Chapter Sixteen
Zeke didn’t like feeling like a babysitter, but he’d made a promise to Brooke, so he stuck close to the house and made sure to keep an eye on any and all exits so he would know if Royal tried to bolt. So far, Royal hadn’t even ventured outside the house. Zeke wasn’t even sure he’d left his room.
With the noonday sun hanging over the ranch, a car pulled up the gravel drive. Zeke had hoped for an early return from Brooke, but it wasn’t her. It was Carlyle.
She came to a stop close to the house, hopped out. “Brought more dog food.”
He was about to give her a hard time for showing up unannounced, but . . . Well, maybe they weren’t the talk-through-our-problems type of family, but they could be. He’d told Brooke he’d changed, so maybe he needed to change in all things. Maybe his sister, who was engaged, could offer some . . . advice.
Little as he liked admitting to her he needed some. But if it was for Brooke, wouldn’t he suffer any embarrassment or discomfort?
“Thanks, Car. Hey, listen—”
They both looked over at the front door as it squeaked open. Royal stood there, making no bones about checking Carlyle out.
“Something Brooke should know about?”
Royal called out across the yard.
Zeke supposed there was no reason to be irritated. He should be glad Royal would feel protective at all over Brooke. “I’m pretty sure she’s aware my sister comes by from time to time.”
“Sister,”
Royal said, nodding slightly. Then he flashed a grin right at Carlyle. “Hey. Luckily you don’t look a thing like your brother.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t like you.”
“Brooke’s brother,”
Zeke supplied.
“Oh.”
She grimaced. “Maybe I’ll reserve judgment. But don’t grin at me like that or you’ll meet the snapping jaws of my fiancé’s rabid dog pack.”
Royal rocked back on his heels. He didn’t stop grinning, but he gave Carlyle a little salute. “Message received.”
“I should hope so,”
she muttered. She turned to her truck, lowering the gate so Zeke could grab the bag of dog food out of the bed. He hefted it up and over his shoulder.
“You want some breakfast?”
he asked his sister.
She eyed him suspiciously. “Already ate. What’s up with you?”
“Nothing’s up with me.”
“You’ve literally spent every second I’m here trying to get rid of me since the day you bought the place, and now you’re inviting me for breakfast. Something is up.”
He shrugged. “Just wanted to talk.”
“Yes, also your favorite thing to do. Us talking is such a common occurrence. How silly of me to be suspicious.”
She rolled her eyes again.
He scowled at his sister. “Are you going to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give me advice or what?”
She looked at him then the house. Royal had disappeared back inside, but Viola was racing around the yard excitedly now. “We going to do this while you’re hefting a fifty-pound bag of dog food?”
“Walk with me then.”
She fell into step beside him as he walked toward the house. “You ever screw things up with Cash?”
he asked, hoping she wouldn’t horrify him with details and make him regret this whole thing.
“Nah, I’m perfect.”
Zeke didn’t bother to sigh. “He ever screw things up with you?”
“Let me guess. This heart-to-heart has something to do with your little redhead?”
“You’re so astute.”
He dropped the bag of dog food inside the back door of the screened-in porch. Then he kept walking, because all this was his. Those roots he’d told Brooke he’d made, even if he didn’t know what to do with them.
And he still didn’t, except that he wanted her here. Tangled in them. With him.
“Look, love’s a mess. So you’ll screw it up all the time.”
Carlyle made a kind of what can you do hand gesture. “The trick is just figuring out how, and not being afraid to admit that you might be the problem.”
“I know I’m the problem,”
he grumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“You? With your winning personality and ability to verbalize emotion and empathy so well? This is a shock.”
“You going to give me a break?”
She grinned at him, humor dancing in her eyes. “Nah.”
“Cool. Maybe I’ll talk to Walker.”
That earned him an even bigger eye roll. “We’re not like Walker.”
“We’re not?”
“No. Walker is a . . . what would you call it? Caretaker. He’s mush on the inside. Always has been, no matter how tough he tried to be on the outside.”
That was fair and true. Zeke had always considered Walker the best of them, personality-wise. Not perfect or anything, just . . . more whole, he supposed. He didn’t know why he was surprised to hear Carlyle say the same. “And what are we?”
“Less mush. More razor blade. Can’t expose that vulnerable underbelly, right?”
Zeke shrugged even though he supposed that was the crux of it all. Those soft feelings he’d spent his whole life hiding—with razor blades, he reckoned—to protect himself from everything out there.
“And that’s what you gotta do with love. Show the vulnerabilities. There’s no getting around it. Sucks, but that’s life.”
“I already sort of messed things up with her once. A while back.”
