected to be greeted by a saloon girl straight off a Hollywood set, but inside, the hotel looked like it belonged in the twenty-first century.
She’d tried to talk to James Cahill earlier, but she’d been thwarted by a nurse built like a fullback who had blocked her entrance to Cahill’s room. Since Charity had learned that Cahill was finally awake, but amnesic—didn’t that beat all?—it might be better to gather information from other sources, have her facts down, before she went face-to-face with him. She had a gut feeling he might not want to be all that forthcoming.
She eyed the surroundings, including a long front desk manned by a woman in her fifties who was helping a
