Chapter 23
Hadley Dawkins
Colleen had pulled through as promised, and the deeds landed in Hadley’s inbox about an hour ago.
She’d printed them all out and spent those sixty minutes going through the documents twice while she ate a late lunch up in her apartment.
From the Vinton family to the Chesters to Donovan Huber, the chain of purchases had happened exactly as Colleen described over the phone.
Hadley now had a decision to make.
She’d remained at the station most of the day on purpose, unwilling to confront Donovan until she was confident in her theory.
If she was right, the land purchases meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.
If she was wrong, she’d be putting a man she’d known since childhood under a light he hadn’t earned.
It would have helped to have someone to talk through the information, but dispatch informed her that Nick was still tied up with the ATF and the FBI.
Confirming a few of her suspicions on her own wouldn’t hurt anything, though.
She pulled her blazer off the arm of the couch and headed downstairs to the first level of the Victorian, where it took her no time at all to collect her keys, lock up, and turn to face Main Street.
The asphalt had gone dark and slick, though there seemed to be a break in the weather.
The humidity had climbed without bringing any heat along with it.
If anything, a chill had worked its way into the air, and it carried the smell of the wet stone and turned dirt.
She scanned the street out of habit, searching for anything out of place, and found nothing but a typical Thursday afternoon.
Hadley descended the porch steps and glanced over her shoulder at the sky above the Victorian.
The morning’s high clouds had turned into something meaner.
A dark ceiling of them had rolled in off the western fields and pressed down low over the rooftops, close enough that the streetlights along Main had begun clicking on hours ahead of schedule, throwing weak amber pools onto the pavement that had no business needing them at three in the afternoon.
Away from the shelter of the house, the wind took her by surprise.
It drove hard down the block in fits and starts, flattening her blazer against her spine and snapping the flag over the hardware store hard enough that the grommets rang against the pole.
Somewhere down the row, a shop awning cracked and billowed against its frame.
Hadley quickened her pace. The last thing she wanted was the sky opening up on her halfway down the block, and she wasn’t keen on the lightning that had started working the clouds to the west. The thunder was arriving closer behind each flash.
Donovan didn’t seem to mind the storm in the least.
The bay door was rolled all the way up. From somewhere inside, a country song played low, an old one, half swallowed by the wind.
Under it ran a steady clank of metal on metal, most likely a socket wrench working a stubborn bolt.
When she stepped inside, out of the wind and into the smell of motor oil and cold concrete, she caught sight of a pair of work boots sticking out from beneath the front end of a truck raised on the lift’s lowest setting.
The wrench clanked twice more. Then the creeper rolled, and Donovan came out from under the truck on his back. The sight of a pair of legs clad in denim standing over him brought him up short.
He blinked, placed her, and sat up quickly.
“Hadley.” Donovan set the wrench down on the concrete beside him. He pulled a rag from his back pocket and worked it over his hands, one finger at a time, studying her the entire time. “Morning. Well. Afternoon, I guess it is now.”
His gaze cut past her, out the open bay to where there was no vehicle to be found. He took his time about it, checking twice for something he might have missed at the curb.
“That SUV of yours giving you trouble? Did you leave it at the station?” Donovan pushed himself off the creeper and onto his feet, working a hand against his lower back. “I can get to it in about an hour.”
“No. Nothing like that.” Hadley was glad she’d kept hold of her keys. They gave her something to do with her hands. “I just walked down from the station. I’ve got a favor to ask you, Donovan.”
Skepticism moved across his face as he crossed to the tool cart, where a mug sat beside a coffee can of loose bolts. WORLD’S OKAYEST MECHANIC was printed down the side of it, a few of the letters chipped away. He picked it up without drinking any of it.
“You want me to take a look at the cruiser?” Donovan was back on comfortable ground with that assumption, and it showed in the set of his shoulders.
“That thing was barely running when Reed drove it, Hadley. I’ll be straight with you.
You’d be better off junking it. Sell it for parts and put the money toward something that’ll get you up a gravel road in February. ”
“It’s not about the cruiser.” Hadley noticed that it didn’t take long for the grin to fade off his face. “I was hoping you’d walk me through the night you found Reed’s truck.”
