Scene of the Crime: Widow Creek
“He’s not here. Maybe she did go off with him for a couple of days,” she said.
“Women have been known to momentarily lose their minds for love,” he replied.
“Not me,” she replied darkly. “Not ever.”
She started the car and pulled out of the driveway. “I’m going back into town to ask more questions, but I’ll be glad to drop you off at your place. I’m sure you have better things to do than spend the day with me.”
“Actually, I don’t.” There was nothing for him at home except the endless silence and loneliness that had gnawed at his heart for the past year. “If two of us are asking questions then we can get it done in half the time.”
She eyed him for a long moment and then shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
The remainder of the ride back into town was silent. Nick couldn’t begin to guess what she was thinking. He didn’t know her well enough, but he was surprised to realize that he wished he did.
They stayed in town throughout the afternoon, drifting into stores, stopping people on the streets and asking about Lauren. By five o’clock it was clear that Lauren hadn’t been seen by anyone since Tuesday.
Nick still held out hope that she and Bo had taken off on some sort of romantic connection, but he could see with each minute that passed that Lexie was growing more distraught.
She nibbled on her lower lip and looked tense enough to shatter if anyone would reach out and touch her. He finally called a halt. “It’s time to go home, Lexie,” he said. “You’ve done all you can do for today and you’re only getting the same answers over and over again.”
For a moment he thought she was going to protest, but then her shoulders fell and she nodded wearily. “You’re right. It’s been a long day and we aren’t getting anywhere.”
Once again she was quiet on the ride back to Lauren’s and Nick wished he had some encouraging words to give her. But there was no question that Lauren’s disappearance was troubling. As the day had worn on his hope that she’d gone off with Bo had faded. If that was the case, then why hadn’t she returned Lexie’s phone calls? Why didn’t she answer her cell phone? Surely she’d know that Lexie would be worried sick.
They had gotten one piece of information from one of Bo’s neighbors who told them that Bo had mentioned visiting some family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If Bo was with family in Oklahoma, then where was Lauren? The whole thing was growing more and more troubling with each minute that passed.
“Thanks for your help today,” Lexie said as she pulled up next to his truck in Lauren’s driveway. She stared at the house as if dreading going inside.
“Look, we haven’t eaten since breakfast. Why don’t I take you out to dinner?”
She turned to look at him. “Why would you want to do that?”
He shrugged. “Because I need to eat. You need to eat and we might as well eat together. Why don’t I pick you up in an hour?”
She turned and looked at the house again, a frown pulling together her delicately arched eyebrows. “I have a bad feeling about this, Nick. I don’t think she’s ever coming home.”
He reached across the seat and took her hand in his. “You can’t lose hope already,” he said softly. “Maybe she took off with Bo and her cell phone went dead. That would explain her not answering your calls.” Her hand felt small in his grasp.
She stared at him as if desperate to believe his words. “Maybe you’re right,” she finally conceded. She pulled her hand from his. “I guess I’ll see you in an hour.”
They both got out of her car and Nick stood by his truck and watched her walk to the house. There was no question that something about Lexie touched him in a place where nobody had touched him in a very long time.
There was an awkwardness about her that he found oddly charming. The pink streak in her hair spoke of a woman seeking attention and yet he’d never seen a woman who appeared more uncomfortable with any attention she garnered.
As he got into his truck he wondered what in the hell he was doing. He’d spent the day with her and now had invited her to dinner, as if he couldn’t get enough of her company.
And yet he knew nothing could come of his attraction to her. She’d given him no indication that she felt the same kind of attraction to him that he did for her, and even if she did he wouldn’t follow through on it.
He’d had the one great love of his life and he’d blown it and the consequences had been devastating. He was responsible for his wife’s suicide, and he’d never allow himself to get close to a woman again.
Chapter Three
She shouldn’t have agreed to dinner, Lexie thought as she entered the house. She shouldn’t have agreed to dinner with him. Nick Walker definitely made her slightly nervous, although she’d been grateful for his presence during the long day.
Still, she should have thanked him for his time and let it go at that. She didn’t need the distraction of spending time with a man who made her just a little bit breathless when he gazed at her, a man who made her feel a strange mix of both anxiety and anticipation.