“Ah,”
she said, as if that explained everything. “So, it’s not just current you that’s the problem. It’s past you. And past you was kind of a dick.”
He scowled at her, but she shrugged. “Hey, the kind of was me trying to be nice.”
Zeke didn’t bother to respond to that. It wasn’t untrue, though he wasn’t sure it was fair of feral Carlyle to call him out on it.
“Not much experience in the mending-a-broken-heart thing,”
she continued. “But I guess it’s the same as anything else, except with more patience. You love someone, you be there for them, and you tell them. You can’t make them get it through their thick skulls. That’s gotta be on them.”
Tell them. Zeke grimaced. He’d always felt like love was a kind of bad word. The sort of thing that had messed his mother up so much she’d gotten herself mixed up with two useless criminals—who’d worked together to end her life.
Zeke loved Brooke, because he didn’t have another word for the feeling, but saying it felt like . . . well, he guessed what Carlyle had said. Exposing a soft, vulnerable underbelly when he’d spent his life putting armor around it.
“It’s not a magic word, I guess. But if it’s real, if you mean it, it feels pretty damn close. And it can heal a lot of broken things. Not all of them, but a lot of them.”
They’d come full circle around the house and back to her truck, and she’d been very real, very honest, very her. Somewhere along the instability, fear and danger of their childhood, she’d turned into this stable, adjusted woman. He’d always known Walker had that kind of thing in him, but to see Carlyle step into her own, and still be herself, was a confidence boost.
He reached out, took her left hand and jiggled the finger that had a ring on it. An engagement ring. So incongruous to everything he thought they’d have. “You really going to do the whole Mrs. thing?”
“Don’t forget stepmom thing. We’ll have a high schooler next year.”
When in so many ways Carlyle was still a teenager to him, even if she was in her midtwenties now. But here she was saying things like We’ll have.
“Izzy’s a good kid,”
he offered, because he liked Cash’s daughter. And more, he knew Carlyle loved the girl.
“The best,”
Carlyle replied brightly.
“And I guess Cash is all right.”
She grinned at him. “Didn’t need the stamp of approval, but I like it anyway.”
She moved forward then, after a pause, wrapped him in a hug. “You’re a good guy, Zeke. Don’t forget it. And don’t be afraid to grovel.”
She pulled back, slapped his arm. “I like what little I’ve seen of her.”
She opened her truck door. This grown woman with a settled, full life that made her happy. And she’d done that mostly on her own.
“Proud of you, Car.”
She hesitated only a moment before she climbed the rest of the way into her driver’s seat. “Then make me proud of you, Zeke,”
she returned before closing the door and driving away.
Zeke blew out a breath. Now he just had to figure out how.
Love.
Hell of a thing.
The two deputies who’d originally been assigned to guard the crime scene had returned, and Laurel was talking with them. She didn’t look happy, but Brooke just sat in the car pretending to work on her laptop.
What she was really doing was watching the interaction. The deputies looked chagrined. Laurel was pissed.
Brooke studied their surroundings from her seat. The preserve was so big, the cave a vast system below it. It gave her a shiver to think about, to remember the day she’d come out of the cave feeling like she was being watched.
But that had likely just been Royal. There was no one out there. There was no threat to her . . . well, that had to do with her work anyway.
Laurel stalked back to the cruiser and got into the driver’s seat rather than gesture for Brooke to get out.
“They claim it was only a few minutes. One of them had to use the restroom, the other heard something and went to check it out. But I don’t like the idea of you going in there when the entrance was left unguarded, even if it was brief. If we’re dealing with a second suspect . . .”
Laurel hesitated, shaking her head. “There’s just no way to make a clean sweep of the cave and make sure no one went in. It’s too big. The other entrances and exits are far away, and you’d have a hell of a time making it from one to another, but . . . It’s too risky.”
Brooke nodded. But, man, she wanted to get some work done today. “I’d like to point out that this second suspect was killing before Jen Rogers, Laurel. I don’t have the data to back this up, so everything I’m saying is supposition, but if those pictures in the scrapbook connect, we really are talking about a suspect who would have to be dead by now.”
Laurel took a few minutes, clearly thinking it over. “Jen Rogers lived in that cave for years. Undetected. Who knows what pieces we’re still missing. That cave system is huge. I don’t like unnecessary risks, Brooke.”
“But if the cave system is too big that we can never be fully sure it’s clear of people, how will I ever finish my work?”
Laurel scowled even deeper. “I know you’re right, but I don’t like this.”
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay, we’ll go in. But we’ll bring in more deputies. At least three plus me.”
“That’s a lot of manpower.”
“This is our biggest case right now. Well-justified manpower. We can borrow from Sunrise and Hardy if we need to.”
