The Homecoming (2 page)

—Thucydides

—Augustine of Hippo

Sax Douchett had heard about people who didn’t dream.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t one of them. Sometimes he even dreamed while he was awake.

Like he might be doing now, as he felt a familiar prickling beneath his skin. Hair rose on his arms and at the back of his neck. A jolt of fight-or-flight adrenaline hit his bloodstream like a Patriot missile.

He bent over. Put his hands on his knees and drew in several deep breaths.

“You are not in the frigging Kush.” Sometimes saying the words out loud gave them more power.

The thick fog on this lonely stretch of beach he was walking on at sunset with his adopted dog turned ordinary things—seaweed, wind-bent cypress, stacks of driftwood—into shadowy objects of mystery. Unlike the placid blue waters of nearby Shelter Bay, the rocky Oregon coastline had claimed scores of ships and their crews over the centuries.

When he’d been trudging through the snow up a steep Afghan mountainside with bad guys blasting away at him and his SEAL teammates, memories of home had kept him putting one boot in front of the other.

When he’d spent another six days all alone on those desolate peaks in the Hindu Kush, wounded, half out of his mind and presumed dead, anticipation for the Dungeness crab jambalaya he intended to fill up on once he got stateside had kept him battling the Taliban assassins sent to finish him off.

And during that lost time when he’d been held prisoner in an enemy village, fantasies of sitting on the porch of the cliff house, an icy bottle of Doryman’s Dark Ale in his hand, listening to the rain on the roof, had kept him sane.

After a few frustrating weeks held prisoner again—this time in Bethesda Naval Hospital—like Odysseus, he’d finally made his way home. Physically healthy and, well,
mostly
sane.

And determined to put war behind him and get on with his life. Which was turning out to be a lot easier said than done. Especially with this weekend’s damn welcome-home parade the Shelter Bay council and local VFW chapter had planned.

Although everyone in town might have insisted on elevating him onto some gleaming marble pedestal, if there was one thing Sax knew he wasn’t, it was a hero.

“Maybe I’ll get to kiss me a beauty queen,” he said, trying to find something positive about the experience he knew would mean a lot to his parents. Which was the only reason he’d agreed to go along with a celebration that, if reports were true, and he feared they were, was threatening to outdo the annual Whale Watch Weekend and Kites and Crab Fest combined. “That might be cool.”

It had been an age since Sax had kissed any woman. Let alone a current Miss Shelter Bay, who’d been crowned during a Whale Watch Weekend he’d had to miss. Given that he’d been tied up.
Literally.

Just happy to be along for her evening walk, the Irish wolfhound mix he’d named Velcro answered with an enthusiastic bark that startled a heron that had been wading along the tide line, causing the bird to disappear into the fog with a flurry of wide blue wings.

The home he’d grown up in—located over Bon Temps, his parents’ sprawling Cajun restaurant and dance hall—had taken a hit two years ago by a vicious winter ice storm. Two months later, it was given a knockout blow when hurricane- force winds triggered by a Pacific typhoon came barreling through. Which was when Maureen and Lucien Douchett had thrown in the towel and retired.

Sort of.

Currently they were running a bait shop on the harbor and seemed content with how things had turned out. Mostly, Sax thought, because they were so content with each other. They were also proud. And stubborn. It had taken every ounce of Sax’s considerable powers of persuasion to talk them into accepting the money to build a new house in town.

Meanwhile, when Sax had returned home, his grandparents moved in with his parents, giving him the keys to their house overlooking the sea, which had become too large for them to keep up. Although he was still toying with the idea, the thought of rebuilding Bon Temps was growing more and more appealing. A lot of people in Shelter Bay could use the work. Along with the opportunity to eat themselves a good meal, kick up their heels, and have some fun, which seemed in short supply these days.

In the distance, lightning flashed, turning the whitecapped water shimmering neon green. Although she didn’t seem afraid of storms, the dog suddenly took off like a shot down the beach, her strident barks being ripped away by the wind.

