Murder on the Horizon (6 page)

8

G
RACIE
stood in front of the mirror in the Gatehouse bathroom, glumly inspecting her face by the dim light of its single wall sconce. The right side of her nose was plum-purple with a twist of Taco Bell napkin protruding from the nostril. Her upper lip was as puffed out as if a cotton ball had been stuffed beneath. Dried blood was smeared across her cheek. “Lovely,” she said to her reflection. “Simply lovely.”

“Should have sidestepped that Mack truck, doodlebug.”

Gracie's eyes slid over to Allen leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed and displaying to their full glory solid fields of tattooed peacock feathers and solar systems. “Hardy har,” she said. “Ow.”

“Got ice?” Allen asked.

“Freezer trays were empty.”

The man disappeared from the doorway.

The front foyer door slammed, setting the little bell hanging above the door to tinkling. Outside in the parking lot, Allen's old Bronco roared to life and drove away.

Gracie withdrew the blood-soaked piece of napkin from
her nostril. “Ow, ow, ow.” A line of blood trickled down her upper lip. She dabbed at it with the napkin. “All ready for the prom.”

She leaned on the sink, staring into the mirror, contemplating her lame loser looks, which then progressed to an analysis of her life and how maybe it was time for a change, although what change, she had no idea. “Something,” she said to her nose. “Anything.”

The front office door slammed again and the little bell did its thing. Quick, heavy footsteps on carpet and Allen reappeared in the doorway. He held out a sandwich bag full of frozen peas and two white capsules. “Tylenol.”

“Thanks.” Gracie washed down the painkillers with a swig of water from the faucet. She used her thumbs to shape the peas into a concave bowl and placed the bag on the side of her face. “Owowowow!” She blew out a long, slow breath. “I need to sit.”

Allen stepped aside to let her pass, then followed her down the carpeted hallway to the Camp Manager's office in the back.

With a groan, Gracie eased herself down into the chair behind the desk. “I feel as if I aged fifty years in the past hour.” She bent forward to peer at a little pile of pink squares in the middle of the blotter. “What are these?”

Allen placed a pile of purchase orders beside the pink squares, then dropped into a metal folding chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Telephone messages. People freaked out that Timber Creek is burning down.”

“The fire's down the hill,” Gracie said, aware that her tone sounded suspiciously like a whine. “On the other side of the mountain.” She leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and rocked. “All right. Thanks. I'll call 'em all back. Give them a reassuring talking-to.”

“So, you gonna tell me what the heck happened?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself.”

Seconds passed.

“Some creep was whaling on his boy. Or trying to until the grandmother got in the way and got whaled on instead. I got in the middle. Well, not really in the middle . . .”

“On purpose?”

“What do you think?”

“Did you stop it?”

“I'd like to think I helped. Maybe a little.”

“Then it was worth it, right?”

“I guess.”

“So quitcher whining.”

Gracie stopped rocking and looked over the peas at Allen. “I wasn't—”

He winked at her.

She shot him a look and started rocking again.

Allen leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “So what happened? I want details, girlfriend.”

Gracie lifted her foot up onto the desk, saying by way of explanation, “Ankle's bothering me.” Skipping the Whitney fiasco and her argument with Ralph, she described the search for Baxter, finding the boy inside the boat, Gardner's bullying tactics, the boy's use of a racial slur, the father's enraged attack. “The grandmother wouldn't let me call the cops.” She shook her head. “Doesn't want to press charges. The guy just gets to drive away.” She stopped, staring off into space.

“Earth to Gracie,” Allen said.

Gracie retrieved her focus. “Sorry,” she said. “I was indulging myself in a little mental castration.”

“Well deserved.”

“The big man who pulled the dad away? The guy's brother-in-law, I think?”

“Yeah?”

“I've seen him before. Maybe even met him. He's kind of hard to forget. Pretty much the size of Alaska. But I can't place him. My head's still jangling from getting my bell rung. My . . . uh . . .”

“Clock cleaned?”

“Yeah, that.”

“I've heard of the family,” Allen said.

“Edwards.”

“They're the ones. Something ain't right there.” He rubbed his palms together. “I know you didn't ask for my advice, but I'm givin' it anyway. Stay away from that crowd. They're bad company.”

