Broken Bonds
“Let’s just say a Good Samaritan came along and saved me. I’ll explain later.”
At that, he turned to look at Char. Tears in his eyes, he pressed his lips tight together and nodded at her. The moment was somehow intimate, as if he had embraced her. Char cleared her throat and turned back to the road.
“Yeah,” Matt told Jen, to answer another question. “You’d better call Royce, let him know, though he’s due in tomorrow. And check the insurance papers on the truck. No, I’ll call you later or be back when I can. Calm down. I’m okay. Right. Bye.
“Thanks,” he told Char, ending the call and putting the phone in the storage space between the two seats. “For the phone and for everything. I appreciate your being much calmer than she is.”
She was tempted to ask if Jen was his assistant or—or what. He didn’t have a ring on his left hand, but you never knew. And “Good Samaritan” or not, it was none of her business. Then, past the next curve downward, something caught her eye.
“Oh! Look, down there! I think that’s your truck in that rocky ravine.”
They had looked over the edge from the crash site, but the jutting rocks and trees below had hidden the wreck. He unfastened his seat belt and leaned toward her to look. “You’re right,” he said, so close his breath fanned the loose strands of hair by her right earlobe. “Can you pull over, so I can look down? I hope that didn’t start a fire. Just got it filled up with gas.”
She stopped the truck, and they both got out to peer over the rim of rock. He reached for her wrist, then her hand, whether to keep her safe or himself sane, she wasn’t sure. When they saw the battered truck below, she gasped, and he swore under his breath. A fire had blackened the foliage around it like an ink spill. A crooked finger of dark smoke pointed upward from the wreck.
“Thank God it didn’t hit a house, or start a rock slide,” he said, his voice rough. “Maybe the guy who pushed it off was just looking for trouble with anyone, but what if someone wants me gone—down there in that?”
He shuddered and gripped her wrist harder, until she pulled him gently away from the precipice. “No, it’s not the vehicle I always drive,” he said, as if trying to reassure himself. “My senior partner and his driver sometimes use it, but they’re out of town.”
“Then maybe he was the target. I mean, isn’t he the one helping to finance all the fracking around Cold Creek? Not everyone’s in favor of that.”
“Don’t I know.”
Char tried to remember things he said so that she could tell Gabe if Matt didn’t recall everything later. He did have a scrape on the side of his head, though he seemed clear-minded. “Sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” she murmured, almost to herself, as they climbed back in her truck.
“Glad you didn’t, or you could have been hurt. What a way to meet.”
There was another strange, silent moment between them as she put the truck in gear and they started down again. “There is a Navajo saying, ‘If you save someone’s life, you feel responsible for them.’ But I didn’t really save yours. You got out on your own and—”
“But I had you to give me courage and to hold on to.”
To have and to hold from this day forward. The words to the wedding vows danced through Char’s head, since she’d been helping her sister Kate memorize them for her December wedding.
They both jolted when a black truck drove toward them just where the one-lane road became two near the foot of the mountain. It was fracking rig workers heading up, two in the cab and four in the truck bed. They tossed beer cans out into the bushes as they roared past. Some folks around here were afraid these people would hurt the natural environment, corrupt the rural way of life. But even before the fracking hit here, Char knew some locals resented the so-called rich folk who built luxury getaway homes or weekend places at Lake Azure. As the face man for that ritzy area, Matt Rowan could have a lot of enemies, and black pickup trucks were thick as thieves around here.
“The guys in the back of that truck are wearing black stocking caps,” Matt said, craning around to look back at them. “I’m pretty sure my attacker wore a ski mask, but it could have been almost anyone who nearly sent me over the edge. And I’m going to find out who and why if it’s the last thing I do.”
Char wished he hadn’t put it that way. Back on curves and hilly roads instead of hairpin turns on peaks, she drove them toward town.
* * *
“Again, I can’t thank you enough,” Matt told her as he got out of her truck and hurried around to open her door in the small parking lot next to the sheriff’s office on Main Street in Cold Creek.
He was feeling worse—a sudden limp caused by a leg cramp, sore muscles all over, maybe from holding himself so tense as well as his leap for life. He was also mad as hell, but he was trying to control his fury around this woman, not take things out on her.