Velcro appeared to have made it her responsibility to rid the coast of the ubiquitous gulls.

“Good luck with that,” Sax said as he climbed the stone steps to the top of the cliff.

He’d just reached the house when she came racing back with what appeared to be a bleached-out piece of driftwood in her mouth.

She dropped it at his feet and began wiggling her fuzzy black butt—her canine way of letting him know it was time to play fetch. Having nothing vital to do at the moment, Sax bent to pick it up.

Since she hadn’t exactly gotten the idea of “fetch” down yet, she took off running again with her prize.

Finally, when she realized he wasn’t going to chase after her, she returned, dropped it beneath a nearby tree. Then barked an invitation.

After retrieving a flashlight from the house, Sax sauntered over.

Then paused.

“Hell,” he muttered.

He’d left the Navy and returned to Shelter Bay determined to put death behind him. Only to have feckless fate—and a clingy, ninety-five-pound mutt—deposit a human bone at his feet.

“It was a murder most foul,” the crime victim insisted for the umpteenth time since Kara Conway, Shelter Bay’s sheriff, had arrived at her home.

“That’s from Sherlock Holmes, right?” Kara’s deputy asked.

“No.” The elderly woman shook a head covered in foam rollers that matched her Pepto-Bismol pink chenille bathrobe. “Really, John O’Roarke, if you’d paid more attention to my lectures in your senior-year English class you’d recognize the description as being written by none other than the Bard himself. It’s from
Hamlet
. Where the ghost, musing over his own death, states, ‘Murder most foul as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural.’

“And murdering my poor, innocent mailbox,” she said on a burst of annoyance, “for the second time in a month is definitely strange and unnatural.”

They all looked down at the mailbox in question, bathed in the glow of the security lights the woman had set up around her house. It had been beheaded, knocked off its post with what Kara would guess had been a baseball bat.

Stifling a sigh, Kara reminded herself that she’d moved back home from southern California to take over her father’s job in order to provide a safer environment for her eight-year-old son. A small town where roots went deep into the sandy soil, where everyone knew your name, where people looked out for one another, and children could play in the town park without anxious helicopter parents feeling the need to hover protectively over them.

And where a crime spree consisted of misdemeanor offenses such as barking dogs, jaywalking, and the occasional brawl at the Cracked Crab, the local watering hole favored by hardworking, hard-drinking fishermen.

And, apparently, mailbox bashing.

Before John had called to let her know that Edna Lawton was demanding to have the sheriff herself check out the crime scene, Kara had finished dinner, overseen her son’s homework assignment and been looking forward to a long soak in a bubble bath with a feel-good romance novel where, unlike real life, despite various trials and tribulations, characters and readers were guaranteed a happy ending.

“See those tire tracks?” Edna pointed a gnarled finger at the tread marks that had been left in the mud at the side of the road. “You’ll need to take a casting of those right away. While they’re still fresh. Then run a DMV computer check on all the vehicles in the county and you’ll find the culprit. Then bring the criminals to justice.”

“It doesn’t exactly work that way.” Kara reached down deep for patience.

The woman tossed up her chin. “I’ve seen it on
CSI
. And
Law and Order
.”

“What Sheriff Conway’s saying,” her deputy broke in before Kara could point out that the television shows were, in fact, fiction, “is that our crime scene techs are currently working with the feds on an important joint task force up in Salem.”

Feds? Crime scene techs
? Since when did her department of three deputies and two dispatchers have any crime scene techs? And what could those imaginary techs possibly be doing in the state capital?

“But it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain tonight.” He deftly cut off any comment Kara might be planning to make.

Studiously ignoring her questioning look, John O’Roarke rocked back on the wedged heels of his cowboy boots and glanced up at the star-studded sky.

“So, Sheriff Conway will send a tech out first thing in the morning to take the casting. Won’t you, Sheriff?” he asked.

