Cold Case Affair (13 page)

Jett’s father limped into the room, cobalt eyes intent on his son. Jett watched his father’s distinctive hobble. It was just as Trapper Joe had demonstrated—the perfectionist, an explosives expert, a veteran miner who bore the battle scars of Tolkin in his body.

And what scars did he bear deep in his soul? What secrets were buried there? What guilt?

“Where did you go in the plane today, son?” Adam said, jaw tight. “Who did you go see?”

“Trapper Joe. Gus had some crime scene photos of the bomber’s prints down in the mine. Did you know that?”

His father swallowed. “No,” he said quietly.

“We took those photos to Joe to see what he could tell us about the man who made them.”

“Then you came here, to look at my boots?”

“Because the prints were made by a veteran miner with size 10 feet and a lame left leg—an explosives expert who had an accomplice waiting up at the Sodwana headframe while the bomb was planted.”

Jett paused, giving his father a chance to offer some explanation. Some denial. But his father remained silent, neck muscles bunching, the fingers of his right hand twitching at his side.

“Did you do it dad? Did you ‘fix’ the strike by planting that bomb, killing twelve men?”

“Jett!” His mother admonished from the doorway.

“Stay out of this, Mom,” he said coolly, eyes focused solely on his father,
willing
him to deny it, to offer some explanation, anything.

Instead, Adam Rutledge’s face turned ash-white.

Nausea gushed up into Jett’s throat, mixing with the acrid heat of whiskey. But he had to see this all the way through. He had to pick a side, and that side had to be justice. It was the
only
recourse, the only way to end the secrets, heal the rifts in this town.

It was also the only way to make things right with Muirinn.

He slugged back the last of the whiskey, slapped the glass down.

“Did you kill Gus O’Donnell, too?”

His father tensed visibly, saying nothing. Jett’s mother started sobbing uncontrollably.

He turned to his mother. “Did
you
know that Dad rigged
that blast, Mom?” His voice remained ice cool. “Did you suspect what he’d done? Or did you just turn a blind eye that help bury it like the rest of this godforsaken town?”

Her sob turned into a wail, and Jett’s heart plummeted even further.

He stared at his parents, eyes burning. “You’re not going to deny
any
of this?” he said, unbelieving.

His mother just cried softly. His father glared, his body humming with tension.

Shaking with anger, Jett stormed out of the house, his entire world shattered.

The screen door slapped dully closed behind him, the sound echoing into the pale, moonless night.

Waves of violent anger, pain, regret all churned through him as he marched toward his truck.

The screen door suddenly swung open behind him, and Jett tensed, hearing his father hobbling out over the gravel.

“Jett!”

He couldn’t face him.

Jett climbed into his truck, started the ignition and slammed the gearshift into reverse. He wanted to get the hell away from here. But he couldn’t—he just could not hit that accelerator. His father had admitted nothing yet, and Jett still wanted desperately to believe that his dad was coming over to tell him it wasn’t true, that there was some rational explanation for it all.

Staring dead ahead, fists tight on the wheel, he listened as his father’s footfalls crunched over the gravel, coming nearer.

He turned slowly to look at him—the face he knew so well and had loved so deeply all his life. The face of a man he’d respected, the man who’d taught him so much.

His father clamped his hands down over the open window. “It was a mistake, son,” he whispered hoarsely. “A
mistake
.”

Jett felt sick.

He shut his eyes tight, gripping the wheel, his ears ringing as he fought the urge to punch down on the gas, flee from things he didn’t want to hear.

His father’s arthritic hands gripped the door tighter, gnarled knuckles white. “The blast wasn’t supposed to kill those men, Jett,” he whispered urgently. “They were not supposed to
die
!”

T
he knowledge that his father was a murderer swilled dangerously inside Jett. “So you did do it,” he whispered. “You’re the killer.”

“The blast was just going to be a warning, Jett, to spook management and scabs. We’d been without work for almost a year, and union funds were depleted. There was no more strike pay coming, and the longer those scabs kept working, the longer management could handle the strike, and the longer half the men in this town stayed unemployed. People were losing homes, they were being forced to leave town. The strike was killing this place—that mine was the only goddamn gig in town!”

