RAVEN'S HOLLOW (2 page)

Chapter Three

“You about done changing that tire, Elijah?” Despite the pouring rain, Rooney Blume stuck his head out the window of his great-grandson’s truck. He squinted skyward as thunder rattled the ground. “Someone upstairs must be working off one big mad.”

“Someone out here definitely is,” Eli said, giving the lug nuts he’d just put on the tire a hard cinch to tighten them. “What were you thinking riding your bike to the Cove in this weather?”

“DMV lifted my license last year, and the sun was shining when I started out. Probably good you came along when you did, though. My balance tends to fail me in the wet.”

As Eli recalled, his great-grandfather’s balance wasn’t a whole lot better in the dry. There’d also been a thermos of heavily spiked tea tucked in the bike’s carrier, and likely close to half of what he’d started out with inside the old man by the time their paths had crossed.

Right now Rooney was pushing a metal cup through the window. Giving the last nut a tug, Eli accepted the cup, considered briefly, then tossed the contents back in a single fiery shot.

Some things, he realized, when the flames in his throat subsided, never changed. He gave the cup back to Rooney.

His great-grandfather pointed a knobby finger at a line of trees bent low by the wind. “Gonna be a bitch of a night.”

Soaked to the skin, with his dark hair dripping in his eyes and rainwater running down his neck, Eli climbed back inside and started the truck’s engine. “You think?” But he grinned as he spoke, and flicked a hand at the thermos. “I’m surprised that tea of yours hasn’t eaten through the aluminum casing by now.”

“You sound like my great-grandson.”

“I am your great-grandson.”

“I mean the other one. The one who’s wearing a police chief’s badge and sporting a big dose of attitude over in the Hollow.”

“Only a town of fools would give a badge to someone who prefers carrot juice to whiskey.” Eli squinted through the streaming windshield. “Self-denial that unswerving upsets the balance of the universe.”

“Spoken like a cop after my own heart. And while we’re on the subject of badges and balances, did you know your carrot-loving cousin’s not gonna be putting a wedding ring on Sadie Bellam’s finger?”

“Heard about it.” Eli kept his tone casual and swept his gaze across the mud-slick road. “I also heard it was Sadie who ended the engagement.”

Rooney’s expression grew canny. “You got awful good hearing for a man who spends most of his time hunting down killers in New York City.”

“It’s not so far from there to here. As the raven flies.”

The old man chortled and offered him another cup of “tea.” “I won’t say you’re a jackass, Elijah, only that among other more valuable things—and for ‘things,’ read ‘Sadie’—the badge on Ty’s chest could’ve been yours if you’d wanted it.”

“And an executive position at the
New York Times
could’ve been Sadie’s if she’d wanted it. We do what we do, Rooney, and live with the consequences.”

His great-grandfather made a rude sound. “You’re as stubborn as twenty mules, the pair of you. You knew each other as kids, connection was already there. Life’ll take you down different paths because that’s how it goes sometimes. But it goes in circles other times, and you and Sadie came to the end of a doozy when you met up last April in Boston.”

“Rooney—” Eli began.

“I was there, Eli. I saw you. And let me tell you, there wasn’t a soul at that wedding reception who even noticed the bride and groom with the fireworks you two set off. Suddenly, next thing I know, Sadie’s back at the
Chronicle
, and you’re tracking a serial killer through the underbelly of Manhattan. Me, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception are still scratching our heads over
that
turn of events.”

Eli sighed. “You, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception read too much into a time-and-place chemical reaction. Sadie was engaged in April.”

“Only until she got back from Boston. Two days later, your cousin Ty was drowning his sorrows in goat milk and a double dose of wheat germ.”

“Sadie’s not ready to be married, and my life’s good the way it is. Cops and relationships don’t mix.”

Rooney snorted. “If you expect me to buy that load of bull, you’re no kind of cop. And no kin of mine.”

“In that case, happy hundred and first in advance, and I’ll be heading back to New York right after I drop you off at Joe’s bar.”

“I need a favor before you go.”

“Yeah?” Eli raised a mildly amused brow. “I could say I don’t do favors for people who claim to have disowned me.”

“But that would make you unworthy of any badge, and we both know that’s as far from the truth as it gets.”

The vague humor lingered despite the fact that Eli could no longer see either the road or the dense woods next to it that stretched from the Cove to the Hollow and beyond. The rain fell in blinding sheets now. “What do you need?”

“Ty’s on duty tonight. I want you to go by his office in the Hollow. He’s got a bulldog there named Chopper. Family in town’s heading south and can’t take him, so I said I’d think about it.”

