If solace was not to be found, he’d settle for oblivion.
If his wife, Vena, were alive, she’d likely have a few words to say about the situation, none nice or good. And he deserved a tongue-lashing. What had he been thinking?
He sighed and took a swallow, no longer wincing at the burn on his throat. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said to the empty room. “I never knew how it would go so badly.”
Ah, Vena… His eyes watered, if from the alcohol or his blue mood, he wasn’t sure, but he felt trapped in a situation without an end in sight. Damn Samuel Grayson and his foul soul, he groused as he drained the glass. He reached for another, and a noise startled him. He turned, the alcohol making his movements slow and clumsy, and seeing nothing, settled uneasily back into his chair. The brandy bottle, half-empty, remained on his birch end table, one of his wife’s last purchases before she’d died in a car accident, many years ago, before he moved to Cold Plains. He smoothed his hand over the wood, feeling the grain beneath the lacquer, and wondered how far he’d get if he packed up tonight and left without saying a word. Just slipped into the night with nothing but what he could carry.
The idea held a seductive allure. Cold Plains had become a place of nightmares, not the peace and tranquility Grayson had promised.
Grayson and his lies… The man had refrained from mentioning that he was a sick bastard with a penchant for hurting young ladies…or anyone who got in his way.
Yes, leaving… The more he turned the idea in his head, the more he liked it. He struggled to rise from the deep indent he always made in his favorite chair—Vena had always harangued him to get rid of it but he’d stubbornly refused—and after he finally made it to his feet, he made an unsteady track to his bedroom to pack.
His mind was a jumbled mess, but he managed to drag his suitcase from the closet and crack it open to start throwing in whatever he could grab.
“In a rush?” a voice from the doorway said, causing him to falter and stumble against his suitcase as he turned to the sound. His heart hammered a panicked note as death stared at him with pale blue eyes. A man, dressed casually in black, leaned against the door frame of his bedroom, a smile stretching his mouth in a caricature of friendliness. “Seems you’re in a hurry to go somewhere? Something wrong, Doc?”
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice pathetically weak and small. He knew not his name, but Rolf ascertained his purpose in the cold set of his jaw and eyes. This man was coming to kill him. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said, trying for some semblance of bravado. “Get out before I call the chief.”
The man ignored him, pushing off the door frame to invade Rolf’s bedroom. The man’s stare roved the room, taking in small details as if they interested him, even stopping to pick up a picture of Rolf’s beloved Vena on the dresser. The man gestured to the picture. “This your old lady?” he asked, to which Rolf jerked a short nod, wanting desperately to tell this miscreant to unhand Vena’s picture, but his mouth wasn’t working properly. The man replaced the frame, and that was when Rolf noticed the gloves on his hands.
“You’re here to kill me,” Rolf stated flatly.
The man affected a wounded expression. “Doc…is that any way to start a conversation? Downright rude, if you ask me.”
“Answer me, damn you,” he shouted, his voice shaking. “Give me that courtesy at least.”
The man spread his gloved hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m just here to give you a ride to wherever you were going. Would you like me to help pack your bag?” he asked, moving to the dresser. “Did you know if you roll your clothes you can actually fit more into your suitcase? I learned that on the Travel Channel. Interesting stuff on that channel.” The man started to toss clothes toward Rolf, forcing him to catch them with shaking hands. He continued almost conversationally, “You know what other channel I like to watch? Animal Planet. It’s full of stuff I never knew. Such as, did you know that all spiders are poisonous? Yeah, that’s how they subdue their victims. Very fascinating. Can you imagine if humans could do that kind of stuff?”
Rolf couldn’t stand it any longer, this cat and mouse. He threw his clothes down, shouting, “Get it over with, you sick bastard. I know that rat Grayson sent you, and I’m not afraid to die. I’ll meet my maker and take my chances, but Grayson will go straight to
hell
for what he’s done!” Rolf trembled from the exertion and wiped the spittle from his lip, knowing this was the end, but refusing to beg for his life.
The man stopped and faced Rolf with a hard calm. “I think you have enough for your journey. Shall we go?”