He figured that Charlene Lockwood was probably midtwenties to his midthirties. She was so petite next to his six-foot height. Slender, almost delicate looking, and yet she seemed as sturdy as they come, despite hands gripping the steering wheel all the way down the mountain. She emanated determination, but seemed strangely vulnerable, which, as bad as he felt, hit him like a sledgehammer. She was a looker in a saucy way with her pert nose, blue eyes and full mouth framed by sun-streaked windblown brown hair. She had a heart-shaped face and, obviously, a big heart. And no ring on her left hand, though he had more important things to worry about right now.
Sheriff McCabe came barreling out the front door of the police station as they started toward it. “Hey, Char,” he called. “Thought you were visiting mountain kids truant from school. Listen, Tess and I don’t want you to move out, really. Oh, Matt. Things okay out at Lake Azure? You look— Are you okay, Matt? Are you and Char here together?”
“Gabe, someone shoved his truck off a cliff on Pinecrest Mountain where I was visiting a family. I found him just before it went over.”
Matt looked at Char. He suddenly felt dizzy. Yeah, that had happened to him. He was not someone else watching it from afar. “I’d better sit down,” he said, taking Char’s arm because that seemed natural now. “Sheriff, maybe she can come in with me—to tell at least the part she saw. I like to think I would rescue a fair maiden in distress, but it was the other way around.”
Matt realized he was staring only at Char, too long, too close. She stared back at him. The sheriff cleared his throat.
“Let’s go inside. You just caught me in time, but what I had to do can wait. How about I talk to you first, Matt, and then interview Char for her perspective on all this after? Do you need a doctor?”
“Not right now. I need answers.”
“Let’s work on that,” the sheriff said as he put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and opened the door he’d just exited. “Are you claiming it wasn’t an accident, but intentional? Did you get a license plate, a description of the driver?”
Matt shook his head, then looked back to make sure Char had come in, too. She was talking to the receptionist, sinking into a chair.
“It had to be a planned attack,” he told the sheriff. “I’m not certain if I was the target or my senior partner, since I was in the company truck he and his driver sometimes use when he’s in town and visits his fracking sites. I’ve never been so shocked or scared in all my life—which I almost lost.”
He took a last glance at Char down the hall, just as she looked up at him and their eyes met again. A terrible day, he thought, but something good had come from it, too.
3
Matt turned down Sheriff McCabe’s offer of a doctor but did take him up on using the restroom down the hall. He leaned stiff-armed on the basin and stared at himself in the mirror. A mess. But blessed. Blessed to be alive. And, despite the terrible situation, to have met the only woman he’d felt an instant attraction to for a long time. And to have looked like this. Oh, hell, worse than that. Some local lunatic might be out to kill him and he didn’t have a clue who.
He washed up with water and the metal dispenser’s liquid soap and dried his face and hands with paper towels. If that idiot in the black pickup with the half-hidden face had been after him, why? He must have been followed. Maybe he was being watched.
Matt walked into the sheriff’s office and sat down in a chair across the cluttered desk from Sheriff McCord. “You still okay?” the sheriff asked. “Here, I got you some coffee and, sorry if that doughnut’s stale, but thought you might need to eat something.”
“What about Charlene? Is she okay?”
“As you may know, I’m married to her younger sister, and let me tell you, the Lockwood girls are tough cookies. Char said she was glad she was there for you.”
“She’s been great, though I can tell she doesn’t like driving up there. She lived out West, but not in the mountains, I guess.”
“She was a social worker near the Navajo Reservation for several years, an advocate for juveniles and families in the outlying areas. She left recently, still misses it, I think, though she’s glad to be back with her sisters and helping kids here. At first, she worked for my wife, Tess, at her day care center. She also helped her other sister, Kate, with her archaeological dig at Mason Mound, sifting soil for ancient Adena bone fragments.”
“So, she lives with you and Tess but is moving out?”
Gabe nodded and took a swig of his coffee. “Charlene Lockwood’s stubborn as they come. We tried to talk her out of it but she’s got a cabin rented, not so far from your area.”
