Dying to Read (10 page)

The information surprised Cate, but she gave it a second inspection. “Apparently the Dudes aren’t doing too great, if Mitch has to work nights and weekends for extra money.”

“He isn’t painting for money.” Beverly waved her spoon in exasperation with Cate’s denseness. “He’s doing it with the Helping Hands volunteers from church. His grandparents back in Tennessee are dead now, but they’d told him how the church helped them when they were in need. He wanted to help repay what the church did for them by helping someone else’s grandparents now. He doesn’t meet needy people much in his regular life, so he started coming to church so he could be a part of the Helping Hands group.”

Another rethinking. A man helping people in need not because he was a Christian, but joining with a Christian group because he wanted to help people in need. A little backward, but there was that old line that even Willow knew: the Lord worked in mysterious ways.

After lunch, Cate wrestled with the heavy mattress. By the time sweat ran down her back and she’d found a parrot earring, which Beverly embraced with glee, plus toenail clippers and a page from a 2008 calendar, she was reasonably certain no ring was hidden between mattress and box springs. Beverly’s other ideas had her down on her knees checking under a chest of drawers, rummaging through a box of Cheerios, and running her hand to the scummy bottom of the toilet tank. No ring.

Beverly thanked her profusely when she left. “And if you see Willow again, you tell her I’m sorry I thought she took my ring. I’m sure it’s right here under my nose somewhere, and one of these days I’ll find it.”

“If you think of any more places to look, let me know and I’ll come back and help you.”

“Okay. And you think about what a great guy Mitch is.”

At the house, Cate parked in the driveway, leaving space for Rebecca to pull her car into the garage beside Uncle Joe’s SUV. There wasn’t room in the garage for a third car, of course, and she always parked in the driveway or at the curb. She was putting her key into the front door when her back suddenly prickled with the feeling someone was watching her.

She whirled and instantly knew who he was. Tall, blond, and rugged. Too handsome for his own good. Long-legged in jeans, broad-shouldered in a black leather jacket. Maybe he wasn’t sneaking up on her, but that didn’t make her feel any safer.

“You must be Cate,” he said with a smile, as if they shared some secret joke. Then his head jerked back in a double take. “Hey, you didn’t tell me you looked enough like Willow to be her sister.”

Cate yanked the key out of the lock. Rebecca wouldn’t be home yet, and no way was she giving him a chance to get inside the house with her alone. She didn’t need video-at-eleven to know he was way more dangerous than that easy grin suggested.

With what she hoped was a professional edge to her voice, she said, “I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“You know who I am. Willow surely gave you the full description.” More easy smile. Coop Langston oozed male self-confidence. He draped his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans as if he were posing for her inspection.

“Why are you here?” Finding the house hadn’t been any problem for him, of course. Belmont Investigations was listed in the yellow pages, with an address.

“You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. What choice did I have?” He managed to sound both reasonable and reproachful.

“I told you, as far as Belmont Investigations is concerned, you are no longer our client. Not as Jeremiah Thompson, not as Coop Langston.” Cate’s gaze edged around him. The sidewalk was empty. The yards around the houses on both sides were empty. Where was a nosy neighbor when you needed one? “I can’t at this moment return your deposit, but I’ll discuss it with Joe and get the money back to you.”

Big put-upon sigh. “I don’t want my money back. I just want to know where Willow is.”

“Stalking is against the law, in case you don’t know.”

“Stalking? Is that what Willow told you, that I’m stalking her?”

“If the shoe fits, wear it.”
Oh, great originality, Cate. That ought to really intimidate him.
She tried to put more threat into it. “I think she will get that restraining order against you.”

“Restraining me from what?”

“From stalking.”

“How can I be stalking her?” he asked, his tone still reasonable. “I haven’t seen her for, let’s see, almost eight months now, which was when she picked up and left. I haven’t known where she was. I kept thinking I’d run into her somewhere around town, but I never did. So I figured maybe she’d left town, and it would take a real investigator to find her. That’s why I hired you.”

“But you located her at Beverly’s. And you tried to choke her!”

“Who’s Beverly, and when and where was this?” Coop sat down on the step and patted the space beside him. He reverted to Southern drawl. “I think you ’n me better have a talk about all this, little missy, because that sweet-talkin’ redhead has been tellin’ you wilder stories than a tabloid expo.”

Cate didn’t sit. “What do you mean?” she asked warily.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what all she told you, but surely you can be fair enough to listen to my side of the story.”

“Uncle Joe and I listened to your side of the story, about a dead grandmother and an inheritance. Oh yeah, and you being in an assisted-living home down in Texas. Miserly Acres, I believe it was.”

He laughed as if delighted with her memory for details. “That may have been a, oh—”

“Lie?” Cate suggested.

“More like a tall tale. Although I have had to be rather miserly these last few months, considering what Willow did to me.”

Cate didn’t encourage him to continue, but neither, because she had to admit a reluctant curiosity, did she refuse to listen. She folded her arms across her chest.

“The thing is, Willow and I were living in a little log cabin over near the river. Belongs to a friend of mine.” He lifted blond eyebrows, and Cate gave a slight nod to show she accepted this much as fact. “Willow, in case you don’t know this about her, is . . . Well, some people might call her a free spirit. But when you get right down to it, she’s like I said on the phone, flighty. She’s fun, but you can’t depend on her. Willow and truth have only a passing acquaintance. She likes making up stories. And she has a temper. Oh, hey, does she have a temper!”

“I didn’t see any indication of that.”

“She didn’t throw any frying pans across the room at you? Didn’t toss your socks in the trash because you forgot and left them on the bathroom floor? Didn’t berate you for being insensitive, inconsiderate, stubborn, and cheap?” He sighed. “And forgetful about her birthday?”