“Why this charade?” Rolf demanded, wiping at his eyes, for they had begun to leak, from tears or simply old age, he wasn’t sure. His bowels felt loose, and he knew once he died what would happen. It was simple biology, but for a moment, he mourned the indignity until he realized he would be reunited with his beloved Vena when it was through. When the man simply shrugged in answer, Rolf snapped his suitcase shut and hefted it to stare at the man who awaited him.
“All set?” the man asked with false cheer. Rolf didn’t dignify the question with an answer. He would not dance to Grayson’s tune, not any longer, and for that he was grateful. “Excellent. I have a car waiting outside.”
The man made a show of moving out of the way, and Rolf forced himself to put one foot in front of the other in stony, resigned silence.
Rolf took one last look at the little house he’d made his home since losing Vena five years ago and mentally said goodbye.
He knew he wasn’t coming back.
The next morning, Rafe made a point to drive to Liza Burbage’s house before work.
“How do you know where she lives?” Darcy asked.
“Small town. Besides, I checked her file. It has her address listed. I need to know she’s okay.”
“Does she have any family?”
“Not here in Cold Plains. I think she said she has a sister in Idaho or something like that, but she moved to Cold Plains after a painful divorce, something about having a fresh start with people who cared about her. She loved Cold Plains.”
“What’s not to love?” quipped Darcy. “Clear skies, clean water, maniacal narcissist running the show… Yeah, sounds like a great place to put down roots. Bring the whole fam.”
Rafe shot her a look. “But on the surface, it cleans up well. What I’ve learned is that people who are hurting inside will overlook just about anything if they think they’ve found what they were searching for. From what Liza shared with me, she’d been devastated by her divorce. She came here looking for acceptance and love. Samuel seemed to offer that in spades.”
“So, why’d she end up in that creepy file?”
“I can only speculate it was because of her weight.”
“Samuel has it in for overweight people?”
“Samuel doesn’t care for anyone with imperfections, particularly ones he feels are easily improved. Liza had a hard time sticking to her diet. She was still packing a few extra pounds.”
Darcy smoothed her hand down her stomach. “I’d better lay off the cookies or the nutrition Nazi might start knocking on my door,” she joked.
“You’re beautiful and perfect, so you needn’t worry. But Liza had age working against her. She was nearing her fifties and she couldn’t seem to lay off the sweets. I was more worried about her insulin levels than her waistline, to be honest. But Samuel wanted everyone to sign off on Heidi’s meal plan.”
“Which, by the way,” Darcy interjected with a scowl, “is total crap. For a nutritionist, she seems to take a hard and fast line against the foods that taste good. Even fruit!”
“Fruit has a lot of natural sugar,” he said, pulling into Liza’s driveway. Switching subjects, he noted, “Liza’s car is parked here.”
“Maybe she’s just been hiding out,” Darcy said, but there was a general dejected and forgotten air about the place that said no one had been there in weeks, and Darcy could see it as plainly as he. She exhaled, a worried frown pulling her brow. “We’d better go check it out. But I hope to God Liza Burbage is not dead in her house, because I don’t think I could handle coming up on a dead body. Just giving you a heads-up that I might throw up.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said, and they climbed from the car. The June heat was already promising a hot day, in spite of it being early morning. The house, like many in Cold Plains, was a bungalow style, small and compact but cute in a country way. Liza had planted spring flowers in baskets hanging from her porch, but they’d wilted from lack of water, which wasn’t a good sign. Her short patch of lawn had begun to crisp, and the ground was packed hard from the heat. Not a drop of moisture had touched this place in weeks. Rafe knocked on the front door. “Liza?” he called out. “Are you in there?”
Nothing. He peered into a dusty window. Doily-dusted furniture met his eye but no Liza. He knocked a little harder. “Liza? It’s Dr. Black. Are you in there?”
“Rafe!”
Rafe bolted for the sound of Darcy’s urgent call. He rounded the corner of the house and saw her cradling a limp dog, clearly near death from dehydration and hunger. “Quick, get some water,” she said, distressed at the dog’s condition. “Oh Rafe…he’s skin and bones. How long’s he been out here without any food or water?”