“You want a dog?”

“Don’t give me that look, Eli. If I die before Chopper does, I’ll leave him to you.”

“Still a cop here. I can’t have pets.”

“No pets, no women. You’re not a cop, you’re a monk.”

“Who said anything about no women?”

“No women of consequence, then. Now, you take my last serious relationship versus the last woman I had sex with.”

“Jesus, Rooney.”

The old man drank from his thermos before offering back a mostly toothless smile. “You think because I’m old I don’t have sex?”

“Yes—no. Dammit, I don’t think about it one way or the other.” Ever.

“Why not? I’m human.”

“You’re also my great-grandfather, and I do my level best to keep thoughts of sex, parents and grandparents out of my head.”

“You’re a prude, Elijah. Doesn’t bother me to picture you with a woman.”

The first bolt of lightning shot down deep in the hollow. “Are we actually having this conversation?”

“I am.” Rooney peered into his thermos. “Seems to me you’re doing more avoiding than conversing.”

Eli swerved around a barely visible pothole. “What I’m doing is trying to figure out how anybody’s sex life, mine included, relates to me checking out a bulldog.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“What, have sex or check out the dog?”

“In a perfect world, both, but I’ll settle for the dog and enjoy thinking about you and Ty firing daggers at each other while you picture, but deliberately don’t talk about, the lovely Sadie Bellam.”

“You have a wide streak of mean in you, old man.” But a slow grin removed the sting of Eli’s remark. In any case, glaring down his resentful cousin would be hell-and-gone preferable to visualizing Rooney naked with a woman.

As the wind picked up, and the truck began to buck, even his garrulous great-grandfather stopped talking. The road, such as it was, became a river, complete with currents, broken branches and sinkholes that could rip out the undercarriage should Eli happen to hit one. That he didn’t was more of a miracle in his opinion than a testament to his driving skills.

Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside his second cousin’s shabby dockside bar, Two Toes Joe’s. He saw Rooney safely through the door, turned down a mug of coppery green beer—old Joe really should have his lines changed—and jogged back to his still-running truck.

The dashboard clock read 9:30, which surprised him since it seemed to have been dark for hours. If he’d believed in omens, as at least three-quarters of his relatives in the area did, he’d check out the dog—couldn’t not do that—then say screw an early arrival for Rooney’s birthday and return to New York. Return to sanity, and more important, the safety of a no-Sadie zone.

What had flared between them last April had been unexpected and intense. Sadie had been a kid the last time he’d seen her. Seven years old and shocked speechless over the murder of her cousin Laura, who’d also happened to be his stepsister.

Although the residents of both Raven’s Cove and Raven’s Hollow had been horrified, few had been as badly shaken as he and Sadie. How could anyone who’d never had the misfortune to do so possibly understand what it felt like to discover the body of someone you loved? And not merely discover, but, in Sadie’s case, literally stumble over.

Her family had left Raven’s Hollow six months later. His had stuck it out for another six years, searching for a closure they’d never received.

To this day, Laura’s killer remained at large. A handful of suspects and numerous persons of interest had been questioned and released. Over time—two decades at this point—what had started as a countywide manhunt had been reduced to a dusty homicide report in the back of the sheriff’s filing cabinet. Clues gathered at the scene had resulted in nothing, and, as they so often did in situations like these, the case had gone cold.

For Eli, the memory of Laura’s murder had dimmed but never disappeared. Not completely. Every similar crime he worked to solve these days took him back to her death. When that happened, the raw pain and guilt would slam through him as hard as it had done the evening he and Sadie had met in the hollow.

On a less grisly note, Eli couldn’t deny that, even at seven years of age, Sadie Bellam had been a beauty. Fast-forward twenty years, slide her into a clingy silver dress, and she’d quite literally stripped the breath from his lungs. He’d prowled around the edges of that Boston reception hall, watching but not approaching her for thirty wary minutes, until one of her aunts had swept in and sealed the deal by insisting they dance.

The idea of taking the memory deeper tempted, but unfortunately, a gust of wind upward of forty miles an hour had other ideas. It grabbed his four-by-four and sent it sliding toward a deep gully. Eli rode the wave, felt the kick of wind abate and urged the truck back onto the road.

It had been a sunny seventy-eight degrees when he’d left New York City. The clear skies had held to Bangor. Then, less than ten miles from the Cove, a mass of boiling black clouds had rolled in and let go.

He glanced left as thunder rumbled up and out of the hollow. Jagged forks of lightning split the sky overhead. His truck, three years old and heavy as hell, shuddered through another blast of wind.