Matt sat up straighter. That sounded good. He didn’t want to seem too pushy. He owed her dinner at the very least. Probably he owed her his life. If she hadn’t arrived and tried to help him, he might not have tried to get out when he did.
“So,” Gabe said, pulling out a piece of paper and taking a pen off his desk, “tell me from the beginning what happened today up on Pinecrest, any and every detail. Then, as soon as my deputy runs you home, he and I will find the site of the wreck and take a good look at it. I’ll interview Char later.”
“Char spotted the wreck. I ought to hire her as a bodyguard— Just kidding,” he added when Gabe’s eyebrows shot up. “You evidently think she’s the one who needs that at her new cabin.”
Gabe leveled a long look at him. “With all the outsiders in town, right. She’s very idealistic, out to help anyone, especially poor kids.”
Maybe he had overstepped, Matt thought. He was a far cry from poor kids, and he hadn’t felt idealistic in years. Nose to grindstone, eye on the stock market and building up a big investment in the people and places of Lake Azure. He supposed, especially compared to the locals around here, he was a driven workaholic.
“Okay. Let me tell you what happened from the beginning,” he said, and figured he’d start with the fact he was taking things he’d bought for Woody McKitrick’s family, things that were now so much ash at the bottom of a ravine where he could have ended up the same way.
* * *
Char was disappointed when Gabe called his receptionist in the main office to say that she should go home and he’d get her story tonight. She wanted to see how Matt was doing now, maybe drive him to Lake Azure. But Gabe was going to take Matt and Jace Miller, his deputy, to see the burned wreck of the Lake Azure truck, then he’d see that Matt got home. Matt had insisted on going to the collision and crash site, too.
She headed to Gabe and Tess’s big, old, recently renovated house with its newly built preschool child care center addition in front. Char had stayed first with her older sister, Kate, at her fiancé Grant Mason’s large home, but the Adena dig team—college students from Ohio State University—were in and out so much it was like an open house.
But now, she’d found an inexpensive three-room rental log house, built as a hunting cabin, ironically located not too far from where Matt must live since it overlooked the Lake Azure area. The place had a great view, not to mention a fireplace, two space heaters, electricity and indoor plumbing. The man who owned it had suffered a heart attack and wouldn’t be hunting—or just retreating to his man cave, as his wife had put it—until next year. Char didn’t know much about him except that he owned the large racetrack outside of Columbus but had a big holiday home near Lake Azure.
“Tess, I’m home! It’s just me. Gabe will be home late again!” she called as she went in the back kitchen door. The fourteen kids at the growing day care would have all left by now.
“Are you all right?” Tess cried, rushing into the kitchen. “Gabe called and said you’d rescued Matt Rowan from a burning truck up on Pinecrest!”
“It wasn’t burning until after he got out of it and it went over the cliff.”
“Oh, that’s terrible! Thank God you were there. You look like you’ve been through the mill. Take a rest and wash up.”
Tess gave Char a hug and helped her take her jacket off as if she were one of the preschoolers. The two of them had their zeal for protecting kids in common, despite their different personalities and looks. They were the same height at five foot six and both had blue eyes, but Tess had blond, chin-length hair while Char’s was brown with natural gold highlights. Tess looked a lot more frail and had been through real-life traumas that made Char’s being threatened and forced to leave her dream job out West seem minor. As for character traits, Char figured some people thought she was too outgoing, maybe pushy. She had to admit she was a lot more stubborn than Tess, and mouthier, too, but what was right was right and she intended to say so.
While Char went to the bathroom, Tess fixed them both tea. Char had seen she had the slow cooker going with some sort of dinner in it—hopefully not a third helping of squirrel stew, but she knew better. Since Tess and Gabe’s honeymoon in France, her younger sister had been serving French cuisine, which seemed pretty odd around here, though maybe not over at Lake Azure on the other side of town. After a quick change of clothes, Char joined her sister in the large kitchen.
“Char, are you listening? I said, please don’t feel you have to move out. Gabe and I don’t think that cabin in the woods is such a good idea, especially with the roustabout types pouring in here to work the fracking rigs and drive the water and oil trucks.”