Rafe filled a dusty bowl with some water and rushed it over to Darcy. She helped the dog get the water to his mouth, but he was so weak she had to practically pour it down his throat. Rafe checked his collar and found a name tag. “Brando,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Figures. Liza was a huge Marlon Brando fan. Damn it,” he said, rubbing the dog’s flank, knowing for certain Liza would never have left her beloved dog behind.
“Did you know she had a dog?” Darcy asked.
“No… I mean, she talked about someone named Brando, but I always assumed it was a friend…not a dog.”
“The poor thing,” Darcy murmured, giving Brando a few more tries at the water. Brando whined, a sad, pathetic sound if Rafe had ever heard one, and then laid his head back in Darcy’s lap. Darcy didn’t seem to care that she was sitting in the dirt with someone else’s nearly dead mutt in her arms. In that instance, he saw Darcy’s strength of character, and his heart gave in just a little bit more.
“I’m going to see if I can find a blanket for him to lie on in the car,” Rafe said, jogging away to look. He made another circle of the house and found a folded blanket on the porch, near a well-worn chair he supposed Liza used to stargaze, another one of her hobbies she didn’t mind sharing with Rafe on her patient visits. He had a bad feeling about all this.
Damn you, Grayson,
he thought mutinously.
Rotten son-of-a-bitch…
He’d better get what was coming to him soon, or Rafe didn’t know if he could keep himself in check much longer, and he could end up blowing this whole operation with one well-timed punch to the jaw.
“What are we going to do with him?” Darcy asked, once they were in the car. The dog, a medium-size breed of indeterminate lineage, remained in Darcy’s lap, in spite of his suggestion to put him in the backseat. “We can’t just take him to the pound. After all he’s been through, that would be insult to injury.”
“He needs a vet,” Rafe said, glancing at the dog, doubtful he would even make it through the night. “But he looks pretty bad. We don’t know how long he went without water.”
“Let’s go straight to the vet’s office, then,” Darcy said resolutely. “I’m not going to rest until I know this little guy has been taken care of.”
Rafe bit back a sigh. Taking responsibility for an orphaned animal wasn’t high on his priority list, but when he saw Darcy caring so deeply for this poor, forgotten mutt, he softened. How could he say no when he’d also benefited from Darcy’s generous nature? If it hadn’t been for her, he’d still be stumbling around in the dark of that secret clinic, likely getting stuck in a broom closet. “We’ll take him to the vet’s before we head to the office. They’ll take good care of him there,” he assured Darcy, smiling when some of the tension left Darcy’s body.
A moment of silence followed, until Darcy, stroking Brando’s matted fur, said quietly, “You know it’s probably likely that Liza is dead. I don’t think she’d leave behind her dog. There’s too much evidence that she loved this dog. His collar is monogrammed and so was his food and water bowl. That’s not someone who doesn’t give a rip about their animal.”
“I know,” he agreed, hating the obvious conclusion. “I’ll go to the police station and report her missing. Maybe someone’s heard something.”
“Don’t go to Fargo. Tell officer McCall. He’ll care.”
He looked at her sharply, but Darcy’s attention was focused on the dog. How well did she know McCall? Her tone suggested a familiarity that struck him as odd. It wasn’t jealousy, he told himself. It was something else. Something else entirely. But it sure felt like the stirrings of jealousy.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that, buddy.
His jaw tensed at his own ridiculous mental babbling and he focused on the road. He had bigger problems.
Darcy worried as she worked. Her thoughts kept circling back to the dog and what might’ve happened to Liza. Her disappearance made the danger that much more real. This wasn’t a game. There were real lives at stake. It sobered her quickly. It wasn’t that she’d underestimated the danger, but there had been a sense of intrigue that hadn’t felt entirely real. Maybe she
had
underestimated the danger level. She suppressed a shudder. Suddenly, she felt a lot more vulnerable than before. Until Louise, death had never been a part of her landscape. She hadn’t known anyone who’d died, and when Louise had been taken from her so suddenly, Darcy had been in a state of denial. Maybe that’s what this trip was, a method to push away her true grief. A wild adventure filled with mystery and intrigue while she ferreted out the particulars of her biological mother’s life with this
supposedly
dangerous man.