Copper Lake Secrets (12 page)

A faint memory stirred: that door standing open, Grandmother’s big old Cadillac gone, Grandfather’s beat-up pickup inside. The tailgate was down, the bed littered with dirt and holding a tarp stained with something dark and wet. Grandfather, filthy and sweating, yelling at her to get back to the house, and Mark…just standing there, a look on his face. Fear? Excitement?

Goose bumps covered her arms, and she shivered violently, hugging herself to ward off the sick dread. She’d seen that feverish, gleaming expression in Mark’s eyes before, one day when he’d…when she’d…

The memory was there, so close, so elusive. She focused inward, trying to grab it before it slipped away, but she was too late. Like fog struck by burning sun, it disappeared.

Like the message on the mirror last night.

“Do you intend to follow me all the way?”

Grandmother’s impatient voice brought her back to the moment. They were halfway to the garage, when Reece couldn’t remember crossing the patio. She looked at the garage, then back at the house, and gave herself a mental shake as she stopped. “No, of course not.”

“The spare key and the code to the gate are on my desk. If you go somewhere, be sure to lock up. And if you do go somewhere, change clothes. Howard women do not appear in public dressed so gaudily.”

Reece stood where she was, book clutched in her arms, until the garage door had lifted, until Grandmother had climbed behind the wheel of a big old Cadillac—Lord, surely not the same one she’d driven fifteen years ago—until she’d backed out of the garage and driven past with a frown directed at Reece.

“Wow. That car’s a classic. It’s older than both of us.”

Jones’s words would have startled her if Mick hadn’t run into view the instant before he spoke. She turned and watched the two of them saunter down the road from the direction of the barn.

He wore shorts again, denim, with a T-shirt advertising a nursery in Louisville. His hair was untidily combed, and dark glasses hid his even darker eyes. He looked friendly, approachable, sexy—and still, somehow, mysterious. It wasn’t the way he moved, all smooth and easy, or the way he grinned, all open and boyish. It was just some aura about him. Some little bit of
something.

“Everything else around here is ancient. Why not the car?” She greeted Mick with a quick rub, then asked, “Walking the property again?”

“Giving Mick some exercise. He’d sleep twenty-two hours a day if I’d let him.” His gaze slid over her. “I like your shirt.”

Glancing at the huge flowers, she smiled. “Me, too. It’s hard to take life too seriously when you’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt.” If only that were true.

“Where is Miss Willa off to?”

Reece fell into step with him and headed back the way she’d just come. “She’s joining the garden club in town. Now that you’re restoring the gardens, it’s her duty.”

“She takes duty very seriously.”

“Yeah.” Except the duty of caring for her granddaughter when she’d taken her in. Had Grandmother been so disinterested that she hadn’t noticed that something was wrong? Or had she just preferred Mark? After all, she’d described Reece as spoiled with a tendency to cry, while Mark was merely a pest.

“You’ve got a book again.”

Again?
He’d never seen her with a book. Oh, but she’d told him she’d read a lot that summer. “It’s a Howard family history, bought and paid for by the Howard family.”

“Lots of unbiased views and straightforward facts, huh.”

“There’s nothing like having total control over the final product. How’s the work coming?”

“Great. I’ve done some preliminary sketches, and Lori, who works back in the office, is doing a search for the original statuary. I doubt we’ll be able to buy much of it back, but Miss Willa wants to try. We’re also putting together a list of—”

He stopped in his tracks, the words stopping, too. Reece looked at him, then in the direction he was staring: his pickup. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong with the picture: both tires on the driver’s side were flat.

“Son of a bitch!” Jerking off his glasses, he lengthened his stride and Mick ran ahead, a low rumble coming from his throat.

When Reece caught up, she saw that the other two tires were flat, as well. With a jerk of his head, Jones muttered, “Yours, too,” and she spun around to the same sight with her SUV.

“They weren’t flat when Mick and I left the house. What about you?”

“I don’t… I was talking to Grandmother, and I—I remembered something from—from before. I didn’t notice the cars at all.”

His gaze sharpened, and she realized his eyes were the biggest source of his mysterious aura. They were so dark, so intense. A lot of emotions could hide there. A lot of secrets.