“So you tried to fix it all with a
bomb?
”

“A warning! There were not supposed to be casualties, son.” Adam’s eyes glittered feverishly in the glow of the northern night. “The man-car carrying those men was not
supposed to trigger the trip wire. The ore car—which is wider and has a third wheel that sticks out—that was supposed to trigger the explosion. But I was cold, wet. It was a long climb, a long hike underground, my fingers were numb from white hand. I…I must have gotten the trip line too close to the track. God knows, Jett, I have not lived a day without regretting what happened.”

Jett couldn’t even look at his father. “You killed Troy O’Donnell,” he whispered. “You tore Muirinn’s life apart.”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen, you’ve
got
to believe that!” Anguish torqued through his father’s voice. He gripped the door tighter. “I did it for you, son. For your mother. We were desperate. If the mine stayed operational with scabs, it meant that men like me—the veteran miners who built this place—would go bankrupt. And if we couldn’t buy stuff in the stores, the shops were going to go under, the support industries were going to go under, the whole damn town was going to go under. We would have lost our house,
everything
.”

“You murdered people to keep the house I now live in,” Jett said quietly. “I used to admire you, Dad.” He shook his head. “I used to be so damn proud of you.”

“I did it so we
could
remain proud. So I could care for all of you.”

The irony hit Jett hard—the things people did for love, the secrets they hid, the lies that bound them, the ripple effect down through the generations. The lingering poison.

He thought of what he’d done to Muirinn, and she to him—for love.

“The deaths were a mistake.” Adam whispered again. “But I never did
anything
to hurt Gus. Nor would I ever try to harm Muirinn. I am not a murderer, son.”

Jett turned slowly to stare at his father. Tears glistened on
the man’s rugged cheeks. A man Jett had always looked up to. Admired. Now he could barely even look at him.

“Who was your accomplice? Chalky Moran?”

His father’s mouth shut in a grim line. Silence hung for several beats. A coyote yipped somewhere on the outskirts of town, hunting neighborhood cats.

“It’s in the past, Jett.” Adam said almost inaudibly. “It’s over. Can’t we just leave it in the past?”

“It’s
not
over.” Jett ground the words out through clenched teeth. “Gus O’Donnell
died
because of those photos Ike Potter gave him. And Muirinn and her baby almost died, too, because someone out there is
still
prepared to kill to keep this secret.”

“I swear on your mother’s life that I had
nothing
to do with that,” Adam said hoarsely.

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Start with your accomplice. Was it Chalky?”

Silence.

So the identity of his accomplice was a secret his father still wanted to keep. A sick coldness slicked down inside Jett’s belly. “Step back from the truck,” he ordered quietly.

“What are you going to do?”

Jett didn’t know what he was going to do with this mind-blowing news—that his father was the mass murderer who’d evaded an FBI manhunt.

He needed to think, process. Someplace where he could find distance, objectivity.

“What would
you
do, Dad?”

Silence.

“Step back from the truck,” Jett repeated through clenched teeth.

And he drove off, leaving his father standing in a settling cloud of dust, his eyes burning with tears—the tears of betrayal.

Jett did not drive home. He headed instead for the unprotected cliffs to the west of Safe Harbor. It was a place that drew him in both good times and bad.

Easing his truck onto the grassy verge, he cut the engine. The night was clear, dusky, the sun not far below the horizon. But the peaks themselves were hidden by a dark band of storm clouds—the pending front was beginning to move in. He called Brock. “Everything okay there?”

“All quiet,” Brock said. “Nothing going on apart from the old tenant awake, light on in her cottage down at the bay. Otherwise, nothing but raccoons.”

Jett killed the call.

He stared out over the ocean, watching the timeless heave and pull of the dark water, listening to the soft crunch of waves at the base of the cliffs. And he tried to process the knowledge that his own father was responsible for a mass murder, a case that had been mothballed, never solved, the truth buried by people in this town that he’d loved so deeply.