“You’ve both been great, but this is the first year of your marriage and Gabe doesn’t need a sister-in-law guest on cozy nights this winter. Besides, the cabin’s not really in the woods. I’ll drive you up to see it. My cell phone works there, and it’s furnished, though I’ll take my own bedding and linens. I’m not far off the road and can be down to town in ten minutes—and the view is of Lake Azure, no less.”
“All right, all right,” Tess said, gripping her mug. “I know not to argue when your mind’s made up, but I think you should at least learn to shoot a gun for protection. Gabe could teach you.”
“If I lived out West in peace without one, I can do the same here. There are enough people around with guns. I’m having the locks changed on the doors, and the windows have latches. It’s almost a luxury cabin, so don’t worry.”
“You know I do—still. But with Gabe, I’m doing better, really. I knew his job was part of the marriage. It’s just I worry about some of my students, especially if they come from broken homes. I’m hardly attracting the Lake Azure kids who have nannies or stay-at-home moms who carpool their kids to school or even send the older ones to private schools.”
“And you worry about your older sisters,” Char added as she reached out to squeeze Tess’s shoulder. Tess still bore the psychological scars of having been abducted as a child. Char’s thoughts flew to little Penny up on the mountain with her box of crayons clutched in her hand and her plea to be “fetched” for school.
“You know,” Tess said, “we’ve still got an hour of daylight left, and, like you said, Gabe will be late. How about I pour our tea into insulated cups and we drive up to look at your rental?”
“I don’t have a key yet.”
“We’ll just peek in the windows. Before Gabe called about what happened to you, I was going to drive to the Hear Ye cult gate and ask to see Gracie. She didn’t look good when I saw her at the Saturday Harvest Market, and I barely got a word in with her since they guard each other so tight. But maybe we can both try to see her tomorrow and you can show me the cabin now—unless you’re too shook up from rescuing a man in distress. Matt’s handsome, isn’t he?”
“That was the least of my thoughts. He was more dinged up than I looked. And scared, though he hid it well. By the way, the second stop I had today was not Handsome Hollow like I told you at breakfast but Hanson Hollow, named for the several generations of the Hanson family living there. It’s amazing the Appalachian project even has a record of them and their kids since they live way up there.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. I’ve seen Matthew Rowan. He gave a sort of PR talk at church after his association paid for the town’s Labor Day picnic this year. What did you think of him?”
“I thought a lot of him—but I don’t want to think more of him, okay? Stop looking at me that way and never mind matchmaking. If you want to see the cabin, how about you drive? My hands ache from gripping the steering wheel today.”
“Which won’t stop you one bit from visiting mountain cabins or living in one,” Tess said with a sigh as she jumped up to pour their tea into travel cups. “Oh, no, not loves-a-challenge, champion-of-the-poor Charlene Lockwood.”
“Sister of the terrific but terrible Tess Lockwood McCabe and Dr. Kathryn, dig-up-those-old-bodies, Lockwood. Well, wish I hadn’t put it quite like that. Someone did try to kill Matt Rowan today—if they weren’t trying to murder his senior partner who sometimes uses that truck. Matt said he has a driver. Can you imagine? A chauffeur in a truck in Cold Creek? You know, Royce Flemming is not only the money man behind Lake Azure but, the Environmental Expansion Company, alias fracking for dollars.”
“Speaking of which, I guess you and Matt Rowan would be like oil and water in your lifestyles and goals, at least. But they say opposites attract.”
Char heaved a huge sigh. “I didn’t think of any of that, just that he needed help. I liked him, and he kind of ended up helping me, too, because he was so grateful, that’s all. I’ve met enough controlling, overly aggressive men in my day, and if people think that makes a man masculine, they’re crazy.”
“That’s all with him, then? The end? Okay, okay, I’ll keep my mouth shut. If I know you, you’ll overlook what a hunk—a wealthy one—he is and just try to hit him up for a donation to the Appalachian Children Poverty fund. I’ll lock up and let’s go.”
* * *
The sheriff, Deputy Jace Miller and Matt stared at the shattered, burned-out hulk of the Lake Azure pickup. Matt shuddered to think of his incinerated, broken bones inside. The whole area reeked of gasoline and burned leaves and grass. At least the fire had not spread farther than the thirty-foot-wide blackened circle.
