Love Inspired Suspense June 2014 Bundle 1 of 2: Undercover Marriage\Collateral Damage\Forgotten Past (20 page)

“B-bathroom?”

He nodded toward the door to the house. “Down the hall and to the left.”

She crashed through the door before he finished talking. “Thank you!”

He stood where he was for a moment, amazed, charmed, far too curious and somehow, beyond all else, comforted, and he didn't even know why. Time to share some of that comfort with someone who needed it more than he did. He picked up the receiver and dialed Sarah's number.

* * *

Sarah's eyelids pulled downward as if ten-pound barbells weighted them. She forced them open for at least the fiftieth time and was jerking the car back onto the road when her cell rang. It awakened her only slightly. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw a wall of semitrucks coming from behind. Her foot had slid off the accelerator and she had slowed to fifty miles per hour.

Must take this call.
She slapped her right cheek hard enough to water her eyes, sped up, grabbed the cell and answered. She checked the screen for a fraction of a second and allowed herself a rush of elation when she saw it was Nick. “Please tell me she's there.”

“She's here.”

She gasped instinctively, and her emotions rolled on a current of remembered thrill at the deep tone of comfort in his voice.

“You sound awfully tired.”

Without warning, the moisture in her eyes turned into a cascade, and Sarah felt her face contort. As in Sikeston, she could barely see the road, and this four-lane was a lot busier. “I had some coffee, but that's not cutting it.” She steered the car onto an exit ramp as trucks rumbled past. “Thank You, God,” she whispered, unable to contain the sobs.

“Hey, Sarah, honey, it's going to be okay.” He used the endearment as if without thought, but it was exactly what she needed at the moment.

It gave her time to compose herself and manage traffic. She stopped at a signal, realized it was green, turned left and followed the road toward the outer edge of Springfield. “I've been so scared. If anything happened to her I'd just...” She would want to die. “I wouldn't be able to handle it. Sorry.” She took some quick gulps of air to regain control. “I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't called, Nick. Thank you. I can never repay you, and I'm so sorry to be causing all this trouble, and—”

“You aren't the one causing trouble, Sarah. You're the one trying to manage everything on your own. Why don't we start worrying about
you
now? Where are you?”

The flow of his words wrapped around her like a blanket held in front of a fireplace. “I just pulled off the interstate in Springfield. I don't know why I didn't just stay on Highway 60, but—”

“Springfield's a good place to stop.” His voice was so gentle she felt more easing of the ache that had been with her for hours. “Is there a hotel nearby?”

“No need for that.” She glanced around her at the signs, then caught a familiar logo. Airport. There would be parking. “If I could just get a little rest, freshen up, get some coffee—”

“Let me call a nearby hotel and make reservations for you. My treat. I don't want you taking any chances.”

She turned right at the airport sign, then pulled to the side of the road, unable to continue. “Why are you being so kind? You don't even know me now.”

“Damsels in distress, that kind of thing. Besides, how can you say I don't know a lifelong childhood buddy? How many English tests did you prep me for? Remember how well we knew the woods around town and every inch of the creek bank? Sneaking into the backside of the cave? Do you still have that little egg-sized formation I found and gave you?”

That brought a slight smile. “Sure do.”

“There are brothers and sisters who don't know each other as well as we do. Don't sixteen years count for anything?”

She smiled a little more as she recalled the happy times they'd gone fishing together, hiked the hills together and yes, even explored the cave before the adults discovered what they were doing and put a stop to it. He'd even confided in her one day when they were sixteen about a crush he'd developed on Shelby. Which had, of course, broken her heart.

“Your little sister looked kind of frightened,” he said.

“Why? Did something happen?” Sarah went on immediate alert.

“She got lost, and I don't think she was sure of the reception she'd receive here.”

Good. “So what kind did she get?”

“Firm but fair.” There was a smile in his voice, and it warmed her.

“Don't worry, Dad will be here before long. In fact, I'll call him now and see what's keeping him, but he's out with old friends and probably forgot to check his watch.”