And yet she didn’t consider calling him to tell him to forget dinner. She had to eat and she’d rather do it someplace else, anyplace else instead of in the horrible quiet of Lauren’s kitchen.
Before she did anything else she checked the answering machine in Lauren’s office to see if any calls had come in throughout the day. There was only one from somebody who had apparently stopped by for their appointment with Lauren while Lexie and Nick had been out. The woman, who said her name was Anna, only said that Precious had missed seeing Lauren and asked that Lauren call to reschedule the training session.
Lexie vaguely remembered that when she’d looked through the folder of contracts there had been one signed by an Anna. She made a mental note to contact the woman the next day and let her know that, at least at the moment, Lauren wasn’t available for taking appointments.
Zeus followed Lexie to the bathroom where she quickly took off her clothes and stepped into the shower. As she stood beneath the warm spray, her thoughts whirled over what they’d learned that day, which had been darned little.
She still hoped they would discover that Lauren had gone off someplace with Bo Richards and that she’d return home any minute, feeling guilty and sheepish at causing so much unwarranted worry. Maybe she’d made arrangements for somebody to take care of the dogs in her absence and whomever she’d hired had just blown off the job.
She got out of the shower and changed into a clean pair of jeans and a Kelly-green lightweight sweater. Zeus sat at her feet and watched as she applied a light coating of both mascara and lipstick. As she finished with her hair and turned away from the mirror he whined, as if protesting the fact that she was leaving him again.
She checked her watch and realized she had another twenty minutes before Nick would be back to get her. “Come on, baby, let’s see if I can find you a treat,” she said to the big dog, who followed close at her heels as she went into the kitchen.
She rummaged in the cabinets until she found a bag of pepperoni dog treats. Zeus woofed his approval and she tossed it to him, laughing as he caught it midair.
He ate it and then headed for the doggy door cut into the kitchen wall that led to the fenced in backyard. She moved to the window and watched as the dog romped around in the grass next to the other fenced area and then lifted his leg against a bush.
As much as she wanted to believe that her sister had taken off someplace, it just didn’t feel right. Zeus was her baby and Lexie couldn’t imagine Lauren just taking off for days and leaving him behind. She would have at least made arrangements for him to be fed and watered by somebody she trusted to do the job.
The ring of the doorbell pulled her from her thoughts. Nervous energy danced in her stomach as she hurried out of the kitchen to the front door.
Nick had showered and changed as well. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved gray dress shirt and, as if his physical attractiveness wasn’t enough, he smelled like clean, crisp cologne mixed with the faint residual scent of shaving cream.
“Ready?” he asked.
She nodded. “Just let me grab my purse.”
Her heart hammered with inexplicable quickness as she got her purse from the kitchen counter and then rejoined him at the front door. “Ready,” she said, knowing that Zeus would return to the house through the doggy door.
The evening was cool as they walked to his car. A slight breeze stirred the autumn leaves on the trees, forcing some of them to drift down to the ground.
Although in her heart for some reason she trusted Nick, in her head she wasn’t sure who she could trust. She was comforted by the fact that her purse held her gun and she wouldn’t be afraid to use it if things somehow went bad.
“There aren’t many eating choices in Widow Creek so I thought we’d drive the twenty minutes to Casey’s Corner. It’s a slightly bigger town and has a great Italian place,” he said as they pulled out of the driveway.
“Sounds fine,” she agreed. She wasn’t really hungry, hadn’t had an appetite since she’d discovered that Lauren was missing, but she knew she had to eat to keep up her strength.
For a few minutes they rode in silence. Lexie stared out the window at the encroaching evening shadows and anxiety pressed tight against her chest. She couldn’t believe another night was about to fall without her knowing if Lauren was okay.
“I just can’t imagine what’s happened to her,” she said as much to herself as to him. “I keep thinking maybe she’s been hit over the head and is lying someplace needing me to find her.”
He gave her a curious glance. “Why would you think that?”
She hesitated, knowing he would probably think she was crazy for what she was about to say. “Friday, when I got into my car after work to go home, I was struck with a blinding head pain.” She raised a hand to the back of her head, remembering that violent, momentary slice of pain. “It was there only a moment and then gone and I immediately wondered if maybe Lauren had gotten hurt.”
