Chapter 14
Hadley Dawkins
Hadley had her keys in her hand and her blazer half on when the front door of the station opened.
She’d meant to get an early start. Nora Oliver worked another twelve-hour shift starting at nine o’clock this morning.
Hadley wanted to catch her beforehand, to ask the questions Garber had pointed her toward the night before.
The Stiles cousin, who’d married into the Mercer family, could provide Hadley with inside information. Whether Roland was as harmless as everyone kept insisting, or whether there was something more to his obsession.
But it was Mason who’d made an appearance, and Hadley’s morning was rocked off its axis. This was the first time in eleven months that he’d taken it upon himself to pay her a visit. She let the blazer slip off her arm and back onto her chair before subtly setting the keys down on her desk.
“Mason,” Hadley greeted, not tearing her gaze from him. He seemed fine. No different than Monday night. “Is everything okay?”
“Morning.” Mason pulled the door shut behind him and stood a moment on the mat.
He studied the main area of the police station, almost as if he were counting the exits.
Most likely, a force of habit he would never be able to shake.
He ran a hand over his beard as his attention finally came to rest on her.
“I didn’t mean to catch you on your way out. ”
“It’s fine.” Hadley hadn’t meant for him to notice, and now she wasn’t quite sure what else to say. “Coffee?”
“I’m good.” Mason touched the tape measure clipped to his belt. “I thought I’d get some measurements for the table you want between the chairs. I won’t be long.”
Hadley came around her desk, because standing behind it came across as if she were using the piece of furniture as some kind of shield.
She came to a stop in front of Reed’s desk, which was completely cleared out, but she’d yet to move it.
As for the two chairs she’d mentioned, they were still in the other room.
“I haven’t moved everything around yet.” Hadley flicked her gaze toward Reed’s desk. She would eventually store it downstairs in the basement, but it would be fine pushed aside temporarily. “If you’ll give me a minute, I can—”
“Where do you want it?” Mason advanced toward the empty desk. “You mentioned living on the upstairs level, so I take it everything else is in the basement?”
“That’s right.” Hadley didn’t have much of a choice but to follow his lead.
He’d already moved to the far end of the desk, and she didn’t want him to take the brunt of it.
She set herself at the other side, bent at the knees, and got a good grip under the lip.
“Basement door is through the kitchen. I emptied the drawers, so it’s lighter than it looks. ”
“On three, then.” Mason counted it down, and the desk came up off the floorboards with a low groan of old wood. Beneath it, the squares of the legs had caused the stain to lighten, leaving four noticeable marks. “You’ll need to re-stain the floor eventually.”
“I tapped the renovation budget dry. An area rug can cover those until next year.” Hadley’s words registered in her ears, and she winced in regret.
She hadn’t meant to bring up money. He hadn’t shared with her the news of receiving the settlement.
Whatever his reasoning, his omission stung.
“Kitchen is through there, which is where the entrance to the basement is.”
Mason took the back end, reading the turn through the door without issue.
They angled the desk into the kitchen. Before she could suggest they set it down, he braced his back against the jamb, shifted the weight onto a raised knee, and worked the knob to the basement with one hand.
The door swung in the other direction, leaving him the ability to reach in and flip the light switch.
“How’d it go with that professor?” Mason asked, taking the first step down.
The question seemed to come easily for him, his gaze on the desk and not on her.
She realized that he wasn’t asking because he wanted a response.
He was merely filling in the awkward silence.
“Was he the one out in Vinton’s fields last weekend? ”
“He’s strange.” Hadley took a step down, then another, keeping the desk between them as level as possible. “And while he technically has an alibi, it’s flimsy.”
“Strange isn’t a crime.”
“No, it isn’t.” The edge of the desk caught the railing, and she lost her footing for a second.
Mason took the weight without a word, patiently holding his end until she had her feet under her again.
“But his office is wall-to-wall maps, pinned up on corkboards. One in particular caught my interest, because it’s the back road that leads to Donovan Huber’s place, along with Elijah Garber’s property. ”
“The dirt road where Reed was found?”
They came off the last step into the coolness of the basement.
The musty air greeted them, but she’d taken to cranking the hopper windows open whenever she came down to work through the old storage boxes.
The odor wasn’t as thick as it had been.
She’d also gained some space by scanning and shredding more than half the old criminal files, and a cleared area waited past the empty cell that hadn’t held a soul in years.
“Yes, which is something I can’t ignore,” Hadley explained as they slowly set the desk down.
“I was able to get a picture of the map, and it’s an old one, for sure.
Has paths and dirt roads on it that only locals use, and there is no denying that Mercer is obsessed with the folklore around these parts.
Apparently, he’s given his entire life to the topic. ”
Hadley wiped her palms on her jeans, noticing that Mason was studying the layout of the basement, especially the single jail cell. The bars had gone dull over the years. Did the sight of them trigger his anger toward her? She didn’t want to know, so she quickly turned to head back upstairs.
