Chapter 17
Reno woke after yet another night of nightmare free sleep, and today it actually took him a minute to remember that this was new and different.
The voice that had chased him relentlessly for three years, no matter how far and fast he’d run from it, was gone—and not crouched and waiting to pounce again when he didn’t expect it.
It was gone the way a houseguest is after he finally packs up and leaves, and the space feels bigger and emptier and a little strange.
He had no idea what to do with the extra room in his brain. For now, he was just living in it.
He put on the brace before he stood, the way Hank had told him to and he’d ignored for the past two months. He padded down the hall barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt.
Grace was at the counter in her robe. She had her phone propped against the sugar canister and was reading something on it with the focused little frown she got when she was solving a problem.
“Morning,” he said from behind her.
She turned the phone face-down so fast he’d have missed it if he were anyone else.
“Morning,” she said too innocently. “Coffee’s poured.”
She was up to something. She’d been on the phone last night when he walked past her room to go to bed, speaking low. Now that phone abruptly turned face-down.
Mary texted me a few minutes ago. She’ll meet us at the sheriff’s department in a half-hour. She wants to get it over with as soon as possible.”
“I’ll drop you off and then take Lilly to school while you two talk with Cooper. I’ll be back in time to take you to the bakery.”
“You don’t have to wait. I can walk.
“I know.” He drank his coffee. “I’m going to wait and drive you anyway.”
She gave him a look that started out as an argument and then decided not to be one.
He knew she still struggled with the idea of letting him be useful and helpful to her.
He figured she’d been so determined to be independent after Liam died that she’d gone too far the other direction and forgotten how to let anyone lend her a hand.
But he was patient. Bit by bit, she was getting used to letting him do things for her. Like his mother always said, there was no profit in fighting a man who was determined to carry your bags.
Lily came down the hall at six-forty in her pink footie pajamas with a seal under each arm and her hair defying gravity as it stuck up every which way..
“Mornin’, Princess Lily,” he said cheerfully.
“Are you coming to the big-girl dinner?” Lily demanded.
“The what now?”
“Mommy says we’re having dinner with a big girl named Madison and I get to meet her.” Lily climbed onto her chair with the gravity of a small judge taking the bench. “Makayla’s my only big-girl friend. She’s eleven. How old is Madison?”
“Fourteen. And Madison’s my niece.”
Lily’s eyes went round. “She’s really old.”
Reno mentally winced. He would hate to hear what she thought if he told her his age. “Madison likes horses,” he offered.
“I like horses,” Lily said eagerly. “Does she like seals?”
“I’ll be honest, I don’t know. But I’ll bet she does.”
Satisfied, Lily accepted the fried eggs he set in front of her, each of which he’d cut into the shape of a heart because he’d apparently signed a lifetime contract about that without reading it.
Grace watched the two of them over the rim of her mug, and there was something soft and unguarded in her face that she didn’t cover up when she caught him noticing.
He cleaned up the kitchen while she got Lily ready for school, and they headed out together.
The sheriff’s department still smelled like old carpet and burnt coffee and the chemical sweetness of whatever they cleaned the bathrooms with. Mary stopped just inside the door and looked at Grace like a scared kid on the first day of school.
“I’m right here,” Grace told her. “The whole time. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Mary nodded. Grace put a hand on her arm, and the two of them went through the door Velma buzzed.
They still hadn’t come out when Reno got back from dropping off Lily at school. He sat down in one of the plastic lobby chairs and stretched his bad leg out in front of him.
“Six letters,” Velma said, not looking up. “Blank-E-blank-blank-E.-blank. ‘To make right.’”
“Redeem,” Reno said.
Velma penciled it in. “You’re handy to have around.”
“So I’m told.”
When the door opened, Mary came out first, and she’d been crying, but it was the kind of crying that came after a weight came off and not the kind that came when a weight landed on someone.
Grace had an arm around her. Cooper came out behind them with an expression Reno recognized: the careful neutrality of a man who’d just been handed something useful and didn’t want his face to show it.
“Mary,” Cooper said, “you did a hard, right thing. I meant what I said in there. We’ll handle your sister as gently as the situation allows.”
Mary nodded.
“You go on to work, Mary,” Cooper said. “I’m going to borrow Reno and Grace for five minutes, and then everybody’s going to go have a normal Friday. All right?”