He started to speak, but bit off the words and yanked his cell phone from his pocket instead. Finding the number he wanted, he gripped the cell tightly and walked a few feet away. “Hey, Calloway, it’s Jones again. I just have a request this time.” Tersely he explained the situation, said thanks and disconnected. “He’s going to send a wrecker out.”

Reece frowned as she walked toward her car. She’d heard the Calloway name before, and not just on the plantation she’d passed on her way here. Memory clicked: Mark had mentioned it. Grandmother’s lawyer.

Why would Jones have Grandmother’s lawyer’s number in his cell?

“Robbie Calloway?” she asked, her voice reedy. “The lawyer?”

“No. Russ Calloway. Owns the biggest construction company around here.”

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it go. It seemed logical a landscape architect would meet the owner of a local construction company. Maybe Jones did a few small jobs on the side while working on big projects like this.

He passed her, walking a wide circle around her truck. “Your ghosts ever do anything like this before?”

She lifted one shoulder in a hapless shrug. “One of them moved my book last night. Have yours?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never run into a destructive one.” He gazed up at the sky, rested his hands on his hips and flatly said, “Well, hell.”

Well, hell,
indeed.

Chapter 6

T
he tow-truck driver gave them a lift to a tire store in town, the one recommended by Russ Calloway. After talking with a service technician, Jones and Reece left their vehicles there and walked outside to the sidewalk.

“You hungry?”

When she didn’t answer right away, he turned to see her staring around intently. There was nothing remarkable about the block: a ’50s-era drive-in; Charlie’s Custom Rods; a window treatment place; a chiropractor’s office. Was she looking for something recognizable from fifteen years ago?

Or was it all recognizable?

“Reece,” he said, and her gaze flew to his. “You want some lunch while we wait?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“You have a favorite place here?” He half expected a terse repeat of the claim that she didn’t remember anything, but he didn’t get it.

“No.”

“Downtown’s that way.” He pointed, and they started walking to the nearest northbound street. “There are a couple places down here to eat—a deli, a steak house, a home-cooking diner, Mexican, pizza, a riverside place that’s a little more upscale than the others. What do you feel like?”

“Any place where I don’t have to sit up straight on the edge of my chair and deal with a full complement of silver.”

“Miss Willa still likes things a little formal, does she?”

Her scowl was her only response.

Copper Lake was a nice little town, laid out around a central square with a white gazebo, lots of flowers and the usual war monuments. He pointed out a couple of businesses as they walked the few blocks to the square, then stopped across the street from the Greek Revival mansion that sat just southeast of the square.

“That’s where your grandmother is. The garden society meets there.”

Reece looked at the house, then back at him. “How do you know that?”

“My job basically boils down to gardening. I learn these things.”

“Beautiful place.”

“The oldest house in town. Not rumored to be haunted, though I assume it is.”

She looked at the house a moment longer, its white paint gleaming in the morning sun, the massive oaks with their Spanish moss casting welcome shade. It had been meticulously restored a few years earlier and was ready to face the next two hundred years with grace.

When Reece glanced back at Jones, her expression was troubled. “Do you think someone sneaked onto the grounds this morning and slashed our tires?”

“I didn’t see any slashes.” Or any footprints, though gravel wasn’t likely to show much. “I’ll bet they just let the air out.”

“They who?”

He shrugged. “Ghosts? Your grandfather? Your grandmother?” A pause for effect, then, “You. Me.”

Her face paled. “I didn’t— Why would you—”

“I didn’t, either.” They crossed the street, passed A Cuppa Joe and continued northward. “I just can’t see Miss Willa stooping to vandalism. For someone to come onto the property, he’d either need the code for the gate or would have to climb the fence, and in the middle of the morning, that’s a bit of risk for very little gain. It isn’t much of a warning. It isn’t violent. Mostly it’s just a nuisance. Why would a living, breathing person bother?”

A few yards passed in silence.

“Mark has the code,” she said quietly.

