Chapter Twenty-Four
Hunter
After I plug my phone in to charge and get some power, I call Dylan, but it goes to voicemail. My already knotted insides tightened. He’s probably driving.
“It’s me,” I say, keeping my voice low and turning away from Linc so he can’t hear me leave a message. “I’m back at the inn. I’m sorry I was an asshole. My phone went dead and finally got a charge. Please call me back.”
I end the call, but I can’t shake the cold, sick feeling gripping me. What if he doesn’t give me the chance to talk? What if he just goes back to Fieldstone? Unlikely. He has my truck, so he has to come back to the inn at some point to get his stuff.
My gaze shifts to the front door. I will Dylan to walk through it. He doesn’t, of course, and unease crawls up my back.
“So, you want to tell me who Dylan Moore is?”
I look over at Linc, waiting expectantly, and shrug. “You already know. He’s a client.”
“But he’s more than that, isn’t he?” Linc’s mouth curves into a knowing grin.
“He’s someone I used to know. We went to high school together.”
Linc’s expression is doubtful. “That’s all?”
The truth is, I didn’t know what Dylan was to me anymore. An old boyfriend? The man I still loved today as much as I did ten years ago? Maybe nothing after I walked out on him. I close my eyes and rub them with the palms of my hands. I’d really fucked this up.
“Look,” I say, opening my eyes and letting my arms fall to my sides. “Whoever Dylan is to me, it’s between us.”
“If he’s your client, he definitely shouldn’t be here with you. Whatever history you have, you should have turned the case over to Colin or me.”
I know he’s right, but it’s too late now. I can’t turn back time and do the right thing, not when I took on his case or anything that came after. “I know you didn’t drive out all this way just to give me shit about Dylan, so why not tell me why you’re really here?”
Linc nods, still eyeing me thoughtfully. “You’re right, I didn’t come here to interrogate you about your love life. I wanted to go over the footage you sent me. Let’s sit.”
He nods at the two armchairs in front of the parlor fireplace.
“Knock yourself out,” I say, following him from the lobby into the room. He sinks into the chair where his bags are piled. He’s staying.
We settle in across from each other, the old floorboards creaking under our weight. The place is quiet at this hour. I keep glancing toward the door without meaning to.
Linc notices where my attention keeps drifting and smirks. “Expecting someone?”
“Yeah.” My face heats. I don’t elaborate. I don’t want to admit I abandoned Dylan at the bar after an argument and shine a spotlight on how just unprofessional I have been. So much for objectivity.
Linc leans back, stretching out his long legs, and cocks his head to one side. “Where is your client?”
“He’s still at the bar. I had work to do. I left him my truck. He should be back any minute.” Even I hear it.
Linc raises a hand, his smirk growing wider. “I’m not here to interrogate you. Footage.”
That snaps my focus back to the here and now. “Tell me you found something useful.”
Linc reaches into his bag and pulls out a laptop. He lifts the screen and taps the keyboard before handing it to me. “We went through the files you uploaded from Matthew’s gear. Took a while to sort through everything. A lot of footage was raw.”
I scroll through the thumbnails, interviews, and landscapes. Exactly what you’d expect.
“Matthew wasn’t just making some generic film,” Linc continues. “He was working on something personal.”
Something had drawn Matthew to this random Vermont town, but what? “How personal?”
“Very.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Did you know his mother was murdered?”
“I know they disappeared when he was young, and they’re presumed dead. There were other unexplained disappearances in the area around the same time.” Just like the unexplained disappearances from Coldwater over recent years.
The skin on the back of my neck prickles. “I didn’t have enough time to charge my phone when I popped upstairs to my room a few moments ago and really need to finish charging it.”
Linc frowns, likely caught off guard by my abrupt change of subject. “Sure,” he says, reaching into his computer bag and pulling out a cable. “You can use mine.”
“Thanks.” I plug one end into my phone and the other into Linc’s laptop. Then look back at Linc. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Matthew believed his mother was murdered,” Linc says.
“Okay, so why come here?”
“That’s the interesting part.” He taps the screen, and a video file opens. Images of Coldwater fill the screen—flashes of the snowy woods around the town, the faded, decaying downtown, and the dull gray inn where Linc and I sit right now. Then Matthew starts to speak.
“My mother and her husband vanished when I was still a small child.” His voice-over continues as still images of his mother flit across the screen.
“I was so young; if not for photos, I’m not sure I would remember her today.
She and my stepfather had gone on a weekend getaway together; they’d rented a beach cabin and left me with family.
” A wedding image of his mother and stepfather lights up the screen, and my gaze narrows. The groom looks familiar.
