The Honeymoon Cottage (A Pajaro Bay Romance) (22 page)

"You had to be honest with him," Ryan said gruffly.

She nodded. "I know. But he's already lost his mom and dad. It's hard to keep uprooting him." Hard for her, too.

"But I'm responsible for you until you leave," he said.

That was always it with him. He was responsible. He had to protect them.

He frowned. "Even if I haven't done a great job so far."

"I don't know about that. We're still alive, aren't we."

He didn't look satisfied with that.

"You do a good job of protecting people, Ryan."

"Not good enough." He sounded so bitter.

"But Sara's death wasn't your fault, either."

"Of course it was my fault." He looked out at the water, and she watched his profile. His jaw clenched and unclenched repeatedly. "I misjudged how the perp would react."

"That doesn't make it your fault. You're not psychic, Ryan. You're a human being."

He dismissed that with a shake of his head. "I misjudged the danger." He shook his head again, vehemently. "You're going to tell me like everyone else that it wasn't my fault. That she might have died even if I hadn't walked with her to the store. But she was my responsibility. If I'd handled it right in the first place, Sara would be alive."

"That doesn't make sense, Ryan. You can't blame yourself for what someone else did."

"Let's change the subject."

"Okay." How could he think he was responsible for something no one could have predicted?

When the plates piled high with calamari and onion rings arrived, Ryan waved to Oliver and he came back to the table to eat.

The chowder was extra-thick, creamy, and just as artery-clogging as Ryan had promised. Camilla took a big bite of an onion ring. "Ooh, my breath is going to smell awful after this."

Ryan leaned toward her. "Let's see." His lips brushed across hers, and she was startled by his public display.

"Ryan!"

"Hey!" Oliver said.

"It's okay, kid. Trust me. I'm a professional."

Oliver shrugged and bent over his chowder. They all ate in silence for a while, and Camilla wondered how attached Oliver was getting to Ryan. She could handle it (yeah, right), but he was just a child, a child who had lost so much already.

When he finished eating, he asked to be excused again. "Don't eat so slow. We have to go on the rides." He went over to the deck rail to look out at the bay, probably watching the Ferris wheel go around.

"He must be pretty confused about what's happening," Ryan said, reading her mind.

"I think it's confusing for all of us," she said.

"Yeah. Listen, Camilla. I don't know what you're planning to do once you sell the cottage."

"Yeah?" she said, watching his face.

"Well," he said hesitantly. "I know you plan to leave town."

"I have to. I have to make a new start. Somewhere fresh."

"Somewhere fresh." He said it quietly. "Somewhere with no past to tie you down."

"Yeah?"

"Well, I'm going to be heading out, too. And there's room in the car for both of you to come along."

She shook her head.

She was being pulled in all these directions. First Robin planting the idea of opening her own business here, and now Ryan saying she could run away with him. But what did she want? What was best for her and Oliver?

"It's too soon to decide, of course," he said. "But, I’m just sayin'..."

"Let's keep it open," she said, not wanting him to say any more, though her heart had started thumping in her chest at the tentative promise in his voice. "Let's see what happens when the cottage is sold."

He nodded. "Yeah. My place hasn't sold, either. So I'll be in town for a couple more weeks, too."

She looked down at her hands, realized they had started to shake. He was saying what she had been thinking—hoping—even dreaming. "Maybe."

He leaned in closer. "We'll leave it open. See where we go from here."

His lips met hers, and this time she opened her mouth to the kiss, felt the taste of him again. After keeping a distance from him for days, it felt so good to sense his warmth against her lips, the scent of him, the taste of him. An alarm buzzed in her ears, and they broke apart.

"Gee, Ryan, you make bells ring when you kiss me."

But he didn't smile. "Knight," he said into the phone. He listened, then said, "On my way, let Serrano know and alert coast guard we might need them."

He stood up, threw some bills on the table. "Gotta go."

"Wait—"

"Missing kids at the amusement park. Gotta go." He took off at a run.

Camilla rounded up Oliver and they headed out.