“Well, unless I run into 'em between the Wonder Bread and the mayonnaise at Stater Bros., I have no intention of seeing any of them again. Ever.” She glanced down at her desk. “I gotta get to work. I'm way behind on paperwork.”

Allen pushed himself to his feet. “Need anything? Give me a call.”

“Thanks.”

Allen disappeared up the hall. “Later, lovebug.”

“Later . . . whatever.” She dabbed her upper lip with a fingertip. “Ow.”

9

W
ITH
dark eyes sparkling, Rob smiled his perfect, golden smile. Then he lowered his head and kissed Gracie. Hands pressed flat against her lower back, he lifted her body against his.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Rob kissed her ear, tongue brushing the lobe and raising goose bumps along her arms. His hands wandered across her back, over her shoulders, the curve of her hip, fingers caressing, teasing. His soft lips moved down her throat, her shoulder, moving to her stomach and lower.

“Holy cow!” Gracie shot straight up in bed and tossed back the sheet. “Holy cow!” she yelled again, tipping herself off the camp mattress that served as her bed and ending up on hands and knees on the wooden floor, heavy hair draping both sides of her face. Her nose and upper lip throbbed.

Gracie shook her head slowly as if she could dislodge the images of Rob swirling inside her head. The feel of his mouth on hers, the warmth of his hands on her body was so
vivid, she wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to look up and see him sitting in her bed.

A faint whine drew her eyes to Minnie, who sat in the darkness six inches away.

“Ohhh, sorry I scared you, little girl,” Gracie said, reaching over to stroke the silky head. “Scared my friggin' self.”

She pushed herself to her feet and padded barefoot downstairs to the kitchen with the dog on her heels.

A glance at the clock above the doorway told her it was 5:18 a.m. “Too early to be up. Too late to go back to bed.” In the mudroom off the kitchen, she scooped a cup of dry dog food from a giant bag next to the back door and dropped it into Minnie's silver dish.

Back in the kitchen, she grabbed up the teakettle, filled it with exactly the right amount of water for two giant panda mugs of coffee. Then she smacked the kettle back on the stove and turned the burner on.

Hands gripping the edge of the stove, she stared at, but didn't see the blue flame. “Yeeesh,” she whispered. “That was real. Bad idea to watch a Rob movie. Very bad. Idiotic.”

Because just like that, Rob Christian was back inside her head. And her heart.

Rob Christian—British megastar, whose life Gracie had saved on a nightmare search the previous Thanksgiving, the man whose mere proximity set her body aflame from head to toe, the man with whom Gracie had played emotional cat and mouse until the last time she had seen him, when she had realized with a sudden onslaught of self-awareness that she was in love with him. She had left him still sleeping. No note. No explanation. Her inability, or unwillingness, to answer his calls and e-mails in the days following had apparently angered him so royally she hadn't heard from him in the months since. The mouse had gotten away. Or had he been the cat? Gracie didn't know and really didn't want to explore the question.

Fed and happy, Minnie pranced back into the kitchen.
“You ready to go out, little girl?” Gracie walked into the living room, pulled open the sliding glass door, and let Minnie out to do her morning doggie duty down in the fenced-in backyard.

Gracie had been able to tamp down to numbness her feelings for Rob. Or at least she had fooled herself into thinking so.

Now, with a single dream, months later, the feelings had roared back to the surface, knocking her feet out from under her.

Back in the kitchen, the kettle wound up to a whistle. Gracie scooped two heaping spoonfuls of Folgers Instant into the panda mug and stirred in the crystals. “So what am I going to do about him? Call him? E-mail him? How about nothing?”

A tinny piano played “Für Elise” on her cell phone charging on the counter.

Gracie looked up at the clock again. “Who's that this early in the morning?”

She made no move to answer the call. Anyone she wanted to talk to knew she had no cell coverage at the cabin. Unless she performed aerial gymnastics on the northwest corner of the deck railing, the good old-fashioned landline was the only way to have an intelligible conversation when she was at home.

The cell phone stopped ringing. Seconds later, the phone on the counter rang.

Gracie took a sip of scalding coffee, leaned over, and checked the caller ID. Three-one-three area code.

“Evelyn.” Once again, her mother had forgotten about the three-hour time difference between Michigan and California.

The phone kept ringing.

