Chapter Five #2
I point to the closed door off the kitchen. He nods and disappears into the small room while I lean back and sink deeper into the couch, letting out a slow breath.
Having Hunter in my home and taking care of me is a weird combination of surreal and achingly familiar.
He’d been like this when I’d gotten into it with Tim Wanamaker, one of the offensive linemen on Hunter’s football team, after Tim found out I was tutoring Hunter and called him stupid.
The guy had been twice my size, and I’d barely gotten one decent hit before he clocked me with one huge, ham-like fist and knocked me flat on my back.
“What are you smirking about?” Hunter asks, returning from the kitchen with two pills and a glass of water.
“Tim Wanamaker,” I say, before swallowing them both and washing them down.
He chuckles, lifts his bag over his shoulder, sets it on the floor, and lowers himself onto the sofa beside me. “I don’t know what the hell you were thinking, taking him on? He was twice your size.”
I hated the way he talked about you. We weren’t together yet, but by then, I was already half in love with him. He was the best person I knew. “He was an asshole.”
Hunter rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “All the more reason to stay the fuck away from him.”
I shoot him a pointed look. “If memory serves, you took a swing at him, too.”
“Because, for a second, I thought he killed you. You dropped like a stone.”
I shrug. “Yeah, well, he was still an asshole.”
Hunter’s smile fades, and he shifts upright beside me. “We should probably go over my findings... if you’re up for it.”
“Yeah,” I tell him, sitting up. “Of course.”
He leans down, opens the flap on the bag and slips out a beige file folder, setting it on the coffee table. “Like I said in the car, I haven’t been able to track Matthew since he left Fieldstone.”
“You say that like he left on his own,” I mutter, annoyed. If I wanted to hear that Matthew took off and was probably fine, I could just go back to the cops.
He shoots me a pointed look. “You don’t know that he didn’t. Try to stay objective.”
“I am objective. I knew him, and I know he wouldn’t have taken off the way he did.”
Hunter drops his gaze back to the file, his attention fixed as he opens it to the stack of paperwork inside. A muscle flicks in his jaw, and I can tell he’s pissed about something, and I’m more than a little disconcerted at how easy it is for me to read his expressions even after all these years.
“Your friend Evan thinks you made a mistake letting Matthew into your life,” Hunter says, opening the folder on the coffee table.
“Evan is suspicious by nature. He thought the same thing when George hired me and let me live in the apartment.”
Hunter shoots me an inscrutable sideways glance before turning his attention back to the file. “With the information you gave me about Matthew, I searched some databases to see if his name popped up.”
“You found him?” I ask, leaning closer.
Hunter shakes his head. “There’s no trace of him after he left Fieldstone.”
“Something had to have happened to him.” A sick feeling settles in my gut.
“Not necessarily. Lots of people can disappear when they want to. It’s trickier in this day and age, but not impossible.”
“So, you didn’t find anything, then?”
“Not necessarily.” Hunter flips through the pages in front of him. “While I haven’t tracked him since he left Fieldstone, I do know where he was before he showed up in your coffee shop six weeks ago.”
I lean closer, as if I can’t escape his gravitational pull. “Where? And how?”
“According to his financial information, he was living in a town about an hour northeast of Fieldstone. Coldwater, have you heard of it?”
I frown, shaking my head. “It doesn’t sound familiar. What’s there?”
Hunter chuckles. “Not a lot. The town’s similar, maybe a little smaller than Fieldstone.”
“And that’s where Matthew’s from?”
Hunter shakes his head. “That’s where he had been living and working for the past nine months, and most likely where whatever or whoever he was running from still is.
I accessed his financial records, and he’d been working at a store in town.
” He flips through the pages to a selfie of a young woman dressed in a red and white smock from a photo-sharing site post. Hunter taps on the slightly blurred profile of a dark-haired man, not posing but caught in the background. “Is that him?”
I lean closer and squint. His hair is shorter, and the blurred image makes it difficult to make out the fine lines of his face, but he has the same lean build. “I think so.”
Hunter nods and riffles through the papers.
“Again, his financials showed he stayed here, The Willow Brook Inn, for nearly a month back in June. I’m not sure where he went after that.
” He flips through the pages until he comes to a map of northeastern Vermont.
More than a dozen small red Xs with neatly printed dates next to them form a messy circle around a town called Coldwater, and an inexplicable chill blows through me like a February wind.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“While on the surface, there’s nothing extraordinary about Matthew leaving Fieldstone. People move on. He’s been working menial jobs that don’t typically lead to long-term careers.”
I shoot him a glare. “Ouch. Seriously?”