In the Waning Light (10 page)

LA: Sheriff, that’s enough. Unless you’re going to charge him, we’re outta here. Ty?

TM: I did
not
hurt Sherry. I’d never hurt a woman. We had sex, yeah. It was . . . energetic intercourse, so yeah, you will find my DNA. She wanted it. She went with me because that’s what she wanted!

LA: Ty?

SK: And you know what a woman wants, do you, boy? Was it good sex, was she a good one, Mack? Got a little too rough, maybe? Got out of hand, maybe? You had to put her in her place? Did she say no at any time?

JI: Lee Albies and Tyson Mack are leaving the room.

SK: Cat got your tongue, boy?!

JI: Kovacs, easy. Give it time. We’ll get him. We will.

Meg inhaled, and looked up from the transcript. She was losing track of time. She’d been reading all through the previous night, falling asleep only briefly atop the papers. Dirty mugs littered the table. The room smelled of stale coffee. From her mother’s journal she’d deduced that her mom had secured most of these documents as copies from Tyson Mack’s defense counsel, Lee Albies, a top Portland criminal lawyer who’d scaled back her law practice when she’d relocated to Chillmook County to begin her segue into retirement. In Chillmook she’d volunteered part-time with a public defender consortium.

She’d taken on Tyson Mack’s case as part of a long-standing personal crusade against what she perceived as class prejudice in the justice system. Tyson Mack was disenfranchised and being made a scapegoat, in her opinion. He’d been the son of an illegal alien mother who was deported when he was three, after which he’d been “raised” by Keevan Mack, an alcoholic father with a history of aggression and an attempted sexual assault conviction under his own belt.

There was everything in these boxes from police interrogation transcripts to witness statements, Sherry’s autopsy report, and crime scene photos—which Meg had not managed to psychologically brave up to yet, not after her first glimpse of a stark black-and-white image of her sister’s naked body spread-eagled in mud. She’d placed those reports in a separate folder, which she’d work up to later.

Meg had also found that Lee Albies still had an address and phone number listed in Chillmook, the large town a few miles down the coast that gave the county its name. The old lawyer had just risen to the top of her interview list.

A vehicle sounded outside and a car door slammed. Meg’s head jerked up, her pulse quickening. Lack of sleep, this reading material, too much coffee, was making her twitchy. She pushed back her chair and moved quickly to the window in the kitchen and peered out. A pickup, black, was parked behind her camper. Shit.

She glanced at the dining room table through the open-plan kitchen archway. The papers were spread out all over the place.

Knocking sounded on the door.

Anxiety speared through Meg. She hurried to the front door, hesitated. No peephole.

No one is going to welcome it. Or you, because of it . . .be careful, Meg . . .

She opened the door a crack.

“Blake?”

“Hey.” A grin dimpled his rugged face. A familiar sense of kinship punched through Meg. It was instantly undercut by leeriness.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?”

His grin faded. “You look like shit, Meg—what’s happening?”

Her hand went to her hair. It was swept up in a wild topknot, tendrils spiraling loose all over the place. She hadn’t bothered with
makeup, and was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, over
the top of which she’d thrown one of her dad’s oversize sweaters.
She’d found it in his closet. Her
mother had kept it all as it was, as though she’d been awaiting Jack Brogan’s return from prison. And when Meg had seen the old sweater, the memories had crushed her. She’d taken it from the closet and buried her nose in it, inhaling the long-forgotten scent of her father, swallowed by memories of being a little girl in his arms, riding high on his shoulders, being tossed in the air, him building her tree house and tending to her scraped knees.

She drew the ends of the sweater tightly across her chest.

“I’m fine. Just busy.”

Blake’s gaze went over her shoulder, into the dark and dusty house.

“I’ve got new windows and the power-washer guys coming tomorrow,” she said, trying to appear normal. “What are you doing here, Blake?”

Then around the side of the house appeared a young boy with pale blond hair, thin face, skinny arms loaded with pizza boxes. The scent of the food slammed her in the stomach. She hadn’t eaten all day. Had she eaten yesterday? She needed to buy some food for the fridge—she was starving.

The boy stared up at Meg. Green eyes. “Hi,” he said.

She brushed her hair back from her brow, self-conscious suddenly. “Hey,” she said to the boy, then her gaze shot in question to Blake.

“What are you doing in the dark, Meg?” He pushed past her, into her house.

“Wait.” She grabbed his arm.

He stilled.

“Just . . . wait here a minute, please.” She scurried into the living room and began scooping up the whirlwind of papers. He didn’t wait. He came in and stood in the archway, eyeing her as she tried to hurriedly plug all the documents back into their respective folders.

“Just one sec, okay?” She got everything back into the boxes, and opened the wall safe. He watched as she placed the boxes and journal in there and closed the door. She locked the safe.

“There.” She forced a smile and dusted her hands off on her jeans, her heart beating unnaturally fast. The kid stood next to Blake, still holding the pizza boxes, still staring with his limpid green eyes.

“You okay?” Blake said.

“I’m fine.”

“So, can we come in now? Thought you might be hungry.” He gestured to the boy with the pizza boxes standing at his side.

“Sure.” She flicked on all the lights she could find, and blinked against the sudden brightness, her eyes gritty and raw, feeling like a mole startled out into daylight.

“This is Noah. My son. Noah, this is Meg Brogan.”

Meg froze. She turned slowly around. Her gaze lit on the kid. She stared, seeing him anew—why had her brain not jumped to this conclusion instantly? Why had her mind been resisting the obvious? He even looked like Allison, had her pale coloring. Her eyes lifted slowly, met Blake’s. He was watching her intently.

“I . . . didn’t know you had a son.” She cleared her throat. “Good Lord. Hey, Noah—nice to meet you.”