“I figured that. And if he was seen, he’d have an excuse: he’d come to check on Miss Willa. But why? Like I said, it’s not a big deal. If the tires had been slashed—” and he could see Mark doing that, quick, vicious work “—that would be different. We’d be out the money for new ones, and there’s some element of threat there. But just letting the air out?”

She nodded as if agreeing as they turned at the next corner. Their destination, a little diner he’d found his first day in town, was in the middle of the block, a place that looked every bit its age. There were rips in the vinyl benches that had been repaired with duct tape, and the industrial carpeting on the floor carried a lot of stains. But the rest of the dining room was clean, the waitresses friendly and the food good.

He waited until they’d settled in a booth and the waitress had taken their order before he brought up the subject niggling at the back of his mind the past hour.

“You said this morning that you’d remembered something from before.” He watched for a response and saw it in the clenching of her jaw, the shadowing of her eyes. “You want to talk about it?”

She looked as if she wanted to put it out of her thoughts forever, but after a sigh, she shrugged. “It wasn’t anything much. Just I’d gone outside one morning and wandered over to the garage. Grandfather and Mark were in there, doing something with his pickup, and he…he
screamed
at me to get back in the house. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. And Mark was so complacent.”

Disappointment shafted through Jones. She was right: it wasn’t much. From what he knew, Arthur had always been angry around her and Mark had almost always been a smug little bastard.

But if she recovered one memory, then the others could come back, as well.

And when she remembered him and Glen? How would she feel about him not telling her right up front who he was and what had happened? She would be pissed off. He didn’t care. He could handle pissed off. He couldn’t handle not knowing what had happened to Glen.

“What was the old man’s problem with you?”

“I don’t know. My dad moved away when he was in college—met my mother, finished the semester and transferred to a school in Colorado, where she was from. He hardly ever came back here.” Her expression was mocking. “Howards didn’t leave Georgia. This was where they belonged.

“But I think it was more than that. My dad was a good guy. People liked him, respected him. He got along with everybody. He was a high school teacher, and even his students loved him. But he couldn’t get along with Grandfather. Even when we did visit, they rarely spoke.”

“So Arthur extended his estrangement from your dad to include you?”

She shrugged, and he was struck again by the air of vulnerability. Every kid, he’d guess, wanted affection from their family. How did it feel when you couldn’t have it, and not even because of something you’d done? Just because of who you’d been born to? Jones missed his family like hell, but he’d known he would lose them when he left the life. He’d considered the consequences a long time before he’d taken the action. And if he had a kid who wanted to know his grandparents, aunts and uncles, they would welcome him. They wouldn’t hold Jones’s sins against him.

“What about your mother’s family?”

“Her parents died before I was born. No siblings, two uncles who traveled around the world on business. She hardly knew them, and I’ve never met them.”

“Wow. Your family really sucks.”

Her laughter surprised her as much as him. “I’ve got good friends. They’re better than family.”

The waitress brought their lunch, a silent invitation to lighten the subject. They talked about inconsequential things as they ate—a few of his more interesting jobs, the shop where she worked, their dogs.

They were trading funny dog stories when a newcomer to the diner stopped halfway to the counter to stare at them. Mark Howard.

He smiled when he saw Reece, then his gaze shifted to Jones, and though the smile remained, the warmth didn’t. He turned cold enough to give a man the chills if he was the sort whose blood ran cold. Jones wasn’t.

“Well, you’re the last person I expected to see in town today,” Mark said, his words directed to Reece but his gaze on Jones. “What brings you out?”

Some of her warmth drained away, too, replaced by stress that darkened her eyes. “Grandmother had a meeting and gave Lois the day off, and I needed to come to town, so…”

Mark frowned at the mention of Miss Willa’s meeting. Afraid she might be with her lawyer drawing up a contract for the garden project? But he apparently decided to let it pass as he turned his attention to Jones. His gaze was steady, like a snake, his expression blank.

Did Mark recognize Jones? How could he forget the faces of either kid who’d stopped him from killing his cousin, especially the one who’d knocked the snot out of him? Especially when, back then, no one told him no and got away with it. Maybe he was waiting to see if Jones acknowledged him first, or willing, if Jones was, to pretend they’d never met.