COME ON IN
MORGAN
Ten Minutes Earlier
Morgan put the book down. It was a good story, but she was too distracted.
She didn't make mistakes. In her line of work, mistakes had consequences. A missed detail at a scene. A question not asked. Not looking beyond the obvious.
Or, in this case, visiting a crime scene she had no business visiting and then leaving her notebook there for someone else to find.
And not some generic, pocket flip pad that anyone could pick up in the dollar store, but one with the ME’s seal on the cover and her name on the inside.
She'd told herself that was the source of her unease, even if it felt like there was more to it than that. Like dropping her notebook was only one in a series of events that was going to change things.
Maybe she was just being overly dramatic. She’d felt unsettled from the moment she’d left Philly.
She could count on one hand the times she'd felt this particular thing—the sense of standing at the edge of something that was about to change the shape of what came next.
When she was seven, her mom took her to visit her family in Philadelphia.
She’d had to dress up, then sit for hours while people she’d never met stared at her and spoke in hushed, unfamiliar language that she now knew was Italian.
The next thing she knew, they were living in Philly and she had a stepfather.
And then there was the summer she turned fourteen. Morgan had wandered away from the family gathering and found herself in a small clearing. The grass was flattened, marked by flecks of red, with a vague coppery scent lingering in the air.
She'd stood there and stared at it for a long time. Not horrified. Not frightened. Interested.
Until her mother appeared with one of her uncles and hurriedly pulled her away, using phrases like “overactive imagination” and a “penchant for drama” when Morgan started asking questions. She'd let it go, because she was fourteen and she didn't have a framework yet for the thing she'd recognized.
She'd spent the next twelve years building one.
And now… this.
What did she do? Should she go back into town and hope to cross paths with the blue-eyed man again and ask for her notebook back? Or did she do nothing and hope it didn’t come back to bite her on the ass?
She made a fresh pot of coffee, just to have something to do with her hands.
She checked her phone, half-expecting to see a text from her supervisor, wanting to know why someone had reported her notebook left at a crime scene.
She walked out to the clearing twice, and around the perimeter three times, before she picked up the book she’d been reading.
When she heard the car on the gravel, her stomach tightened.
No one came to Frank’s house except Donna, and she’d already come and gone.
She went to the door because her grandfather was putzing around out in the old barn, and promptly sucked in a breath when she saw who it was.
It was him.
He was halfway up the path. Dark hair, blue eyes, the same air of ease he’d had in the café. He was wearing a jacket with his hand already moving toward the pocket, which meant he'd put the pieces together much quicker than she’d anticipated.
She found that irritating… and intriguing.
He produced the notebook and waved it in the air.
Morgan looked at it. Looked at him. A beat passed, long enough to be a tell but not a conscious choice, before she took it, turned it over once to confirm what she already knew, and looked back up at him.
“Where did you find it?” she said, knowing exactly where he had found it.
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but close enough to make her heart skip a beat.
“Somewhere it probably shouldn't have been.”
She crossed her arms. Lifted her chin slightly. “I was taking a walk.”
“Sure.” He said it without inflection, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it with sarcasm.
Shadow chose this moment to arrive at her side.
Morgan had been secretly hoping he'd bare his teeth and growl menacingly or do something equally territorial that would shift the dynamic and give her an excuse to step back and close the door.
Instead, the uncooperative beast sat down next to her and looked on in interest.
Morgan made a mental note to have a conversation with him later about whose side he was on.
The man looked at the dog. Something in his expression softened slightly. “Yours?”
“My grandfather's. How did you know this was mine?”
He returned his attention to her, his eyes showing far more interest than she felt comfortable with. That slight curve to his lips grew. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
She held his gaze. He held hers. She was, she noted with some annoyance, going to have to be careful here.
“You're not from the sheriff's office,” she guessed.
“No,” he confirmed.
“Press?”
His brow furrowed, communicating what he thought of that. “No.”
“Then maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t have been there,” she said.
“Maybe I was taking a walk too,” he said easily.
Touché.
She heard Frank before she saw him and had about two seconds to decide how she was going to handle this.
Frank appeared in the doorway behind her.
He looked at Patrick with that direct, unflappable way that gave nothing away.
