If You Hear Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (19 page)

Natalie reached up and patted Lucy’s narrow, stooped shoulder. “Now, Grandma, you’re meddling.” She winked at Ezra and then added, “Besides, you’re also slipping. Otherwise, you’d know that Ezra was out at the café yesterday—had breakfast with Lena Riddle, too.”

“Lena …” Lucy peered at him. She pursed her lips and then, a slow, pleased smile curled them. “Lena Riddle. Oh, pretty girl, that one. Been living here nine years now. She’s a nice girl, too. Not afraid to work, and my goodness, she can cook …”

One good thing about a small town was how easy it was to find out information on a person.

One mention of her name and Ezra had inadvertently ended up hearing a Reader’s Digest version of her entire life. Only child, had been born in Ash, but her parents had decided to move to Louisville when she was young. Her father had died in an accident when she was twelve.

Went to school in Louisville, ended up graduating,
and bought the house that used to belong to her parents, before they moved.

She was a chef—of course, that fact he already knew, but now he knew her schedule, her specialties, and if he was smart, he’d ask her to whip him up some white-chocolate, macadamia, and cranberry cookies.

She took a break long enough to skim her list. “Natalie, we’re done, right?”

“Yes, Grandma. And you told me once we had everything on the list, to make you get in line—you didn’t want to do any of that ‘evil impulse buying.’ ” She delivered that last line with a deadpan expression on her face.

Ezra studied the heap of groceries in the cart, then glanced at the minuscule piece of paper Lucy held. “You actually had all of that on the list?”

“Oh, a lot of these are staples.”

Ezra craned his head and studied the neat little stack of paperbacks tucked in the front part of the basket. “Books are staples?”

She arched snow-white brows. “Books are one of the most important staples. And you mind your own business about the groceries and I won’t mention that personal item I saw in your basket.”

Blood rushed up his neck.

He was not blushing. No way in hell had an eighty-year-old woman managed to make him blush over a damn box of condoms.

Natalie gave him a look of sympathy. “She’s got eyes like an eagle. They keep saying eyesight is one of the first things to go when you get older, but I swear, her eyesight gets better.”

“My hearing is just fine, too,” Lucy said smartly, marching ahead of them toward the lines. “So. Lena Riddle, Ezra? Is she the reason you haven’t come by to visit?”

This could be a land mine, he decided. Lucy wasn’t a gossip, exactly, but she heard things. If he let her assume he was dating Lena when he wasn’t …

Shit. This woman was like super-mom or something. She had the ability to make him feel like a teenager, sneaking outside after curfew. And he’d only done that like twice.

“We’re not dating or anything. Just friends,” he said, blowing out a sigh.

“A nice girl—you could do a lot worse, you know. I haven’t talked to her much, mind you, but she seems to be quite a nice girl. After all, Natalie likes her.”

Natalie smiled at her grandmother. “Lena’s a sweetheart.”

Lucy inspected the contents of Ezra’s handheld basket and shooed him in front. “You go first. You’ve only got a few things there.” Then she winked at him. “And it’s not like you have to hide your purchases, after all.”

Courtesy demanded he decline. But then he looked at Lucy’s heaped basket. Forget courtesy. Besides, he really would rather get out of there before she decided to strike up a conversation regarding his “purchases.”

“If you don’t mind?”

She beamed at him. “If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered, now would I? Natalie, didn’t Lena date Remy for a while?”

“I think so,” Natalie said, her voice distracted. She was scanning the magazines on the rack, nibbling her lower lip.

“If you’re talking about Lena Riddle, yeah, she dated Remy. Almost a year, I think.” That came from the cashier.

Natalie and Lucy didn’t look at all surprised and Ezra stood by, a little bemused as the woman jumped feet-first into the conversation. “A few people were talking
like it was kind of serious and then they just stopped going out. Never did hear why.”

Ezra frowned as he tried to place the name. Once he did, the frown threatened to turn to a sneer—Remy Jennings. Yeah, he knew that name. The pretty-boy lawyer he’d met in the sheriff’s office that day, and he was more than a little disgusted to think of the pretty boy putting his hands on Lena.

Remy Jennings—who might or might not be related to the kid who had been driving all over his property, too—an issue he had agreed to let go, he remembered. Scowling absently, he dumped his stuff on the conveyor belt as the cashier decided to prattle on, at length, sharing all she knew about Lena.

She knew quite a bit. As far as information went, the woman had it nailed. She knew how often Lena had her dog to the vet, to the groomer’s, how often she went into Lexington, how often she went to Louisville. Her brother-in-law had done some contract work out at Lena’s place, and how it was just plain odd that a blind woman would choose to live so far out in God’s country when she could be living back in Louisville.

“Maybe she likes living in God’s country,” he said when the cashier stopped to take a breath.

“I don’t see why. I mean, it’s not like she can drive herself into town or anything.”

“Yeah, because driving into town is of the utmost importance in everybody’s life,” Ezra said.

She just blinked at him, looking vaguely confused.

He took advantage of that to push the money for his stuff into her hands and make a break for it. He needed to get the hell out of there before he did something really humiliating—like pry for more details about this so-called relationship between Lena and Remy Jennings.

Man … he had it bad.

“Deputy, did I ask you what your thoughts were about that complaint?”

