Paranoid(21)

Slowing, his eyes trained on the man, Cade was ready to leap over a fence and dive into a nearby hedgerow until he spied the man withdraw a key fob and point it at a sedan parked on the street. The car bleeped, lights flashing as Cade called out, “Hey!”

About sixty, unshaven, and wearing glasses, he stopped and turned. Bushy gray eyebrows pulled together beneath the watch cap. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“Maybe.” Cade reached the car, a white Buick. With out-of-state plates. Idaho. “Do you live around here?”

“Eight or nine blocks over.” He hitched his chin toward the main road. “On Toulouse. Frank Quinn.”

“Cade Ryder.”

If the name meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. “I’m over here looking for my dog. A damned beagle. Got out again and took off after a squirrel or something, I don’t know.” Lines of worry furrowed his brow. “I’m going to have to get a tracker for him or build a brand-new fence. Don’t suppose you saw him.”

“Sorry.” Cade shook his head. “But I thought you might have been by that house, there, the cottage with the red shutters?”

“I was . . .”

“In the backyard?”

“No. But I peered over the fence.”

“Didn’t go through the gate?”

“Nope.” He scowled. “Why?”

“The gate was open.”

“Was it?” He rubbed his jaw, scraping his whiskers. “I don’t think so. I leaned against it, y’know, to look over.”

“But you didn’t unlatch it?”

“No. Didn’t want to risk trespassing. Well, unless I’d spied Monty. Then I would have.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“In that yard?”

“Coming out of the house?”

“Nah. And I would’ve noticed, cuz I was lookin’ for . . . well, speak of the devil—” His worried face cracked with a relieved smile as a small beagle appeared from the bushes of a house three doors down. Baying, he came running, bounding over puddles and splits in the sidewalk where tree roots had lifted and broken the concrete.

“So, the prodigal dog returns. You little pain in the ass!” Quinn said, leaning down for the dog to jump into his waiting arms. “You know you’re a bad boy?”

White-tipped tail wagging like a whipsaw, Monty licked Quinn’s silvery-stubbled jaw.

“Yeah, as if you was lookin’ fer me,” he said, opening the car door and setting the dog behind the wheel before shooing him over to the passenger side. “He’d drive if I let him, but I make him settle for shotgun.”

Laughing at his own joke, Quinn slid into the car, then drove off.

Innocent.

Cade made his way back to the house and his pickup parked out front. Maybe he’d imagined it all. Maybe his nerves were jangled from the article in the paper about Luke Hollander’s death, and then the homicide scene. Maybe everything was fine.

Then again, maybe not.

*

Rachel picked up a bouquet of daffodils from a roadside stand, then drove to the cemetery. The day was gray, which seemed fitting, and although the rain had subsided for the moment, the ground was sodden. The long, wet grass soaked the edges of her tennis shoes as she wended through the markers to find her brother’s headstone, marking the spot where his ashes had been buried.

A landscaper’s truck was parked on one of the gravel lanes at the perimeter of Edgewater Pioneer Cemetery, and a man with a shovel was digging around one of the pine trees that marked the periphery of the graveyard. In another tree a bold gray squirrel scolded from the pine’s gnarled branches.

Melinda Gaston was already here, a solemn figure standing on the rise where Luke’s ashes were buried. In a long black coat and boots, her head bent, she seemed older than her years. The fingers of one hand curled over the handle of a folded umbrella that she was using to prop herself up as she stared down at her son’s grave.

“Hey,” Rachel said as she approached and saw that her mother had been crying, her eyes red rimmed though she managed a thin smile.

“Hi.” Melinda blinked, then turned to stare again at the ground where a bouquet of white roses marked Luke’s grave.

Rachel added her drooping daffodils. “This is always such a hard day.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“I told myself I would stop coming.”

“But . . .”

“But I guess I’m not ready.” She cleared her throat and added, “I wonder if I’ll ever be.”

“I hope so.”

“Me too.”

A gust of wind, thick with moisture, blew past, toying with the hem of Melinda’s long coat, billowing its skirt around her slim legs. After a beat, her mother said, “You know that I don’t blame you, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Melinda had said as much over the years.

“Try believing it.”

“I do.”

Her mother eyed her. “Then you should quit blaming yourself.”

“I don’t.” The lie came easily.

One of Melinda’s eyebrows cocked, and though she still used the umbrella for support with one hand, she grabbed Rachel’s fingers with her other, then squeezed gently. “I felt that I lost two children that night, you know, both my son and daughter. Luke . . . he was gone, yes, but you retreated.”