“I'll get there as soon as I can.” She dabbed at her face and resisted checking her reflection in the mirror—and why on earth would she do that? It wasn't as if he could see her. And it wasn't as if she wanted to impress him with her appearance.

“Sarah, it's late. By the time you'd get here we would all be asleep, including you, and that would be dangerous. There are two spare rooms for guests—you know how Mom loved company. They opened up the attic to make another guest suite just last year, and that's where I'll put Emma. She'll be safe and warm and fast asleep before you could get here. I'm serious about making reservations for you in Springfield.”

“No. Thanks, but I'll be fine.” Her parents had taken care of her responsibility all these years. This time she could handle it herself. “You're right. I'll get some rest and pick up Emma in the morning.”

There was a short silence. “Pick her up?”

“I need to get her back home to Sikeston where she belongs, and out of harm's way.” And keep our lives from exploding in our faces.

“You know what? I've been thinking about that. School's out for the year, right?”

Sarah grimaced. “Yes, but Emma's been talking about getting a summer job, and I still have so much legal work to take care of for Mom and Dad.”

“Can it wait? Dad's been through a lot these past weeks. He's barely functioning. Same with me. You and Emma must be reeling.”

“And thus this crazy flight across Missouri.”

“You don't need to be alone right now. Some time here could help.”

She grabbed a paper towel from the passenger seat and tore off a sheet to wipe her face. Again. “Jolly Mill isn't exactly safe.”

“I had alarms put up in the house. We have a motivated neighborhood watch. Everyone's on the alert, and Gerard has a lookout from his place on the hillside above the town, complete with telescope. He's taking it seriously. Dad and I could really use your company. If it makes you feel any better, nothing else has happened since the explosions three weeks ago.”

She wasn't up to an argument right now. She'd just have to convince him in the morning that she and Emma couldn't stay there. He was being a gentleman about twisting her arm, but he was twisting. Why? Part of her felt a little thrill at the thought that Nick Tyler—the guy she'd adored for years as a teenager and had thought about constantly when Emma was growing up—now wanted to reach out to her. Another part of her wanted to hide.

She couldn't respond. The longer Emma stayed in Jolly Mill, the more secrets might emerge.

“Your cousin lives right down the street from us,” he said. “Carmen even packs a pistol and learned how to shoot since our ex-cop moved to town, and I know for a fact she has plenty of room in her big old house for company.”

“And does Carmen have an alarm system in her house, as well?”

“Sure does. A woman living alone can't be too careful. She had it installed a week ago.”

Sarah leaned her head against the headrest. On this long drive across Missouri, why hadn't she considered what she would do about a situation like this? She hadn't expected Nick to be so generous with his time. She hadn't thought, period.

There was a sigh. “Sarah, I know you've got to be exhausted. Stop and sleep. Find a safe place. Everything's covered here, so I'll see you in the morning. Will that work for you? We'll talk about the rest then.”

“It'll have to. I'm afraid my brain's on lockdown.”

His voice lowered and lingered, comforting and kind. “Then sleep.”

“Nick...you've always been the sweetest guy.” Always.

“And you're everything I remembered you to be.”

“Um...I'm not sure what that means,” she said with a smile. “Good night, Nick.”

“Sleep well, Sarah.”

Her whole body tingled as she disconnected and placed her phone on the passenger seat. She buzzed. Excitement? Memories? Fear?

She pulled onto the deserted road that led to the airport. She would find long-term parking and catch a few hours of sleep, then wash up as well as she could, maybe even catch a shower at a nearby truck stop.

Tomorrow she could place the mantle of worry back over her shoulders.

THREE

O
n Saturday morning Sarah craved a shower. After a few hours of sleep at the far edge of the Springfield/Branson airport parking lot, she'd tried uncountable times to call Emma, but of course she was diverted to voice mail. The line for a shower at the truck stop in Mount Vernon was too long for her to wait.

