CHAPTER TWENTY #2
Then she yawned, confirming my suspicions, and as I drove the car in the direction of The Llewellyn Family Funeral Home, I smiled, wishing I were curled up in bed with her instead.
“Were you taking a nap?”
She was the early bird in this relationship, and most days, I needed her to give me a shove or five, even with my alarm blasting off on the nightstand beside my pillow.
“I woke up a couple of hours ago and had breakfast,” she explained before yawning again. “But I must've fallen back to sleep after we were texting. I'm so freakin' tired.”
“Couldn't sleep last night?” I guessed.
“It was weird without you here,” she admitted sadly. “Your side was too cold.”
“Maybe we should get a dog,” I suggested, thinking about how lonely Aunt Stormy's guest room was and how little sleep I'd gotten myself.
“Why? Do you plan on more of these weekend excursions?” She said it teasingly, but I couldn’t miss the undertone of reluctant worry, and it made my chest ache with sadness and longing to be home.
Where I belonged.
“Well, I mean, when I'm made detective, who the fuck knows what mysteries I'll have to solve, right?” My lip quirked into a forlorn smile.
I loved this—hunting people down, searching for clues, putting the pieces together—but what would that type of career do to the cozy little life I was building with her?
The constant game of tug-of-war between wanting this and wanting her was getting old and exhausting, and I didn’t know how to balance it.
“You can do detective work here, you know.”
I couldn’t hold back the barked laugh that burst through my lips, filling the quiet car. “Babe, what the hell kind of detective work am I gonna do in River fuckin’ Canyon?”
“I … I don’t know. I mean, there’s—”
“Yeah, hunting down missing wallets and lost cats.”
“Well, that’s probably not—”
I cut her off with a sardonic chuckle. “Meg, I’m telling you, that’s all there is to do down there. That’s why I’m becoming detective in the first place. You know this.”
She was quiet for a few seconds, her silence speaking volumes, before she said, “I guess I just didn’t realize that it would mean you’d want to … what? Leave?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to leave,” I said quietly, steering the car toward the funeral home. “I’m not … I’m not leaving, Meghan. Come on.”
“Well, why not?” she challenged, now wide awake and defiant. “If you’re so bored here, then why wouldn’t you just leave and find something more exciting somewhere else?”
As I rolled to a stop at a red light, my elbow landed against the window ledge with a heavy thunk, and my palm scrubbed against my face.
“Babe, I—” I pulled in a deep breath, pressing my fist to my lips for another moment, watching the turn signal on the car in front of me blink over and over.
“I wasn’t calling you to argue about this, okay?
I wanted to tell you how things had gone at the cemetery.
I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.
We just don’t know what a change in career is going to mean for me.
That’s all. It could lead to more time away from home, or maybe it won’t. We don’t know.”
She pulled in a shaky, audible breath. She was getting angry, upset, and I wasn’t sure why, but she was calming down, and I was relieved.
“Okay,” she replied softly. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired, and I slept like shit, and I miss you, and the idea of this becoming an everyday part of life is feeling really unappealing at the moment.”
“I get it.” And I did. Sincerely.
But stopping the bad guys and fighting the fight for helpless victims were more important than me and the cold bed I would be leaving at home.
“Anyway,” she said in a hurry, like she couldn't wait to brush the topic away, “what happened? Tell me.”
So, without another moment to spare, I told her about the plain headstone of Tomas Nolan.
It had read nothing but his name in uppercase letters and the dates of his birth and death.
Whoever had carved the epitaph didn’t bother to indicate what he’d done with that dash between the days his life had begun and ended, and I guessed maybe that was because whatever he had filled his days with wasn't worth remembering.
Or maybe I was looking too deep into it.
The grounds weren't as neatly landscaped as the cemetery Charlie cared for, though I couldn't see a weed in sight around Tomas's plot of land. It had struck me as odd when there seemed to be the odd dandelion here and there poking through the surrounding land.
But what had been even stranger was the freshly laid bouquet of flowers, leaning against the stone.
“Someone probably left them yesterday,” Meg suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But … I don't know. I don't think so.”
Then I told her about the man I'd seen, hurrying from the direction of Tomas's grave.
