Chapter 5
“You’ve got the lodge back up and running? I thought for sure it was going to slide down the mountain or get snatched by one of the developers always sniffing around.”
“I’m doing my best to bring it back to where it once was. That’s what my grandparents would’ve wanted.” I stared at the sheriff of Blue River and struggled to stay seated while he gave me a judgmental once-over.
I’d debated if it was worth reporting the incident on the night of the storm, but after getting spooked by the too-close-for-comfort gunshots this afternoon, I’d decided there needed to be an official record of the weird things occurring. I should’ve known that the man who had often busted me for skipping school and racing up and down the pass when I was a teenager wouldn’t take me seriously now that I was a law-abiding grown-up. In his eyes, I was still a rebellious kid, doing anything to get my parents’ attention. There had been a period when I na?vely believed if I acted out enough and caused enough of a ruckus, it would force my folks to stick around and do some actual parenting. I should’ve known that behavior would only drive the two of them closer together and further away from me.
“You aren’t concerned about the pictures I showed you?” It was a fight to keep my composure.
Risky had warned me that law enforcement would likely blow me off. He didn’t elaborate on why he was so certain I was wasting my time by driving into town and reporting my findings to the sheriff. However, I got the distinct feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d been in a situation with sinister undertones and murky evidence. He had been far too calm about everything that had recently happened.
“It’s hunting season, Lucky. You grew up on the property. You should know better than anyone that people are going to be up and down that river until the season ends. All those pictures prove is that someone was down in the basin. I doubt the blood belongs to a human. Someone was probably cleaning a fish or small game at the water’s edge. And look at how you’re limping. The torn fabric is more than likely from a tourist who tripped and fell because they had no business being in the wilderness.”
I gritted my back teeth and felt my nostrils flare with irritation at the none-too-subtle insinuation that I no longer knew my way around the mountainside. I was a Blue River native, born and raised in this small town. Just because I’d left for a few years for college didn’t mean I lost my local status.
Before I could argue back, the sheriff sighed and debunked my final concern.
“You and I both know it was irresponsible of you to go wandering around the woods without the proper gear. You should’ve had a safety vest on. We also know inexperienced hunters account for most of the accidental firearm injuries we see around these parts. It happens during the season at least once a year. This time, you were just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got mistaken for prey.”
I wanted to repeat what I’d said to Risky about no one hunting with a handgun, but it felt like I would just be wasting my breath. The older man had clearly decided that I was overreacting to common occurrences and was just being a nuisance, like I had been prone to back in the day.
“Being unlucky is nothing new to me, Sheriff.” I rose to my feet and shook out my hands, which I’d unknowingly curled into fists like I was ready to fight. “Thank you for your time.”
I snatched my phone off his desk and left the office in a serious huff.
Every day while I lived in the city, I longed for home. Because of the rose-colored glasses I viewed Blue River through, I’d forgotten there were things about living in a small town that weren’t the best, and that everyone knowing your business inside and out was rarely any fun.
“Lucky.”
At the man’s serious tone, I paused with my hand on the door of the sheriff’s office and looked over my shoulder.
“I know what happened in Denver. I read the police report. I sincerely hope you didn’t plan on bringing any of that back to Blue River with you. This is a peaceful, easygoing town. The only things that cause me a headache regularly are having to deal with entitled and rambunctious tourists—and you.”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to rein in my volatile emotions. If I had a singular sore spot, this grumpy old man had just poked it. The wound was too fresh and too raw for me to take anyone targeting it lightly.
“If you read the file, you should know I had nothing to do with what happened. It was simply a tragedy.”
The sheriff lifted his bushy white eyebrows and gave me a judgmental glance. “A preventable tragedy. If that boy had fallen for anyone but you, he’d still be around, and his family wouldn’t be grieving.”
I jerked open the door as fury filled every vein in my body. “Funny, guys like you always call him a boy, as if he wasn’t a full decade older than me when we started dating. I remember when it all happened, and the press and law enforcement in Denver accused me of leading Baker on. They didn’t want to look at the thousands of text messages he had sent me each day or listen to the increasingly unhinged voicemails he’d left. No one pointed a finger at his history of mental illness or that his previous girlfriend had a restraining order against him. Nobody mentioned he’d stalked one of his coworkers. None of that mattered because it was a better story to say I’d led him on, that I’d driven him to the point of no return like some sort of Lolita.”
I huffed an aggravated breath and stepped out the door. “That isn’t luck. It’s a flawed mentality and blatant bias and misogyny.” None of which I was surprised to find in my hometown.
I left the sheriff’s office in a quietly boiling rage. When I reached my old truck, I kicked the tire out of frustration, forgetting I had soft slippers on to accommodate my swollen ankle and foot. I jumped when my toes started to throb after making contact. I looked up in embarrassment when the driver’s door opened and a long leg in faded jeans appeared.