Only a seriously disturbed person would stay out in this. Would
be
out in this. The dog could have waited while he went head-to-head with a glass of Joe’s toxic beer.

Without warning, twin beams of light appeared directly ahead. They slashed through the murk, momentarily blinding him. Swearing, Eli jerked the steering wheel hard, felt the truck’s back end fishtail and had to compensate to keep the entire vehicle from tumbling into the ravine.

He might have won the battle if something—tree, car or possibly both—hadn’t become a sudden and solid roadblock in front of him.

Using his forward momentum, together with muscle and brakes, he went for a one-eighty turn. But the mass was too close and the road too slick for him to gain the traction necessary to execute it.

The collision sent his head and shoulder into the side window. A clap of thunder underscored the hit, but the sound was nothing more than a murmur in Eli’s mind. By the time the truck stopped moving, the storm, the night and the hollow had faded to black around him.

Chapter Four

“Eli, can you hear me?”

A woman’s voice reached him. Possibly Sadie’s, possibly not. She was far away but definitely calling his name. Did that mean he was alive? Because if not, he’d gone someplace dark, wet and incredibly uncomfortable.

“Eli, damn it, open the door!”

Someplace where the angels—at worst, he hoped, angels—shouted orders, and every thought was coated in a bloodred haze.

The haze pulsed for several seconds before subsiding to a repetitive and annoying thud.

He cracked his eyes open to a different kind of darkness. This one was loud and it moved. Both sound and motion jabbed at him like dull knives. He was tempted to sink back under until it stopped.

“Wake up, Eli, and open the door.”

Sadie’s voice—he was sure of it now—sounded impatient, yet held the barest hint of a tremor. He let the memory of her face draw him to the surface and most of the way through it to consciousness.

Levering himself upright, he swore. And kept swearing because it helped him clear out the last of the haze. Once it was gone, he located and hit the lock release.

The door shot open. It very nearly flew off its hinges judging from the screech of metal and the ferocious howl of the wind that grabbed it. Eli managed to clamp a hand on to Sadie’s arm before the unexpected backward motion sent her into the ravine.

He’d forgotten she had the balance of a mountain goat. Without missing a beat, she bunched his wet T-shirt and gave him a hard shake. “Are you hurt?”

He almost smiled. “Been better. Need a minute for my brain to settle.”

“In that case, Lieutenant, shift your excellent butt to the passenger side, and let me in.”

Not quite a storybook angel, but close enough. He grinned. “Helluva time to decide you want to do what we managed not to do in Boston.”

With a glance into the hollow, she pushed on his shoulder. “If we do now what we didn’t do, this really thin rock ledge that your rear tires are barely sitting on is going to crumble apart and send us straight to hell. Or into Raven’s Bog. Jury’s still out on which name’s more appropriate.”

Either place was jarring enough for him to snap his head around.

“Bet that hurt—” she began, then gasped when he lifted her inside and deposited her on the passenger seat. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t move.” He reached for the ignition key.

Swinging her legs around and down, she snagged his wrist. “The engine’s running, Eli. You just can’t hear it over the Tarzan roar of testosterone in your brain.”

“Pretty sure I spun out trying to avoid a head-on with your vehicle, Sadie.”

Keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, and using a spectacular bolt of lightning to aid his vision, Eli shoved the truck in gear. After several seconds of maneuvering, he crawled it away from the edge.

Sadie let out a relieved breath. “I’d be impressed if I didn’t know for a fact that I could have done the same thing a full minute sooner.”

“We’re not on a deadline, sweetheart.” He fingered a cut on his forehead, and wasn’t surprised when he spied a smear of blood. “Are you hurt, and did we hit?”

“No, I’m not, and yes, we did. But not each other.” In the process of wringing out her long red-brown hair, she nodded at the windshield. “It’s difficult to see right now, but that big black thing in front of us is a pine tree. It started to fall, I hit the brakes. At the risk of fueling your already massive ego, you must have done one wicked spinout to avoid being flattened by something that could have pancaked an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Speaking of.” Eli sized up the tilt of his truck’s back end. “Unless one of my tires is sitting in a hole, I’ve got a flat.”

She waved a hand in front of his face. “Did I mention the tree was huge, with the potential to destroy both you and your vehicle?” A frustrated sound emerged. “Why are you even on this road, Eli? Why are you in Maine at all for that matter?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t come for Rooney’s hundred and first?”

“No, I figured you’d come, just not until the last minute.”

“I’d be offended if I wasn’t sure about that flat and apparently in need of a lift.”