The sheriff kept his voice mild.

Nielson wanted to make absolutely sure that Prather got this message.

He was still pissed off—he’d kept it hidden well, he knew, but Detective Ezra King’s visit had not started his day off in a good manner.

He’d made a few calls and discovered pretty much what he’d expected to discover.

King was a good cop. Had a bad case six months earlier and could have died—it was the sort of case that could break a good cop. Could break a person.

King hadn’t broken, but only time would tell if he could go back to the job or not.

Having a good cop in here, telling him about one of his own cops—a lousy fucking cop—set his teeth on edge, but it only made it worse because King wasn’t wrong.

Prather wasn’t dirty, but he sure as hell wasn’t a good cop.

He also didn’t know how to control his temper worth shit. He glared at Nielson with eyes that all but glowed with all the anger he had trapped inside him. Nielson wished, just once, the man would let some of that anger slip … in his direction, of course. If he could put it in writing that he felt Prather might prove a danger, he could boot the bastard out.

But Nielson couldn’t do it just because he didn’t like the bastard, and the man hadn’t crossed the line in any way that could get him fired, either.

“What is the problem, Sheriff?” Prather asked, his voice stiff and level, despite the rage that had his face red and snapped in his eyes.

“My problem is that we had a civilian call with a valid concern and you did everything but shove her out the door when she came in to discuss it.”

“A valid concern?” Prather snapped. “She didn’t see anybody—she
can’t
see anybody. She heard something and nobody else heard it. Nobody fucking believes a word …”

“I do,” Nielson said, his voice cool, quiet. Yelling at buffoons like Prather might make him feel a little better, but he’d learned a long time ago, those buffoons listened better when he didn’t yell … and there was something about a cool, quiet voice in the face of temper that just unnerved people. “She’s not a quack, she’s not a flake, and if she claims she heard a woman screaming, and very explicitly details the screams, the words, and even the direction and general area of the screams for my deputies, then I’m more inclined to believe her. This isn’t like the crock-of-shit reports Deb Sparks calls in, just to get one of us out there.”

Then he leaned back in the chair and pinned his deputy with a direct stare. “What’s more, Jennings feels there’s something odd going on. As does the state cop you insulted when he was here. You’re making an ass of yourself on this and you didn’t just insult a civilian, you also insulted a fellow law-enforcement official. Are you trying to cause me problems, Deputy? Or is it just natural?”

Prather’s chin rose a notch. “What does it matter if King believes her or not? It’s not like he’s out here investigating anything. He’s on leave.”

You’re so damned stupid
. Nielson resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. He’d woken up with a headache—it was a sign, he realized, a sign that today would be a crap day and nothing else. That headache had only gotten worse as the day went on.

When Prather came swaggering in just before two, the
headache had grown to gargantuan proportions. The bastard was an insult to his uniform, and every year that passed, he just got worse.

Taking a slow, calming breath, he focused on Prather’s face and said, “No, Detective King isn’t out here on an official investigation, but then again, that’s not going to keep him from poking around if he decides to poke around, is it?”

“He ain’t got no fucking reason to poke around. Nothing happened.”

As if Prather hadn’t said a word, Nielson continued, “Not that I much care for having some state big-shot messing with my territory, but then again, considering he’s gone and developed an … interest in Ms. Riddle and you were about as insultingly rude as you could get, how could I expect him to do otherwise?”

Prather’s face went pasty white, then back to ruddy red, all in the span of five seconds. “Now listen here, Sheriff, if that woman is claiming I acted improper somehow, she is lying—”

“Did you tell her she should consider getting a live-in companion?”

Prather gave a restless, jerky shrug. “And how is that insulting?”

Gently, using the same tone he used when explaining something to a five-year-old, Nielson said, “She’s blind, Prather. She can’t see, but she’s not mentally challenged, she’s not helpless. She has a rather demanding, chaotic career, which she manages to handle without a companion, she’s lived on her own here for quite a while, and I do believe I’ve heard she’s a college graduate—that doesn’t sound to me like somebody who needs to be on the receiving end of companion services.”

Prather just blinked.

He really didn’t get it.

Rising from his chair, Nielson leaned over his desk,
hands braced on the surface. “You don’t get it. I can’t make you get it, even if I paint it on a billboard. Yet you seem to think she’s the one who needs assistance,” he muttered, disgusted. Why in the hell did he have to continue putting up with this?

T
HE STORY WASN
’
T MOVING, AND HADN
’
T BEEN FOR
about the past week.

Plain and simple.

Law tried to figure out if the problem was the story, or him. He had too much shit on his mind, there was no doubt about that. Maybe that’s all it was, and he certainly hoped that was at least part of it, because he’d spent the past six months working on the current book and if it turned out the book was the damn problem, then he had a major damn problem, because there was no way he could start from scratch and still meet his deadline.

Law didn’t miss deadlines.

Period.

Blowing out a breath, he stared up at the ceiling, absently throwing an old baseball up, catching it, and then tossing it up again. Over and over.

He let his mind drift and hoped that it would settle on whatever was blocking him.

And to no surprise, it wasn’t the book.

He found his thoughts torn between two women—two women who meant a lot to him. Lena, a woman he adored, and Hope, one of his dearest friends. Worry for the two of them ate at him.