Copper Lake Encounter

The air was thick and damp, and he smelled more than a little ripe from the hours spent at Maggie’s place with the heavy bulletproof vest on. Definitely reason to get his order to go. He went inside, cold air rushing over him, a sensation as common in summer as the kudzu trying to conquer the South. He ordered a frozen coffee and two of Liz’s special oatmeal raisin cookies, picked them up and then stepped back outside on the sidewalk and almost plowed over the woman standing there.

“Sorry,” he murmured, but she didn’t seem to notice him. She stared down the street toward River Road as if she were in a trance, so intense that he turned to look behind him to see if anything was out of place. There wasn’t. About the usual number of shoppers, the usual old men sitting on the benches in the park, the usual cars parked diagonally along the street.

He looked back at the woman. She was a good six or eight inches shorter than him, wearing a sleeveless red dress that hugged her curves and a pair of open-toed heels that showed off her deep red nails. Sunglasses hid her eyes, but it was a good bet they were brown, fitting with the creamy milk-and-cocoa hue of her skin. Her lips were deep red, too, and her shoulder-length brown hair was smooth. Probably the result of an hour’s worth of wrestling with a flatiron.

She was... Not beautiful. Not pretty.

Lovely. She was absolutely lovely.

And Tyler Gadney was a sucker for a lovely woman.

* * *

Of course you’ve seen it before. You’ve taken the virtual tour on the website a dozen times in the past week. You’ve looked at the pictures enough to blur the line between reality and dream, right?

Right? Because that was certainly what Nev had tried to do.

Still, standing here on the sidewalk, the square on her left, the coffee shop on her right, staring ahead at the river, was raising goose bumps all up and down her arms.

“—help you? Are you okay?”

The words came from right in front of her and shook her into consciousness. A man stood before her, the kind of man who made her blink twice and back up a step. A dangerous man.

Then her rational self took over. Dangerous only if she was ever foolish enough to get involved with such a man, and she wasn’t. She’d never even had a chance, because men like him took one look at her sister and forgot she existed.

He’d asked her something and, judging by his raised brows, was waiting for an answer. Something about help? “Um, no, I’m fine,” she said, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat and forced a slight smile. “Really. I am.”

“You sure? You look a little shaken.”

His frown and concerned tone seemed vaguely familiar but couldn’t possibly be. If she’d ever met him before, she wouldn’t have forgotten him. Heavens, she didn’t even go places where guys like him went. Sporting events, trendy clubs, modeling shoots, hangouts for the beautiful and adventurous. She went to church and shopping and the occasional movie.

“You want to sit down? Maybe have some coffee?”

She saw the coffee in his hands, quickly losing its frozen texture, and the cookies in a thin paper sleeve, and her stomach rumbled. She’d bet Marieka’s stomach never growled in front of hot men like this.

“Have a seat.” He set down his cup and cookies on the wrought iron table beside them and then pulled out a chair. “I’ll get you...coffee? Something cold? Cookies?”

Her gaze drifted past him to the square, and a shiver deep inside worked its way out. “Yeah, okay,” she said numbly.

She was here, in the place of her dreams. It had taken a full day for YaYa to convince her to come and then the rest of the week to arrange to be away and take care of last-minute details that couldn’t be handled by computer while she was gone.

Lima hadn’t been happy with Nev’s plans, but then, Lima was never thrilled with anything her older daughter did. Marieka had laughed at her for wasting vacation time in a little old Georgia town. She was going to New York on her next vacation to do some quality partying with her best girlies. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a dirty old town like Copper Lake.

But YaYa had encouraged Nev, and the dreams hadn’t gone away, and now here she was. The place of her dreams. Sounded like a good thing. Nightmares was more like it. Hauntings.

She tried to relax on the iron chair, wiggling like an uneasy cat. She’d been in town less than fifteen minutes, and she already wanted to leave. What could she possibly learn here? She didn’t know a soul to ask questions of and didn’t know what questions to ask.

And she certainly wasn’t walking down that asphalt path in the riverside park. Not alone.

A rush of cold air blew over her as the man came out with an identical cup of frozen coffee and a couple of cookies. He set them down and then pulled a linen napkin from his hip pocket and laid them down, too. “I’m Ty Gadney,” he said as he slid into the chair across from her.