“All right,” Mary whispered.
Grace walked her out. Through the glass front, Reno watched Grace hug the older woman in the parking lot, hold her by both shoulders, say something that made Mary almost smile, and send her off.
When Grace came back in, Cooper tipped his head toward the doors to the back. “Two minutes. My office.”
They trooped into an office even smaller and more cramped than Sheriff Wheeler’s.
“I’ll keep it short,” Cooper said. “First, Reno, you’re here as Grace’s counsel. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Mary gave me a statement and consented to let me photograph a notebook she found under the passenger seat of her sister’s car.
It is, indeed, a log of times. They’re labeled, as well.
Grace’s open and close time , the preschool drop-off and pickup times, when the cottage lights go off at night.
Two weeks of it, in the sister’s handwriting.
Mary also gave me screen captures from her sister’s phone, calls to a number that belongs to Tara Marchand, and every one of those calls was made the day before something happened to you. ”
“So it was Eileen and her accomplice.”
“Mary told me her sister’s boyfriend is named Curtis. She doesn’t know his last name.”
Reno’s jaw nearly dropped open, but he managed to stop it at the last instant. Grace’s jaw did fall open.
Cooper said, “The evidence points hard at them. But pointing isn’t proving. It is, however, enough that I can bring Eileen in for a formal interview, which I’m doing Monday. I want to give her a chance to bring a lawyer.”
“Do you think she’ll cooperate?” Reno asked.
Coper replied, “My read is Eileen is a scared woman in over her head. Her boyrfriend asked for small favors that turned into bigger ones, and somewhere along the way she stopped being able to see the bottom of the swimming pool. People like that talk, once somebody gives them a way out of the trap they’re caught in. ”
Reno asked, “Any news on the sender of the email about the fly in the hot chocolate?”
Cooper’s face was deadpan. “Funny you should ask. got an email overnight from the FBI cyber-security folks about that.”
“And?” Reno demanded.
“The header had an originating IP address embedded in its code. The IP is attached to the internet account of a certain fancy bakery in Apple Pie Creek.”
Bingo. Reno felt the cold, clean click of a piece dropping into the slot it had been cut for.
“That’s not enough to arrest Tara,” Cooper went on, before Reno could say it. “She can claim an employee sent the email, or maybe that her wifi’s open to anyone in the store. In which case, half of Apple Pie Creek uses it. As a criminal matter it’s a thread, not a rope.”
“As a civil matter,” Reno said, “it’s a very good thread. It puts her own building behind a libel I’m already suing over. It gives me a reason to demand every device that signed onto that network the day the fly email was sent.”
He broke into his shark grin. “Her lawyer is going to spend all weekend explaining to her what a forensic image of a hard drive is.”
Grace looked between them. “Is that good?”
“It’s good,” Reno and Cooper said at the same time, and both men smiled.
Then Cooper set his forearms on the desk and looked at Grace, and the temperature in the room changed, and Reno knew what was coming a half-second before it came because he was very good at reading people.
“There’s one more thing,” Cooper said. “Arizona. What I went down there to find out. I’m close to being able to lay it in front of you, and I’d rather do it sitting down, with whoever you want in the room, at a time you pick.”
Grace went still in the particular way she had, where she looked calm but was actually holding herself still very carefully so she wouldn’t do anything else.
“Right now?” she said.
Cooper glanced at Reno, and there was a question in it.
“Monday,” Reno said firmly. “Give her the weekend.”
Grace turned her head and looked at him. He held her eyes.
“My niece is meeting her tonight,” Reno told Cooper, but he was still looking at Grace when he said it. “Let her have two days where the biggest thing on the calendar is a little girl and a pie.”
Cooper looked at the two of them for a moment, and whatever he saw, he decided not to comment on it.
“Monday,” he agreed. “Ten o’clock. My office, or your porch, your call.”
“The porch,” Grace said. “Thank you, Cooper.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Cooper said grimly.
Out in the parking lot , the clouds were finally breaking up, and the sky was blue in between them. Grace stood by the truck, looking at nothing, and he gave her the time. Then she squared her shoulders and got in the truck.
“Bakery,” she said. “I have a lot of baking to do today.”
“Anything special?”
“Nope.” But when she gazed out her window, he caught the tiny upcurve of her mouth. She was so up to something.