Cold River (10 page)

“That’s what we assume,” Hannah said, hesitant. “It’s not clear…”

“What’s not clear, Hannah?”

She saw it now. She’d stepped right into Jo’s trap. She had little choice but to press ahead. “We don’t know it was actually Rigby who stole the money. The cash stolen from the café was in a blue willow jar in the kitchen. If he’d come in here before his search for Nora and any of us had seen him, we’d almost certainly have remembered him. If we’d seen him anywhere near the kitchen, we
definitely
would have remembered him.”

Jo drank some of her coffee. She was steady, as focused as Hannah had ever seen her. “Are you suggesting he and Melanie had an accomplice here in town?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Hannah said.

“No one at the lodge remembers seeing him or Melanie near the shop where the money was stolen,” Jo went on. “Nora’s apartment at the Whittaker place is more isolated, but it still would have been risky for him to duck in and out of there with cash from her kitchen.”

“I’m not a law enforcement officer, Jo. Or a prosecutor. I don’t have to build a case.”

“That’s right. You’re a witness.”

“I have no intention of meddling in your investigation. I just know how easy it is for any of us to jump to conclusions. It’s been a long five weeks and we’re all frustrated and maybe scared—”

“Scared of what?”

Another trap, Hannah thought. She didn’t hesitate before answering. “We’re all afraid there are more killers out there. More murders in the works. That scares you, doesn’t it, Jo?”

“It doesn’t matter what scares me.”

“What about the prospect of this network having a connection to Black Falls? Does that scare you?”

Jo’s rich, deep turquoise eyes stayed on Hannah. “Did you help Drew with his cabin, Hannah?”

“No,” Hannah said, recognizing the question as a deliberate non sequitur.

“You know I’m a federal agent. Telling the truth—”

“I am telling the truth, and I know the law. I didn’t help Drew with his cabin. My brother didn’t help him, either. He carried supplies up the trail and left them where Drew asked him to leave them.”

“And you had no idea what was going on?”

“Not until late October.” Hannah glanced at Elijah, who hadn’t said a word; his expression was neutral, making it impossible even to guess what he was thinking. She turned back to Jo. “Devin had a hard time after finding Drew’s
body. He thought he could have done more to save him. We all know he couldn’t have.”

Jo pushed back her chair slightly, stretching out her legs. She rubbed the engagement ring on her finger. Hannah saw Elijah notice, too.

“Do you know who helped Drew with the cabin?” Jo asked.

“I don’t know that anyone did,” Hannah said.

“Did you know he’d found that old cellar hole?”

“No.”

“Why did you go up there today?”

“I wanted to see for myself where my brother nearly died.”

“You went on impulse. Alone.”

Hannah shrugged. “So I did.”

Elijah settled back in his chair, his gaze on Hannah. “Bowie had just been in the café.”

“So had you, Jo, Sean, Zack Harper, Scott Thorne and who knows who else.”

“We’re not ex-cons who grew up with you,” Jo said. “We don’t blame you for a bar fight that got us thrown in jail and put on probation and disrupted our lives. We don’t blame you for leading Drew Cameron to us so that the chief of police could arrest us.”

“You’re assuming Bowie blames me, and he doesn’t.”

Jo touched the rim of her mug with one finger. “Now who’s assuming, Hannah?”

Her wrist throbbing now, Hannah resisted the urge to jump up and run out of there, get away from Jo Harper and her suspicions and attitude. “Bowie wasn’t an ex-con when we were kids. He was a boy with dreams and a hard row to hoe.” Her voice was under control, even as her heart raced. “Be grateful you didn’t have his childhood.”

Jo started to say something else, but Elijah spoke first. “How’d you do up at the cabin?”

“I was only there for a short time. It was cold and I’d
been hiking for several hours. I didn’t want to stop moving. That’d only make me colder.”

“Sean was there,” Elijah said.

Hannah forced herself not to react. “He saved me from a long hike back to my car.”

“What about Bowie?” Jo asked. “Has he ever been up to the cabin?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t asked him. Until this morning, I hadn’t seen him since his arrest. If you want to know if he’s been up to the cabin,” she added coolly, “you can ask him yourself.”

“I did. He says he hasn’t been up there.”

Hannah wondered if she’d stepped into another of Jo’s traps. As much as she’d learned in law school, she didn’t have Jo Harper’s experience as a federal agent. Best, she knew, to shut up now. “Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?” she asked. “What about a scone? Jo, I know how much you love Dominique’s scones.”

Jo surprised Hannah with a smile. “I keep trying to get Elijah to try them.”

Hannah sighed. “It’s no secret you all are looking for a Black Falls connection to these killers. I understand that, and I understand that Bowie’s convenient—”

“It’s not about convenience,” Jo said, rising. “We didn’t find anything up at the cemetery that definitively suggests you and Bowie were attacked. Sean says you ran straight to the hillside after you got back on your feet. Why?”