She dropped her hand back to her lap as a laugh of embarrassment escaped her. “It’s kind of a twin thing. One time Lauren broke her arm and I knew it before she told me because I felt her pain in my arm. Another time I broke my little toe and she called me to see what I’d done because her foot hurt.” She laughed again without any real humor. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“Not really, I saw a documentary one night about twins and the special bond they share. Must have been interesting growing up. Did you two pretend to be each other? Try to fool people?”
Lexie cast her gaze back out the window, her thoughts taking her backward in time. “No, never. From the very beginning, even though we were identical twins, we had completely different personalities. Lauren is an extrovert and I’ve always been painfully shy. I could have never made anyone believe that I was her.”
She turned to look at him, trying not to notice how handsome he looked with the last gasp of the sun lighting his features. “When we started high school there was Lauren and then there was the other twin. Nobody could remember my name, nobody really knew who I was. That’s when I decided to go Goth.”
He gave her an amused smile. “So you dressed in black, wore heavy makeup and spouted tragic poetry.”
She returned his smile. “Something like that.”
“And did that help the other kids get to know you better?”
“Not really. I went from being the ‘other’ twin to being the weird twin.” It all seemed so silly now, but at the time high school had been the most painful experience Lexie thought she’d ever live through. “It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized it was okay to embrace my quirkiness, to be a little different than everyone else.”
“We’re all quirky in one way or another. Some of us just show it more than others.”
“You don’t look quirky to me,” she observed.
He grinned. “Ah, but looks can be deceiving. I sleep in my socks.”
“That’s not quirky, that’s nerdy,” she replied and then gasped at her own words.
He laughed. “That’s what I like about you, Lexie. I have a feeling you always speak what’s on your mind. And you’re right, it is nerdy, but I always have nice warm feet.”
She averted her gaze back out the window and tried to cast out the vision of her in his bed, his warm feet against hers, slowly warming her body from her toes upward.
By that time they had reached the town of Casey’s Corner. It appeared to be a big sister of Widow Creek. The business area stretched over three short blocks and there were only a couple of empty storefronts.
He pulled up in front of Mama’s Italian Garden and as he parked she realized that the conversation they’d shared on the drive had momentarily taken her mind off Lauren. She suspected that’s what he’d intended and a warm gratefulness swelled in her chest.
It took only minutes for them to be seated at a table for two in the restaurant. It was a typical Italian setting, with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, a little candle flickering in the center of the table and a very limited wine list displayed between the salt and pepper shakers.
As Lexie picked up a menu her stomach rumbled with sudden hunger. Maybe it was the aroma of rich tomato sauce and fresh herbs that wafted in the air, or perhaps it was the conversation they’d shared that had relaxed her a bit on the drive to the restaurant.
“I eat here fairly often and can tell you that pretty much anything on the menu is good,” Nick said.
She was acutely conscious of his nearness at the small, intimate table. His eyes glowed almost silver in the candlelight and she found herself wondering what his lips might taste like.
She snapped her focus down to the menu, wondering if the stress of everything was making her lose her mind. She’d given up on men almost six months ago when she’d discovered that the man she’d believed was “the one” turned out to be “the rat.”
Michael Andrews had been a smooth-talking, hot-looking guy who had swept Lexie off her feet and away from her computer. They’d met through a mutual friend and they’d dated for six months. Lexie had thought they were moving toward an engagement, but instead she’d found out that Michael had a woman on the side, a cute, bubbly blonde who was all the things that Lexie wasn’t, that Lexie would never be.
“Face it, Lexie,” he had said. “You’re a little bit weird. It was fun for a while but I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it.”
She’d mentally dug a hole and buried her hopes for happily-ever-after in it and had returned to a social life that involved cyberfriends who didn’t have the capacity to hurt her.
Nick reminded her just a little bit of Michael. Maybe because he was good-looking and seemed to know exactly what she wanted to hear when she wanted to hear it.
The waitress appeared at their table and Nick ordered lasagna while Lexie opted for the manicotti. “Lauren told me the two of you were raised by your father,” he said once the waitress had departed.
She nodded. “Our mom died in a car accident when we were four. Dad was devastated, but he rose to the challenge of raising us.” A pang of grief touched her heart as she thought of her dad. He’d been her rock and she missed him desperately.
“He didn’t remarry?” Nick asked.