A pod of killer whales, sleek as mercury, ribboned through the swells below, hunting seals as the midnight sun began to rise again over the distant peaks.

The world in beauty and death.

Beginnings and endings.

It was time for justice to be done, for the past to be put to rest. For new beginnings.

But to do that Jett would have to take his own father down. He rubbed his brow.

All he had to do was pick up the phone and call the FBI, tell them that his dad was a killer.

It wasn’t as easy as one might think.

As the day brightened, Jett drove to the airstrip, picking up a bagel and coffee on the way. He wanted to get his plane into the air, get above it all during those rare dawn hours when the world was still pure. When he came back down to earth, he’d face his duty. He’d call the feds.

He parked his truck and headed on foot out onto the airfield, coffee in hand. Dew glistened on the grass, and on the wings of his plane as they caught the first warm rays of the sun.

After one more phone call to Brock, who said all was still calm at Mermaid’s Cove, Jett swung himself up into his cockpit.

Muirinn watched dawn breaking over the sea, the loaded shotgun resting in her lap. All night she’d sat, absently rocking in her grandfather’s bent-willow rocker, thinking about Troy.

Her son.

Another tremor of emotion ran through her body, and she placed her hand over her stomach.

Two children.

A son and a daughter.

Again her eyes filled with moisture. But with it came the anger, the profound sense of betrayal. And so it had been all night, waves of intoxicating exultation washing through her, alternating with shafts of bone-deep sadness at the sense of time lost with her son, exhausting her.

One thing Muirinn knew for sure was that as much as she might spark and simmer and clash with Jett, he was—and always would be—the father of her son. And she was not going to leave Safe Harbor.

She was going to give birth to her daughter here, raise her baby girl in this town, and watch her son grow into a man—from a distance if necessary.

She’d run the paper. Be a mother. Grow vegetables in the garden and show her daughter how to collect clams, just as Gus had shown her.

And God help anyone who tried to take that away from her now.

Because no matter how hurt Muirinn might be, Jett had done an incredibly bold thing going after his child, alone. It was the kind of move that defined him. He had a rock-solid core of values he was not prepared to compromise. And he valued family.

Then she thought of Adam Rutledge, and cold anxiety surged fresh through her. He was family, too. But she had to believe that Jett would do the right thing, and see justice done.

She had to believe in
him
.

Even if the rift between father and son meant she and Jett could never be together.

Finally, she slipped off, eyes closing as sleep claimed her.

Sun was hot on Muirinn’s face when a noise in the hallway startled her awake.

Someone was inside the house.

She raised the shotgun, heart in her throat. “Who’s there!”

“It’s just me, Muirinn. Oh goodness, child, put that gun down. What on earth is going on?”

“Mrs. Wilkie?” Muirinn swallowed, disoriented. “I…it’s nothing. I was having—” she laughed, embarrassed. “Just a bad dream.”

The old woman frowned and tutted. “It’s the baby. The hormones can do it to you. I’ve never had children myself,” she said, setting her basket down on the kitchen counter. “But when my sister, Margaret, was pregnant with my godchild, she had vivid nightmares all the time. Chamomile tea really
helped.” She tapped her basket, smiling warmly. “I brought you some scones for breakfast, baked in my wood oven. And strawberries, fresh from Gus’s garden.”

She removed a cluster of smiling daisies from the basket, and busied herself emptying the older foxglove blooms from the copper vase and rearranging the daisies in their place.

Mrs. Wilkie had left the front door wide open to the bright morning, and a soft warmth drifted inside on the sea breeze. Muirinn glanced nervously at the door. She knew there was a bodyguard outside, yet she was suddenly filled with an unspecified sense of trepidation.

“I’ll make you some chamomile tea, dear. It’ll be good for those nerves, and for the baby.” Mrs. Wilkie shuffled into the kitchen and took down one of the tea tins Gus kept on the shelf. “With a few sprigs of mint. You used to like that mix as a child, remember? I used to make it chilled for you in the summer.”

