Feeding the Fire (2 page)

It had been an amazing night, one she would not soon forget, but she wasn’t stupid enough to repeat it. Grant was like one of the decadent fudge cakes in the windows of the bakery next door. You want a slice even though you know it’s bad for you. If you finally break down and tell yourself you’ll just take one bite, you find out it’s better than you ever imagined and you moan with the pure pleasure of the experience. You take another, and another, then you find you’ve eaten the whole damn cake. And when it’s over, all you’re left with is a righteous stomachache and pants that are too tight. From now on, temptation be damned—Pepper was on a diet.

“Pepper,” Sarah said. “I forgot to tell you. Ivy’s coming home in a few days to spend Valentine’s Day with Blake. She said she’ll be in town for a few weeks before she kicks off her North American tour. Maybe you two can go to the auction together?”

Pepper missed her friend since she went back to California last fall. Even though Ivy’s fiancé lived in Rosewood, they hadn’t figured out the logistics yet and were still living on opposite coasts most of the time. “That would be nice. Especially since I wasn’t able to see her when she came home over Christmas.”

Ivy had come home to spend the holidays with her fiancé, Blake Chamberlain, and her family, but Pepper had spent every spare moment dealing with her father’s failing health.

The day after Thanksgiving, her father had a stroke. The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s were spent in hospital waiting rooms, doctors’ offices, and rehabilitation clinics in Birmingham. They’d finally gotten Dad home and able to get around, but he wasn’t 100 percent yet.

“How is your dad?” Sarah asked.

“Better. We’re still not sure if he’s ever going to be able to run the garage again. One of his mechanics has been helping my mother run the shop, but if he doesn’t make significant progress in the next few weeks, we might have to sell it.”

She’d hate to do that. Her father had worked his whole life to make his way up from a gas station attendant to running the family auto shop. Having their own business had allowed her mother to quit her job in the elementary school cafeteria and work as the receptionist for the garage. It had paid for them to move from their trailer into a real house. They’d do everything they could to keep the shop open as long as possible.

“That would be a shame,” Sarah said, echoing Pepper’s thoughts.

“I’m still hopeful. My brother just moved home from Huntsville, so that should help.”

“I thought I noticed someone renting the house on Morning Glory where the Rosewood Realty offices used to be. Is that where he’s setting up his practice?” Miss Francine asked.

“Yep, that’s Logan. That house allows him to live and work in the same building, saving him a lot of overhead. Plus it’s across from the garage, so he can run over there if he needs to.”

Speaking of Logan, she had to remember to take dinner over to his place tonight after the salon closed. She’d volunteered to help him unpack and get settled in his new place. Setting down her scissors, she pulled her phone out of her back pocket to set a reminder to call in an order to Pizza Palace.

“A pretty gutsy move opening a law practice in Rosewood,” Miss Vera noted. “The Chamberlains have had the monopoly on that for seventy years.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty of business for everyone,” Pepper replied before going back to trimming Miss Francine’s hair. Her brother practiced family law and could handle some minor civil or criminal cases if he needed to. Small-town lawyers had to be a jack-of-all-trades. She anticipated he would do good business here. There were certainly families in Rosewood that couldn’t afford the Chamberlains’ exorbitant hourly rate.

Like her own. She’d had her brother put together a will and living directive for her father after he fell ill, but other families didn’t have that luxury of a lawyer in the family. The Chamberlains’ firm charged prices that had made her head spin. The average family couldn’t afford fees like that, and yet, they couldn’t afford not to have the protection and peace of mind that a will or directive provides.

Pepper tried not to get pleasure from the idea of her brother chipping away at the Chamberlains’ turf, but it was hard not to hope for Logan’s success. Not everyone in town thought the Chamberlains were southern royalty. In her household, the name was rarely even spoken without her mother getting agitated and changing the subject.

“Anyway,” Pepper continued, “it’s not like Norman has a child in law school to take over the practice when he retires.”

Blake, the oldest Chamberlain, taught and coached football at the high school. Mitchell was in med school, and his twin, Maddie, worked at the bakery. Grant was a fireman and Simon was a cop. The youngest, Hazel, was still in high school, but somehow Pepper doubted that the bespectacled bookworm she saw around town would be interested in law.

