The Honeymoon Assignment Read online

  The twenty-dollar bills under Cormier’s floor had indeed proved to be phony. A close examination at Kelley and Sam’s cottage had verified it. And although there hadn’t been many bills left in the stash, Harold’s guess about it— “He must have put them there when he first arrived and forgot there were any left when he took off"—seemed to be a plausible explanation.

  Except—

  Except that neither Kelley nor Sam had been able to concentrate on dinner. Even their waiter had noticed and had asked them three times if everything was all right.

  “Dessert and coffee?” he asked now, as he cleared their plates.

  They both shook their heads. “Just the check,” Sam said, leaning back in his chair. He’d changed into a clean white shirt before leaving the Windspray Community, and the crispness of it highlighted the worn creases of his blue jeans and the unruly tangle of his dark hair. Kelley watched the candlelight moving over his thoughtful features and felt her own thoughts flickering just the same way.

  The case is over, she told herself. Harold and Helen are satisfied. It’s not your problem anymore.

  But she’d worked so hard, trained herself so exhaustively to be a thorough professional. And all her experience was telling her that this was wrong.

  “All right, cowboy,” she said to Sam at last. “What’s on your mind?”

  Her words seemed to startle him. He raised one dark eyebrow and tapped his long index finger rhythmically against the tabletop.

  But he answered her readily enough. And his words were as blunt as ever. “I feel like we’ve been set up,” he said.

  She was more relieved than she’d expected. So she wasn’t the only one feeling this way. “Me, too,” she said. “I’ve been in this business long enough to know that the obvious answer is often the right one, but this is—”

  “Too obvious.” He finished the sentence for her, seeming unaware that he’d even taken over her thoughts. “You’re right. I just can’t believe that Cormier would go to all the trouble of making that hiding place under the floorboards and then leave his stash there when he took off.”

  “Or that he’d disappear without clearing that ten grand out of his bank account.”

  It had taken some doing to convince the local bank manager to check the bank’s computer records when Sam had called him after hours. But after some persistent urging, the man had done it, and had confirmed that Cormier’s account was untouched.

  “So where does that leave us?” Kelley wondered out loud.

  “Out of the loop.” Sam crossed one long leg over the other, frowning down at his cowboy boots as though they’d said something to insult him. “The case is over. Harold and Helen aren’t going to pay us to continue, now that they’re satisfied Cormier is the culprit.”

  “They did offer to let us stay out the rest of the week as a bonus, if we wanted,” Kelley reminded him.

  He snorted. “Wonder what Wiley would say about that,” he mused.

  She knew what he meant. Given the way Sam had kicked about working with Kelley again in the first place, it would be an abrupt about-face to extend their stay instead of heading home at the first available opportunity.

  But—

  “Wiley would say that Cotter Investigations has a welldeserved reputation for getting things right,” she murmured.

  Sam was still tapping the tabletop. The sound was beginning to make Kelley feel edgy, or maybe it was just that the faint, insistent drumbeat echoed her own unsettled feelings.

  “If we assume Steve Cormier isn’t the bad guy, then the person who tried to kill us is still out there,” Sam said slowly.

  “That’s not a pleasant thought.”

  Their words were only skimming the surface, Kelley thought. Their eyes were holding a separate conversation, digging deeper, raising more troublesome questions.

  Can we turn our backs on this thing now?

  Do we trust each other enough to go on?

  It was an uncomfortable challenge to keep her eyes level with Sam’s, reading his unspoken thoughts in those blue depths. Kelley cleared her throat and was glad when Sam finally spoke.

  “Do you want to keep this investigation going, under the table?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to walk away from here leaving some son of a gun thinking we’ve been fooled, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Fooled, or scared off.”

  “That, too.” She leaned back in her chair. “Which son of a gun are you thinking it might be, Sam?”

  “Well, there’s Wayland. Although if we stay, we’re going to have to find a way to check him out without his parents knowing we’re doing it.”