Heat flushed her cheeks. First, he’d witnessed her standing on the sidewalk like a zombie; now he’d bought her food and felt obligated to sit with her and make sure she didn’t do something stupid like stumble in front of a car or collapse to the ground.

Nothing like looking her best when she met a gorgeous man.

“Nev Wilson,” she mumbled, paying extra attention to the napkin she spread across her lap.

“Short for Nevaeh?” He laughed. “I’ve got a cousin named that. She goes by Vaeh.”

Though she couldn’t quite meet his eyes, she smiled, too. “My younger sister got the perfectly normal name of Marie—to which she added an extra syllable in fifth grade because it was too normal—while I got heaven spelled backward. I guess my mother thought of me as a gift from heaven.” Or the backward spelling meant she wasn’t quite the gift Lima had expected.

“Vaeh has sisters named Cherina, Shiraz, Kaiea and Chablis. Makes for interesting yelling at family reunions when the rest of us have names like Tom, Janet, Linda and Bill.”

He took a bite of his cookie, and a look of pure pleasure crossed his face. Nev pinched off a piece from her own. In one bite, she tasted oatmeal, walnuts, chocolate, butter and sugar. Man, she needed this recipe.

“Are you visiting someone here?”

The obvious question—he was from here, she wasn’t—startled her, and the chill deep inside gave a faint shiver to remind her it hadn’t gone away. “I, uh, no. I’d seen the, uh, website and had some time off so...”

“If you have time while you’re here, stop inside the coffee shop in the evening. Raven works then. She did the website, pictures and everything. She’d love to hear that it caught your attention enough to make you come.”

An image of every barista she’d ever bought coffee from popped into Nev’s mind, teenagers and college students, with an occasional adult thrown in. Not exactly tourism/website developers. “She did an excellent job on the site.”

“She’s better with a camera than anyone I know.” He shifted positions, his shirt rippling over taut muscles. For the first time, she noticed the embroidery on the left chest: Detective Division, Copper Lake Police Department. Suddenly she realized why his wrinkled brow and concerned tone had been familiar: he shared more than that with her favorite television federal agent. Shaved head, muscular body, quick grin, aura of danger, devastatingly handsome.

Sighhh. Not for her, but still sighhh...

“Would you like a tour of downtown Copper Lake? Depending on whom I channel, it could take as little as ten seconds.”

She reached for her iced coffee and miscalculated, almost knocking the cup over. Catching it quickly, she looked up, meeting his gaze. “Channeling?”

Cocoa brown eyes, grin, shrug that reminded her of a big lazy cat. “Channeling, copying. Like my boss. ‘Coffee shop, church, old house. Square, memorials, old buildings. Ellie’s Deli, more old buildings. More that way, that way, that way.’” He gestured north, east and south.

The vague uneasiness stirred by his mention of channeling faded. “I take it your boss is a man of few words.”

“He was. Now that he’s got kids, he’s expanding his vocabulary. Now, I could also do Miss Lydia’s version of a tour. Her family’s been here for centuries—they built the mansion over there—and she knows the history of every building and pretty much every family in Copper Lake. She can remember seeing presidents in the town square when she was a little girl.”

“History is good,” Nev agreed. Her family had history, too, but they weren’t big on remembering it. Lima said it was people a person should value, not places, circumstances or events. Nev couldn’t figure out how to separate them. Didn’t growing up black in the South, with a grandmother who’d been a slave, do a lot to shape YaYa into the woman she was today? Hadn’t Pawpaw’s experiences in helping to break down race barriers in the army in World War II—harassment, prejudice, hatred and fear—affected who Daddy had become?

Hadn’t growing up with a father who adored her, a sister who was perfect and a mother who preferred that sister played some role in who Nev was?

“How long will you be here?”

“I don’t know. I’m pretty flexible.” As soon as his grin started, her face heated and she restated, “My schedule is flexible. So...” She took a long suck of coffee, savoring it. “Does it offend you if people call you police officer instead of detective?”

He stretched out his long legs, bumping hers, murmuring an apology. “Some of the people I work with take offense, yeah. It takes commitment to become a detective, and some people want the respect of the title. But me, nah. It took commitment to become a cop, too. Either title deserves respect in my opinion.” He took a long drink of his own. “In a lot of people’s opinion, neither does.”