Hannah shut her eyes briefly, remembering those first seconds after the rock fell, before Sean arrived. She looked at Jo. “I can’t say for sure. I don’t know if I saw or heard something and was so hyped up on adrenaline I can’t remember—or if I just operated on instinct.”

“You didn’t go down the hill,” Jo said. “Why not?”

Hannah kept her gaze steady. “Sean had arrived by then.”

“Ah.” Jo nodded with understanding. “I see. He stopped you.”

Elijah surprised her with a grin. “Sean didn’t tell us that part, either.” He stood up. “Next time you want to take off onto the mountain by yourself, call me.”

“Take care of that wrist and cheek,” Jo said, rising next to Elijah. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt any worse. Bowie, too.”

“On that,” Hannah said with a small smile, “we agree.”

“I suspect we agree on more than you want to admit,” Jo said quietly.

She headed for the door to the center hall, but Elijah remained behind, his Cameron blue eyes leveled on Hannah with an intensity that made her glad she’d never had to encounter him on a battlefield. “Let’s be clear,” he said. “No one’s lumping you and Bowie together just because you grew up on the same part of the river, or because you were at O’Rourke’s in March when the fists started flying. You’re not responsible for what he does.”

“You’ve never had to prove yourself. You don’t know—”

“I do know, Hannah.” He gave her a quick smile. “Try boot camp and then tell me I’ve never had to prove myself.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“We’d all do well not to let our pride keep us from recognizing our friends,” Elijah said. “Stay in touch. Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.”

She nodded, feeling tears forming in her eyes. He had the grace to pretend not to notice and left without saying anything more.

A
lthough she felt steadier on her feet now that she’d finished talking to Jo and Elijah and had devoured another cupcake, Hannah descended the cellar stairs slowly. They were straight, steep and utilitarian, not as graceful as those in the center hall. They needed painting—on the to-do list she had made up for her absentee landlord.

She pulled a string hanging from a lightbulb socket, revealing spiderwebs, dust-covered pipes, stored furnishings and junk cast in dim, yellowish light. The cellar’s cement floor was reasonably new, but the old stone foundation was original. She remembered her father working on it one summer when she was a child.

A summer he hadn’t been in prison.

She edged to the back wall, on the river side of the house. There was no standing water right now, probably because it was coming from outside and the ground was frozen.

That couldn’t be good.

She started to push a dusty, heavy, flat-topped trunk away from the wall. She had no idea what was inside. Treasure, maybe? She smiled to herself at the thought, but jumped, startled, when she heard footsteps behind her on the stairs.

“Hannah,” Sean called to her. “Are you down here?”

“Just me and the spiders.”

He appeared under the seventy-five-watt bulb. He’d changed out of his mountain parka into his long, black cashmere coat. “I ran into Jo and Elijah on the street,” he said.

“Ah.” Hannah scraped the trunk another few inches across the cement. “We just had a nice chat up in the café.”

“They’re meeting A.J. at the lodge and filling him in. I’m heading up there next.”

She regretted her sarcasm. “Poor Jo’s caught between a rock and a hard place, and Elijah—”

“Jo?” Sean’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Are you kidding? She’s mad as hell, and she has a job to do. Kyle Rigby tried to kill her. She saw Melanie Kendall get blown up. Jo wants answers, and she doesn’t care if she has to irritate friends and family to get them.”

“She’s also in a holding pattern with her life,” Hannah said with some sympathy. “She could go back to Washington and decide everything that went on up here was too much of a whirlwind and just forget it all.”

“You mean her and Elijah?” Sean said.

Hannah stood up from the old trunk. “They got back together in a few high-adrenaline days. Once things settle down, who knows?”

“They do. They’re for real. They always have been. It just took them fifteen years to realize it.” Sean ducked under a low pipe and came closer to her. He reached out to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes. “What about you, Hannah? Are you okay?”

“I am. Yes. Thanks for asking.” She fought back a wave of self-consciousness at his touch and pushed the trunk with a toe, but it didn’t move. She could hear her name in the wind, the flapping of the tarp, the initial scraping sounds of the rock and dirt falling onto her. “If you came here to
argue about what happened at the cemetery, you can go up to the lodge now and leave me to my spiders.”

“I didn’t come here to argue.”

The dim light created shadows on Sean’s face that made him look less the charming Cameron. Hannah ran her fingertips over a mustard-painted hinge on the trunk. Her wrist and cheek ached, and she was suddenly hot, choking on the stirred-up dust in the air. “There’s probably radon down here. All this stone. Perfect breeding ground for radon.”

Sean smiled. “Adding radon testing to my to-do list?”