At least she'd had a chance to brush her teeth and wash her face and grab a fast-food breakfast, so her stomach was full, but it rumbled with nerves. Last night, despite her fatigue, she'd struggled to fall asleep because she couldn't stop thinking about Nick. After all these years, she wouldn't have believed his voice would have the power to affect her. But it was more than just his voice—it was the sense of caring he'd related over the phone, the words of kindness. He'd brought back so many memories, and she caught herself wondering how their lives would have gone if they'd made different choices.

How often she'd longed to crawl back into the past and never leave town.

She pulled into Jolly Mill thirty-five minutes after finishing her breakfast and felt blasted by memories she'd believed had settled into the dust along the surrounding country roads. She admired the modest, three-bedroom brick house when she pulled into the Tyler drive. Someone had done a fine job of landscaping, with trimmed hedges, a freshly mown lawn and real grass—not the mowed weeds she'd always managed to grow on her own lawn.

She parked behind an old brown Ford pickup. Edward's truck. It had been nearly new when her family moved away. Okay, this set of recollections was hitting a little too hard.

She glimpsed a flash of bright red peeking out from behind a juniper tree at the corner of the house, and felt a quick squeeze of her chest. It was Mom's beloved VW Beetle, which Mom had been generous enough to share after Emma got her driver's license. Soon it would belong to Emma, though the title wouldn't be in her name until Sarah was convinced Emma could handle the responsibility. Maybe by the time she was twenty-one...

Lowering her squeaky driver-side window, Sarah sniffed the air. Bacon and other smoked meat scents combined with a sweetness of maple, reaching her from the restaurant a couple of blocks away, across the street from the big old wooden grain mill from which Jolly Mill had gotten its name. No telling who owned the restaurant now. Nick's uncle, Will Parker, had once made the place the most popular hangout around for local high-schoolers—therefore, Shelby had loved the place, and Sarah had seldom gone there. Nick and his cousin, Billy, Will's son, had never run in the same circles at school. Nick was more scholastically minded, and Billy hung out with the hard-partying crowd. Where Nick went, Sarah went. Why hadn't it occurred to her during those years of innocence that there might have been a reason why she and Nick stuck so closely together?

She continued to admire the neatly trimmed shrubs, the bricks surrounding the flower beds, the trees, nicely mulched, that shaded the yard with spring green. Nick had begun earning money for college and med school in eighth grade by doing lawn care...and working on a wonderful tan and beautiful muscles that she was sure would've had most of the girls in their class following him around like hungry kittens if he'd ever gone without a shirt.

It was difficult for Sarah to decide if she felt more relieved or worried that Emma had spent the night under the Tyler roof—likely with her own father and grandfather, both oblivious. Family and old friends would surround Sarah and Emma here in Jolly Mill...if they stayed.

A dog barked from down the street, and a lawnmower fired up a few blocks away—actually, in a town of eight hundred twelve people, there were only a few blocks in any direction. Sarah had loved growing up here. How she'd missed this place.

Focusing to keep her breaths steady, she marched to the front door and pressed the doorbell. The deep, soothing sounds of Westminster Abbey chimed through the house. She recalled those chimes from her earliest memories, and that soothed a little of her tension. Today was Saturday. Maybe everyone but Emma was sleeping in. Emma never slept in.

The door opened a crack, and dark brown, sleepy eyes peered out.

“Emma?”

The eyes widened and Emma gave a soft gasp as she pulled the door open. “Um, hi, sis. Wow, what're you doing here so early?”

Sarah stepped past the threshold. She grabbed Emma in a tight hug that obviously surprised Emma as much as it did her. “If you ever do anything like this again I'll ground you for the rest of your life. Do you know how scared I was?”

Emma held still for a moment, breathing slowly, as if soaking in the hug. They'd been close all of Emma's life, but because Mom and Dad were the disciplinarians, Sarah had always taken advantage of the opportunity to just enjoy time with her. She would need to start relying on her instincts as a kindergarten teacher when it came to discipline from now on. She could only imagine how Emma would respond to
that.