Donovan instantly dropped his gaze to his mug. He stepped past her without a word and didn’t speak again until he was on the other side of the truck.
“Need a warm-up.” Donovan was halfway across the bay when he aimed a courtesy back over his shoulder, his voice hunting for its ordinary register and very nearly finding it. “You want a cup? Pot’s fresh enough.”
“No, thanks.”
Donovan carried on toward the far corner where a coffee maker sat on a rather short counter. She couldn’t have sworn to it, but she thought she’d caught the faint sweetish scent of whiskey as he’d passed. It hadn’t been fresh, which was the only reason she withheld judgment.
What was it about this town, though?
Every last one of them seemed determined to drink their troubles away, all the way down to the bottom of a glass.
Hadley stayed where she was near the front of the truck and let him take his time, and she suspected the refill had less to do with his coffee than with getting his bearings. He came back eventually and leaned a hip against the fender, a good six feet of concrete between them.
“I don’t know what I can tell you that isn’t already in my statement.” Donovan lifted a shoulder, though there wasn’t anything apologetic in the gesture. “I wish I could’ve been more help. All I was doing was driving home. I came on him too late.”
“Humor me.”
He stared at her a long moment, and a wariness worked its way through his features. That was too bad, because she wasn’t dropping the request.
She’d spent the better part of the day running the scenarios, and she didn’t believe Donovan had anything to do with Reed’s death. He didn’t have it in him. But she couldn’t shake the sense that he hadn’t been truthful about that night, either.
“All right.” Donovan took a long drink of his coffee before letting his gaze slide off her and out into the street. “I closed up the garage late. Seven, near enough eight. Stopped in at Gus’s on the way home as I usually do. Shot a couple racks of pool, had myself two beers.”
His focus dropped to the mug in his hands.
“Headed home afterward. Made that last turn onto the back road, and that’s when I saw it.
Thought for sure somebody had set a burn pile too close to the ditch.
The closer I got, the more trouble I had accepting what was sitting off in that little clearing.
” Donovan’s thumb moved over a chip in the rim of his mug.
“But sure enough, it was a truck. Whole thing was engulfed, but I recognized the back end right away. I called 911. Then I called Nora.”
Donovan’s jaw tightened, and then it seemed as if he forced himself to relax.
His boots had been aimed at her from the moment he’d leaned against the fender.
Now, they turned, both of them, and his torso angled toward the open bay and the gray light beyond it.
His free arm crossed his middle to grip the elbow of the arm holding the mug, folding him a size smaller than he’d been a moment ago.
“Donovan.” Hadley took a step toward him, unhurried. He stiffened, though he stayed put against the front of the truck. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What do you mean?” A slow flush of irritation climbed Donovan’s neck. “That’s what happened. That was my statement to the sheriff, and you’re welcome to go check it. I don’t know what you’re implying, but—”
She closed another step of the distance and lowered her voice, so he’d understand exactly how serious she was. She needed his help, and she was willing to go out on a limb to get it.
“I want to say something to you, and I want you to hear it as plain as day. I don’t believe you had anything to do with that fire.
I don’t think you hurt Reed, and I don’t believe you killed him.
I never have.” Hadley waited until Donovan’s gaze came up and met hers.
“But you are leaving something out, and I can’t have that.
A man died over in Emberwood this week. A professor.
I think his death and Reed’s are tied together.
So, if there’s anything you saw that night that you’ve been holding back, I need to know it. ”
Donovan stared at her while he turned her words over, but she was confident he’d heard the meaning behind them. A low roll of thunder gave him a few seconds more to weigh it. Then he gave a slow nod.
“You might be closer to the mark than you know.” Donovan set the mug on the fender, steadier now that he’d made some connection of his own.
She tamped down her impatience and let him get to it in his own time.
“That professor. Roland Mercer, right? I know who he is. He came out to my place last summer.”
“Say that again,” Hadley instructed him softly, unsure she’d heard him correctly the first time around.
“It’s true. Rena and I were talking about it the other day.
I mean, how much of a coincidence it was that his name came up.
