A SEAL's Vow (SEALs of Chance Creek Book 2) (28 page)

Clay, who’d been so warrior-like moments ago he’d made her heart race, faltered mid-stride.

“Yeah, I recognize it,” he said. He took the shirt from the chief and held it out to read the logo. A high school wrestling team. “It’s my dad’s.”

‡

C
lay couldn’t believe
what the fire chief had pulled from the ruins of the blaze. Nor could he believe that Dell was nowhere to be found when they went looking for him. Despite the fact he’d been headed for Pittance Creek the last time Clay saw him, his truck was now gone.

Had he set the fire because of their fight?

Jericho took over as Nora’s bodyguard and rounded up the women in the bunkhouse.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Boone told Clay when they were gone. “This is your dad you’re talking about.”

But what was Clay supposed to think?

“Your father’s never broken the law before,” Boone said. “Besides, why would he set one of the houses on fire? He wanted to live here, right?”

“Only until Mom took him back.” But Boone was right. His mother would never take Dell back if she thought he’d committed a crime. And his father was no criminal.

Although he’d been under a hell of a strain lately.

Over and over again, Clay replayed their last conversation in his mind. He saw himself unzip the tent and tell his father to get out.

Had that been the final straw?

“Are you sure that’s his shirt?” Boone asked.

“It’s definitely his shirt,” Clay confirmed.

“Why would he leave it at the fire as evidence? It doesn’t make sense.”

“He meant for it to burn, obviously. He didn’t think there would be evidence.”

“Well, we’ve set a watch. There’s not much more we can do until the sun comes up. Time for everyone to get a little shut-eye. We’ll reconvene at first light and figure this out.”

There was no way Clay could go to sleep, though. Not until he knew if his father was involved.

He wanted to go to Nora, but what would she say now that it seemed clear his father had set the fire instead of her stalker? Could there really be two men creating mayhem at Westfield?

It seemed so.

Instead of returning to the bunkhouse, he sat on a log near the fire someone had kindled and waited for dawn’s gray light to replace the inky darkness of the night. Once they’d found out for sure who’d done it, he’d have to start all over again to build the second house. Just when he thought he’d been getting ahead. Whoever had started the fire had hit him where it hurt.

Which made him doubly suspicious that it could be Dell.

It was nearly dawn when an engine in the distance roused Clay from a half-slumber. He shook himself awake, and when Dell’s truck pulled up, he got to his feet and went to meet his father.

“Where were you?”

Deep lines grooved Dell’s face, and he stooped a little as he got out of the truck and closed the door. Clay didn’t care if he was tired. He wanted answers.

“I said, where were you?”

Dell frowned. He must have caught a whiff of the charred building because he swung his head around to survey the building site. “What happened?”

“You tell me, old man. Why did you set that fire?”

“I didn’t set any fire.” When Dell tried to push past him, Clay stepped into his path.

“Tell the truth! Now!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dell tried to elbow him aside again.

Clay stood firm. “Are you sure? Because someone set that fire. Took out the house I started. I want to know who did it.”

Dell finally seemed to register the severity of the accusation. He looked at the housing site again, took in Boone’s house and then the burnt out skeleton nearby. “Shit.”

“Yeah, shit. So the question of the hour is, where were you when the fire started?”

For a long, horrible moment, Clay thought Dell would refuse to answer. When he finally did, his head hung low and he couldn’t look Clay in the eyes. “I went home. Tried to get your mother to take me back. She refused.”

Clay almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

It could easily be a cover story. If he woke Lizette in the middle of the night and begged her to take him back—or argued with her, more likely—she might get muddled on times when she was questioned later.

Or maybe she’d cover for him no matter what; they were husband and wife.

Dell had been furious that Clay hadn’t followed his lead on the house. He’d been even angrier when Clay had assigned him the job of building the tool shed. They’d fought last night. He certainly had a motive.

So did Nora’s stalker, though.

“I said, she refused,” Dell reiterated.

Clay sniffed the air. Dell didn’t smell of alcohol. He’d never been much of a drinker. More his style to drive for miles when he was angry, wasting fuel and polluting the air—

But that didn’t matter tonight.

“Dad, the fire chief found your shirt in the wreckage. How do you explain that?”

“My shirt?”

“Your Chance Creek High wrestling shirt. You know the one.”

Dell shook his head. “I looked for that shirt last night. I was going to wear it and remind your mother of the past—all the time we spent together. I couldn’t find it.”

All that T-shirt would remind his mother of is how stubborn Dell could get. “Are you saying someone took it?”

“I had it yesterday.”

Clay paced away from him. Was it coincidence that both Dell and Nora were missing items? Was his father being framed? Maybe some of the film footage could clear up some of these mysteries.

“Come on.”

“Where?”

“To the fire station. You’d better tell the chief everything you know.”

“I’m glad you
told them everything,” Avery said to Nora as the women worked to clean up after breakfast. They’d taken over the job from Kai, but kept things simple. Eggs, toast and cereal.

Nora nodded, scrubbing down the battered counter of the bunkhouse kitchen with a dishrag. She felt numb. The events of the past few weeks had taken on a surreal quality in her mind and she didn’t know what to think anymore. Had a student—a teenager—actually followed her to Chance Creek? Why not transfer his ire to the new teacher grading him? Had she been wrong all this time? Was it about something other than grades?

“Don’t expect sanity from a psychopath,” Cab Johnson, the local sheriff, had told her early this morning when he’d come to take her statement. She supposed he was right. Still, even though she’d taught seventeen and eighteen year olds who definitely had the bodies of full grown men, they rarely had much spending money, or cars, or the means to travel all this way and watch her for weeks. It was hard to believe any of it in the light of day.