“No.” She picked up her water glass and took a drink, then continued, “He told us that mom was his one great love and he had no desire to be with anyone else.”
“Ah, the one arrow theory.”
She looked at him curiously. “One arrow theory?”
“Some people believe that Cupid has one true arrow for everyone. If you’re lucky when that arrow hits you, you’re with your soul mate and you’re together and happy for the rest of your life.”
“That’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t account for Cupid’s misfires,” she said dryly.
His eyes sparkled with a light that threatened to draw her into their depths. “But if you believe in the one arrow theory, Cupid doesn’t misfire, and people often misinterpret and think it’s a real arrow that has struck their heart. I assume from your comment that you haven’t been struck by Cupid’s magic arrow yet.”
Lexie thought about her relationship with Michael. Had she truly been in love with him? She’d certainly thought so at the time, but since their parting of ways, she had become equally certain that Michael hadn’t been her soul mate. In the very depths of her heart, she wasn’t sure there was a soul mate for her on the face of the earth.
“No,” she finally replied. “I don’t think Cupid’s arrow has connected with me.”
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the waitress with their orders. The food looked delicious and tasted just as good. “So, you said you grew up in Widow Creek. Have you always ranched?” she asked after enjoying several bites.
“Always,” he replied. “The house where I live was my parents’. They decided to enjoy early retirement in Florida and so I bought the place from them. I thought it would be nice for my kids to be raised in the same house where I’d had such happiness.”
“But you don’t have a wife so I’m assuming there are no children yet.”
His eyes darkened, the twinkling silver lights in the center dousing like candle flames that had been blown out. “I had a wife and almost had a child but then everything exploded apart.”
Lexie stared at him as grief stole over his handsome features. She set down her fork, the food in front of her temporarily forgotten. “What happened?”
For a moment he stared down at his plate as if lost in thought, and when he looked up at her again some of the grief had passed and weariness lined his face. “I was twenty-five when I married my high school sweetheart and we moved to my parents’ ranch to start our lives together. Danielle and I were a perfect couple. I worked the ranch and she worked in the mayor’s office and things were terrific. After a couple of years of marriage we decided it was time to start a family. It took almost three years for Danielle to get pregnant. We were so excited when it finally happened.”
He paused and took a sip of his water. Lexie felt a tightness in her chest. She knew something bad was coming and even though she’d only known him for a day her heart already ached for him.
As he placed his glass back on the table she noticed his fingers trembled slightly. “When Danielle was eight months pregnant she went in for her usual checkup and the doctor couldn’t hear the baby’s heartbeat. The doctor decided she needed to deliver immediately so Danielle was hospitalized and labor was induced. Ten hours later she delivered a beautiful stillborn baby girl.”
Lexie released a small gasp. “I’m so sorry.” She fought the impulse to reach across the table and take his hand in hers. “Did they know what caused it?”
He shook his head. “One of those tragic medical mysteries.” He straightened his shoulders. “Anyway, I took Danielle and we went home to get on with our lives.” He eyed Lexie intently, beseechingly. “She was so depressed, and I tried to do everything in my power to be supportive, but it seemed like no matter what I did or said it was wrong. After six months she told me she needed some space and she moved into an apartment in town.”
“So, you not only lost your child, but your wife as well,” Lexie said, working to speak around the lump in her throat.
He leaned back in the chair and released a deep sigh. “Actually, four months after the separation we began to see each other again.”
For a moment his features lifted and a small smile curved his lips. “It was just like old times and we started talking about a reconciliation. She seemed to have moved past her grief and was ready to start living again.” The smile dropped from his lips. “And then she disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Lexie’s heart slammed into her ribs. Was he implying that there was some sort of connection between his ex-wife and her sister?
“She was gone for three days and during that time I went to Gary Wendall to file a missing persons report.” His eyes darkened with a steely light. “And he basically told me the same thing he told you, that it wasn’t a crime for a grown woman to take off. He also told me that everyone knew Danielle and I had a troubled history and she’d left me and maybe she just didn’t want to be found by me. But I knew something was terribly wrong. Three days later her body was found in a motel room.”
Once again a small gasp escaped Lexie, but before she could say anything he continued. “She had a fatal gunshot wound to her head and it was officially ruled a suicide.”
Lexie searched his face. “But you didn’t believe the official ruling.”
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