Too soon for Sarah, her daughter wriggled free. “I told you where I was coming.” She folded her arms across her underdeveloped chest. “Don't you think I'm old enough to take care of myself a few miles from home?”

“You drove across the whole lower state of Missouri! And don't think you're going to get away with this.”

Emma sighed. “I know,” she said in a singsong voice, “I'll have my cousin John to answer to when we get home.”

“You'll have me to answer to, but the Tylers have been through too much already. They don't need two feuding sisters on their hands.” It was a little late to start being the boss in Emma's life, but too often these past weeks she'd depended on John to step in as a father figure.

“According to Nick,” Emma said, “when you and Shelby were together you were always feuding.”

“Nick said that?”

“He even told me he had a crush on Shelby that lasted maybe a couple of weeks.”

Sarah forgot to breathe for a moment. “He said that?” A couple of weeks?

“Okay, then he admitted maybe it lasted a little longer than that, but he wasn't in her league. He was a nerd, you know, not one of the jocks Shelby went for.” She grinned up at Sarah. “Edward said you were Nick's true love, and everybody knew it.”

Sarah tried not to react to that, but oh, it felt good to hear those words, whether or not they were true. And then she wondered why she felt so strongly about it after all these years.

“Y'all must've talked a lot last night.” Sarah glanced up at the set of family photos to their left in the vestibule. One showed Nick at sixteen, standing above his seated parents. After all these years the memories tied knots around her heart. But before she could get maudlin she caught sight of a photo of Aunt Peg and Edward on their wedding day. Peg was what, twenty-four? Had Emma caught sight of herself in her grandmother's photo?

Emma closed her eyes with a sigh, and when she opened them again, they were slightly moist. “I'm sorry I scared you, sis, really. I couldn't stop thinking about that all the way here. I kept imagining how hurt you'd be, and I wanted to call you before I left, but really? Don't you want to know what happened to Mom and Dad?” Her typically soft, girlish voice tapered to a tiny tremble.

Sarah strolled past a padded foyer bench surrounded by a bentwood hall tree and an umbrella stand. She entered an open kitchen and living area that surely provided a pleasant great room for entertaining. She sank onto a pale green plush chair that faced an unobstructed view of the carefully tended backyard.

“I do want to know what happened to Mom and Dad,” she said. “I also want to keep you safe. Nick's told me what he and his friend, the ex-cop, are doing, and I'm afraid we'll just get in the way.”

Emma sat on the edge of a sofa that matched the chair, the sweet floral scent of her shampoo settling around them. “I'm not useless, you know. I can ask around. Besides, I want to get to know folks around here, and you can get reacquainted with old friends, right? What if Nick's right and someone can tell you something? Don't you want to know?”

Sarah suppressed a sigh. Her inquisitive, precious, irritating daughter. The trait of friendliness had been learned from the cradle. Sarah, on the other hand, would rather curl up for hours on her sofa in her tiny brick house at the edge of Sikeston, laptop across her knees as she compiled endless pages of fiction in her make-believe world with imaginary characters. For years she'd dreamed of having a novel published. It wasn't as easy as she'd once thought. With Mom and Dad gone, would she ever be able to return to that?

“Nick's really cool,” Emma said. “So's Edward. We stayed up late last night and talked about Mom and Dad and Edward's wife.”

“Aunt Peg.”

“He said you and Shelby always called her that.” Emma reached over and touched Sarah's arm. “Please, please, don't you think we can stay awhile?”

Sarah braced herself against this child's well-known charm.

Emma turned and looked up at her, eyes large and entreating, a look Sarah had never been able to resist. “Did Nick tell you much about Gerard Vance?”

Sarah raised her eyebrows.

“The man who used to be a policeman down in Corpus Christi.”

“He told me a little.”

“He runs this homeless rehab place up at the top of the hills overlooking the mill. Isn't that really great?”

“Homeless rehab?”

“Yeah. The guy married an old friend of yours, Megan Bradley?”