“So, you think that, by some ridiculous stroke of luck, you just happened to be visiting the same grave on the same day as this random guy?” Meg sounded dubious, and I felt stupid.
“I mean, it's not impossible, right?”
“Well …” She hesitated and pulled in a deep breath I heard through the phone. “No, I guess not, but … it seems … very unlikely.”
“Yeah,” I muttered with a sigh, thinking she was probably right.
Yet …
Something—something—was niggling at me. Tugging at a strand of intuition somewhere in my gut, telling me I wasn't far from finding the guy I was looking for.
Benjamin.
The world erupted around me with a sound of crashing thunder moments before the sky opened and dumped buckets of rain onto the windshield of my car.
“Holy shit,” I said, driving down the street lined with businesses, stores, and more gas stations than any street in a two-block radius needed.
“Was that thunder?”
“Yeah,” I said, grimacing at the storm surrounding me.
The thought of stepping out into that was about as appealing as sticking my hand in a box full of scorpions.
“We had a nasty storm come through last night,” Meg said. “I guess it went up there.”
“You have reached your destination,” my GPS announced, and I looked out the car window to see an old, towering Victorian-style house.
I squinted my eyes to read the sign hanging on the porch through the pouring rain, and sure enough, it read The Llewellyn Family Funeral Home.
In this area of big-box stores and warehouses, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
My gut erupted into a thousand swarming bees as I flipped my turn signal on.
“You're at the funeral home?”
“I am,” I said, turning into the parking lot. “Let me run in here and see what I can find. I'll call you when I'm done.”
Meg cleared her throat. “Okay …” She let the word linger, like there was something else she wanted to say but … wouldn't.
I turned the car off and waited for another moment, giving her the time to speak, to stop me, but instead, she hesitantly added, “I'll talk to you later.”
“Okay,” I said, looking out the car window toward the house with the wraparound porch. “I won't be long in there. I hope.”
“Love you,” she muttered.
“Love you too, babe.”
I hung up and got out of the car, stepping into a torrential downpour of biblical proportions.
I couldn't help thinking the rain was a bad omen.
I'd thought the same of the ominous clouds at the cemetery.
But I ignored my nagging intuition as I trudged on and headed toward the steps.
Because a good detective knew when he was heading toward potential danger, but he did it anyway.
No matter how many sirens were being set off in his head, so loud that he could barely hear the calling of a sharply dressed man, standing beneath the funeral home porch roof with a cigarette in hand.
But I saw him before I heard him, and I headed over, steeling my nerves as I reached into my jeans pocket for my badge.
“Sorry about that,” I said, having no clue what the man had been trying to say. I walked up the porch steps and approached, finding him to be nearly as tall as Dad. I held my badge out to him and allowed him to take it from me as I introduced myself. “Officer Noah Mason.”
“Officer,” the man said carefully and coolly, his voice deep and rich in tone.
He studied my badge for a moment before scanning my ID, his eyes volleying between my face and the picture the RCPD had taken years ago.
And as he made no secret of assessing me, I quietly did the same. A suspicious man often gave reason for suspicion, but I didn't want him knowing he'd raised some flags by very clearly questioning my presence.
He was in his late thirties, early forties.
Easily six foot five, maybe six foot six, but not as tall as Dad at six foot seven, and judging from the way his neatly pressed black suit fit, he wasn't a stranger to the gym.
His jaw was heavily speckled with dark brown, nearly black, stubble, the same color as the hair on his head, save for his temples, where the hair was primarily a stark silvery white—the greatest indication of his age.
Thick brows sat above his deep gray eyes, his nose was strong, and his lips fell somewhere on the line between thin and full.
A good-looking guy, I noted. Hollywood attractive.
The kind of dude Meg would see on the TV screen and poke at her inner cheek with her tongue, and I'd know she found him hot, but didn't want to say anything to protect my confidence.
But guys on a screen didn't threaten me.
I knew I physically paled in comparison to those actors and rock stars, but I'd tell myself they weren't real.
They had been manufactured by teams of surgeons and makeup artists and physical trainers.
But this guy—whoever the hell he was—existed in the real world, and I could safely say that he left me rattled, his appearance and manner combined.
After a moment, he passed the badge back to me and asked casually, “What can I do for you, sir?”