“Is it what you always wanted to do?”

“Always. Are you doing what you always wanted to do?”

Once again she shifted on the metal chair. Doing what she always wanted? Not by any stretch of imagination. She was old-fashioned, Marieka said scornfully, because she’d always wanted to get married, have a bunch of kids and be happy. That was it.

Jobs didn’t matter; she’d held a variety of them and hadn’t hated any of them except waiting tables. Money didn’t matter. As long as they could pay their bills, that was enough. A husband she loved who loved her back, kids who grew up safe and hopeful and loved—that was her dream.

Aware that Ty was waiting for an answer, she shrugged. “I don’t think my job existed when I was a kid. I’m a virtual personal assistant.”

“So you work mostly online and do virtually everything your clients need?”

She smiled at his play on words. “I shop. I do research. I plan events. I liaise. I answer mail. I post on Facebook and tweet for my clients.”

He laughed. “So when people think they’re chatting with your clients, it’s really you?”

“Most of the time.” She broke off another piece of cookie, thought about her curvaceous figure and Ty Gadney’s muscles and almost put it back. Marieka certainly would have. Marieka rarely ate more than a few bites in front of a man. But she wasn’t Marieka, so she took a bite instead. “YaYa, my grandmother, became a computer whiz after she retired, but she just can’t grasp someone being so busy that she’d pay me to ‘speak’ for her.”

“Me, neither, actually,” Ty said. “Shop? You bet. I hate going into stores. Do research, plan parties, take care of my bills, sure. But I can’t imagine wanting someone else to do my talking for me.”

“My clients are mostly public figures. Their jobs require a certain amount of public interaction, but they don’t have either the time or the temperament to sit at a computer and do social media.”

“Interesting. Next time I see my favorite quarterback tweeting, I’ll wonder if it’s really him.” He polished off his first cookie and then glanced at his watch. “Man, I’ve got to get going. I’ve got a big date tonight, and I can’t be late.”

“A big one, huh?” Of course he had a date. He was gorgeous. It was Saturday. Living, breathing women lived in this town. Nev wouldn’t have thought otherwise. How long had it been since she’d had a big date? Four months? Six?

“Yeah, Granddad can’t stand to miss the beginning of a movie.” He flashed that bright smile at her again. “It’s been nice meeting you, Nev Wilson.” He picked up the lone cookie left in the wrapper. “Granddad can’t stand a day without one of Liz’s cookies, either. I’ll see you again.”

That last seemed a bit presumptuous—he didn’t know where she was staying, what she would be doing, how long she would be there, because even she didn’t know those things—but the thought was lost as she watched the back view of him on the way to his car. Snug-fitting jeans, long legs, muscular everything...sigh.

Seeing him again would be a benefit.

But it didn’t change the reason she was here.

Her next sigh was heavy and morose.

Chapter 2

Nev had reviewed online the accommodations available in Copper Lake and settled on the Heart of Copper Lake Motel. If she’d had some of Marieka’s money to splurge, she would have opted for The Jasmine, an antebellum mansion turned bed-and-breakfast. It would be nice to see how the one percent lived. But a night at The Jasmine cost as much as five nights at the motel, and she didn’t intend to spend a lot of time in a room.

She checked in and unloaded her luggage in room ten—too many bags for a stay of undetermined length, but she had to be prepared for anything, YaYa had insisted, from sightseeing to interviewing people for information to a night on the town. Sure, as if Nev spent lots of nights on the town. She took the time to hang up her dresses and then headed out to her car again and drove Carolina Avenue from one end of town to the other, before taking River Road to the north edge and then the south.

She drove through neighborhoods of houses that ranged from small mansion to shack and everything in between. She passed at least one church for every three bars, noted nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, schools and historic sites, businesses of every sort. Some of it she knew from the website. Some she’d never seen before. Some she knew from her dreams.

The sun was low on the horizon when finally she pulled into the parking lot of the riverside park. A woman sat on a blanket underneath a live oak, an electronic reader in one hand, while two kids climbed on the pirate ship nearby. She glanced up with a courteous smile when Nev passed, and then she went back to her book.

