Chapter 7
Seven
“Um… Are you sure this place is safe?” Rachel sounded skeptical as she looked up at what remained of the house.
Jonah bumped her shoulder with his. “Can you get tetanus if you step on a nail in there? Probably. Is it going to fall down on your head while we’re inside? No.”
The arch of her brow said she didn’t quite believe him.
He couldn’t blame her. Paint had peeled from most of the wooden siding. The roofline of the front porch sagged like a swaybacked horse, and Virginia creeper and vines of poison everything had swallowed one end. Multiple floorboards had rotted beneath, leaving gaps big enough to break a leg. He knew from his prior trips out that much of the interior was only a little better.
His mom’s expression was regretful as she looked up at the place. “It was my grandmama’s house. She passed nearly twenty years ago and left it to me. It wasn’t practical for us to live this far out, and we didn’t have the money to fix it up at the time. Kept putting it off. Then it got damaged in a storm, and it reached a point where it wasn’t worth trying to fix it up.”
A faded blue tarp still covered the roof on the side of the house a huge tree limb had fallen on. They’d removed the tree and replaced the tarp a few times over the years, boarding up things as best they could, but the mountain was doing its level best to take back the spot. Jonah wondered if he’d finally find the time and motivation to do something about it now that he was home for good.
“The land is valuable, so we haven’t sold it off, but we can’t actually do anything with it without knocking the house down, which also costs money.” Rebecca spread her hands. “So here we are.”
“It made for a convenient place to toss Lonnie’s crap until we could go through it.” Jonah moved toward the front stairs. “Mind your step. I haven’t checked to see what condition they’re in, and I haven’t been out here in more than six months.”
Carefully picking his way over the rotted wood, he unlocked the door before returning to hold out a hand, first for Rachel and then his mother, to see them up the rickety stairs. Holt brought up the rear, hauling a couple of camp chairs. There were more in his truck, along with garbage bags, a cooler full of drinks and snacks, and a Bluetooth speaker to make this feel a little less like the chore that it was.
Their footsteps echoed through the house as he led them to the living room. Unlike much of the rest of the house, there were few leaks here, and it was the most structurally secure space available, so this was where he’d piled all his father’s worldly possessions.
“Holy shit.” Holt paused at the edge of the space, taking in the stacks and stacks of boxes. “This is… more than I was expecting.”
“I don’t have the first clue what’s in here. I just threw every damn thing into boxes for us to deal with later.”
“Is there furniture?” Rachel asked.
“Only a few pieces I kept in case they could be salvaged. A desk. A cool old trunk. Chest of drawers. They’re under all this shit… somewhere. I just had Goodwill pick the rest of it up, and whatever they didn’t want went to the county dump. If the flash drive was hidden in that somewhere, we’re SOL.”
“Maybe there will be a backup or paper copies of some kind,” Holt suggested.
“Or some other evidence entirely.” If this didn’t pan out and give them some kind of legitimate lead, or proof of his father’s involvement in whatever this was, Jonah didn’t know what their next steps would be.
Rachel’s hand settled on his shoulder. “One thing at a time. This is going to take a while.”
He laid his hand over hers and squeezed, refusing to analyze how much comfort he took at her touch. “True enough. I’ll go get the rest of the chairs and the speaker. Holt, you wanna help me with the cooler?”
“Sure.”
They went back out to his truck, hauling the ice chest he’d filled with drinks and picnic fare out of the back.
“I appreciate you helping with this, man.”
“Of course. I’ve got your back. And it’s in my best interest to get to the bottom of this shit, too.” He shouldered one of the remaining camp chairs. “Rachel seems to be recovering well.”
The bruise had mostly faded, and the gash on her temple had started to heal. But Jonah hadn’t been able to stop watching her like a hawk, monitoring the dilation of her eyes, keeping watch on her gait, looking for signs of dizziness or nausea or anything else that would indicate longer-term problems from the head injury.
“I wish she’d take some more downtime, but I’d have to handcuff her to a chair to make her. She doesn’t sit well.”
Holt smirked. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Holt had certainly been around in the early months when Jonah had kept pushing, kept demanding his body do more than it was capable of. He’d seen the rage when Jonah’s body had given him the middle finger and refused. There’d been a lot of setbacks because he didn’t listen to his doctors or his brain. He didn’t want that for Rachel.
“I like you two together.”