“I guess,” Kara said. And was immediately hit by a razor-sharp look that reminded her of stories of how the elderly woman had once run her classroom with an iron hand. “Sure.” She tacked more enthusiasm onto her tone. “Absolutely.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re taking this seriously,” the older woman said.

“I always take crime seriously,” Kara said. It was the unvarnished truth.

“Your father was a good man,” Edna volunteered suddenly. The curlers bobbed as she shook her head with regret. “It was a crying shame, what happened to him, getting shot that way.”

“Yes.” Her father’s too-early death in what had been ruled a hunting accident—eighteen months after Kara had been widowed—still hurt. She suspected it always would.

“A terrible tragedy.” Edna looked a long way up at O’Roarke. “You never found the shooter.”

“No, ma’am.” Kara knew this was a sore point with the man who’d not only been her father’s deputy, but his best friend for nearly three decades. The two had gone hunting together in the fall, fishing together in the spring and summer, and argued about sports year- round, although the one thing they could both agree on was that the best place to spend a Friday night was at a Shelter Bay Dolphins high school football game.

“But you’re not going to close the case?” Edna pressed.

“No, ma’am.” His deep, cigarette- roughened voice was firm with resolve, but Kara knew they were both thinking the same thing: that unless the hunter who’d mistaken her father for a deer came forward, all they had was a spent shell—the same kind sold in gun stores, sporting-goods stores, and even Walmart—all over the country.

“Good.” Edna aimed her flashlight down at the flower bed overflowing with pink and purple petunias that surrounded the mailbox post. “That beer bottle wasn’t there when I brought my mail in this afternoon. Do you know what that means?”

Not having realized when she’d gotten the call to come out here that she’d be facing a pop quiz, Kara said, “It could have been thrown out of the car by whoever bashed your mailbox?”

“Murdered it,” Edna corrected briskly. “Thing’s a goner. You should take it in. The bottle, not the mailbox. Get DNA off it. Throw the little miscreant in the slammer.”

“That’s a good idea,” John O’Roarke jumped in again. “Would you happen to have a pair of gloves we could use to pick it up? Wouldn’t want to destroy trace evidence.”

“As a stroke of luck, I just bought myself a new pair of Rubbermaids while doing my marketing today. So we won’t have to worry about contaminating the evidence with any dish detergent residue.” Turning on a bunny-slipper-clad foot, she marched back to her weathered gray house.

“DNA tests?” Kara asked with an arched brow once they were alone. “Tire tread print castings? What did I miss while I was home working on long division problems with Trey? Did Shelter Bay’s sheriff’s department suddenly win the lottery? Which is the only way we’d have enough bucks to buy all that equipment.”

“Doesn’t take any equipment or all that much time to have Lonnie come over here in the morning and lay down some plaster of Paris,” John said with a shrug of his wide shoulders.

Although her deputy was in his sixties, his body was as lean and rangy as back in the day when he’d worked on trawlers. His deeply tanned face was lined, but in a comfortable, lived- in way that made people immediately trust him. Another thing he’d had in common with her father.

“As for the DNA, my niece Sydney—that’d be my brother Webb’s middle girl—comes in once a week to tidy up for Edna. She says the old lady TiVos every damn one of those crime shows.”

“Which explains why she’s constantly calling the sheriff’s office,” Kara guessed.

“Could be. Though mostly I think she’s lonely. But whatever, since she considers herself a criminality expert, it shouldn’t be that hard to blame any delay in results on the state police crime lab’s being a little busy with major crimes and port terrorism stuff these days.”

They watched as Edna came back out of the house, moving with exceptional purpose and vigor for a woman who had to be pushing ninety.

“You’re a good man, Deputy O’Roarke,” Kara said.

Another shrug that told her he was uncomfortable with personal compliments. “Our job is to protect and serve the community. Way I figure it, serving’s just what we’re doing out here tonight.”

“Here are the gloves,” Edna announced. “Right out of the package. And I brought you a Ziploc bag to put the evidence in.”