My truck was older than dirt. It was a stick shift, which I normally had no problem with, but at the moment, my ankle screamed at me every time I put too much pressure on it. I’d had no choice but to rope Risky into playing chauffeur and was surprised he was familiar with a manual transmission. After the disaster with the skid loader, I could only picture him operating something small and automatic. He’d struck me as a flashy-import kind of guy underneath that flannel.
“Are you all right?” There was a hint of humor hidden within his concern.
I pushed my hair out of my face and hobbled to the passenger side of the truck and waved off Risky’s offer to help. It took some effort to hoist myself up into the cab, but I managed, cut hand, sprained ankle, and all. I looked at Risky from the corner of my eye when he climbed behind the steering wheel. He didn’t say anything, just started the truck and headed out of town, back toward the lodge. Waiting a solid ten minutes for an I told you so , I wasn’t sure what to do with myself when it never came.
I was used to causing chaos and being told what a burden I was in the aftermath. It felt strange that Risky hadn’t batted an eye over any of the unprecedented situations I’d dragged him into.
I propped my elbow on the ledge next to the window that no longer rolled down and forked my fingers through my hair and rested my head on my palm.
I stared at the man in the driver’s seat and told him, “You were right. The sheriff didn’t even bother to look through all the pictures. He thinks everything is related to novice hunters and that I’m overreacting.” I let out a frustrated sigh. “He’s been the sheriff in Blue River since I was a teenager, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything else. He’s always had a terrible opinion of me.”
He grunted and turned his head to meet my gaze briefly. “Personal opinions shouldn’t matter when you have a job to do.”
“I agree. Unfortunately, that’s not how things work in a tiny town like this. Personal is a given. Professional depends on the day and the mood of whoever you are dealing with.”
One of Risky’s dark eyebrows lifted. “What’d you do to leave such a shitty impression?”
I chuckled, the sound devoid of any humor or cheer. “My parents are local. Everyone knows they had me when they were teenagers. My mom’s parents hated the talk and scrutiny so much that they left. They didn’t care if she came with them or not.” Which was why she’d had no issue doing the same thing to me. “She’s lucky my dad’s parents took her—and me—in. I came into the world under the shadow of irresponsibility and impulsiveness. My parents have always lived up to every bad thing people around here whisper about them. I’m guilty by association.”
I sighed again and shifted to look out the window. “I never wanted to leave my grandparents alone at the lodge, especially when they got older. My grandfather insisted I go to college. He wasn’t going to leave the property to me if I didn’t agree. A lot of folks around here think I abandoned them for the city, and they blame me for letting the lodge fall into disrepair after my grandpa’s death. The property has always been a local landmark of sorts. If I couldn’t take care of it the way it deserved, the locals wanted me to sell it so it wasn’t an eyesore.”
“Why didn’t you come home when you finished college if the lodge was so important to you?”
I dropped my hand and let my forehead hit the window. The glass was cool, but it did nothing to temper the fiery anger still surging through my blood from dealing with the sheriff.
“I ran into a bit of bad—”
“Luck.”
I blinked in surprise when Risky finished my sentence for me. I saw him smirk out of the corner of my eye.
“I’ve noticed that’s your default explanation for everything that goes wrong. Big or small. It’s nothing more than luck. Somehow, the power going out and someone taking a shot at you are equally unlucky.” He turned his head slightly to give me a pensive look. “I think your perception might be off.”
I laughed for real this time and held up my hand and started ticking things off on my fingers. “I was born to parents who act like they’re on perpetual spring break. The first time my grandpa tried to teach me to ride a bike, I broke my arm. On my first day of school, I got attacked by a loose dog and ended up needing twenty stitches. The first time I went camping, I fell into a patch of poison oak and nearly died from an allergic reaction. I got lost in a blizzard when I was ten and had the state’s search and rescue teams out looking for me. I thought it would be fun to join a sport in middle school. I played one game of soccer and left the game with a broken nose. I got this truck for my birthday when I was sixteen. Thank God my granddad knew I needed a tank because the first time I drove it without him supervising from the passenger seat, I ended up in a multi-car pileup on the pass. And don’t get me started on my love life.” Because that was where things had really turned into a train wreck. The situation with Baker had been enough to turn me off of dating for the rest of my life.
“But I want to ask about your love life. I’m curious if there’s anyone you can think of who might want to take a shot at you.”
I frowned and shifted on the hard seat uncomfortably. “You don’t think it was a wayward hunter?”
He gave me a look that indicated I shouldn’t ask dumb questions that I already knew the answer to.
“I only have one ex capable of hurting someone. But his target was never me. It was himself.” I shuddered as memories of the bloody night broke free from the chains I’d kept wrapped around them. “He’s no longer a threat to anyone. He died.”