Jonah glanced at Holt over the cooler. “We’re not together.” It felt wrong to say it, but the friends-with-benefits thing was temporary. Neither of them was looking for more. No reason to get their friends excited about something that wasn’t going to be a real thing.
Holt arched a brow. “You sure about that? You’ve been spending an awful lot of time together.”
“She’s staying at my house. And I’ve been on nurse and bodyguard duty. Of course, we’re spending a lot of time together.”
“You spent a lot of time together before that. You kept up with her when the rest of us didn’t.”
Jonah fought the urge to grind his teeth. “We’re friends.”
“Cayla and I were friends.”
That had been Holt’s excuse for stepping in to act like her husband when her ex had unexpectedly been released from prison. Then he’d married her for real, to keep his lie from coming back to bite her in the ass. But the rest of them had known the truth from the beginning: Holt was crazy about her. He’d just needed to get out of his own way.
“It’s not the same. She’s going back to New York when all this is finished.”
His buddy held up a hand. “All right. I was just making an observation.”
Jonah wished he’d keep those thoughts to himself. He hadn’t talked with his friends about his reasons for not pursuing a long-term relationship. It wasn’t just about Rachel. He didn’t intend to cross that bridge with anyone. But with both of them wrapped in marital bliss, he supposed it wasn’t surprising that they figured he’d be the next to fall. His friends meant well by it. They were simply wrong.
By the time they came back inside, someone had found the breaker box and restored power, turning on the window unit air conditioner. Jonah couldn’t believe the thing still ran. It chugged along like an asthmatic train, spewing out an anemic stream of cooler air. With the ceiling fan going, it was just enough to combat the oppressive late summer heat. The women had set up sorting stations: Keep, Toss, Donate, Investigate. Each one was designated by a sign taped to a different wall of the room. He and Holt set down the cooler. Camp chairs were unfolded.
Jonah set up the speaker with a bluesy playlist as their unpacking backdrop. “Well, everybody pick a box, I guess, and dig in.”
There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what was in each box. Lonnie couldn’t have been called a hoarder, but there was a whole lot of crap Jonah didn’t know why he’d kept. Old issues of Motor Trend. A bunch of empty mason jars. A box of assorted cables belonging to out-of-date electronics. A bag of bottle caps. Some beat up baseball cards that definitely weren’t collectibles. None of it had anywhere to hide a flash drive, and there were no signs of paperwork that amounted to anything incriminating. The mounds of stuff on the Toss wall continued to grow.
“Is this you?”
At Rachel’s question, Jonah rose and crossed to where she was sorting through yet another box. She had a vinyl photo album in hand, open to a picture of him in T-ball uniform, hat too big for his head, broad, gap-toothed grin on display for the camera. His dad had been so excited he’d played. He’d come to every game. That was before everything had gone to shit.
Jonah swallowed. “Yeah. I think I was about six.”
“You were adorable.” She flipped through, and there were more photos of him and of Sam. Birthdays. Christmases. Images of the family that had been a lie.
He grunted, his gaze dropping to the rest of the contents of the box. He spotted the T-ball trophy from that year, and the peewee baseball mitt he’d outgrown. Beneath it, one of the plastic dinosaurs he’d prized peeked out. They were pieces of a childhood so long distant, he barely remembered it. Why had his father kept this stuff when he hadn’t wanted to keep his family?
Rachel’s hand curled around his. “Hey. I’m sorry. This is hard on you.”
“I’m fine.” The protest was automatic. Something he’d said for decades, whether it was true or not. But he knew she saw through him, so he relented and squeezed back. “Okay, it’s weird. But I will be fine.”
Having her support while traversing what was turning out to be a field of emotional landmines meant more than he wanted it to. Because he needed time to think, he stepped back and raised his voice.
“Who’s ready for some lunch?”
Jonah hurled another bag of trash onto the pile in the back of his truck. “Okay, I’m calling it.”
Rachel handed him the one she carried, so he could heft it over the side. “You sure?”
He rolled his shoulders and jerked his chin toward where the sun had sunk behind the mountain, painting the sky in a vibrant wash of oranges and pinks. “It’s getting late. We’ve gotta be up early for work tomorrow, and we’re not getting through the rest of this crap tonight. Plus, I don’t think we can cram any more bags or boxes of garbage in here.”
Holt had headed out a couple hours before, so he’d be home for the bedtime routine with Maddie. They hadn’t found anything overtly useful, and there was still plenty of stuff to sort through. The job was bigger than any of them had anticipated, made more complicated by the fact that they were combing through things so carefully, hoping to find anything that might amount to evidence. One thing Rachel knew for sure—she wasn’t cut out to be a cop. She didn’t have the patience.