  Kelley agreed. Harold and Helen had reacted with scorn to any suggestion of treating Wayland as a suspect. If Sam and Kelley accepted the Prices’ offer of hospitality, their investigation of Wayland was going to have to be extremely discreet.

  “But you agree he’s worth looking into,” she said.

  “Hell yes.” Sam stopped drumming on the table and held up one strong hand, listing his points on the ends of his fingers. “He has access to keys to all the cottages, through his parents. His job is an obvious sham. He knew his mother already had her suspicions about Steve Cormier. And he showed up here exactly two days before the first phony bill surfaced. If Cormier isn’t the real counterfeiter—and it sure as hell feels to me like he isn’t—then Wayland Price is the obvious next choice.”

  Kelley nodded. “And somehow I can easily picture Wayland trying to shove the blame onto somebody else,” she said. “He seems to think the world was made for his personal pleasure.”

  “Good point.” The waiter had brought their bill, and Sam dropped a pile of cash on top of it. “Let’s get out of here, all right, sweetheart? I think better when I can stretch my legs while I’m doing it.”

  The restaurant was only a couple of blocks from the beach. They left Sam’s truck parked where it was and walked toward the water. Kelley was glad she’d put on her heavy yellow cotton sweater earlier. The wind off the Gulf was steadily rising, and the air seemed to be turning cooler.

  There was something eerie about Cairo’s streets at night. The little town had so clearly been a busy place once. But the wind whistling across vacant lots and down deserted side streets made it seem like the ghost town Harold Price had jokingly called it.

  Sam seemed to be reading her thoughts again. “Finding buyers for the rest of those Windspray cottages sure would make a big difference to this little burg,” he commented.

  “I know. And it’s such a beautiful spot.”

  Cairo’s waterfront was the prettiest part of the town. Even at night the long sweep of sand beach, bolstered by the stone breakwaters, made a clean, pleasing line along the shore. And the big fishing pier seemed to beckon to them, drawing their steps toward the broad, brightly lit platform that ran several hundred feet out into the Gulf waters.

  “If we’re going to stay, we shouldn’t confine ourselves just to looking into Wayland,” Sam said. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets as they started onto the pier. “Most of the other names on Harold’s list have turned out to be dead ends, but—”

  “There’s still the Gustaffsons.” Kelley hesitated, then added, “There’s one thing I probably should have mentioned—”

  A particularly strong gust of wind whipped the words away and made Kelley wrap her arms around her midriff for warmth. At least she told herself it was for warmth. Deep down, she knew it was the thought of Susan Gustaffson’s unborn child that chilled her.

  “The Gustaffsons knew how Helen felt about Steve Cormier, too,” Sam said, loping comfortably toward the end of the pier. Kelley could hear the clunk of his boot heels echoing in the dark, empty space between the dock and the water. “And assuming that somebody did plant those bills in Cormier’s cottage, it could very well have been Susan or Jon. They knew he wouldn’t be around, because they’d arranged to have him come and fix their plumbing.”

  “How would they get into his co
ttage?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll need to see how accessible the cottage keys are. I know there’s a master set in the maintenance room at the main building, but I don’t know how easy it would be to get at it.”

  His strides had lengthened, making it harder to keep up with him. He really did think better when he was in motion—always had, Kelley thought. He was as restless as any true cowboy, always keeping one eye on the horizon no matter where he happened to be.

  “I think we’d have better luck with the Gustaffsons if we try to talk to them separately,” Sam said. “Aside from that first morning, when you found Susan by herself in the exercise room, I’ve barely seen them apart. Hell, they’re more like newlyweds than any real newlyweds I ever saw.”

  If the reference to newlyweds made him think about the honeymoon act he and Kelley were going to have to continue, his face showed no sign of it. She watched his brows lower and recognized that his mind was working hard.

  “I wonder if Susan and Jon might be sticking so closely together so they can corroborate each other’s stories,” he said. “Or maybe—”

  “Sam.”