She didn’t answer as more footsteps sounded on the stairs. She remembered Bowie had promised to stop by and started to call out to warn him Sean was on the premises, but Devin ducked into the dim light.

He was halfway through one of the cupcakes. “I figured this was meant for me.”

Hannah collected herself, but she was aware of Sean’s eyes on her. Their clear blue had turned to a dark, smoky color in the cellar light. Whatever was going on between them, she would do well to remember that he was as relentless and mission-oriented as any Cameron ever born. He believed she was holding back on him, his brothers, Jo. He hadn’t given up the fight.

“Toby’s back, too,” Devin said. “Your message—we were worried about you.”

“Everything’s fine,” she said, trying not to sound breathless, self-conscious. “Toby has to finish a trigonometry take-home test before he heads to California.”

Devin peeled off more of the cupcake wrapper. “I hated trig.”

“You hated math, period. Did you work at the lodge at all today?”

“Nope. Tomorrow.” He stopped, glancing at Sean, then back at his sister. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Dev, you can say what you have to say in front of Sean.”

Her brother finished off the cupcake, his eyes on the old trunk now, as if he just needed to have something to focus on that wasn’t Hannah or Sean. “Even if what happened up at Four Corners wasn’t his fault, Bowie’s trouble,” Devin said. “He always has been. I remember Mom saying trouble will find him if he doesn’t find it for himself.”

“She liked Bowie.”

“Yeah, he’s a great guy when he’s not punching someone’s face in.”

Hannah felt Sean’s stillness next to her. “The police didn’t find anything up at the crypt,” she said, “and Bowie was hurt worse than I was.”

Devin balled up the cupcake wrapper in one hand. “Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do. You go tearing up Cameron Mountain, and then this.” He looked at her again. “You should see your face.”

“It’ll heal in no time.” She gave him a light smile. “All’s well that ends well.”

Sean squatted down behind the trunk and examined the leak damage in front of shelves of dusty canning jars. “I gather you haven’t told your sister what we talked about this morning,” he said.

Devin rubbed the back of his neck as the hulking furnace came on in full force. It had been churning away against Vermont winters for at least two decades. “Think this thing’ll make it through the winter?”

Hannah sighed, recognizing her brother’s behavior as his way of avoiding telling her something he didn’t think she wanted to hear. “Beth, Dominique and I have a pool going. I say it dies before Valentine’s Day. Dom’s giving it until the first day of spring. Beth’s the optimist—she thinks it’ll last through this winter
and
next.”

Sean grunted. “That furnace will last another five years.”

Hannah looked at him with amusement. “Well, if it dies when it’s four degrees out, I’m calling you in Beverly Hills. I don’t care if I have to get you out of bed.”

He smiled. “You do that.”

His voice was husky, sexy, which she told herself she only noticed because of her fatigue, pain and adrenaline.

Devin, mercifully, was oblivious. “Wish I knew something about furnaces,” he said.

“Ha. Don’t we all.”

Hannah abandoned the trunk and suddenly wished she hadn’t come down here at all—hadn’t hiked up the mountain or checked on Poe and Bowie at the cemetery. If she’d just stayed at the café and baked cupcakes and studied for her bar exam, she wouldn’t have Sean Cameron on her case right now.

She stepped back, right into cobwebs hanging from the ductwork. “What did you and Sean talk about this morning, Dev?”

Sean rose and Devin averted his eyes. “Nothing,” he mumbled. “It can wait. We can talk after you’re done down here.”

“Dev,” Hannah said, “just tell me what’s on your mind. If it’s something you think I don’t want to hear, that’s my problem, not yours.”

Sean dipped behind the trunk, examining more water spots on the cement floor and the stone foundation. Without looking at either Shay, he said, “Devin, you need to tell your sister your plans.”

Devin swiped at the remains of her cobweb. “You ever think about leaving Vermont?”

Hannah went still. “You mean move?”

“Yeah. Start over somewhere else.”

“How would I—” She stopped herself. “No, I haven’t thought about moving. Why?”

“I’ve been thinking…” He gave her a weak smile. “Let’s at least talk up where there are no spiders.”

Finally Sean rose again, with a sharp look at her brother. Hannah gulped in a breath. A collage of images came at her. The California desktop background on the computer she shared with her brothers. The searches she’d found for smoke jumpers and Beverly Hills. The talk about needing to figure out what came next for him now that he’d graduated high school.

The nightmares, the pacing, the certainty that he had to do
something
.

“Toby’s leaving for California with Sean the day after tomorrow.” Hannah tried to keep her emotions under control. “Is that what you’re up to? Going out there with your brother?”

Devin grimaced and looked down at the floor. “Sean offered me a job.”

“Sean Cameron?” She spoke as if he weren’t right there. “What kind of job?”

“Basic step-and-fetch-it until I figure out what comes next.”