Gracie took another sip of coffee, relishing the liquid caffeine surging through her body. “To answer or not to answer.” It wasn't like she was doing much of anything else at the moment. She grabbed up the receiver. “Hello?”

“MoMo is dying!” her mother wailed.

Gracie blinked. “What?”

“MoMo. He's dying. It's vascular disease. The doctors don't give him very long.”

Gracie set her mug on the kitchen table and sank down onto one of the ladder-backed chairs.

“You need to come to Detroit,” her mother continued in a quivering voice. She blew her nose loudly, then said, “He wants to see you.”

Quick! Think of an excuse!
“I can't. I . . . have a dog now.”
Yeah, that's it. A dog.

“Put the dog in a kennel, for Christ's sake! It's a dog, not a child.”

“And I have a job now, Mother. A good one. I'm managing a camp. I can't just take—”

“So take the time off. It'd only be a couple of— Stop it, you naughty girl!”

“Wha . . . ?”

“No. It's that stupid Corky. Ridiculous creature. Take the time off, Grace Louise. Surely you can do that for Morris.”

Memories rushed back. Morris. The man her mother had married two years after Gracie's own beloved father suddenly, without note or explanation, had left them. Morris. The man who had inherited an eleven-year-old tomboy filled with anger and resentment. The man who had beaten her and her half siblings. The man who had pressed the glowing end of a cigar to the soft skin of her ribs. The man whose toupee Gracie, years later, had shot off with a shotgun after he had broken her mother's arm. The man who, in the ensuing verbal altercation, her mother had defended, so wounding Gracie that she had quit her high-paying job as an ad exec, sold her house, given away her belongings, and traveled two-thirds of the way across the country to Timber Creek, California.

That man was dying.

“Surely you can do that for Morris,” her mother had said.

What Gracie wanted to do for Morris was help him along a little by chucking him out of a tenth-floor window.

Reminding herself that her mother was losing her husband, Gracie took in a deep, cleansing breath. “I really can't, Mother. I have a group in camp until tomorrow and another one coming in on Saturday after lunch. I have to be here.” She tacked on, “I'm really sorry.”

Beep! Beep! Beep! The shrill tones of her SAR pager filtered down from her loft bedroom.

“I have a callout,” Gracie said. “I need to hang up now.”

“A what?”

“A Search and Rescue callout. My pager just went off.”

“I thought you had quit that nonsense.”

“Nope.”

Phone to her ear, but barely listening, Gracie took the stairs to the loft two at a time. She grabbed up the pager from the bedside stand. Squinted at the tiny neon screen.
MISSING JUVENILE. SHORT TEAM
. TRACKERS ONLY.

“Shit, Baxter. Not again.”

“What?” came Evelyn's voice over the line.

“Mother, I have to go. I'll talk to you later.”

“I'm buying you an airline ticket.”

“Don't. Please.”

“I'll send you the information.”

“Mother. No.”

“I won't take no for an answer.”

“Gottagobye.” Gracie thumbed End, listened for the dial tone, pressed Talk, dialed the number for the SO squad room, and said, “Gracie Kinkaid. ETA fifteen minutes.”

*   *   *

GRACIE LOOKED LEFT.
Then right. Then left again. No traffic coming. She stomped down on the accelerator and zoomed out onto the boulevard, the main artery running east and west the entire length of the Timber Creek valley and along the southern shore of Timber Lake.

She checked her watch. To haul on uniform shirt, pants, socks, and liners and lace up her hiking boots, run downstairs,
check that Minnie had enough water out back, gather up her gear, run out to the truck, back down the driveway, and careen down Arcturus to the main boulevard had taken her less than seven minutes. “Record time,” she said aloud. “And now . . . hardly any traffic. For once, I won't be the last one there.” With only those with tracking capabilities responding, she might even been the first. In fact, she might be the only one to show up. One never knew.

She watched the speedometer inch upward to sixty, then held it there. As the Ranger glided around the curves leading into town, Gracie mentally planned what steps she would take upon her arrival. Park. Run into the SO. Grab a sign-in sheet. Sign her name. Jog back to the SAR storage room. Grab the Pelican case with the HTs. If Warren wasn't there—he wasn't a tracker—grab the keys to the Suburban off the hook on the wall. Run outside and across to the SAR—

Beep! Beep! Beep!