Nev walked to the edge of the asphalt path and gazed at the river a few yards away. The Gullah was lazy, not too wide, giving the impression it had nowhere to go and was in no hurry to get there. A few small boats puttered toward docks jutting into the water on the other side, weekend fishermen calling it a day.

It smelled familiar. Important. A century ago it would have been vital to the logging industry that had made fortunes here. Two centuries ago it would have played a major role in the decision to found the town here. People had used it to irrigate their crops and ship them to market. They’d culled fish from the water for their meals. Kids had swum in it. Folks had been baptized in it. It had given life, and it had taken life.

It held secrets.

She stood there so long that her feet began to ache, and awareness slowly crept over her. Floodlights buzzed in the parking lot, and sound—music, voices—came from a nearby restaurant whose deck hung over the river. The sun had set more quickly than she’d expected, and then a glance at her watch showed that, no, she’d been lost in the river longer than she’d realized.

The dusky evening wrapped around her, making her shudder, reminding her of the suffocating closeness of the dream, and she spun on her heels and hurried to her car. Though she was only a few hundred feet off River Road, though there were people within shouting distance, she felt frighteningly vulnerable and alone, and the sensation didn’t ease until she’d locked herself inside the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

No fan of eating in a restaurant by herself, she stopped at a drive-through for comfort food: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and golden buttery biscuits. Back in her room, she kicked off her shoes, her arches giving a little spasm of relief, and sat on the bed to eat, the television tuned to a movie she’d seen so many times that she didn’t need to pay attention.

She’d cleaned her plate, washed her face, changed into a nightgown and was about to settle in bed for mindless channel surfing when her cell rang. Muting the TV, she smiled as she answered, “Hello, YaYa.”

“Do you have a special ringtone so you know it’s me before you answer?”

“I don’t have special ringtones for anyone.”

“I need my own ring. Soon as you get back, give me your phone and I’ll hook you up. Every single person in my smartphone has her own ring. Rachelle’s is that Elton John song about the bitch.”

Her matter-of-fact tone choked a laugh from Nev. Rachelle Newton was YaYa’s neighbor, competitor in everything from cooking to gardening to tweeting and best friend she loved to hate. “YaYa! What if she finds out?”

“Oh, she knows. Her ringtone for me is ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.’ She wishes.” Immediately she changed direction. “What do you think of Copper Lake?”

“Same thing I thought when I left Atlanta this afternoon. I’d rather not be here.”

“See anything that looked familiar?”

“Everything, just about.”

“What’s your plan?”

Nev bent one knee to massage her foot. Heels killed her feet, but they were her only real vanity. She wasn’t as tall as Marieka. She wasn’t as thin as Marieka. She wasn’t as beautiful as Marieka. But she had good legs and reasonably pretty feet, as far as feet went, and she loved heels. “I don’t have a plan, beyond going to church in the morning.”

The words surprised her more than her grandmother. At home, church was a Sunday morning requirement, at least for YaYa, Lima and Nev. Marieka got excused because she spent a lot of Saturday nights with her besties—or so she claimed—and because allowances were always made for Marieka. But Nev was the good girl. Besides, she loved singing old gospel hymns as much as she loved wearing heels, and she had the voice for it.

But she was on vacation. She was a stranger in a not-too-strange town. She’d figured she had a pass for tomorrow’s services.

Her subconscious apparently had other ideas, because it even knew which of the many churches she would attend: the AME Zion church, a small structure surrounded by tall pines and oaks, blindingly white with tall windows that opened for a cooling breeze and a small but faithful congregation. She wasn’t sure how she knew that last part. She didn’t want to think about it too much.

“That’s good,” YaYa said. “You might meet someone there who has information for you. You know, the Lord didn’t lead you to that town to just leave you hanging without answers.”

“The Lord, the internet and you.”

“And once you’ve put the dreams to rest, you’ll thank us.”

Nev wasn’t as convinced about that.

“Say a prayer for your sister while you’re in church tomorrow. She just left on a date with her new boyfriend. Ooh, mama, that man was hot. Maybe he’ll be the one to settle her down and get me some great-grandbabies. Though I expect I’ll have a houseful of them from her before you even say ‘I do.’”