Brooke waited patiently while Laurel got more men situated. They did a sweep of the cave as best they could, and then finally Brooke was allowed to go in and set up. By the time she was ready enough to get to work, it was nearing lunchtime.
She could be annoyed about that later. Right now, she had to get to work. Not for the skull this time, but for the square she’d designated. Maybe she wanted to search for a body that would match the skull, but that wasn’t how the job worked. She had to follow the standards set out by her profession, by her studies. If she looked for something specific, she might miss something just as, if not more, important.
So, she got to work in the meticulous fashion she’d learned, carefully moving through sediment, on the lookout for more remains.
After a while, as she moved from one section to another, Brooke caught a glint of something out of the corner of her eye. She turned toward it. In the same exact spot the scrapbook had been wedged, there was a tiny silver item. Brooke leaned closer to inspect it. A . . . thimble? But not a working thimble. No, like a piece from . . . a board game.
She reached out then thought better of it. Because someone had put it there purposefully. Just like the scrapbook, but only since the scrapbook. Because she would have seen this before today if it had been there before.
Someone had been in and out of these caves just as much as she had been.
Or maybe someone had been in and just never out. Laurel had said Jen Rogers had lived in here for years. Maybe the police had done their best to search for anyone else, but no one could guarantee there was no one else here. Deep inside.
Brooke sucked in a breath. “Laurel? Can you come over here?”
The detective was quick to move to her side. Brooke pointed to the game piece. “This is exactly where I found the scrapbook. And it was not here then or since.”
Laurel’s expression was grim. She didn’t say anything but photographed the area before pulling on gloves and picking up the item and putting it in an evidence bag.
“Can we get tests run on it right now?”
Brooke asked.
“It’s so small. I’m not sure we’ll get a print off of it. Brooke, I don’t like this. I think we should get out of here.”
It felt like such a waste. To just get started and then to pack everything up again, but this was concerning. So, she agreed. “I have to pack up though. Especially if someone is in and out, I want to make sure I’m not leaving anything behind. And we’re photographing everything.”
They all got to work, the other deputies helping Brooke by carting out the packed-up tools while Laurel photographed everything.
“Do you think someone is trying to send some kind of . . . message?”
Brooke asked as she turned off one of her lights, folded it up and handed it to a deputy.
“With board games?”
Laurel returned.
“I don’t know. But someone put that scrapbook there—and it couldn’t have been there that long before I found it or there’d be more damage to it. The thimble is new since two days ago.”
“Maybe it’s just a sign that someone else is in here. You grab that light and I’ll grab this one and we’ll be done.”
They didn’t turn off the lights or dismantle them, just carried them toward the narrow pathway that led back outside.
Brooke heard a strange rumble and then the clatter of pebbles falling, scattering. It almost sounded like some kind of earthquake, but the ground didn’t move even as rocks fell from above. “That’s . . . not good.”
“No. It’s—”
But she didn’t finish her sentence. Instead, Laurel shoved her back, hard. It didn’t take long for Brooke to figure out why, even as she stumbled onto her butt and let out a yelp of pain.
A big boulder fell right at her feet. More rocks were falling, pelting her in the head. It was some kind of . . . cave-in.
There had been a survey of the safety of the cave before she’d been cleared to excavate. Every report had determined it was stable and perfectly safe to work in.
Were they wrong, or had something . . . caused this?
Well, it didn’t really matter, did it? The rocks were piling up. Laurel was shouting directions at her deputies, but Brooke was afraid to follow as huge pieces of rock rained down between her and Laurel.
She scooted farther back into the cave. Maybe it was the wrong move, but the rocks stopped pelting her here. Her head throbbed from where one had really gotten her good.
But she couldn’t go deeper into the cave. She had to get out. She reached up, touched the throbbing spot on her head. Her hand came away sticky. That wasn’t good.
Brooke pushed to her feet, grabbing the light she’d lost a grip on. She shone it in front of her.
A wall of rocks. There were a few spots at the top that were maybe holes she could get to or through, but she’d have to climb up something to reach them. She’d have to try to move the rocks, but would that cause more of a cave-in?
Panic was crawling up her throat, but not at being caved-in. No. This was worse.
So much worse.
There were sounds coming from behind her. Like footsteps. Splashing in the pools of water. Squelch, tap. Squelch, tap.
Fear seized her, but she forced herself to look over her shoulder.
A small, bent-over man was making his way toward her—illuminated by an actual torch he carried as well as the light of hers that still functioned.
“Well, hello.”
His smile showed off rotted teeth, his beard was long and matted. His eyes were wild, even if he spoke in a calm, singsongy voice. “Welcome to my home.”