“In a few years, we’ll be thankful we don’t have to recruit a law firm to come into the area. Not many up-and-coming lawyers are interested in leaving the big cities for a little place like this.” Pepper finally finished trimming Miss Francine’s hair. She set aside the scissors and ran her fingers through the damp strands. “We’ve just got to blow you out,” she said, “and you’ll be good to go.”

Pepper used the round brush to quickly dry and shape the older woman’s strawberry blonde hair into the style she preferred. The color was nothing like the original, but Miss Francine had told her that once she went gray, there was no reason she couldn’t change things up. She’d always wanted hair the same color as Ann-Margret and that’s what she got. Pepper sprayed her work with hair spray and spun Miss Francine to the mirror to admire her handiwork.

“Wonderful, as always, Pepper.” Miss Francine dug into her purse for her money, leaving her a generous tip. “Now, you mentioned going on vacation soon, right? It’s not going to interfere with my appointment, is it?”

Pepper was taking a week off work to get some things done around the house. She couldn’t wait to start getting her house into better shape. “No, ma’am,” she said. “I’m taking off the week of Valentine’s Day. You won’t be back here until the following week.”

“Okay, good,” Miss Francine said, getting up from her chair. “After the Valentine’s rush, I’m going to need a full day of pampering.”

Pepper arrived on her brother’s doorstep at five thirty with a pizza, a six-pack, and a box of cupcakes from Rosewood Bakery.

It took him a few minutes but finally the door swung open, revealing him to be covered in dirt and out of breath. There were flecks of dust in the brown waves of his hair and dark smudges along the square line of his jaw.

“Hey, sis,” Logan said, smiling.

“You look like hell,” she stated. “Did you get in a fight with a feather duster?”

“Something like that,” he admitted, taking a step back into the entryway to allow her in. “I made the mistake of pulling down the ladder to the attic. Apparently no one has done that in a couple, um, decades.”

“Lovely. You get in the shower and rinse off. I’ll have pizza waiting for you when you get done.”

“Thank you,” he said, leaning in to give her a kiss on her cheek. “Oops.” He reached out and brushed away the smudge he left behind. “I’ll be right back.” He turned and ran back upstairs.

Pepper shut the front door behind her and weaved her way through the piles of boxes and random furniture to the kitchen in the back of the house. Formerly a real estate office, the majority of the downstairs had been used as offices and conference rooms. She supposed her brother would do the same once he opened his practice. Tucked in the back, the kitchen was untouched.

It was also unrenovated. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Pepper’s house, but considering no one had used the oven here in twenty years, no one had replaced it, either. All the fixtures were old, the wallpaper dated. The only modern thing in the place was a Keurig coffee machine on the counter. Knowing Logan, that was the first thing he’d unpacked.

Pepper slid a box labeled “kitchen stuff” out of her way and put the pizza and drinks on the counter. She opened an empty cupboard, then another and realized he didn’t have any plates, cups, or flatware unpacked. She supposed that was the difference between her and her brother. Pepper didn’t cook much, but whenever she moved into a new place, the kitchen was the first thing she put away.

She hadn’t thought to ask for paper plates at the pizza place. They gave her napkins and twenty little packets of red pepper flakes, but no plates. Looking around, she eyed the different boxes and started opening ones that looked promising. In the fourth or fifth box, she found a stack of paper plates. That was all they needed. They could drink from the cans since they were still cold.

Pepper carried everything into the conference room to eat. Technically, it was the formal dining room, but it had a long table with rolling executive chairs, the far wall had a screen, and overhead, instead of a light fixture, there was a computer projector.

Logan joined her a few minutes later, clean and with damp hair. “Thanks for bringing food. I’ve had nothing but coffee and chips all day.”

“This is a nice setup,” she said, gesturing around the room. “Did you bring this with you?”

“No, it came with the house. They left this stuff, the chairs and coffee table in the lobby, and a big desk in the room I’ll use for my office.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah. A few less things I need to buy.” Logan lifted a piece of pizza onto a plate and sat down. “Starting your own business isn’t for sissies. It’s hard to justify buying a flat-screen television for the lobby when I have no clients.”

Pepper passed him a soda. “You’ll get clients. You just have to open.”

Logan shrugged, taking a bite of his food instead of arguing with her. Pepper knew he was worried. Moving back to Rosewood and going out on his own was a big deal. Especially going up against competition like the Chamberlains’ firm. It was a risk, but she knew he did it for the family. He couldn’t sit idle in Huntsville while everything was falling apart at home.