“The two chairs are in the dining room,” Hadley said as she ascended the staircase without looking over her shoulder. “Let me clear them off, and then we can set them on either side of the windows overlooking Main Street.”
Hadley figured he would follow in due time. She glanced at the coffee pot as she walked through the kitchen, debating whether to grab another cup. Mason had already turned down her offer for one, and she didn’t want him to feel obliged to change his mind.
She left the pot alone and made her way into the dining room, where two chairs sat pushed together against the far wall.
They were nothing special. Fully upholstered, frame and all, in a soft dusty blue gone pale at the arms where years of hands had worn the nap down.
They were sturdy, and that was all that mattered right now.
They would serve their purpose, which was a place for Mrs. Foster to sit with a hot beverage and go over her Monday list of grievances instead of hovering over Hadley’s desk.
She heard Mason’s footsteps, and it wasn’t long before he made an appearance.
“These two?” Mason took the nearest one and lifted it, testing its weight. “Not bad. I can reupholster these if you want another fabric or color.”
“I can look online for some material,” Hadley said in lieu of the automatic response she had to bite off.
He was being nice. Too nice. He hadn’t once driven into town to see her since getting released from prison.
He’d not once taken the first step to reconnect, not that she’d expected anything else.
It all landed on her to make amends, and her once-a-week visits to the house weren’t cutting it.
She picked up the other chair, grateful it wasn’t too heavy.
“These don’t really scream professional setting, but maybe the table and rug will help. ”
“These have some good bones under the fabric,” Mason said as he followed her into the main area. She set hers down on the left side of the double window, leaving him to do the same on the right. “Is this about right?”
“Maybe a little more toward the window,” Hadley said after stepping back to ensure both chairs had adequate space from the windowsill. He nudged it over and angled it just so, eyeing the gap in between. “There. That’s about right.”
He unclipped the measuring device and stretched the tape between the two chairs, then again from the nearest chair to the wall, his lips moving over the numbers without sound.
He then pulled a small notebook from his back pocket, the spiral kind that fit in a palm, and wrote them down with a stub of pencil that he’d had tucked behind his ear under the rim of his baseball cap.
Because he’d stepped close to her, she was able to catch a faint, familiar odor.
Not strong, not the way it came off of Sam from across a bar, but there in the warmth of his skin.
A weak sweetness of whatever Mason had been drinking last night, though not so strong that it indicated he’d had any this morning, especially given that his hands had been steady on the tape and his eyes were clear.
She turned away to avoid addressing the issue.
She would say things she couldn’t take back, and she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be to her advice.
It wasn’t like he was drinking and driving, giving her a reason to pull him over.
She’d also promised herself she wouldn’t bring up the money.
Had been successful in that endeavor, too.
After all, it wasn’t her business what he did with it, and she’d already done enough to his life without managing the rest of it.
But as he tucked the small notebook into the back pocket of his jeans, that small bit of hope died a small death.
“I stopped by the Watering Hole last night,” Hadley said as she walked around her desk. She pulled the drawer open and reached for the bottle of antacids. “Sam was working. He mentioned the settlement came through.”
“It did.”
Hadley’s chest tightened as heat spread through her. She thumbed the cap off, removed two tablets, resecured the lid, and dropped the bottle back in the drawer. Somehow, she managed not to slam it shut. She popped both chalky tablets in her mouth and chewed so she wouldn’t say anything else.
“I’m not sure I’m keeping it.”
Her good intentions immediately went out the window. She stopped chewing and stared at him, unsure she’d even heard him right. When he continued to stare at her, she resumed chewing until she could swallow the last grit of the tablets. The burn behind her sternum was no quieter for any of it.
“You got an opinion on that?” Mason asked when she couldn’t find the right words.
In theory, she had a great many things to say in response to such a foolish statement, but they came up all at once and jammed in the back of her throat.
The first was that the settlement was supposed to make up for the years taken from him.
That amount of money was the least the state owed him, and he should take every cent and never look back.
Two, he should go somewhere far away where folks didn’t know his name, where they didn’t know his own sister had testified against him.
In reality, though?
She had no right to an opinion about anything he did with the life she’d cost him.
She glanced up to find Mason still staring at her intently. When she still offered nothing, he nodded slowly, like he wasn’t expecting any different. How was it that she could still disappoint him?
“I’ll let you get to your day.”
Mason moved toward the front of the station. He had his hand on the door before she found her voice. Before she had the courage to say what she should have said the day he’d walked out of that prison.
“Take the money, Mason.” Hadley’s words came out rough, scraped up from somewhere inside the acid in her chest. He stopped, though he kept his back to her.
“Take it and leave Whistlerun. Start somewhere else where the residents don’t know a thing about you, because nobody here is ever going to let you just live.
I’d understand it, too. I wouldn’t blame you for every mile you managed to put between yourself and this place. ”