Hannah felt as if the dust were settling on her, encasing her, as if she were another cast-off in the old, musty cellar. “How long do you plan to stay in California?”

“I don’t know. It’s open-ended.”

“So—what? A month to start? Five months?”

“I’ve committed to three months to start. Same as Toby.”

“Where will you live?”

“I said he could stay at my place until he gets on his feet,” Sean said.

“Not a bad deal, right, Hannah?” Devin seemed desperate for her approval. “Sean also said I could fly out with him and Toby.”

“The day after tomorrow,” Hannah repeated dully.

“That’s right. I’m eighteen,” he added, with a hint of defiance. “Almost nineteen.”

“Of course. You don’t need my permission.” She raked both hands through her hair, not even sure what she felt. “You can do whatever you want now. Toby turns eighteen soon, too. Then he can do whatever he wants, too. Stay in California and mountain bike his life away.”

Devin looked crushed. “I can stay here. I don’t have to go.”

“No—no, Dev.” She shook her head, pulling herself together. “If this is something you want to do and you can make it happen, I’m not going to stand in your way just to keep you here.” She was aware of Sean’s presence. The coconspirator. But she wasn’t going to let Devin get sucked into whatever was going on between the two of them. “I’ll be upstairs in a few minutes. We can talk more then.”

His face brightened with obvious relief. “Yeah. Great. I’ll go up and figure out supper.”

Hannah waited stiffly for him to get back up the cellar stairs. Her side throbbed now in addition to her cheek and wrist. She forced back the pain and turned to Sean. “How long have you known?”

“Two days.”

Sean came around to her, his coat open to a dark, soft-looking sweater. He’d changed since she’d left him at Four Corners. She was still in her hiking clothes, still had rock dust and dirt on her, the cuff of her shirt wet from her ice pack.

“Hannah—”

“When did he start talking to you about California?”

“During the search for the twelve-year-olds on Christmas Eve. He’d been thinking about it for some time. He convinced me he’s serious.”

“He’s romanticizing your life, smoke jumping, California.”

“Then he’ll find that out for himself.”

She heard more footsteps, heavier than either Devin’s or
Sean’s. It had to be Bowie. She called up to him. “Come on down, Bowie. You can handle the stairs, right? You’re not going to pass out from loss of blood, are you?”

“Ha. Funny, Hannah.”

He thumped down the stairs and, dodging the string hanging from the lightbulb, headed over to the back wall. His face was badly swollen and bruised. He’d changed into a heavy gray sweatshirt and put a fresh bandage on his hand, no blood yet seeping through.

He glanced at Sean, then turned to Hannah. “I can come back.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said quickly. “The leak’s right over there. Please, have a look now. Sean owns the building. It’s not a problem that he’s here.”

Bowie’s expression was unreadable, controlled. Sean said nothing, just watched, impassive, as Bowie dipped behind the trunk and had a look at the water damage.

Hannah leaned over the trunk. “Do you need more light?”

“Nope.” He stood up. “It’s not an active leak right now because of the outside temperatures, but water’s obviously getting in. My guess, the wall here’s rotted. I’ll have to get a closer look.”

“Can you fix it?” she asked.

“Yes, I can. I’ll have to figure out exactly where and how the water’s getting in, but I think I can just repoint the stone, do some resealing. A little mortar and hydraulic cement should do the trick.”

Sean was cool. “I’ll want an estimate—”

“I estimate I can fix it.”

Hannah checked her irritation with both of them and focused on the task at hand. “It has to be done. When do you think you could get to it?”

“A week or two. It’ll keep until then. If it doesn’t, call me.”

She nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Take care of yourself,” he said, and left, the old stairs creaking and groaning as he headed up.

Hannah didn’t move, didn’t look at Sean. She listened for the center-hall door to open and shut and then crossed her arms on her chest, careful with her injured wrist. She felt tight, emotional, on the verge of spinning out of control. “I need to check on Toby,” she said half to herself.

“Hannah,” Sean said. “What’s going on?”

She shot him a look. “Other than my brothers taking off for California? Other than hiking up to see where one of them was nearly murdered? Where a man we all loved…” She pushed back the rush of emotion. “I’m sorry. You have enough on your mind. You lost your father to those people. I’ll be fine.”

He stepped closer to her. “That’s your refrain, isn’t it? You’ll always be fine.” He moved another few strands of her hair from off her face and smiled at her. “There’s something sexy about a woman with cobwebs in her hair and dust on her nose.”

“Are you the big charmer in Beverly Hills?”

“I’m an amateur out there.” With his fingertip, he touched her cheek, just under where the rock had struck her. “You don’t want dust getting into an open cut.”

“It hardly counts as a cut. It’s mostly just a bruise.”

His fingertip drifted down to her mouth, brushed her lower lip. “No one wants to see you hurt and alone.” His smile had vanished. “I don’t.”