“Fair enough. Are we going to run by the bakery to toss all this in the dumpster?”
“Yeah, we’ll hit that on the way home.”
Her heart did a quick tap dance against her ribs at hearing him include her in home. He didn’t mean it like it sounded. They were going to his home. But she couldn’t deny that, after their intensive forced proximity during her recovery, it was starting to feel like hers, too. Maybe that was just because nowhere had really felt like home since John died. Home for her had never been a place. It had been him. She didn’t want to think too hard about what it said that Jonah was starting to slide into that position. They’d agreed to short term. Casual. She wasn’t the new woman in his life. She was his right-now. That was all.
Rebecca made her careful way down the rickety steps, a box in her arms. “I’ll drop the donations off tomorrow. I’ve got time between appointments.”
Jonah plucked the box out of her hands. “I’ve got it.” He shoved it in the backseat of the truck and wrapped an arm around his mom’s shoulders. “You’ve helped enough.”
“I don’t mind, baby. You’ve got so much on your plate already.”
“And I’ll feel better if you get on home before it’s full dark.” To move her along, he opened the driver’s side of her car and gestured to the seat.
It was a polite dismissal, but a dismissal nonetheless.
Rebecca’s brows drew together, her lips pursing in disapproval. “Stubborn boy.”
“I come by it honest.” He brushed a kiss over her brow. “Please head on home, so I don’t worry about you.”
“Fine. But I’ll be back out here to help again, whether you like it or not.”
“Thanks. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too.” She waved in Rachel’s direction. “Bye, Rachel. Don’t let this one railroad you too badly.”
She chuckled. “No, ma’am.”
Then Rebecca was gone, rolling down the rutted, overgrown driveway to the county road beyond the treeline. Jonah’s shoulders seemed to relax as she disappeared.
“You okay?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Yeah. Why?”
“You don’t actually have to do everything by yourself, you know.”
“I know. But it just doesn’t seem right, her having to do anything related to Lonnie’s crap after how he treated her. It’s not her responsibility.”
“Fair point.”
Rachel knew little about Jonah’s dad, other than he hadn’t been in the picture much. Just the mention of his name had a disgusted coldness sparking in Jonah’s eyes. He hadn’t done right by his family, and that was a cardinal sin for Jonah, who put everyone ahead of himself. But it was clear from his reactions over the course of the day that things with Lonnie hadn’t been so cut and dried as Jonah had believed.
She waited until he’d locked up the house, and they were on their way back to town, before trying to dig a little deeper. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Jonah. I know today was harder on you than you were expecting. I’m just checking in on you.”
She watched him swallow his instinctive response. Probably something akin to, “Well, don’t.”
He blew out a breath, his fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “It’s just weird that my dad had anything related to our family.”
“Why? You were his kids.”
“Because he completely walked away. Totally hands off from the time I was eight years old.”
The idea of it hurt her heart. “That had to be so hard on all of you.”
“It wasn’t great. He didn’t carry his weight, so I stepped up to be the man of the house. To take care of my mom and Sam.”
And that right there was the origin of that overgrown sense of responsibility. He’d been carrying that load for a long, long time. No wonder he didn’t know how to set it down.
“Why did he leave?”
“I don’t know for sure. One day, he just up and left. I don’t remember them fighting. He was just gone. Not far. Still in town. But not a part of our lives anymore.”
Rachel couldn’t imagine the blow that must’ve been to all of them. “Was there another woman?”
“If there was, I never heard anything about it. Mom never mentioned it and over the years, he was never tied to any one person in particular. He just chose to remove himself from our lives entirely. That wasn’t Mom’s call. After about a year, once the divorce was finalized, she changed our names because he wanted nothing to do with us.”
“He didn’t fight that?”
“Didn’t lift a finger.” Though his gaze didn’t stray from the road, a muscle jumped in his jaw.
Rachel couldn’t wrap her head around any of this. He and his family were awesome. The credit for that clearly went to his mom, who’d had to be strong as hell to get through something like that. And Jonah himself for stepping up when he’d been only a child himself.
Needing to comfort, she reached across the center console to lay a hand on his thigh. After a long moment, he dropped one hand from the wheel to curl his fingers with hers. He said nothing else for several miles, but he held on, and that link was enough for now.