"Are we going to the rides now?" he said anxiously. "You're not backing out again, are you?"

"I'm not backing out," she said absently. "We'll go to the amusement park."

They headed that way, but all the time she was looking for a tall man in a khaki uniform.

~*~

"There he is!" Oliver pointed out to the sand, where Ryan's uniform could be spotted in the center of a group of onlookers.

They headed that way. As they got closer she could see him more clearly. He stood out, not only because of his height and the uniform, but because of his expression, his stance, everything about him. This was a different Ryan than she'd seen around the cottage all week. This was the guy you wanted in a crisis. His eyes looked like lasers, scanning the crowd, taking in every detail, focused, intense. She remembered the annoyance she'd felt at his overprotectiveness toward her and Oliver, and now saw its flip side, the sense of personal responsibility he carried for everyone in his charge. She realized she needed to cut him some slack. This was who he was, and she should try not to chafe so much under the weight of his smothering. At least for the short time they had left together.

His eyes passed over her, noting she was there, but not acknowledging her on the edge of the crowd.

At the center of the group, where he stood, a woman was babbling in Spanish, hysterical. He listened to her calmly, all the while those eyes watching, assessing everything going on around them. She could see the tension in his body, feel even from ten feet away how responsible he felt for some missing kids he'd never even met. If her child were missing, this is the guy she'd want looking for him. She pulled Oliver a little closer. She felt a sense of pride in watching him, though he wasn't her man. He and she were—what, exactly? They couldn't ever be a couple, not really, not with the barriers between them.

Him being a cop, her being a criminal's daughter. Him being so honest, and her carrying secrets deep inside her that he couldn't ever understand. Still, she felt that foolish pride in "her man," and watched him as he did the work he was obviously born to do.

"What candy?" he said suddenly, interrupting the mother in mid-sentence. That laser gaze focused sharply back on the crying woman. He repeated the question in Spanish.

She said something else to him, and he smiled at her gently. Spoke to her reassuringly in Spanish, patted her arm.

He strode off through the crowd as if they didn't exist, and they parted to let him through.

The crowd followed him, but his long strides quickly outdistanced them.

Camilla, still keeping Oliver close, stood at the rail separating the wooden boardwalk from the beach itself, and watched him from a distance.

He went straight up to a concessions booth, spoke to the attendant, nodded, then took off at a run down the main boardwalk, through all the rides. She lost sight of him when he ducked in between two of the amusement park rides a hundred feet away.

He was gone a few minutes, and it seemed the crowd watching held their breath.

Then he came into view with two little kids, no more than five years old, each clutching a huge wand of cotton candy.

She watched as he lifted them up onto his shoulders and came striding back. As they got closer she could see their little faces were completely smeared with sugar, and he was joking with them, making them smile.

Just then Joe Serrano pulled up next to her in a lifeguard Jeep. "Where's Ryan?"

She pointed.

The mother of the children came running when she saw the kids, and he let them down when they met, stepping back as she smothered them with hugs and kisses.

The crowd still watching burst into applause.

Ryan saw Joe's Jeep alongside Camilla and Oliver, and came over.

"False alarm?" Joe asked.

Ryan shook his head. "She told them they couldn't have any cotton candy because it would rot their teeth, and then they disappeared."

"So you realized they were hiding from her?" Camilla said.

He nodded. "They're perfectly fine. Just very sticky."

"Gracias a dios," Joe said.

"That's what their mom said," Ryan said. "Will you call in the all-clear?"

"Sure, Captain. And congrats."

Ryan shrugged it off and turned to Camilla and Oliver. "I'm going to have to go in and write up the report. Sorry. It's my job."

"And you're good at your job."

He shook his head. "Not always. I got lucky."

"No. You're good. You figure things out more quickly than most people do." She stood in front of him there on the sand, gazing up at him. She couldn't get past that silly pride in him, and found it odd how offhand he was about what he'd just accomplished. She had never been this close to a cop before, and she'd never really thought about the endless stream of daily successes and failures they must go through, with people's welfare—their very lives—in the hands of very mortal and flawed men and women just doing their best. "I'm proud of you," she said tentatively.