“Megan? Really?” With a sense of loss, Sarah realized she had so much catching up to do. She'd missed nearly seventeen years' worth of Jolly Mill life.

“Yeah, she's a doctor now, and she met Gerard at his mission in Texas. He looks for people living on the street who want a new start in life, and he moves them to the rehab place. Just up that way on the hill.” She pointed north. “He's helping Nick research the...the deaths.” Her voice wobbled.

Sarah patted Emma's knee. “Sorry, sweetie. I'm so sorry. This is hard, I know.” She blinked at the moisture that seemed so ever present in her own eyes the past three weeks. “Where are Nick and Edward now?”

Emma dabbed at her cheeks and sniffed. “Why do you call Edward by just his name when you always called his wife Aunt Peg?”

“Mom once told me it was a modified Southernism—instead of Miss Peg she was Auntie Peg, then the name shortened to Aunt when we got older. Edward insisted everyone call him Edward instead of Pastor or Reverend. He's kind of a laid-back guy.”

“Edward said this is his only day to sleep late, so he'll be up later. I think I heard the shower a while ago, so that's probably Nick.”

Then now would be her only chance to get Emma out of here. “Emma, honey, I know you don't want to think about it, but as I said, what if someone did cause those explosions? We could be in danger here, and Nick would be distracted if he has to see to our safety.”

“But we can help. You're packing heat, aren't you?”

Sarah blinked. “You mean, did I bring my Smith & Wesson?” she asked dryly.

“In the wheel well, where you keep it? John told you to always keep it near you for protection. A woman alone can never be too—”

“Yes, but I don't ever want to have to use it, and it doesn't have to come to that if we would just leave.”

“Nick got a couple more leads on his blog late last night,” Emma said. “New person, fake name, couldn't trace it. Anyway, this person warned Nick to get on with his life if he wanted to keep it, and then they also mentioned how easily they could strike at any time. There was something about a party almost seventeen years ago?”

Sarah recoiled at the slap of those words. “The party?” So it was someone she'd known long ago. Someone, perhaps, who'd spiked the sodas at the going-away party Nora Thompson had thrown so the kids could say goodbye to Sarah's identical twin, Shelby—a party thrown at Shelby's request.

“Did Nick tell you about that?”

Emma shrugged. “He said someone spiked the soda. Edward said he thought the comment might be a prank. You know how sleazy people can get online.”

“I doubt Nick's taking it casually. I'm not anymore.” All the more reason to get Emma safely out of town.

“Why?”

“Honey, some jerk slipped a bunch of ecstasy into the sodas at that party, and the kids all kind of went nuts. Whoever sent that message to Nick obviously knew about it and is probably still in town.”

Emma frowned up at her, scrunching her lips as she often did, which Mom had always warned her would give her wrinkles. “Edward would rather think it's some kind of hate crime. You know, like maybe somebody who hates Christians found out about the retreat. We hear a lot of stories about church shootings.”

“But in Jolly Mill? This is the last place I can imagine that happening. Strangers couldn't even find it. This place is isolated. Besides, as Nick pointed out to me, if they wanted to kill a bunch of preachers they'd have struck earlier. I think this was more focused.”

Emma took a shuddering breath, and Sarah wished she hadn't said that.

“Has Nick gathered any more information about the retreat center on Spring River that got shut down because of a dioxin spill?”

Emma slumped back into the cushions. “No, but he told me about it.”

“So you can see why Dad might have been the one targeted. Hypothetically. He was instrumental not only in convincing the ministerial alliance to move their meeting place from Verona, but he spoke to others who met there, as well, and there was a general exodus.”

“Nick's about to give up on that lead,” Emma said. “Not much to go on, and as Edward said, who's going to wait more than thirty years to get their revenge? Nick made a few more calls last night. The retreat owner's wife got remarried and moved away with their daughter about a year after he killed himself. Two of his brothers stayed on and farmed and did pretty well. Gerard Vance?”