She’s the one who told me he died on campus this week.
” Donovan reached for his mug now that the conversation had drifted away from that road and that fire.
“Mercer knocked on my front door one evening, polite as you please, asking if he could walk the property with a metal detector.”
Donovan shook his head, a man apparently still marveling at the gall of a stranger.
“I told him no, of course. Didn’t know him from Adam.
Told him to get off my land and not come back.
” Donovan paused to take a sip, waiting out a roll of thunder that shook the tools on the pegboard.
“A grown man wanting to run a metal detector over another man’s land at suppertime?
I honestly didn’t know what to make of it.
Figured he was one of those types, always out hunting old coins and belt buckles. That sort of thing.”
A crack of lightning lit the whole sky white, and the thunder came right on top of it.
Within seconds, the rain started, a scattered pattering that turned steady before Hadley had finished counting it out.
Past the bay doors, Main Street had gone to a gray blur.
A separate world existed out beyond that threshold now, and she was going to have to walk back through it to reach home.
“Never saw the guy again. Like I said, didn’t think on it twice until Rena brought his name up last night.
” Donovan gestured with the mug for them to move deeper into the garage.
Rain had begun splattering on the sidewalk outside, kicking a fine mist in through the open bay.
“You’re telling me you think Mercer’s death is connected to Reed’s murder? ”
“I do.” Hadley didn’t think it was wise to lay out her theories, so she continued with her questions. “Is there anything else you can think of, Donovan? Anything at all that would help me?”
He didn’t answer right away. He crossed to a cart of tools and stared at them while she followed him deeper into the bay, out of the mist. When he finally turned to face her, his attention went past her shoulder to the rain coming down harder than before.
His hesitation was her opening, so she made her plea personal.
“Please, Donovan. Reed deserves justice. He deserves for somebody to get it right.”
When Donovan finally spoke, his voice had dropped low, and his words came out reluctant, dragged up from somewhere he clearly kept hidden from view.
“There are nights I still dream about it. That fire.” Donovan rubbed a thumb across the chipped letters of his mug again.
“And in the dream, there’s something behind me.
Out in the east field, across the way, back in the rows where the truck lights and the fire can’t reach.
Someone, or something, standing there. Watching it burn, same as me. ”
He shook his head, quick, trying to rattle the image loose.
“But I don’t know if that’s some type of memory or if it’s the nightmares putting it there.
I was standing on that road in the dark, all by myself, knowing Reed was burning in his own truck.
I didn’t know then that he was already dead.
I thought…” Donovan stopped to clear his throat.
“Well. It doesn’t matter now. And just so you know, a person’s mind isn’t right in a moment like that. ”
“Nobody should have to witness something like that, Donovan. And I’m sorry you were the one who found him. Truly sorry.” Hadley kept her voice gentle. “Thank you, though. For being honest, and for telling me about Mercer. It matters more than you know.”
Her thoughts were already sorting through the details as she turned back toward the gray rectangle of the bay door. The wind had picked up even more, driving the rain sideways past the opening, and she wasn’t looking forward to the walk back.
“Chief?”
The title stopped her just shy of the threshold.
Donovan had always called her Hadley. So did most of the townsfolk her age, and she’d never once minded it. But there was nothing careless in the way he’d uttered it now. It carried respect, and something close to deference, and she turned to find plain curiosity on his face.
“What did Mercer think he was going to find out on my property?” Donovan gave a short, baffled chuckle. “A grown man with a metal detector, wanting to dig up my back forty. I always figured he was just a little bit touched.”
It was Hadley’s turn to hesitate.
The last thing she wanted was half of Whistlerun descending on Donovan’s land with shovels and lanterns, turning over his soil in search of treasure.
If there was a shred of truth to Roland’s research, then a young woman lay buried somewhere out on that ground and had been for well over a century.
Disturbing her rest wasn’t something Hadley would put in motion over an old wives’ tale.
So, she altered her answer.
Not a lie, but not the whole truth either.
“The Threshing Man.” Hadley had to raise her voice over the rain. “Roland Mercer was looking for the Threshing Man.”