“I went to see Dad today,” Logan said, changing the subject.

“How was he?” she asked. “The last time I was over there, he seemed a little sluggish. He was getting around okay, but you could tell it was a lot of work for him.”

“He was better,” Logan said. “That cane the doctor gave him helps. He came to the door to let me in, then walked with me to the garage to help me find some tools to work on the house.”

“I’m worried he won’t get the use of his left hand back,” Pepper said with a shake of her head. “He can barely hold a spoon without dropping it. I just don’t see him working on cars and handling heavy tools anytime soon.”

“It’s only been a couple of months. He’s going to therapy and he said that’s helping. You never know. We’ve got to take this one day at a time. He could be in there tinkering under the hood with Sean by summer.”

“You’re right,” Pepper said, trying to stay positive. She was usually an upbeat person, but it was hard to do when she was watching her family struggle. “On the bright side, now that Dad can stay home alone during the day, Mom’s able to go back to run the shop. It’s taken a lot of pressure off Sean. Now he can focus on fixing the cars and Mom can handle the customers and the phones.”

“I’m sure she’s happy to get out of the house. Of course, now I have to worry about her sneaking across the street to check on me all the time.”

“Ah, the downside to renting a house so close to the garage,” Pepper replied with a smile. “I’m sure she’d be glad to help you decorate.”

Logan groaned and rolled his eyes. “She’d want to cover everything with those doilies she crochets.”

Pepper chuckled, knowing he was right. She had a box with about fifteen doilies her mother gave her for her new house. It was currently collecting dust in the corner of the dining room, but so were most things.

“All right,” Logan said, pushing back from the table, “enough eating. It’s time to get some work done.”

“Fine.” Pepper sipped the last of her drink and followed Logan into the kitchen to throw out their trash. “I’ll start on the kitchen. Then you can spend all day tomorrow trying to figure out where I put things.”

Logan laughed. “Okay. Just don’t hide the K-Cups or you’ll get a desperate call from me at dawn.”

Chapter Two

Pepper finally got ready to leave around nine thirty. It took more time than she expected to wipe out the cabinets, line them, and put away all of Logan’s things. The kitchen was small and the layout was a little awkward, so it took some time to figure out what should go where. She was pretty pleased with herself when she was finished. It actually looked better than her own kitchen, which stung just a little.

As she stepped down off his porch and onto the sidewalk, the patio light flickered for a moment, then went out. A streetlamp up the block made it bright enough to walk without tripping, but the sudden darkness was disconcerting.

The street was quiet. Too quiet. She looked around and didn’t see a single person out and about. No cars, no people walking dogs or coming in and out of the grocery store. On any other day, she wouldn’t have given a second thought to it, but after that conversation today about the peeper, she found herself a little on edge. All of the victims had been single women who lived alone. There had been no rhyme or reason to the nights, no patterns to anticipate when he might strike again. Whoever he was, he could be out there watching her right now.

The rustle of leaves sounded on her left, and she snapped her head around to look. There was no breeze tonight, but a bush at the corner of Logan’s foundation was moving. She told herself it could be a cat or rabbit and forced her feet down the sidewalk to her car.

Logan’s house was only about five blocks away from Pepper’s, but she’d opted to drive tonight not knowing how late she’d finish. She rounded her car quickly and checked the backseat for crazies before she climbed in. She shut the door and locked it as soon as she could. From there, it was a short, uneventful drive. The whole town was quiet tonight, including her street, Daisy Drive.

When she parked and turned off her car, she eyed the area around her house and prepared to make a run for it. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but she was spooked nonetheless. It was a short walk from her driveway to her front door, and she made certain she had her house key ready in one hand and her pepper spray ready in the other. Miss Francine had told her to get a big gun or a big dog, but that wasn’t really her style. When she moved out of her parents’ home, her daddy insisted she have some way to protect herself, so she special ordered the police-grade pepper spray from the Internet. If it could drop a violent three-hundred-pound drunk, it could handle whoever might be looking in the windows of Rosewood homes.

Pepper’s house was two blocks off the main square, just across from Whittaker’s restaurant. The restaurant could get a little loud on the weekends and during the summer when they stayed open later, but on the average weeknight, they closed up at nine. Not even the dishwashers were still there tonight.