Unloading the bags and boxes from the truck to the bakery’s dumpster took longer than they’d planned. More than one split, and they had to scoop up and toss the detritus in by the armful. By the time they’d finished and made back to the house, it was full dark.
As they climbed out of the truck, Jonah came around to take her hand again, his fingers dancing along her palm. “How do you feel about going home, showering off the sweat of the day, nuking some leftovers, and cuddling up to watch another episode of Great British Bake Off before hitting the hay?” If he still felt any discomfort over their prior conversation, his voice didn’t betray it.
Sleeping wasn’t specifically what Rachel had in mind. Neither was a solo shower, but now didn’t seem the moment to push him on that front. “That sounds like exactly the kind of chillaxed evening to round out the day.”
He opened the door, and they stepped inside.
Two paces into the kitchen, she ran into his back when he went stock still.
“What is it?”
His body had gone taut as a bowstring. “Someone’s been here. Stay put.”
Releasing her hand, he pulled a gun from a holster hidden in the back of his jeans. Seeing him armed, knowing he must have been carrying it all day, gave her a bit of a jolt. He was never truly off duty, and that was something very, very different from John.
As he moved away from her to search the house, she saw what had stopped him in his tracks. The kitchen had been tossed. Drawers and cabinet doors hung open, the contents of some spilling out. The old radio that had sat on the counter had been smashed to bits. She could just see into the living room, where more signs of a hurried search showed in the cushions on the floor and the overturned basket of books and movies.
Jonah returned a minute later. “They’re gone. I’m gonna call the police. Check your stuff and see if you can tell if anything’s missing, but don’t touch anything.”
Rachel hurried to do as he asked. Her room had received a similar treatment to everywhere else. The contents of her dresser and suitcase had been strewn about. Her toiletries were scattered across the bathroom cabinet and all the drawers and doors were ajar. Everything in her itched to clean up and put things back to rights, but the police would need to dust for prints and check for other evidence.
Sheriff Kincaid was in the kitchen when she came back out. His expression was grim. “I don’t like this. It’s another escalation. One outside the bakery itself. This feels personal to you.”
“To my dad, just like we thought.” Jonah pointed to the remains of the radio. “That radio was in the bar. He kept it up there for years. It was one of the few things I kept when he died.”
“You think something was hidden in it?”
“There wasn’t. I already took it apart to check, but obviously somebody thought it might be a hiding place. Why else smash it?”
Xander blew out a breath. “Is anything missing that you can tell?”
“We won’t know for sure until we do a full clean up, but offhand, it looks like no.” Jonah turned to face her. “What about your stuff?”
“Like you said, it doesn’t look like it. Everything was just pawed through.” She crossed her arms over her middle to ward off the chill that swept down her arms. This was supposed to be her safe space. Now someone had violated it.
“Was there anything on the alarm system?” Xander asked.
Jonah looked disgusted with himself. “I forgot to set the damned thing, so no.”
“All right. I’ll be getting my people in here to see what other evidence they can find. In the meantime, y’all might want to find somewhere else to stay for the night.”
“I’ve got it covered.”
Rachel looked at Jonah. “Where are going? The inn? To your mom’s?”
“No. I’ve already talked to my buddy Porter, who owns this place, to let him know what happened. He’s got another cabin further out that has a hell of a security system. We’re going there.”
“Ty’s old place?” Xander asked. “That place is wired up about like Fort Knox. It’s a good option.”
Someone knocked on the door.
“That’ll be Clyde. We’ll get started on your bedrooms so you can start packing things up to take with you.” Xander strode to answer the door.
Rachel stared around the kitchen at the chaos. “Do you think he found what he was looking for?”
“No. The mess is worst in the back, probably because he didn’t find what he was looking for.” Jonah closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her.
Rachel held on, letting the warmth of him soak in to combat the chill. He sucked in a breath, but before he could speak, she beat him to the punch. “Don’t ask me to go home, Jonah.”
He huffed a noise that, under other circumstances, might have been a laugh. “Am I that predictable?”
She tipped her head back. “In this, yes. But my reasons for refusing remain the same.”
With a gentle finger, he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Okay. I get it. You’re in it now. You want to see it through. I respect that, even if I don’t agree with it. As soon as we’re cleared, we pack our bags and move out.”
“Move out entirely?”
“For now. This location’s compromised. The cabin will be more secure. It’ll make a better safe house.”
Compromised. Secure. Safe house.
Toto, I am definitely not in Kansas anymore.