Chapter Five
That afternoon, Rachel rubbed her hands together to warm them, determined not to start her minivan’s engine again for at least ten minutes.
Poor dog owners, whose pets still expected walks during snow showers, had already sent curious glances her way as they’d passed.
She couldn’t afford to draw more attention to herself, looking like a stalker.
One without the good sense to choose better weather.
Her window of time was closing fast. School let out in eighty-four minutes, and she couldn’t be late to get in line in the pickup lane.
Again. That she’d been out helping Riley every time she was tardy made no difference.
Even if she arrived early every afternoon through the end of the school year, she would never make it off the parent naughty list.
If she didn’t need Mick’s help, then what was she doing here, parked outside his new apartment on the off chance he would stop by for supplies?
Mick probably hadn’t even rushed in to work last night’s fire.
Riley would have. Her dad would have. Both had been too dedicated to leave their crew in the lurch when they could help.
That didn’t mean this outsider would have missed a minute of beauty sleep to start his job early.
Rachel glanced up and down the street again, past cars that were slowly disappearing beneath a speckled blanket of snow.
She wouldn’t need to see an out-of-state license plate to identify his midnight-blue quad-cab since she’d taken note of it in the station’s parking lot last night.
Only he wasn’t there and probably wouldn’t be before she had to leave.
“Forget it. I don’t know why I thought—”
Why had she allowed herself to believe for an instant that the new chief might be concerned about her brother or her daughters or her?
More proof of her inability to judge the decency in people.
She’d already allowed ideas Mick had planted in her head to make her overreact to Riley’s emails.
Would he have her imagining spies next as they peeked out through closed curtains and hid arsenals in their kitchens like in Mr. & Mrs. Smith?
In quick, angry moves, she twisted the ignition and put the van in gear.
As she started to pull away from the curb, she glanced in her rearview mirror and noticed someone approaching on the sidewalk.
A man, she determined from the heavy stomps and wide frame, bent against the wind.
No dog in sight, and no one without one would have been caught dead walking in this weather.
He wore a hooded sweatshirt beneath his coat, its strings pulled so tight that only a fist-size section of his face remained exposed.
Like he wanted to avoid being identified.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood, and a chill sauntered down both arms, her body ignoring that earlier dismissal of her concerns. Her thigh shook as she continued to press down on the brake, the engine idling. Was the guy following her? On foot? In this slippery mix?
Oblivious to her questions, the man started up the walk to the brick apartment building.
That coat and the broad-shouldered shape of the person inside it suddenly looked familiar.
As if Rachel needed more hints to his identity, her chilled hands beneath her gloves suddenly felt clammy.
She shifted into Park and shut off the engine.
The bundled walker glanced back at the sound then continued toward the building. She pushed the door wide. “Prentiss, wait!”
Mick, who’d just been waving a key fob in front of a sensor for building access, turned and stared at the open van door.
“Rachel, is that you?” His words produced a white conversation bubble in the mist.
Instead of waiting for her to answer, he hurried down the walk, forced to catch himself as he lost his footing on slick spots. She had only enough time to climb out and close the door before he crossed the street and met her outside the minivan.
“Hey, Prentiss.” Her teeth chattered as the wet wind seeped through her coat and hat.
He yanked on the strings to untie his hood and shoved it back. “Since you’re showing up at my home now, you should start calling me Mick.”
His lips spread in the kind of sexy smile that probably made other women’s knees buckle. She locked hers instead.
“I shouldn’t have come.”
The smile vanished. “Is everything okay? You? The girls?” He cleared his throat. “Your…brother?”
“Everyone’s fine,” she said and then swallowed. He was concerned about Riley? Actually, her brother hadn’t called her in days, and she had no way of knowing how he was doing.
“Then why are you here?” He gestured to the number above the door on his building. “And how did you get my address?”
“Ever lived in a small town?” When he shook his head, she said, “You’ll soon learn that everyone knows everything about everyone else.”
His brows pulled together, further creasing the line already forming between them. She couldn’t blame him for questioning her statement. If she knew all of her fellow residents’ secrets, she wouldn’t have been searching for answers.
“You still haven’t—” he began and then shrugged. “Want to come in? There’s no place to sit down except an air mattress with a sleeping bag spread over it, but I can’t stay out here. I’m freezing. Aren’t you?”
She shivered as her gaze shifted from him to the building and back.
Alone with Mick Prentiss in his apartment?
On an air mattress? Since a two-child buffer hadn’t been enough to keep her hormones in check last night, she decided the cold would be a better choice.
Aborting her plan to share what she’d discovered with him would be the best one.
“Sorry to have bothered you.” She opened the car door.
“Hold on, Rachel.”
Slowly, she turned to face him.
“You came here instead of the station for a reason. Maybe you found something that you didn’t want my crew to know about. Or you didn’t want anyone to be aware that you’d spoken to me again. Which is it?”
“Both.”
“You’re already here, so let’s talk.” He pointed to her van. “How about in there?”
At her nod, Mick rushed around the vehicle to climb in on the passenger side.
As soon as she’d closed her door, she recognized that the interior of the van wasn’t a great idea, either.
The air inside was too thin, too intimate, with scents of snow and masculine sweat twining.
She sneaked a ragged breath, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“Where’re we headed?” He pointed to the windshield.
“We don’t need to drive anywhere.”
“Didn’t you just say everyone in town knows everything?”
“But—” She scanned the streets for more dog walkers or shifting curtains.
“Then let’s get out of here before someone sees us parking right on Maple Street.”
His stress on the word and his annoying grin as she pulled away from the curb made her cheeks burn.
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
“Try.”