Muirinn felt surreal, as if she couldn’t believe the past events had actually happened, that she’d slept in a rocking chair with a shotgun. That this woman had just walked into her home with a basket of flowers and breakfast. Maybe she was just confused by the heat of the sun that had been on her face while she slept. Still, it seemed strange that Mrs. Wilkie hadn’t really asked about the gun. Or mentioned the bodyguard outside.

“I…I’d love some tea. Thank you.” Muirinn clicked the safety on her weapon, got to her feet, set the gun against the wall and stretched her back. Not only was she thirsty, she was starving.

Chimes tinkled in the breeze, and Muirinn glanced at the open door again. “Did you see anyone outside, Mrs. Wilkie?”

Mrs. Wilkie glanced up. “No, why?”

Muirinn frowned, wondering what had happened to the bodyguard Jett had sent over. Perhaps he was laying low, or maybe he’d left when the sun came up. Which was odd.

“Is everything all right, Muirinn, love?” Mrs. Wilkie asked, concern creasing her brow.

“I’m fine. Will you stay and join me for breakfast? I wouldn’t mind the company.”

“Of course I will, dear.” Mrs. Wilkie reached for another china cup. “But no chamomile for me—” she grinned. “I need caffeine in my tea.” She spooned a different herb mix into another small teapot, poured in boiling water and set both pots on the table with a little mat.

The tea was good, different from the way Muirinn remembered, but that might be because her mouth was so dry and fuzzy from adrenaline the night before. She sipped from her cup as she watched Mrs. Wilkie buttering scones, her bright gypsy skirt swirling around her ankles as she moved, her long gray hair caught back in a colorful scarf. It was comforting to watch her. Equally comforting was the soft, warm sensation that was beginning to flow outward through her chest, her body. With mild surprise, Muirinn realized that this tea was working fast—too fast. A faint dawning of fear whispered in her brain, but she couldn’t quite harness the thought. Her mind was growing foggy. Then she heard voices outside the door—a man and woman.

She glanced at Mrs. Wilkie, her vision suddenly blurry.

Mrs. Wilkie was watching her intently, smile gone.

“Did…did you hear…that…”
Oh God, she couldn’t talk, her tongue was thick and slow in her mouth
. Muirinn tried to lift her arm. It was heavy, as if she were trying to move through syrup.

Panic struck her heart, but she couldn’t seem to react to it, to think straight.

“Mrs…. Wilkie…”

The woman said nothing.

Muirinn’s brain swirled as she squinted at Mrs. Wilkie, the colors of her gypsy skirt morphing into a chromatic blur. The purple foxgloves lay on the counter behind her. So pretty. Pretty…as poison. It struck Muirinn suddenly—foxglove contained digitalis. The same medicine Gus had been taking.

Years ago Gus had told Muirinn that dried foxglove leaves could easily be confused with comfrey. He’d liked to drink comfrey for his health. But foxglove would stop your heart, he’d said.

Muirinn tried to look up into Mrs. Wilkie’s eyes, to read what was going on. But her vision was too hazy, a halo seeming to shimmer around the woman’s body. Mrs. Wilkie knew about herbs. She’d made Gus’s tea blends.

She could have given him foxglove.

Mrs. Wilkie had also just mentioned her sister Margaret’s pregnancy. Margaret was married to Old Man Henry Moran. And Margaret’s child—Mrs. Wilkie’s godchild—was Chalky Moran.

Jett’s voice rumbled into Muirinn’s fading consciousness.
Moran blood runs thick in this town
…

Mrs. Wilkie was protecting her godchild, her flesh and blood—and she’d put something into Muirinn’s tea!

My baby
…Muirin had get out of here, get help.

She tried to stand, bracing her weight on the table. But she slid slowly down to the floor as her legs buckled out from under her.

Mrs. Wilkie moved forward quickly.

Muirinn reached out her hand, trying to mouth the word
help
. But nothing came out.

Lydia Wilkie crouched down, stroking Muirinn’s long, soft, red hair. “Sleep, child,” she whispered softly. “You’ll be
with Gus soon. This town needs peace now. The past must sleep.” Wilkie’s eyes closed, tears spilling down her cheeks.