He seemed startled. "Proud?" Again he seemed to shrug it off, like being praised made him uncomfortable. "It's nothing."

She wondered if he really believed that, and if that was why he was quitting. What he'd just done had saved that family hours of grief—at the least—and he brushed it off as nothing.

"What's wrong?" he asked. Her face must have gone from jubilant to dismayed in an instant.

"Are you sure you want to quit this job?"

He stepped back. "Yes," he said shortly. "Of course."

So she just nodded up at him. "Just asking. So Oliver and I are gonna go on all the rides while you write up your report."

"It's about time!" Oliver said. "First the roller coaster!"

"Whoa, young man," she said. "After that big lunch I think we'll start with something tamer and work our way up to the thrill rides after we've had a chance to digest everything."

Ryan gave her a thin smile. "Have fun." He walked away and was soon lost in the crowd.

She let Oliver lead her over to the rides.

~*~

Joe met him at the station when he was still finishing up his report.

Ryan looked up from the computer screen. "How's the Dennis research going?"

Joe threw his hat on the hat rack and went to his desk.

He returned with a stack of papers. "Quite a few possibles came in yesterday. I've been trying to eliminate 'em as quickly as possible—some have been apprehended, some don't match the description. But there's at least one bad one."

Ryan put in the last period on his report on the missing kids and turned away from the computer. "Bad one?"

"Yeah." Joe shuffled the papers while Ryan went over to the whiteboard and took out a pen.

"First one is in L.A. The timeline doesn't fit, but parents of a college coed reported she'd been ripped off by a con man who promised to marry her. The description's perfect, the guy's name was Dennis Harrison, but the crime was reported long before the pattern starts."

Ryan wrote it on the board under L.A. with a big question mark. "I'd hate to think there are two different Dennis H's running around California pulling this garbage. That's going to be hard to track." He took the copy of the complaint Joe handed him, read it quickly. "No wonder her dad was mad. He's an attorney, and saw right through the guy. I want to talk to the girl."

"I couldn't find any listing of the girl. Her name's Dora Favre."

Ryan wrote it on the board.

"But I've got a call in to the family. We'll see if there's any chance it's a match."

"Sounds like you've made some progress."

"Yeah. But the next one is the bad one."

"A death?"

"Yup. Accidental, of course."

Ryan looked at the board and shook his head. He had to solve this. "This isn't going to happen again. It stops here." This was his last weekend on the job. And Camilla kept talking about leaving town. He couldn't let her and Oliver leave until they solved this.

He turned back to Joe, who was looking at him quizzically. "Just thinking," he told him. "So what's the dead girl's story?"

"Not a girl."

Joe handed him a printout.

Ryan took it and examined it: "You have got to be kidding me. She drowned in a bathtub and nobody questioned it?" This was getting frustrating.

"They did an autopsy. She dropped a hairdryer into the tub while taking a bath and it shorted out."

"Right. This guy is screwing with the system now." He wanted to break something. This guy thought he could get away with anything. He was making a game out of killing innocent women.

"Who was she?" Joe gave him the report: she'd been a nurse, single woman, 43 years old, honored for her work with terminally ill children. Damn it. "Not the kind of woman who make a stupid mistake like that." He read the rest of the report, read between the lines: a caring woman who deserved happiness after an early failed marriage. Ripped off and murdered—she deserved justice. He had to get it for her.

"There's a picture for the board—and this is a find," added Joe. "We got a picture of the perp."

Ryan grabbed it from him. "Why didn't you say so? That's huge."

A grainy engagement photo had been printed in the Fresno paper. "Worthless," he said after a minute staring at it.

"It might help some?" Joe said.

Ryan shook his head. The nurse, Shirley Worth, gazed happily out of the photo. She had a fine-boned face, with a bit of gray hair showing. Next to her stood Dennis "Hastings." His head was turned sideways to face the woman, making him look like the adoring fiance he was pretending to be, and not coincidentally making identifying him from the picture nearly impossible. "Look how he posed in the picture."