Chapter Two
Franny didn’t bother to unpack. She’d save that annoying chore for when she wanted something specific or when she hit a rough patch in the book and needed something to occupy her hands.
Everything she absolutely required for the first few days was packed in a separate bag anyway—some clothes, toiletries, her inhaler and the like.
She did set up her workspace. She’d learned over the years that she could work anywhere, at any time, with just about any background noise, but she still liked having one organized space to go to when everything started to feel too fractured. A center.
The apartment above the Hope Town Bakery was small—one bedroom, one bathroom and then a kitchen/dining/ living room area that was really just one large room.
She’d had Copeland put her writing desk and office drawers up against the far wall that was dominated by three tall, narrow windows that looked out over Main Street—the only street—in Hope Town.
She took a moment to enjoy the view. Too bad she wasn’t writing a historical. She could almost imagine herself as some mysterious woman from “back East,” looking for a fresh start in a Wild West frontier town.
Maybe she could make the book a dual timeline. Maybe her next book should be a historical Western. Maybe…
“One book a time,” she muttered to herself.
But she liked that so many ideas were already percolating. It meant she’d made the right choice.
Hope Town was an interesting place with a mysterious history. It had been a ghost town years ago, completely abandoned. Then a man named Zach Simmons, who’d been an FBI agent before he’d settled in Bent, had bought up a bunch of land and buildings and begun to revitalize the town.
The mystery was why Mr. Simmons, who owned all the land and buildings, wouldn’t allow anything in that didn’t meet his approval. Not a business, not a renter, no one.
Franny had needed to meet with Mr. Simmons with her rental application, answer a few questions. Provide references. He had been professional, kind, and friendly. But he’d been pretty…vague in answering her questions about Hope Town.
A little disappointing, because she wanted to get a better understanding of how the town had come to be. Not because she was writing nonfiction, just because she wanted…some framework for her idea that was based in truth and reality.
So she didn’t have to get all the details right exactly as they were, but she wanted to know as much as she could. She wanted everything to feel real, authentic, and she wanted to do right by the story that had been simmering in her brain for a while now.
In her book, this town would see tragedy and fear, death and mystery, and then justice, hard won, with maybe a little romance thrown in.
On that thought, she turned away from the window, grabbed her laptop, and got to work sketching out some ideas.
ROYAL DIDN’T COMPLAIN about his zone assignment. Out loud. He was the rookie. He’d get the grunt work for a while yet.
A zone that included Hope Town and a handful of ranches would result in a fat lot of nothing to do. He probably wouldn’t even be able to pull anyone over for a speeding ticket. If he got a call, it’d likely be for… Hell, he didn’t even know out here.
One thing he’d learned about the citizens of Bent County was that a lot of them—especially the ones who lived more isolated—liked to handle their own issues. They didn’t call the police for just anything.
Frustrated, he stood and moved through the room to Corporal Gardner Fairhurst, Gard to his friends—and Royal felt he’d earned the friends label by now.
Gard had been his FTO and had been just the kind of trainer a person had to be thankful for.
Calm, patient, willing to answer any question, giving solid advice, and also had given Royal the room to develop his own confidence as an officer of the law.
And since he liked and trusted Gard, Royal voiced his frustration to him, though he made sure to be quiet about it.
“Shouldn’t I be put somewhere I might actually get some experience?”
“You will.”
“When?”
Gard looked at Captain Kraig who still stood at the front of the room, then back at Royal. He didn’t answer the question. Royal scowled in spite of himself.
“He hates me.” Royal knew his past could be used against him, but he’d figured he wouldn’t have been hired if the sheriff held that past against him. His record had been expunged. That was how he’d even gotten into the police academy, that and some of Zeke’s family greasing the wheels.
But Royal hadn’t considered some of the men between him and the sheriff might see it all differently.
“He doesn’t trust you just yet. You’ll get there.
Be conscientious, ask questions or for help when you need to and for the love of God, don’t complain to anyone but me.
” Gard clapped him on the shoulder and nudged him out of the conference room.
“It’ll make its way back to the captain faster than you can blink. ”
Royal only grunted as they made their way through the building and outside to the waiting patrol cars.
“You’ve got this, Campbell. If you can learn to swallow your tongue.”
“Big if,” Royal muttered.
Gard laughed. “There’s always bartending,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to hide those tattoos then.”
Royal snarled, then split off from Gard toward his patrol car. It was hot to be wearing this damned long-sleeved uniform, but those were the rules and somehow he’d become not just a man who had to follow pointless rules, but a man whose job it was to enforce them.
With his current zone, he had two main jobs today. Run radar on the highway outside of Hope Town, do a walk-through of Hope Town in the afternoon, and respond to any calls that came over the radio for his zone.
So, he went about his business and didn’t allow himself to dwell on the fact that no calls came through for him, while pretty much every other deputy on the road was getting called constantly.