“She said you slapped and punched her!”

He touched his chest. “Oh, that’s a low blow. A really low, low blow. I’ve been in a barroom brawl or two, but I’m not a woman hitter.” Both his gesture and injured tone struck Cate as melodramatic, but then he added reflectively, “Though I guess I did throw a dish towel at her once when she complained I didn’t put the dishes away right.”

Cate hesitated with another retort. He really sounded hurt about being accused of punching Willow. And how dangerous could a dish-drying guy be? Then her spine and resolve stiffened. What phony, good-guy role was he playing now that he’d given up the Jed Clampett drawl?

“The thing is, Willow got mad at me. Like I said, it was about eight months ago. She wanted a new car, and she somehow got it in her head that I was going to get her one for her birthday. But no way could we afford it, and . . . okay, I admit it, I actually did forget her birthday. But things were rough at work—”

“You worked at home. Willow had a hard time escaping from you because you practically kept her a prisoner.”

Coop blinked, as if the statement amazed him. “I didn’t work at home, except to call a potential customer in the evening once in a while. I worked at a shop called Ridley’s Cycles. We sold and serviced motorcycles and ATVs. I don’t work there anymore. Hard economic times, and the place closed down. Now I’m selling and installing car stereo systems. Though business is going down the tubes there too.”

“Where is this place?”

“You interested in a stereo system?” He eyed her car. “I can get you one that’ll blast your socks off. Place called Sound by Sammy.”

“I don’t think so.” She needed her socks, thank you. “Okay, so you forgot Willow’s birthday.” She didn’t necessarily believe any of this, but his quick and prolific imagination did make her reluctantly curious. “So what happened?”

“When I got home from work the day after her birthday, she was gone. Packed up and moved out. Without so much as a good-bye note. She took everything from the toaster to the bedroom TV. Probably would have taken the bedroom set too, if she could have gotten it in the car. But what was more important, she cleaned out our bank account, almost ten thousand there, and got a bunch more in cash advances out of our credit cards. Leaving me to pay that off, of course.”

“If Willow’d had any money, she’d have left Oregon,” Cate scoffed. “She’s been trying to hide from you by taking live-in jobs around here.”

“What Willow obviously didn’t tell you is that she’s always had this belief, and it’s a real belief, not just a hope—she says she can see it in her palm—that she’s going to hit it big in a lottery. The big Powerball one, or the Oregon lottery, or maybe some scam on the internet. Which is probably where all the bank account and credit card money went.”

“Willow wouldn’t waste all that money on a lottery. If you’re even telling the truth about her taking it.”

“Wouldn’t she? Her grandmother sent us a thousand bucks once, and that’s exactly what she did with it. Well, with about half of it,” he amended. “The rest of it went to some screwball save-the-trees outfit.”

Cate sat down on the step. “I don’t believe you,” she said, but the statement didn’t hit bedrock level this time.

“Anyway, all I want is to find her and see if I can get my money back. Some of it anyway. Is she still driving the old Subaru?”

Cate almost said no, she has a Toyota Corolla now, but she caught herself in time. She wasn’t telling Coop Langston anything. But now she had to wonder: How had Willow managed to get that car, broke as she claimed to be?
Had
she cleaned out bank accounts and credit cards and used the money to buy the car?

“And there’s another thing,” Coop added. “Maybe this hurts worse than the money. My dad was a rodeo cowboy. He’s been dead a long time now, but the one thing I had left of him was an engraved buckle he won in a bull riding over in Idaho. She took it when she left.”

“It’s valuable?”

“It’s sterling silver, maybe worth something that way, but what it means to me has nothing to do with money. It was my dad’s, something he won. Maybe she took it for the money value. Or maybe she took it because she was mad at me.” He looked down at his foot, where his boot heel made half circles on the concrete step. “I’d really like to get it back.”

“Willow doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d do something just to be mean.” Cate didn’t totally believe him, but the buckle story had a troubling ring of truth.

“Maybe Willow wasn’t 100 percent honest with you. And sometimes she can be a real drama queen.”

Cate rubbed her temple. Had Willow fed her an invented-on-the-spot story? Or was Coop Langston giving her a new story now, since the first one about grandma and an inheritance hadn’t worked? The money thing sounded uncomfortably possible, especially since Willow now had that new car. But if she’d taken money when she left him, and she really was afraid of him, why hadn’t she left Oregon?

“So I’d really like to find her,” Coop said. “I don’t figure I’ll ever get any of the money back, but I’d sure like to have my dad’s buckle.”

Amelia’s jewelry missing. Beverly’s wedding ring. Now Coop’s belt buckle. But there was that original pothole in Coop’s story.

“So you couldn’t find Willow, and you hired a private investigator to do it. Why pretend you were an old man from out of state if you weren’t out to do her harm if you located her?”

“I guess I figured a detective might think I really was stalking her,” he admitted.

“I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can do,” Cate finally said warily. “Where can I reach you?”

He patted his pockets, then said, “You got something I can write on?”

Cate reached in her purse and handed him a pen and scratch pad. He scribbled a number on it.

“Cell phone. Call me anytime.”

Reluctantly Cate asked, “Are you going to keep looking for Willow?”

“Do I look like a man who gives up easily?”

Cate watched Coop saunter down the sidewalk. At the corner, as if he knew she’d be watching, he turned and gave her a smile and wave. A few moments later a motorcycle roared from around the corner.

The fact that he’d deliberately parked the bike out of sight increased Cate’s uneasiness. Had he figured Willow’s description of him included a motorcycle, and Cate would be suspicious when she arrived at the house if she saw one? She doubted his determination to find Willow was solely because he wanted that belt buckle back; he had more than that in mind if he was willing to fake an identity and hire a private investigator.