“Really?” Gracie said. “They called it off?” She unclipped the pager from her waistband and read the screen. “All SAR stand down. Juvenile located.”

“Well, crap. I'm already here.” She braked and turned right into the SO parking lot. “And no one else is here yet. Boo.” She pulled into a spot and stopped, leaving the engine running. Rather than going into the SO and risking another run-in with Gardner, she called the number for Dispatch on her cell phone. When Gracie identified herself as Search and Rescue, the woman confirmed that the missing juvenile was indeed Baxter Edwards.

“What happened?” Gracie asked.

“He went missing from the parents' yesterday evening,” the Dispatcher told her. “Grandma reported him missing early this morning. He showed up at her house about ten minutes ago.”

*   *   *

STUFFING THE TRUCK
keys into an outer pocket of her pants, Gracie walked into the Stater Bros. grocery store.
Still in field uniform—orange shirt and camo pants, short, black gaiters over hiking boots, baseball cap with the Department chevron on the front and her name in orange script on one side, she felt as conspicuous as a jack-o'-lantern at an Easter egg hunt, swiveling heads and drawing curious looks as she sauntered the aisles.

She picked up a jumbo jar of Folgers Instant, another of Jif creamy peanut butter, plus three six-packs of PayDay candy bars and took her place in line in the express aisle behind a middle-aged woman with an enormous derriere, wearing pants so tight she looked as if she had been dipped in white pant. Trying to look everywhere except at the woman's dimpled backside, Gracie dumped her groceries on the conveyor belt, picked out a pack of grape bubble gum from the impulse-buy shelf, and threw it on after, then focused on the rack of magazines at the end of the aisle.

Her eyebrows shot up. Her jaw dropped.

On the front page of the
Star
, in living color, was a picture of Rob, dressed in a tuxedo and looking as dazzlingly gorgeous as ever. On his arm was a young woman—blond,equally gorgeous, and bursting out of a slinky silver dress that looked as if it had been created with less fabric than the hand towel in Gracie's kitchen.

Beneath the picture, headlines screamed,
ENGAGED!

“He's getting married?” Gracie yelled.

The woman with the painted-on pants turned around, and said, “A tragedy, right? My heart's broken.”

The groceries moved forward.

Gracie snatched the magazine out of the rack and riffled through it, looking for the accompanying article. She found and scanned it.

According to the article, Rob had indeed, just the day before, announced his upcoming nuptials. Farther down in the column, her own name jumped out at her. “What the—?” She read:
When asked about his alleged romance with
Grace Kinkaid, the woman who rescued him the previous Thanksgiving, Christian responded, “She's a terrific girl.”

“Girl!”

“Fifteen sixty-two,” the young, male cashier said in a bored voice to the woman in line ahead.

“She'll always hold a special place in my heart,”
Gracie read.
“We're still very close. She's like a sister to me.”

“Sister!”
Gracie wadded up the entire tabloid down to the size of a basketball and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the register opposite. Then she grabbed the rest of the tabloids on the rack and stuffed them in after.

“Hey!” the cashier hazarded. “You can't do that.”

“I just did,” Gracie growled. She dug a twenty and a ten out of the side pocket of her pants and slapped the bills on the belt. Gathering up her groceries in her arms, she squeezed past the enormous derriere whose owner was still fiddling in her purse, and stalked out of the store.

“A sister?” she stormed. “Three months ago he tells me he loves me. Now I'm his friggin' sister?” She strode across the parking lot, practically spitting nails from her mouth. “What the hell? What the
hell
!” She stopped next to the Ranger, cradling the groceries with one arm and anchoring them with her chin, and hauled her keys out of her pants pocket.

Something slammed into Gracie from the side. With an “Oof!” she bounced off the truck window, slid along the fender, and crashed down onto the nubbly asphalt. PayDays and gum smacked the pavement. The Folgers and Jif rolled in opposite directions across the parking lot.

“Uhhh,” Gracie groaned, prone on the asphalt. “Hell's b— . . .”

“So it is you, you bitch,” a husky female voice spat.

Gracie squinted up to see someone standing over her, silhouetted against the sky. “Well, I'm certainly glad you shoved me because it was me,” she grunted, trying to sit up, “And not because it was someone you didn't know.” Brushing the
stinging grit from the palms of her hands, she pushed herself to one knee, then to her feet.