Both of her neighbors were older. Miss Phyllis owned the antiques store and was almost completely deaf. Instead of wearing a hearing aid, she opted to crank the volume up on her television so loud that Pepper knew exactly what she was watching at all times. The silence indicated she was in bed already. On the other side were the Jacksons—Art and Connie. They owned the gas station, and Art usually got home late from closing up.

Not the most dangerous place, but that didn’t keep her from climbing her stairs two at a time and lunging for her front door. She unlocked it quickly, stepped inside, then shut and bolted the door. Only then did she let out a sigh of relief mingled with nervous laughter. “You’re being silly,” she chided herself, then immediately turned and pulled the curtains closed on her front windows. Why would the peeper come to watch her? Really, there wasn’t anything exciting to look at.

Pepper switched on the lamp by the front door, illuminating what she liked to refer to as her
livbedoset
—a combination living room, bedroom, and closet. Her couch, bed, television, dresser, and a makeshift clothing rack occupied most of the free space in the room, making her feel sometimes like she had a studio apartment instead of a thousand-square-foot house.

She dropped her purse and pepper spray on the table by the door and made her way through the house, closing curtains and securing windows as she went.

Her house was a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow. In theory. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough time or money to make all of the rooms usable. The home had previously been owned by an elderly widower. He’d fallen and broken his hip, spending the next few years in a long-term-care facility in Ashville. When he passed on, his kids had fought over his estate for several years, and by the time the house went on the market, it had been vacant for almost a decade.

One bedroom had a weak floor that needed to be reinforced and a window in such a poor state that the curtains moved even when it was shut. The other had an electrical problem, so none of the outlets or fixtures worked, and the wallpaper was peeling down in a mildewy mess. She was pretty certain that the drywall needed to be replaced in there, too.

She would use the rooms for storage if she could, but neither was in any shape to put anything in them. With her luck, a heavy box would fall through the floor and she’d find a family of rabid raccoons in her crawl space. That meant that all the boxes of unpacked belongings and homeless furniture were stacked up in what should be the dining room.

Pepper turned on the light in the kitchen. The saving grace of the house was that both the bathroom and kitchen were functional, although out of date. There was no dishwasher, no washer-dryer hookups, and the cabinetry and tile in both rooms hadn’t been fashionable since before Pepper was born, but they did what they were supposed to do. That was more than she could say about the rest of the place.

When all was said and done, though, Pepper loved her house. It was her first home. A real wood-and-brick home. She had grown up in a trailer and then moved to an apartment when she got her job at Curls. It took several years to save up a down payment, but she finally had a little place to call her own.

She’d saved a little over five thousand dollars to put toward improvements to the house. Her attempts at doing a little bit over time hadn’t gotten her very far. She did get the hardwood floors in the living room and dining room refinished and the walls painted in a couple of rooms before she moved in. Everything else had been bumped to the foot-long to-do list she had tacked to her refrigerator.

Pepper eyeballed the list for a moment, then opened the door to pull out a drink. Her father’s health had taken precedent lately, but her vacation was coming. She was desperate to get at least one of the bedrooms functional so she could move out of the living room. Maybe then she could have people over and not be embarrassed.

People like Ivy. They had become pretty close again while Ivy was in Rosewood to help with the tornado fund-raiser. Pepper would love to have her over for a visit, but it just wouldn’t happen the way the house looked now. She wouldn’t even let her brother in—there was no way she was going to let a rock star in her house, friend or not.

Pepper turned to head back toward the livbedoset but stopped when she caught a blur of movement outside the kitchen window. She could barely make out the face of someone watching her. The sudden realization shot her heart up into her throat and she dropped her drink, sending soda spewing across the floor. She scrambled to pick up the can and drop it in the sink. By the time she got to the window to look outside again, there was nothing to see.

Her backyard wasn’t fenced. Anyone could get up to that back window, then go in five different directions and disappear into someone else’s yard or the next street over.

One window. She had one window without anything to cover it. She’d bought one of those ruffled valances to go over the top, but the rest of the window was wide-open. That was about to change. Pepper marched through the room and pulled a bath towel out of the linen closet. She returned to the kitchen and flung the towel over the window, tucking it around the curtain rod and blocking the entire view.

“Peep on me now, you bastard!” she shouted at the window, although the culprit was long gone.

Pepper had intended to curl up in bed and watch some television before she fell asleep, but she knew now those plans were shot. Instead, she picked up her cell phone and called the police department to add her report to the long list of complaints.

