Busted (Promise Harbor Wedding)(16)

His throat tightened up and he couldn’t make himself take another step inside the room.

“He’s sleeping.”

Jackson turned toward the voice. A woman in her midfifties emerged from the room across the hall. She crossed to him and nudged the door open enough to give him a peek inside.

He wished to hell she hadn’t.

His first instinct was to tell her there had to be some mistake. Mitch Stone had been a big, burly man, too much life in him to ever be confined to a meager hospital bed that nearly swallowed him.

Christ.

She closed the door and offered a friendly smile. “I hope you’ll come back tomorrow. He’s been talking about you more than usual lately.”

Jackson managed a nod, staring hard at the closed door for a long moment.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Mitch Stone was not supposed to go like this. Not fading away while cancer ravaged his body.

Frustration tore at Jackson. Something else that was beyond his control.

He made it to his car, holding on to the helpless emotion lodged in his chest, then lashed out. The hood of his car vibrated under the force of his fist, the pain barely penetrating his thoughts.

Palms down on the car, he dragged in a deep breath, then another. And another.

He dug out his keys and slid behind the wheel, cranking the music until it drowned out everything else. The drive back to his parents’ wasn’t long enough to settle the relentless ache wedged between his lungs. He tried watching television for a couple hours, then gave up, contemplating heading to Stone’s to see if Matt was there. In the end he decided to go for a run.

The sun was dropping behind the trees when he cranked his iPod up until he couldn’t even hear himself think, and ran until his muscles burned and his knee throbbed. By that time his thoughts had returned once more to Hayley.

She was a whirlwind. Cool, calm and collected cop meets animal activist and loyal best friend with a mouth hot enough to melt a polar ice cap.

And just like that running became uncomfortable. He slowed to a walk, a little annoyed that something as simple as a memory of one kiss could make him harder than a sixteen-year-old flipping through a borrowed Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

God damn.

He turned down a dead-end street. Spotting the lake through the trees should have made him feel like he was breathing through a straw all over again. Instead he felt himself grinning, reminded of winters he’d played hockey on that lake in mid-January.

Fifty feet to the southeast of the house on the lake was exactly what he needed. He didn’t know what he’d do with it exactly, but something.

The house was dark and he found the shed unlocked like always. Coach hadn’t locked it for as long as he could remember. The light switch inside worked for about half a second then fizzled out, plunging him back into darkness.

He threw both doors wide open, relying on the light from the full moon. A flashlight would have made his search go that much faster, but he couldn’t see one, naturally. Crates of hockey gear of all kinds—gloves, helmets, skates, pads, tape—spilled from boxes stacked higher than Jackson.

He tripped over stuff on the floor and bumped into a tool bench hard enough to knock loose whatever had been hanging on the wall. Squinting to make out the shapes in the dark, he replaced the tools one by one, almost losing a finger to a hatchet or small ax.

Wouldn’t that just be the perfect way to end the day?

Someone really needed to go through this stuff. It was both a hockey enthusiast’s dream and an organizational nightmare all rolled into one. How Coach ever found anything in this chaos made Jackson’s head spin.

Movement to his left had him turning around, ax still in his hand, and then something slammed into him and all he could do was yell.





Chapter Five


“Our perp is getting bolder. He didn’t even wait for it to get dark this time.”

Hayley crouched opposite one of the other detectives. Brian Gauthier was pushing fifty, had been divorced three times and was addicted to lemon-filled doughnuts, and lucky for her, she’d gotten to stare at the gel-like stain on his shirt from said addiction for the past ten minutes.

After Jackson drove away, she’d called her partner back, filling him in on the wedding disaster, then decided she should clean her neglected apartment. When that wasn’t enough to keep him mind of Jackson, she’d changed into her favorite pair of ripped jeans and an old T-shirt, planning to head back to her gramps’ to get more painting done. She hadn’t made it as far as her front door when the call came in about another robbery.

Offering to assist whoever was already on-site had seemed like the perfect distraction after the past twenty-four hours. Things couldn’t possibly get any more surreal.

“You and that hockey player gonna shack up?”

Apparently she was wrong.

Ignoring Gauthier’s question, she glanced from the shallow impression in the mud next to the basement window, and across the private backyard.

Being the last house on the cul-de-sac, the backyard was only visible to the neighbors on one side. The woods bordering the far side of the property left plenty of cover for the perpetrator to get into the yard virtually undetected.

The couple who owned the two-story brick home had been guests at Allie and Josh’s wedding—along with half the town, it seemed—and then had dinner with friends instead of attending the reception. Their arrival had startled the thief, and the couple heard him flee the house, leaving the back door open behind him.

“What alarm company do they use?”

“Big company out of Boston,” Gauthier answered. He moved to the basement window, careful not to disturb the footprint.

Retracing what she’d guessed might have been their guy’s path, she kept her eyes open for any other evidence that would give them the break they needed to nail his ass to the wall. Like every other scene, though, there wasn’t much to go on.

She returned to Gauthier’s side as he picked at the dried lemon on his shirt. Hayley had the strong suspicion he would have lifted his shirt to lick at the stain if she hadn’t been standing there.

“I’m going to check the basement.”

Gauthier didn’t look up from his shirt. “I’ll see if the neighbors saw anything.”

“Okay.” Hayley let herself in the back door, relieved the couple had gone to the neighbors so they wouldn’t be in the way. Hayley didn’t want to be in their house any more than they probably wanted her there, but that just came with the job.

Nothing looked to have been disturbed in the kitchen. Their thief hadn’t wasted precious time here. He’d probably assumed he’d have much better luck with the owners’ home office and upstairs bedrooms.

The owners had already turned on the basement light, making the likelihood of getting a viable print from the switch unlikely, assuming their guy had turned on any unnecessary light. She doubted it though. Would have drawn too much attention.

The space was empty except for a handful of boxes and an old exercise bike. The window used to gain entry into the house had been left unlocked. Since their perpetrator hadn’t needed to smash his way into any of the previous properties, she was betting the window had been unlocked to begin with. Not everyone paid attention to the warnings to keep their cars and houses locked.

“Any viable prints?”

Hayley jumped at the sound of Gauthier’s voice. “Jesus, Brian. How does a linebacker like you get down those stairs without making a peep?”

“Living with a ghost is making you twitchy, Stone.”

She rolled her eyes knowing full well where this was headed. Thanks to Matt and his tendency to exaggerate at work—which then became gospel to anyone drinking enough not to see right through his tall tales—half the people in Promise Harbor were convinced her nan’s spirit haunted Gramps’s house.

One stuck window and a few door slams did not a ghost make in Hayley’s opinion, but people had way too much fun joking about it for Hayley to convince them otherwise.

“You’d think you would be used to being taken by surprise,” Brian continued. “Matt says he can’t even sleep in the place anymore.”

“Matt also believes in Bigfoot and alien abductions.”

Brian waved her off. “He just says that stuff to entertain folks.”

Hayley didn’t disagree, but she knew full well he hadn’t entirely outgrown his childhood fascination with Sasquatch sightings and little green men.

“You think you’ll actually be able to sell that place with it being haunted?”

“It’s not haunted.” Hayley studied the panes of glass and window casing, then branched out to see if they’d missed anything else. “I thought you were going to talk to the neighbors.”

If Hayley had her way, she wouldn’t be selling the place at all. But with her gramps’s rising health costs and stubborn refusal to let anyone else help with the bills, they didn’t have any choice but to sell.