My stomach drops.
It’s him. “They never reached the cabin, and no one saw either of them again.”
“There were theories, of course.” Newspaper articles from around the time of the disappearance, the same ones I’d already read, flash across the screen.
“Some people thought they’d been in an accident, or that they ran into someone dangerous, or that they’d run off together, but most people believed they’re both dead.
I believed they were dead. I guess that’s why I was shocked to discover my stepfather running a country inn in Coldwater, Vermont. ”
The image changes again to a video of Jim out front of the inn shoveling snow from the walk under a hard winter sun. My stomach drops. Cold floods my limbs. The groom is Jim.
I stop the recording and scroll back to the wedding picture. It’s him.
“Holy shit,” I whisper and let the recording play again. Matthew keeps talking. Matthew, who is probably already dead.
“Friends of his stayed at the inn last year,” Linc says. “They took a selfie, posted it online. Jim was in the background, and Matthew recognized him from family photos.” When I just stare, Linc shrugs. “What? I watched ahead.”
“Is it a coincidence? Who is Jim Ellis? What really happened to my mother?” Matthew says on the recording, “And what happened to the men who vanished inexplicably from the area?”
The recording ends, and silence falls over the cluttered parlor. A chill crawls up my spine.
“Jesus,” I murmur. Could Jim have killed Matthew? Killed the men who have vanished from Coldwater for over a decade?
Where is he now? Where is Dylan? Pissed at me or not, he should have been back by now.
Linc points at the screen. “There’s another clip where he theorizes this guy killed his mother, then started over as a schoolteacher.”
“Hold on,” I tell him, grabbing my phone. It’s charged enough for me to check on voicemail notifications and text messages. There are none, and my stomach sinks a little. I dial Dylan’s number again and press my phone to my ear, but the call goes directly to his voicemail.
“Shit,” I whisper, before ending the call. “Something’s wrong.”
Linc leans forward. “That’s putting it mildly. The kid must have confronted him, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” I say. It tracks, after all. Matthew believed Jim was his stepfather.
Believed he murdered his mother. Believed he faked his death to start over.
And Matthew came to Coldwater to prove it.
“Or Jim figured out what he was doing.” Then Matthew hides his footage and runs.
He meets Dylan, works at the café while he plans his next move, but Jim finds him first.
The break-in at our room flashes through my mind. The stolen camera bag. Jim insisted he hadn’t heard or seen anyone.
“Son of a bitch,” I mutter.
“What?” Linc asks.
“Jim broke into our room,” I say. “He must’ve known what Matthew had been doing and worried what kind of proof he had.” And now he wants to know what kind of proof Dylan and I had found.
The pieces start sliding into place.
Matthew comes to town. Starts asking questions. Digging into old records. Maybe even confronting Jim. Jim realizes the past he buried is about to explode. So he shuts Matthew up.
My chest tightens.
“He killed him,” I say.
“Looks that way,” Linc agrees.
“And he tried to get the footage back from us. He did get it. He just doesn’t know I already sent it to you.”
Linc nods slowly. “Which means we should probably not be in this inn.”
“Yeah,” I say grimly.
A heavy silence falls between us, and I look toward the door again. Still closed. Still quiet. Something uneasy shifts in my chest.
Dylan should be back by now.
I shouldn’t have walked out like that. I wish he’d call me back.
The bar is a ten-minute drive from here. Even if Dylan waited a half an hour before leaving, he should be pulling up by now.
I pull out my phone and scroll to his contact. No messages. No missed calls. I hit dial, and the call goes directly to voicemail.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Linc watches my face carefully. “What?”
“He’s not answering.” That’s not like him.
“Maybe he’s driving.”
“Maybe.” But the knot in my chest tightens. I stand abruptly and start pacing the cluttered room.
“You think something’s wrong?” Linc asks.
“I don’t know.”
Nothing.
“Hunter,” Linc says carefully, “if Matthew was right, then Jim has been hiding under a new identity for twenty years. If he already killed once to keep that secret...”
My pulse hammers in my throat. “He’ll kill again.”
I stand and grab my coat. “I need to check the bar.”
Linc stands immediately. “I’m coming with you.”
As we head for the door, the unease in my chest turns into something colder. Something darker. The more I think about it, the more one horrifying possibility pushes its way to the front of my mind.
If Jim killed Matthew to keep his past buried, and he thinks we’re on to him...
I shove the door open into the freezing night air.
Please be at the bar; I think desperately. Please, just be sitting there, pissed at me.
Because the alternative—
I don’t let myself finish the thought.