  “Maybe neither of them wants to take a chance on slipping up, so they stay close for backup. Even the best liars miss a step now and again. Maybe Susan and Jon—”

  “Sam, listen to me.”

  They’d reached the end of the fishing pier now. The waves churned against the big pilings under the wooden structure, and the big floodlight over their heads shone ominously down into the heaving depths of the the ocean. Somehow the sight made Kelley uneasy, as though the muddy water might hold secrets that could come bobbing to the surface without warning.

  Sam was leaning on the railing at the edge of the pier, looking sideways at Kelley. The wind whipped his dark hair back from his forehead, and his features suddenly looked harsh and bleak.

  “What is it?” he asked impatiently.

  Kelley took in a deep breath. “Susan Gustaffson is pregnant,” she told him. “They just found out about it last week. That’s why they’re sticking so close together. They’re happy, that’s all. Happy that they’re going to have a baby. It’s how expectant parents behave, Sam. It’s how we behaved, in case you’d forgotten.”

  She hadn’t realized her voice was going to falter until it happened. It was the word baby that tripped her up.

  And the sweet, half-buried memory of those few days when she and Sam had looked forward to their future together with the same kind of joy and hope that had shone in Susan Gustaffson’s eyes when she’d told Kelley about her pregnancy.

  She wasn’t prepared for the way her whole body started to shake as Sam turned to face her. He looked as though she’d hit him, hard, without warning, and his eyes were nearly as black and wild as the night sky overhead.

  “Susan told me this morning she already feels sure she’s carrying a boy.” The words were out without Kelley planning to say them. “It’s funny—I had the same feeling, early on. Remember I told you I was sure it was going to be a girl?”

  “Don’t do this, Kelley.”

  She barely heard his gravelly protest. Suddenly she couldn’t hold this back, couldn’t rein in the words she’d kept inside her for what felt like a lifetime.

  And who else could she say this to, if not to Sam? They hadn’t shared the news about the baby with anyone else. And so they were the only ones in the world who could share the grief of its death.

  She could hear that grief in her own voice, and feel it in her belly as she said, “It’s amazing, Sam, how close you can feel to a child who isn’t even born yet. Do you remember that day in the hospital, when I seemed like such a zombie?”

  “I remember.” He’d closed his eyes, and there were deep furrows in his brow, making him look older, impenetrable.

  “It was because I couldn’t believe it,” Kelley said. “I couldn’t believe she was gone.”

  Suddenly everything around them—the wind, the water, the circle of light from the tall pole at the end of the pier—seemed to have turned to a gigantic swirl of pain, washing out of the past and over her without warning. Kelley caught her breath and heard a sob forming in it.

  But she still couldn’t stop. “It took the longest time for it to sink in,” she said raggedly. “I would find myself walking around with one hand pressed over my stomach.” She pressed a hand there now, unconsciously, and saw Sam’s eyes open again, taking in the gesture, wincing at the sight of it. “And I’d look down and tell myself there was no baby there anymore, but some part of me just wouldn’t accept it. I felt as if she was still there—that everything was going to be all right—that you—”

  She had no words for the silent hope that had tormented her for so long. I was so sure you would come back to me. I couldn’t believe you would just leave me alone…. How could she say that out loud, when Sam’s stormy gaze was warning her not to say anything at all?

  She was suddenly appalled at what she’d done. She’d ripped the lid off her carefully concealed hurts, letting them spill out unprotected into the night air.

  And the cold wind and the blue steel of Sam’s eyes were withering those fragile feelings, leaving her more vulnerable than she’d felt since that awful day when he’d turned away from her in the hospital.

  “You—you said you thought the baby was never meant to be.” Could he hear the soft words over the gusting of the wind? Suddenly she didn’t care. She just needed to say this out loud, once, in Sam’s presence. She hadn’t known how badly she needed it until she’d already spoken the words.

  “But you were wrong, Sam.” She wrapped her arms around her midriff again. “Babies are gifts, not mistakes. I just didn’t realize then how precious a gift they are.”