“I responded to a call at your girlfriend’s house last night.”

Grant looked at his brother Simon and frowned. He didn’t have a girlfriend and Simon knew it. Grant wasn’t much for the kind of commitment that required labels. He narrowed his eyes at him. “You know something I don’t?”

Simon chuckled. “I went to Pepper’s house last night,” he explained.

“She’s not my girlfriend, dork. We’ve never even dated.”

“I know. But she’s the one you dream about,” Simon said with a misty, romantic look on his face.

That earned him a kick to the shin under the table. Simon bit down a yelp, not wanting to cause a scene in Ellen’s Diner. If he did, Ruth, the waitress, would scold him. Grant’s twenty-two-year-old brother was hard-pressed to get any respect as a police officer as it was. He didn’t need to be publicly reprimanded by a crotchety, middle-aged woman having hot flashes.

“That hurt, you dick,” Simon hissed over their food. He leaned down and rubbed his leg with a frown lining his face. “Someone is a little touchy about the subject of Pepper Anthony.”

Pepper was always a touchy subject and had been since the ninth grade. Grant wasn’t used to failing when it came to women. He always knew exactly what to say, how to act, when to look into their eyes at the perfect moment to make all their defenses melt away. None of those skills had helped where Pepper was concerned.

“Someone doesn’t feel like getting ragged on by their baby brother today. Now get to the point of the story. What happened that you had to go to her place?”

“She was struck by the peeper.” Simon shoved a French fry in his mouth. “That’s our eighth report so far. The second this week.”

Grant didn’t like the sound of that. Rosewood was a small, quiet community. They weren’t used to having some pervert roaming the streets at night, harassing the local ladies. Especially Pepper. She lived alone in that house and her family lived way on the edge of town. She was surrounded by older residents who probably couldn’t hear her screams. She had no one to protect her from the town weirdo. “Is she okay?”

“Oh, yeah, she was just a little unnerved by the whole thing. The guy never tries to get in the house or make contact. He just watches. Pepper said she was in her kitchen and saw someone watching her from the backyard.”

“That’s creepy. I don’t like it. Pepper doesn’t have a security system, does she?”

Simon snorted. “No. Who does? You know a big dog and a loaded shotgun are the ADT of the South.”

“Yeah, but Pepper doesn’t have either of those.”

“Who doesn’t have what?” Blake asked from over their shoulder.

Grant and Simon both turned to watch their oldest brother approach the booth and force Simon to slide over. Because of Blake’s class schedule he usually didn’t have time to pop over to the diner at lunch, so this was unexpected.

“A security system,” Simon repeated.

“Are we going to rob someone?”

“No. I was just telling Grant that we got a report of the peeper at his girlfriend’s house. Ow, stop it, Grant!” Simon shouted the last part as Grant kicked him again.

“Is Pepper okay?” Blake assumed, making Grant’s hands tighten around his fork and knife.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Grant complained. Brothers were severely overrated. He’d dated plenty of women in town, but she was the one they always ragged on him about. She was his dating Waterloo, or at least he let them think that.

“She’s fine,” Simon replied, ignoring him. “I think she was just startled by the whole thing.”

“Do you guys have any leads on who it might be?”

Simon shook his head. “Not really. All we got is one muddy footprint from Colette Vaughn’s backyard. It was a men’s size ten narrow shoe, a work boot they sell at the shoe store on the square. We’ve got the store checking their orders, but they’re not computerized yet, so it’s going to take a while to go through all their files. That’s the only lead we have. We thought for a while it might be Jasper Daniels.”

“The guy who drove his truck into the lake?” Grant asked.

“Same guy. His wife left him right after Christmas, and not long after that, we started getting the first peeping reports. But last night, he was passed out in a cell. Sheriff Todd picked him up for driving his riding lawnmower down the street drunk. Apparently he didn’t realize that counted as a DUI. We didn’t let him out until this morning, so he couldn’t have been the one at Pepper’s window.”

“That’s just great. We’ve got a pervert in town and the cops haven’t a clue who it might be.”

“Ease up,” Simon complained. “You sound like Dad.”

Grant fought to keep his hackles from coming up. Nothing got to him quite like being compared to his father. He got that a lot. He had the misfortune of looking the most like his father out of all his siblings. They had the same build, the same carriage, and the same power over women. Grant just used his powers for good instead of evil. “And you sound like you don’t know what you’re doing,” he countered.