“Go put those in the kitchen, Noah,” Blake said to his boy. The kid turned, and headed off into the kitchen.

“You look a wreck, Meg,” he said softly, coming close. Into her living room, her space. Her heart beat harder, faster. She gave an embarrassed laugh, pushed more loose tendrils back off her brow.

“I . . . I guess I should have expected it, that you had children. I’ve
been self-absorbed. I . . . is he the only one, or do you have more?”

“Just Noah,” he said, his eyes holding hers, a strange sort of energy, visceral, rolling off him in waves.

She swallowed, her thumb beginning to absently fiddle with her engagement ring. “He looks like her, like Allison. Like I remember her looking. But he has your eyes.”

“What were you hiding? Putting in the safe?”

Noah returned before she could answer. The kid regarded Meg intently. Her cheeks warmed and she pulled her sweater closer across her chest.

“You knew my mom,” Noah said.

Meg shot another questioning glance at Blake. He offered no
guidance. “I . . . yes, I did, indeed. Allison was in my class. I haven’t
seen her for a long time, though. Is she coming over tonight?”

“She’s dead.”

Meg sat opposite Blake at the dining room table, Noah to her right, munching his pizza. It was surreal, the three of them in this dusty, boarded-up house, eating by the glow of lamps. She glanced at Blake’s wedding band again. And he noticed her doing it. He met her eyes in silence.

So, he was a widower. Why did she feel that changed everything? Why did she feel a wild kind of hope? She got up abruptly. “I’m going to make some tea.”

In the kitchen, she put the kettle on, and stood staring out the kitchen window into the dark while she waited for the water to boil. Her own sorry reflection stared back, marred by worms of water wriggling down the pane. She glanced at her cell phone lying on the counter. It had beeped earlier. A message from Jonah to call him. She had not returned his call. Blake came in behind her, carrying plates. He set them in the sink.

“I left Noah watching TV. Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“I’m surprised cable is still connected. I bet they’ve been debiting Irene’s account since she left here. I must check.”

“Dishwasher?” He held up the plates.

“It’s broken.” Yet another thing on the fix-it list.

He ran water into the sink.

“What happened to Allison?” she asked, dropping a tea bag into her mother’s pot—Tara had always loved her tea. It was a habit she’d acquired from her Irish mother.

“Breast cancer. It’s just over a year now that she’s been gone.”

“I had no idea,” she said quietly.

“Of course you didn’t.” He squirted dish soap into the running water.

“I’m so sorry, Blake.”

He didn’t look at her. He scraped the leftovers off the plates, and put the dishes into the warm soapy suds. Meg watched the movement of his big hands. Capable, strong hands. Hands that had once touched her.

“He’s gorgeous,” she said softly. “He really does look just like her.”

He snorted softly and placed a clean dish in the drying rack.

“First your dad, then Allison so soon after, it . . . it must be rough. You. Noah.”

“We’re coping. We got a plan.” He cast her a glance, smiled, but she could see that it didn’t quite reach into his eyes, or fan out those crinkles.

“Is that why you quit the army?”

“Yes.”

He said no more. She weighed him, trying to read between the lines. And inside her belly a desire started to build, to know more, everything about him. But at the same time she felt she had no right to any part of his life. She was the one who’d left. She had her own plans with Jonah. None of them included Shelter Bay.

He finished washing the dishes, drained the water from the sink, and reached for a towel to dry his hands. Her stomach warmed as she watched the roll of muscle under the tanned skin of his forearms, the gold hair. It made her think of how he’d looked that last summer, working down on the dock without his shirt, how the hair on his chest had tapered into a delicious whorl between hard abs and vanished into the low-slung waistband of his shorts. He caught her watching, and for a second time he stilled. Electricity crackled in the silence between them. She swallowed.

“Kettle’s boiling,” he said.

She spun around quickly. Grateful for the distraction, she poured hot water over the tea bag.

“It was on the radio,” he said, hanging up the towel. “That you’re doing a book on Sherry.” He paused. “Are you really sure you want to pursue this? Because it’s already taking on a life of its own. Could get ugly.”

Her mind shot to her mother’s journal, the transcripts. “And why would it get ugly if no one has anything to hide?”

“I’m just saying, Meg. A lot of people just wanted to put this behind them. Not all of them could leave town.”

Irritation flared right back up to the surface. “Is that why you really came by? To stop me from doing this?”

“Maybe I came to bring you some food. Look at yourself. You haven’t even plugged your fridge back in. What have you been doing all the time, holed up here in the dark, in this vandalized house that needs a cleaning service? What’s with all those papers in the safe?”

She moistened her lips, unsure suddenly of how much to share, how much to trust. Trust was an unfamiliar thing to her. She’d learned how to stop trusting the day her dad killed Tyson Mack and kicked his body to a bloody pulp. His gaze ticked to her diamond, then back to her eyes.

“You know what worries me,” she said. “is the fact that so many people
do
seem to feel threatened by my doing this.”

“Like who?”

She hesitated. “You, for some reason. Deputy Dave Kovacs. He came by earlier, yesterday—” It struck her suddenly how time, days were blurring. “He warned me off.”

“Dave came by
here
?
”

She nodded. “As I was moving back in. Like he’d been waiting for me to show up. He cautioned me not to go near his father, or mother. Apparently Ike has a heart condition, and getting his blood pressure up, as I apparently would, could kill him. Dave also let drop that it was an election year, and that he’s running for sheriff.”

Blake snorted. “Yeah. And he’s running on his dad’s law enforcement legacy. I can
see why digging up an old case of his father’s that resulted in the key suspect’s death might threaten Dave right now.” He hesitated, as if reading something deeper in her demeanor. “What are you
not
telling me, Meg?”

“I want to know why you seem threate
ned by this, as well. What’s bothering
you
?”