“You're one of Jack's,” he said. Not a question.
The man’s composure shifted. “His grandson. Patrick Callaghan.”
“Ian’s boy,” Frank said, nodding. “The hair and the eyes. Can't miss it. Come on in.”
“Frank—”
“He's not going to bite anyone,” Frank said, already turning back into the house. “Neither is the dog.”
Shadow looked at Morgan. Morgan looked at Patrick.
“You don't have to,” she said, hoping he took the hint.
“I know,” he said cheerfully, and stepped over the threshold.
Frank poured coffee without asking whether anyone wanted it.
She guessed that was the polite thing to do when someone showed up at your door and didn’t warrant the shotgun.
Patrick sat across from her. He'd looked at the house with curiosity and recognition, filing it away for later consideration. She found it difficult to be annoyed, since she’d done the same thing.
“You know my grandfather?” Patrick asked.
“I do,” Frank confirmed. “Your dad and uncles too.”
Morgan looked between her grandfather and Patrick, sensing something pass between them.
“What brings you out this way?” Frank asked.
“Just returning something I found,” Patrick said easily.
Surprisingly, Frank didn’t ask what it was. Instead, he made a sound that was neither agreement nor skepticism. “Good of you.” He looked at Patrick over his mug. “Your father was a damn good systems man.”
“Still is.”
“And you?”
Morgan looked at Frank. Frank was looking at Patrick.
“Depends on the system.”
“Mm.” Frank turned his mug in his hands. “You planning to put it to use?”
Patrick's gaze moved briefly to Morgan before returning to Frank. “That’s the plan.”
“Good.”
The odd exchange had the texture of a conversation happening on two levels simultaneously, the surface one and the one underneath it, and she felt as if she were missing something on both.
They talked for another twenty minutes—about the pub, about Pine Ridge, about the house Patrick was renovating with his cousins. Morgan drank her coffee and watched them and noted, without comment, that Pine Ridge was even smaller than she’d first thought.
“It was good talking to you, Mr. Sullivan,” Patrick said eventually, and stood. “I’ll tell my grandfather you were asking about him.”
“You do that. Morgan, see him out.”
Oh, she’d see him out, all right.
Patrick said nothing until the front screen door closed behind them.
“About the campground,” he said.
“I told you. I was—”
“Taking a walk. I know.” He wasn't dismissing it, just setting it aside. “Something tells me we have the same questions.”
She looked at him. “Of what interest is it to you?”
“I grew up here,” he said. “And dead bodies with no answers don’t sit well with me. Why were you there?”
She crossed her arms. “Because that’s my job.”
“In Philadelphia. Not Pine Ridge.”
Well, he had her there. “What do you do besides renovate old houses and skulk in the woods?”
Rather than be offended, he grinned. “At the moment, I run a local moving company and tend at my family’s pub.
But here’s the thing, Morgan,” he said, his voice dropping and growing quieter.
“I know the area. The history. The people. And I’m very good at finding answers to questions that aren’t easily answered. Just like you.”
Morgan said nothing but she was even more intrigued. The bait he’d just dangled in front of her was impossible to resist.
She had no professional standing here. She was a guest in her grandfather's house, and her job was in jeopardy. The last thing she needed was to get further involved in something she had no business getting involved in.
She was also standing on a porch in Pine Ridge, Pennsylvania, seriously considering a collaboration with a man who had tracked a notebook back to her in less time than it should have taken, and was suggesting they work together to find answers.
At least, she thought that was what he was suggesting.
“I'll think about it,” she said.
“Fair enough.” Patrick nodded, satisfied, and continued to his black SUV. With his hand on the handle, he turned to look back at her. “You can find me at the pub,” he said. “If you decide you want to. Your grandfather can tell you where it is.”
Morgan remained on the porch until the SUV was out of sight and the crunch of tires on gravel was no longer audible.
Frank was in the kitchen, paper open. “Kid’s a Callaghan, all right,” he said without looking up, a ring of approval in his tone.
Which said something, because her grandfather didn’t approve of many.
Morgan refilled her coffee, sat down at the table, and looked at the notebook in her hand.
She was going to think about it.
She was absolutely going to think about it.
And then… she was going to take him up on it.