  And because she hadn’t realized it, she’d let her own overconfidence and inexperience get her into the situation that had led to a miscarriage. The image of that night still haunted her thoughts, waking and sleeping. Kelley felt the familiar clenched knot of loss low down in her body and wondered if it would ever go away.

  And there was another image that haunted her, too.

  “She would have been nearly three now.” She closed her eyes, although her inner vision of a smiling three-year-old— with fair braids like her own, she always wondered, or dark, unruly hair like Sam’s?—was almost as hard to face as the wounded look on Sam’s face. “Do you ever think about that?”

  “No.”

  The word was so blunt, so unequivocal, that it rocked her. No? Just like that? How could he—

  “I can’t think about those things, Kelley.” He was speaking slowly, as though something inside him was trying to keep the words in. “I just—it doesn’t do any good. It won’t change anything that happened.”

  He was right.

  Kelley had thought incessantly about everything that had happened, and yet nothing had really changed. She still felt the same pain, lived with the same guilt.

  But still—

  “Can you really do that?” she asked. “Just turn off all those feelings like you were turning a tap?”

  He turned briefly to look out over the water, and Kelley shivered again as she followed his gaze. The ocean was so vast, so dark, utterly without comfort or mercy.

  And Sam’s eyes, when he swung them back to meet hers, were just as dark, just as bleak and comfortless.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” he said.

  Slowly, heavily, as though he’d aged in the past few minutes, he stepped away from the wooden railing and started to walk back toward the shore. The angle of his shoulders looked forlorn, almost defeated.

  It took a little while before Kelley could make herself follow him. She was still in the grip of too many memories, too many unresolved feelings. And she’d never found a way to put all of these old hurts behind her.

  Something in the past few days had fractured the careful control she’d prided herself on. The ragged sound of her own voice when she’d poured out her thoughts a few minutes ago only proved that.


  And unlike Sam, she’d never learned how to turn around and just walk away.

  Chapter 8

  Son, you’ve got a pair of ears that could hear a flea crossing from one side of a cat’s belly to the other.

  At first Sam thought it was the memory of his father’s voice that had wakened him. That in itself was surprising enough to make him roll over on the sofa and prop himself on one elbow, blinking in the near-darkness.

  He didn’t usually think about his dad any more than he could help. Yet in the past few days he’d been hearing J.D.’s deep, affectionate growl in his head, almost as though the two of them were together again. It was beginning to get on his nerves.

  Then he heard something else, and realized what had alerted those sharp ears his father used to tease him about.

  The wind was still blowing hard outside, and the high-pitched hiss of the waving beach grasses overlaid the occasional gusts. But there was another sound out there, too, one that had gotten through to Sam even in his sleep.

  Someone was walking across the deck.

  It was the faintest of steps, just a soft padding of feet on the wooden boards. But it was enough to make Sam roll over and settle Kelley’s pistol into his palm. He’d been keeping it close to him these past couple of nights. If it turned out they were under attack again—

  He rolled off the sofa and into a low crouch on the carpeted floor.

  The light footsteps on the deck seemed to be moving away from the back door, not toward it. Puzzled, Sam followed the sound as it rounded the corner of the cottage, and realized when it stopped abruptly that whoever was out there must have stepped off the deck onto the lawn.

  He was on his way cautiously through the kitchen when he saw her.

  It was Kelley, her fair hair blown into disarray by the wind. And she was moving quietly but purposefully toward the Windspray road, or perhaps toward the dunes that lay beyond it.

  Sam cursed silently and slid the kitchen door open. He put the safety on the gun and jammed it into the back pocket of his sweatpants as he went down the wooden steps.

  Was she sleepwalking? Her pace was unhurried, her long limbs as graceful and poised as ever. He couldn’t see her face, but something about the way she was moving made him think she was paying no attention to her surroundings. She seemed to be far away, maybe wandering in some dreamworld of her own.