Still, the tight coil of dread in her belly wouldn’t loosen, despite the fact that she and her friends had spent the night together in the bunkhouse with Jericho watching over them, and the knowledge that some of the other men were guarding the ranch outside. Nora wondered how the men could continue to function on so little sleep, but Savannah reminded her that as Navy SEALs they had survived far worse.

Jericho entered the kitchen. Walker came in behind him. “The sheriff and the fire chief are back for another look around. The place is crawling with law enforcement, and some of the men from local ranches are here, too. So the good news is you won’t have to spend the day cooped up in here. We’re going to reassign people today. Riley and Savannah, you’re going to help me out on the solar project. We’ve got to get it up and running pronto so we can have more lights in camp. Boone and Clay will deal with Cab and the fire chief. Walker, you take Avery and Nora to town. Stock up on everything while you’re there. With the extra men hanging around, we’ll be feeding a crowd tonight.”

“We get to go to town?” Avery echoed. “Thank God. This place is giving me the creeps right now.”

“But shouldn’t Nora have more people to guard her?” Riley asked. “No offense, Walker.”

Walker shrugged.

“We’ve got that in hand,” Jericho said. “You’ll have a unit following you to town to see if you pick up a tail.”

Nora didn’t like the sound of that.

“You’re using Nora as bait?” Savannah said.

“Sort of. This guy’s M.O. is to be opportunistic. He won’t go after Nora in plain sight of other people, but he obviously does his homework and takes chances when he gets them. We’re hoping to catch him trailing Nora before he ever gets the chance to attack her. Chance Creek’s sheriff’s department doesn’t have the manpower to watch the ranch on an ongoing basis, and we’ve got too few men to keep an eye on everything all the time so we’ll give this a try and see if we can draw him out. Walker will be in contact with the unit at all times. Don’t worry; we’ve got all our bases covered. This guy, whoever he is, is an amateur. He’s going to make a mistake.”

Nora realized she wouldn’t feel any safer remaining here. Not with the smell of smoke in the air from the charred remains of the second tiny house. She was off-kilter and anxious. “I’ll stick to Walker like glue,” she assured the others. “Any stalker won’t stand a chance.”

Jericho answered all of Riley’s and Savannah’s concerns. Avery helped Nora jot down a quick list of supplies they needed. There were a lot of them, and Nora was too jittery to think straight. She was sure she’d forgotten several things, but when Avery pointed out she’d written down onions twice, she decided it was time to go. They’d simply have to walk up and down all the aisles in the grocery store so they didn’t miss anything.

After several rounds of hugs and “be carefuls” from Riley and Savannah, Nora was relieved when they finally got in the truck and left Westfield behind. She settled in happily, feeling safe on the bench seat between Avery and Walker. Renata had insisted they take William, too, and he sat behind them in the extended cab, filming everything.

Avery kept turning around.

“I don’t see anyone. I thought a cop car was supposed to follow us.”

“The sheriff is following us. If you saw him, so would our mark. He’ll hang back,” Walker said.

“I don’t see anyone else, either. I don’t think your stalker is following us, Nora.”

“Just because you can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there.”

Nora’s relief at leaving the ranch disappeared. Walker was right. Whoever it was had managed to sneak into their house several times without them noticing. Into her tent, too.

He’d burned down a house.

It seemed improbable that the sun would rise and shine brightly today after the night they’d been through, but it had done so in a sky so blue it dazzled her. Gradually her anxiety dimmed again and anger took its place. First her stalker had stolen her self-confidence, then he’d stolen her career and now he was stealing Westfield and the life she’d tried to build here.

That stopped right now, she decided. She wasn’t going to hand over her future to him. She’d let the fire chief and sheriff do their investigating, and the men of Base Camp keep her safe. Meanwhile, she’d act like she always did.

In the store, she walked purposefully with her shoulders thrown back, refusing to skulk through the aisles looking constantly over her shoulders. When her dress raised the eyebrows of the other customers, she met their gazes head on and refused to be the first one to look away. At all times she was aware of Avery by her side and Walker a pace behind them, his eagle eyes taking everything in. William trailed Walker. Walker ignored him.

She glanced at her list, wondering what she was forgetting.

“There are the beans. Which kind do you need?” Avery interrupted her thoughts.

“Black beans. Lots of them. The way people keep flooding into the ranch, we’d better make enough tacos to feed half the town. We’re going to do veggie ones and beef ones, so we’ll need a bunch of ground beef, too.”

They bent to make their choices, then moved on to pick out tortillas, ground beef and sour cream. Cab met up with them in the dairy aisle.

“No one followed us?” Walker asked him.

The sheriff shook his head. “Not that I saw. I’ll stick close, though.”

“We’ve only got a couple more things to find.” Nora scanned the list again. After all they’d gone through to get to the store, so she didn’t want to forget anything.

Concentrating, she followed Avery through the rest of the aisles, ticking things off the list as they found them, and pointing to items she hadn’t even considered before she saw them. Still, something was nagging at her. Something she’d miss if she went home without it.

“That’s it,” Avery declared fifteen minutes later. “We’ve seen everything.”

Not everything, Nora thought. Not the thing she was forgetting. It was beginning to drive her crazy. But with three other people waiting for her to declare their trip done, there was nothing for it but to head for the till.

“We’ll probably need to come here again in the next few days,” Nora told Walker as she pushed the cart toward the front of the store. “I know I’ve forgotten something. Sorry,” she added. “This isn’t a good time to be disorganized.”

“Oh, Walker’s used to it,” Avery said with a laugh. “You should see me trying to get ready to help him each morning. I get almost to the barn and then have to turn around and go back for my gloves or my apron. He calls me Avery Latefoot instead of Avery Lightfoot.”