He’d get there, he reminded himself. Gard had said he would, and Gard hadn’t steered him wrong yet.
After noon, he headed over to Hope Town, parked at the end of Main Street. The assignment here was to walk up one side of Main, then down the other. Mostly just looking for things that didn’t fit in.
He’d only done this duty with Gard twice on field training, and now that Royal was handling it himself, he wondered why Hope Town got special treatment. There were other tiny map dot towns in Bent County, but this was the only one that got a Bent County daily walk-through.
Besides, what would ever “stand out” here? They had a handful of shops—a bakery, an antique store and a bookstore. There was one other building that looked like maybe it was getting a new business, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
Maybe there might be some theft because of the businesses, but you’d have to be a pretty stupid thief to come all the way out here to get…what? None of these cash registers could be holding that much money.
He wouldn’t complain about it though, he reminded himself. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but being able to get out of the car, stretch his long legs, get some fresh air, that was definitely a positive for him.
It was eerily quiet for a sunny summer afternoon, but as he passed different storefronts, he realized that all of them that advertised their store hours said they were closed on Mondays. Still, there were people living in the apartments above the businesses, in the houses farther down the road.
It was weird to be this quiet. As he walked, he noticed up the street there was the antique store with a few cars in the lot. Somewhere a ways off a dog barked. There were signs of life here and there, he supposed.
When he came back on the opposite side of the antique store, things had cleared out again, but it wasn’t quiet. He heard…swearing? He stood still, and listened to the stream of creative, threatening profanity.
Was someone in trouble? Excited for some potential action, he moved quickly toward the sounds. Behind the bakery building. He turned the corner to find a woman at the bottom of a rickety-looking set of iron stairs that led to the upper floor of the building. Maybe an apartment above the bakery.
“You okay?” he asked.
The woman stilled for a moment, before she turned toward him and blew the bangs out of her face. She looked vaguely familiar, but Royal couldn’t place her. She had a bookshelf half her size leaning precariously against the wrought iron staircase.
“Just made the idiotic decision to purchase this from the antique store across the way.” She gestured in the direction of the antique store.
“Then thinking, oh, it’s just right there, I could carry it back to my place.
It’s small. And it is, but it’s an antique, so it’s heavy.
Which would have been doable, if I didn’t have stairs to navigate.
” She sighed dramatically. Studied him for a moment, then flashed a smile.
“I don’t suppose you could give me a hand? ”
“Not really in the job description.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” she said, her gaze moving over his uniform in a way that left him…oddly uncomfortable. It was like she was filing away every button, snap, pocket and item on his belt.
“Does Hope Town have its own police dep—” She shook her head before finishing the question. “No, you’re Bent County. But a deputy. How does the sheriff’s department decide how to police Hope Town?”
Not quite sure where she was going with this, Royal answered the question watching the teetering bookcase and the odd—if pretty—woman. “We get assigned zones. Zone’s a lot bigger than Hope Town.”
“Do you get a lot of trouble here?”
He frowned at her. He wasn’t used to being peppered with questions. That was usually his job. “You looking to apply?”
She laughed, the sound was surprisingly husky when she was kind of a tiny thing. “No, but I suppose the questions are a bit of a professional hazard. I’m a writer. Currently working on a story sort of based on Hope Town. Maybe. Brain is constantly in book mode at the moment.”
Royal wasn’t sure what to make of that. Her. This.
Before he could decide, a car pulled up and parked in the little lot behind the building.
“Oh, that’ll be Rosalie,” the woman said.
But Royal would have known the woman even without the name supplied. Vaguely anyway. Rosalie Kirk was a private investigator with Fools Gold Investigations out of Wilde. She harassed the detectives a lot, and occasionally the deputies if she had a case that lined up with police work.
Plus, she was married to Duncan Kirk, former professional baseball player. Pretty well-known around these parts, even if Royal had only been in these parts a few years instead of his whole life like most of them.
Rosalie walked up, carrying a big potted plant. She looked Royal up and down. “You harassing my cousin?”
“Why would I do that?”
“He’s not harassing. He was asking if I needed help,” the woman supplied. She smiled kindly at him. “Thank you. But I bet Rosalie and I can handle it.”
He didn’t point out to either one of them that he hadn’t offered to help.
Just nodded and walked away. Maybe he gave the lady a backward glance, just because she was…
he didn’t have the right word for it. Something about her was…
off-putting, and he didn’t know what. And he was supposed to be looking for things that felt off, wasn’t he?
“I’ll run up and put your happy new place plant inside, then come down and help,” he heard Rosalie tell her.
Happy new place. New shelves. She was moving in. Rosalie’s cousin.
Which was when it clicked—why she looked familiar. The moving truck.
She’d been the brunette in the truck with Copeland Beckett, though out here in the sun her hair edged toward red.
But Royal figured that was all he needed to know about her.
Even if that laugh kept coming back to him throughout the day, a haunting sound he couldn’t quite get rid of.