Without a destination in mind, she turned left on Walnut Drive and then right on Willow Lane. Rows of well-kept 1950s ranches and the occasional early 1900s Queen Anne–style home marched past them in silence and her slower than normal speed on the icy roads.
“Do teenagers even use the term ‘parking’ anymore?” Rachel blurted when she could no longer bear the quiet. Great. She’d turned the conversation back to that?
Again, his smile. The uninvited tingles were hers.
“You’re asking me?” He scoffed and then chuckled.
“I have no idea what teenagers say now. But stop stalling. What had you upset enough to talk to me again? You might have missed it, but our conversation last night didn’t go well.
And, for that matter, why did you show up when I was supposed to be at work? ”
“I’ll answer your questions after you tell me why you were walking home in this?”
She pointed to the mess the windshield wipers shoved aside with each swipe.
“I needed clothes since I wasn’t set up at the station yet when I came in to help with last night’s fire.” He patted the knees of his damp jeans. “And I left my truck at the scene. I needed someone to drive me back to pick it up. Thanks for volunteering.”
“You could have taken a rideshare like in the big city,” she said with a smirk.
“I checked my app. No drivers within fifteen miles of the station.”
“Sorry. I can’t help, either. I have to pick up the girls at school in—” she paused to glance at the dash clock “—seventy-six minutes. And the roads are lousy.”
“That’s over an hour. Isn’t Mount Isabel only two miles north to south? And this is nothing for you. I thought Michiganders took pride in their superior snow-driving abilities.”
She lifted her shoulder and let it drop. “Fine.”
Instead of continuing straight, she moved into the right-turn lane and headed south.
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“The fire was on County Road 600 East. Photos are up on the Informer website.”
“And you always check.”
He didn’t present it as a question, and she didn’t deny it. Having lived with a police scanner as a lullaby since childhood, she always craved immediate emergency information.
“Okay, your turn.”
“After the sirens last night, I’d guessed you’d need to stop home for a few things.”
“Now, how about the other question?”
She gripped the steering wheel tighter. Saying it out loud would do one of two things: make her discovery seem sillier or realer. She worried it would be the latter.
“I broke into Riley’s email account last night.”
“Remind me never to underestimate your sleuthing skills,” he said, but sat straighter. “Didn’t the police already go over his laptop?”
“It was his web-based account that I accessed.”
“What did you find?”
“I never expected my brother to be a quote-of-the-day type.”
Mick turned so that his knee came up on the seat. “He was receiving quotes in his emails? What kind of quotes?”
“Strange ones. Mildly menacing when taken individually but more sinister when I looked at them together.” She moved her head to push away the shiver that settled at the base of her neck. “But I can’t take them as a group since they all came from different email addresses.”
“Wouldn’t a quote-of-the-day come from one source? Like one newsletter?”
Rachel blinked rapidly. She hadn’t thought of that. “One was from a guy who’s been dead for four hundred years. ‘I shall be as secret as the grave.’”
“That’s creepy, all on its own.”
“It could have been a warning, but it also could have been just a quote.” Either way, she couldn’t resist shivering.
“But you don’t think so.” Like earlier, it wasn’t a question.
She shook her head. “One of the other quotes wasn’t attributed to a speaker at all. ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’”
Mick planted his hands on the dash. “You’ve got to stop asking questions. It’s not safe.”
At the vehemence in his words, Rachel hit the brake, causing the van to slide. Once she’d managed to correct, she frowned over at him. “What was that for? I didn’t share this with you so you could tell me what to do.”
“Then why did you tell me?”
The heat of his stare on the side of her face made her squirm. “Because I needed someone to acknowledge that Riley could have been set up.”
He didn’t answer. What had she expected him to say?
That they had enough evidence to go right away to the Mount Isabel PD?
She couldn’t tell him that she’d come to him because he was a stranger rather than despite it.
That among the people she’d known all her life, she suddenly didn’t know whom to trust.
Neither spoke as she turned from the salted and plowed two-lane highway onto the snow-covered side road.
Up ahead, his pickup was buried in snow across from a blank area of sky with piles of debris where a house used to stand.
She turned around in the driveway, pulled to the side of the road about thirty feet behind his truck and parked.
Mick unbuckled his seat belt and turned to face her. “If your theory is correct—and I’m still not saying it is—don’t you recognize the risk you’re taking in digging around for answers?”
He’d said nearly the same thing last night, but she shook her head, still rejecting it. “The email senders can’t even know that I accessed Riley’s account.”
“But if they were in the station, they know you’re hunting for answers.”
She shifted in her seat as he’d confirmed her concern. “All anyone who saw me can say for certain is that I’m furious Riley was forced out of his job. Which is true. And I want him to get it back. Which I do.”
“Maybe. I still wish you’d leave the investigation to the professionals, but it’s clear you’re not going to stop. So, I’m asking you to come to me at least if you find new information.” He held out his hand, palm up. “A back channel, if you will. I might even be able to help.”
She stiffened. “I didn’t ask for your help.”
“The emails are a start. But we still need to find more information before taking your theory to the police.”
“And there is no we.” She needed to remember that. It would be dangerous for her to rely on him. Or anyone else. “As I said, I didn’t ask for anything from you.”
“Are you willing to bet Carly’s and Carissa’s safety on that belief?”
She unbuckled her seat belt and faced him, lifting her chin. That was dirty pool bringing her daughters into it. Still, a tremor started at her core and spread across her shoulders. “I would never put my daughters at risk.”
“Aren’t you?” He climbed out of the minivan. “You keep telling yourself that, and maybe you’ll believe it.”
Then he closed the door and stomped away, his boots leaving deep tracks in the snow.