“I’ll have Jace run you home, and I’ll go have a look at the spot you got hit,” Gabe said, craning his neck to look up at the rocky ridge of Pinecrest Mountain glaring down at them. “Never know but there might be some trace of the other truck up there. I’ll ask around about who the guys with the mule in their truck could have been, too, in case they passed your attacker heading up toward you.”
“The pull-off’s easy to find,” Matt said. “It’s marked for a bus stop, but I’m thinking anywhere along the road that...that killer would have found me, he’d have tried to send me over the edge. I must have been followed.”
“Or, you told someone where you were going, so you didn’t have to be followed close,” Jace Miller put in. “I guess you and Gabe covered that.”
“Yeah, we did,” Matt said. “The people in my office knew where I was going, and I’d sent word to Woody McKitrick’s family that I’d stop by during the day, but not when.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. I still can’t believe it happened.”
“Brad Mason never drove this truck, did he?” Gabe asked. “As your partner Flemming’s front man in the area, a lot of people have it in for him, too. He’s been worried about his safety. He’ll be part of my family when Char’s sister Kate marries Brad’s brother, Grant Mason, next month.”
“I’m pretty sure he drives a red pickup—easy to spot, kind of flashy for around here, even for Lake Azure, where he’s bought a small condo. You know, Royce wanted me to take that job, but I turned him down. Maybe some people against the fracking don’t know that.”
“As for the place your truck went over, I know that spot. That pull-off is near a formation called Coyote Rock, though I don’t think it looks much like a coyote. Must have been one spotted up there. Jace, when we get another deputy in, it’ll be a lot easier to patrol around here. Could use at least two more deputies, but at least we’re getting one soon. Keeping an eye on moonshining, pot patches and meth labs in the hills near town’s bad enough, but these mountains are a whole other world, not to mention the fracking.”
Matt nodded. “Char and I saw some rig workers heading up Pinecrest in a black pickup, looking pretty happy, tossing beer cans out. New outsiders like that have taken some of the pressure off us Lake Azure people being the intruders.”
“It’s getting better,” Gabe said. “Live and let live—but not kill someone by shoving them off a cliff so it looks like an accident, even suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“Sorry to bring that up. When my father was county sheriff, he had a bad case where a guy drove off near Coyote Rock—meant to kill himself, but took his wife’s life in the crash, too. Murder-suicide.”
A chill shot up Matt’s spine as the sheriff started to pace off the circumference of the burned circle. Matt stood his ground, just staring at the charred wreck. In a way he’d been charred today, too, by meeting Char Lockwood. Crazy thought but she’d heated him up. He’d been burned a couple of years ago, and that made him gun-shy about getting serious with a woman, especially when he kept himself so busy. The women he met in Cold Creek were either married clients, or were locals he just didn’t have much in common with—and then there was Ginger Green, who was after him as well as every other man in sight, so she was hardly his type. He wasn’t looking for a quick hit, quick goodbye woman.
“Too bad you lost the stuff you’d bought for the McKitricks,” Jace was saying. “Bet they could have used it. Gabe, didn’t you say that they were on Char’s list of families to visit over a truant student?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Gabe said, distracted as he wrote in a little notebook.
So, Matt thought, maybe he and Char could go together to visit the McKitricks when he replaced the food and clothes he was going to give them. Not that he wanted to go back up the mountain, but he wasn’t going to let this impact his freedom or his duty.
“Hey,” Gabe shouted, from across the wreck. “Someone’s been here gawking already. Footprints in the ash. I didn’t see any on the side where you’re standing.”
Matt and Jace watched as he approached the truck and glanced inside. “And there’s an unburned piece of paper in here with something written on it.”
Jace went over to the wreck. Though the burned, acrid smell was seeping into the pit of Matt’s stomach, making him feel sick, curiosity got him. Walking in Jace’s footprints, he went over to the wreck and peered in the front passenger-side window, too.
A piece of white paper was lying on the blackened front seat. He could see a drawing of a skull and crossbones, like on an old pirate flag. Under that were big, black printed letters.
YOUR FIRED!
4
“Well, I admit it is kind of quaint looking—in a pioneer way,” Tess said as she drove into the narrow, short driveway of the hunting cabin.