She didn’t mean to put Nev down. Nev understood that. Heavens, it wasn’t as if she’d had even one-tenth the dates Marieka had. But she hadn’t been a nun living in a convent, either. She’d even been in love a time or two. It hadn’t worked out, but...

Ruefully she admitted that, with her current prospects, Marieka was more likely to fall in love, get married and have babies before Nev met the right guy. And Marieka wasn’t even looking.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” YaYa said, “and let you know what monstrosity Rachelle wears to church. Love you, little girl.”

“Love you, YaYa.”

Nev laid the phone on the night table and curled onto her side, mindless channel surfing forgotten. It wasn’t fair that some women had men lined up around the block and couldn’t care less while others wanted nothing more than love, marriage and a family of their own and were lucky to get two dates a year. It wasn’t as if she was asking for a man who was hot enough to impress her grandma. Just a nice guy who shared her values and her goals. He didn’t have to be tall and muscular or supersuccessful or model-handsome. An ordinary guy for an ordinary woman who would share an ordinary life.

An image of Ty Gadney came to mind, and she gave a little sigh involuntarily. See, Lord? She wasn’t expecting someone like him. She was sure she didn’t even register as a dateable woman from his perspective, especially given the less than stunning impression she must have made on him when they’d met, lost in her own world, barely able to answer questions coherently.

Not that she would object if the man chosen for her was handsome...tall...sexy...with gleaming dark eyes...

* * *

Neveah’s nightmare, take thirty-four.

It starts the same as usual: walking along the sidewalk, following the running trail, reaching the tree. But there, things change. The tree remains the same, crooked wooden fingers dipping into the river, branches rising into the sky, swaying in the breeze. Way off to the northwest, darkness encroaches, a storm, winds pushing the clouds so fast that they bump into each other, turning purplish blue in their anger, but overhead the sun is bright, the sky vivid blue, the clouds puffy and white.

I watch the gentle movement of the branches, and an inexplicable urge to kick off my shoes and climb up the massive trunk strikes me. It’s ridiculous enough to make me laugh. I’m not a tomboy. I’ve never climbed a tree. I don’t even go barefoot, ever. My bright orange sundress would snag, and the tender soles of my feet throb at even the thought of digging into the bark for purchase.

The wind picks up, and someone ahead along the winding path calls. I look just in time to catch a glimpse of a slender leg, a long black curl, disappearing into the tall grass. A child, and her giggle is all that remains by the time I reach the spot. Raindrops begin to fall. I don’t worry about getting wet. I don’t scamper for cover. Instead I follow the trail, led on by the laughter of the young girl and the calls, fainter now, picked up by the wind and blown away before I can make out the words.

“Wait!” I shout, walking as fast as the uneven ground and my high-heeled sandals allow, but the girl doesn’t listen, or perhaps she doesn’t hear. Perhaps the wind carries my voice away, too. Yet her laughs come back to me clearly, though they, too, should be dispersed on the growing gale.

Seeing only occasional glimpses—a sneakered foot, a hot-pink blouse, more of those glorious long curls—I break into a run. My heart pounds in my chest, and I’m gasping for air when I see lights ahead. When did it get so dark? I look, and the blazing sun, the fat clouds, the vivid sky are all lost in the roiling anger of the rushing storm. The air is electric, robbing the very breath from my lungs, and I struggle, but for each step I take forward, the wind pushes me back another. I can no longer hear the calls or the laughter. I can’t hear anything but the thunderous beat of my heart and the fierce power of the storm descending.

Rain drenches me, unloosing the curls in my own hair, soaking my clothes, making my feet slip within the delicate straps of my shoes. I fall, struggle back up, fall again, but my gaze remains fixed on the lights up ahead. House lights, I realize: a yellow glow above a door, cooler incandescent glows from all the windows. Home.

The place is home, and I need to get there, but something’s stopping me. Rain, thunder that vibrates the very ground, lightning so brilliant I have to close my eyes. It strikes a nearby tree, the dead wood flaming before the rain extinguishes it, and the trunk splits in two, half of it landing mere feet in front of me. There’s no path around, I can’t climb over it, and I’m too big to wiggle through the narrow space beneath it.