She stabbed at the windshield, repeated very clearly, “Big tree, tremendous crushing power.”

His lips curved. “Yeah, I get the luck part. What I haven’t got is a second spare.”

He told her, in bullet points, about Rooney, the bicycle that was currently strapped to his roof rack and Joe’s bar.

Laughing, she dropped her head back onto the seat. “If I said any of that surprised me, I’d be lying.” She slanted him a speculative look. “Still a little shocked to see you, though. On this road. At this time of night.”

“Right back at you. And don’t tell me you didn’t know there was a storm rolling in.”

“I knew,” she agreed, far too softly for his liking.

He studied her profile in the next flash of lightning. “Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

With his brain back on track, he reached out and wrapped his fingers around her neck. “You were driving from the Hollow to the Cove, Sadie, in weather no sane person would take on without extremely strong incentive. As I recall, you’re stubborn, but relatively sane.”

She started to speak, then broke off and grabbed his chin as lightning snaked through the clouds. “You’re bleeding!”

“A little. It’s not...” He hissed when she poked at the gash. “Well, it
was
going numb.”

“Sorry.” She lightened her touch and her tone. “Eli, you were barely conscious when I found you. You could have a concussion.”

“I could also be halfway back to New York. Might have been except for a damn bulldog. Don’t ask. Just trust me when I tell you I’ve been hit on the head more times than I can count.”

She formed her lips into a smile. “To which I’ll simply say, no comment—and you can let go of me now.”

“I will, just as soon as you tell me why you were heading to the Cove in a storm that scared Rooney spitless for close to twenty minutes.”

“I—seriously?”

“Talk to me, Sadie.”

She blew out a breath. “Fine, I got an email. It was—unusual. I don’t know how or why, but it also seemed familiar. Like a memory buried deep in my head. So deep I can’t visualize it.”

“You got a familiar feeling from an email?”

“Well, I say feeling. It was more like a punch of pure creepy. And a strong sense that the sender was watching me.”

“Was he?”

“I don’t see how. I was in my office at the
Chronicle
. The guy on the phone couldn’t have...” She halted there, bit her lip. “I, uh, didn’t mention him, did I?”

“Not unless my brain’s shorting, and I doubt that.” Because his fingers were still curled around her neck, she couldn’t draw away. That she made no effort to do so told him a great deal—most of it not good. She was scared. “What did the guy on the phone want?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have been going to the Cove in a storm that scared your great-grandfather spitless.” Her eyes, as gray and stormy as the night, slid past him to the trails of mud that slithered down the driver’s window. “The ravens must be significant.”

Eli’s grip tightened. “You wanna back that up for me?”

“The card was animated. One of the ravens was inside a cage, the other was out. The outside one scratched the word
MINE
in blood with his talon. I freaked at first, but after a while I convinced myself it was no big deal.”

“How long’s a while?”

“Not sure, maybe fifteen minutes. Afterward, I decided to proofread a column I’d imported for the weekend edition about fanatics and the rising numbers of them who’ve begun to act on their so-called beliefs. And there I was, right back to freaked. Seeing as he knows everything raven-related, I figured the best thing to do would be talk to Rooney, who, in case you’re unaware, never answers his phone.”

“I am aware of that, actually.” But Eli’s response was preoccupied as he searched his mind for—something. “A raven in a cage,” he repeated. “Why can I almost picture that?”

“No idea, but please tell me there isn’t a legend in the Cove about this kind of thing.”

“Not that I know of, and it’s the card part that’s ringing a really distant bell.”

“That bell could be your head still ringing from the whack it took when you almost wound up in the bog.”

“There is that,” he agreed.

When thunder caused the ground to tremble, she stared straight into his eyes. “You know where we are, don’t you.”

It wasn’t a question, Eli reflected. “Yeah, I know. This is where you and I met the night we discovered Laura’s body.”

“Met, argued, walked and found.”

“It’s been two decades, Sadie.”

“I have a long, and vivid, memory.”

“Ditto, but right now I have a more immediate problem.”

The breath she released ended on a laugh. “You really don’t, you know. You’ve got a flat and no spare, which means your vehicle’s stranded. Mine, on the other hand, has all four tires intact. Seeing as it’s on the other side of the pine, the Hollow as a destination wins by default.” A light danced up into her eyes. “Looks like you get to check out that bulldog after all, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, well.” He moved too quickly for her to react. One moment, his gaze was sliding across her mouth. The next, his own was covering it.

The last thought Eli had before his brain shut down was that kissing Sadie Bellam would be either the best thing he’d ever do or the worst mistake he’d ever make.