He’d told me he couldn’t live without me after years of isolating and controlling me. My biggest romantic failure to date was mistaking obsession for love. Something I’d sworn I’d never do after watching my parents’ ridiculous relationship all my life.
“He’s the reason I didn’t come home right after college. I was worried that if I left, he would do something drastic.” So, I stayed, and something awful happened anyway.
“Let me guess.” Risky’s voice was low, but not pitying or consolatory. “You attribute how things went down with that guy as part of your endless run of bad luck as well?”
I lifted a shoulder and let it fall in a careless shrug. “Meeting him certainly wasn’t lucky. Not like meeting you. You came along at the exact right time, Declan Risk.”
He snorted. “I’ve heard that once before.”
I rotated my sore ankle and asked, “Oh, really? Who else told you that? Did someone else find you wandering alongside the road and pick you up? Do you make a habit of imitating a stray dog?”
No one could resist those hypnotic eyes of his. They very much gave sad puppy when he wanted them to.
“She didn’t find me alongside the road. She found me at an abandoned meth lab when I was five or six. Not sure which one of my parents had left me behind after they traded me for a fix, but I guess it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. My mentor swooped in and took me into her home before anything unsavory happened to me. She spent years making sure I learned everything I needed to know. She told me I came along at the perfect time. The person who worked for her before me was thinking about quitting. He got tired of doing things he couldn’t tell anyone outside of the business about. I was sent to school, given a mostly normal home, and trained step by step to fill a certain invaluable role in my former boss’s business. I was there to take over when he left to start a new life with the woman he had fallen in love with. The timing was perfect. Just like the day we met.”
It was the first time I’d heard him speak so much and so glowingly of anyone or anything. I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface of whatever was brewing under his attractive facade.
“She taught you everything, but changing a fuse and how to stop a running toilet weren’t on the list?” I was just trying to tease him and lighten the heavy atmosphere. I wasn’t ready for his response or the way it sent chills rolling down my spine.
“No. But being able to tell the difference between how a shotgun and a handgun sounds when fired was. That’s how I know it wasn’t a lost hunter. Who else might have a score to settle with you, Lucky?”
I was taken aback by the matter-of-fact way he’d dropped that information. While my brain tried to process all he’d revealed, I stammered, “I don’t know. Maybe an upset guest. There’ve been a few. The guy I hired to handle maintenance before you came along was fired because he kept disappearing during his shift. He only worked for me for a few weeks though.”
I shifted on the seat to stop my butt from going numb and tapped my fingers on my thigh as I tried to think of who I might’ve pissed off recently.
“There’s always a real estate developer hounding me about selling the property. But there are four or five of them competing. I don’t see how they would benefit if something happened to me.”
“Who gets the lodge if you aren’t in the picture?”
I shivered at the cold-blooded way he’d asked the question. “My parents. Well, my dad, specifically.”
If I had anyone in my life who loved the lodge half as much as I did, I would give it to them instead. Since that wasn’t the case, my parents were the default.
I held up a hand before he could speculate further. “My parents barely remember I’m alive most days. They don’t have the capacity or wherewithal to try to harm me.”
He grunted again and gave me some serious side-eye. “You’d be surprised how cunning and capable people can be when money is a motivating factor. Give me a list of the developers who have approached you. Put them in order of who’s been the most insistent and pushy.”
I turned to stare at him. A million questions ran through my mind. The loudest one screaming for attention was, Who is this man I brought into my home and business? And why does he suddenly seem so scary?
“You said you used to fix things before coming to work for me. What does that mean exactly?” I tried to keep my voice calm and not let on that I was having an existential crisis because of him.
Risky shrugged. “Just what I said. People, problems, situations that went sideways, places where bad things happened more often than not—I fixed them all for a price.”
I started to sweat a little, my overactive imagination running wild at his words. “Did you fix all those things as in improve them, or …” I trailed off, unsure of how I should finish that sentence.
I felt like I’d gone from paddling happily in a kiddie pool to being shoved straight into the deep end without knowing how to swim. I was very out of my depth with the man as he revealed more of himself to me.
“It depends on whatever the person paying the bills wanted. I told you. It wasn’t up to me to judge if what I was doing was good or bad. I showed up, fixed whatever was broken, and never looked back.”
“It sounds like an interesting career.” Not one the average person could do.
I wondered about the mentor who had found him when he was young and trained him to do something that sounded so scary and scandalous. I was even more curious about how he’d ended up on my mountain.
“Truthfully, I find working for you more challenging and exciting. Which means I have a personal stake in making sure nothing happens to you.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to taunt him about mixing personal and professional interests, but I couldn’t get the words out.
What had once been a clear line between boss and employee seemed to be rapidly fading the more I started to rely on him.