Dana Marton - Broslin Creek 05 - Broslin Bride (11 page)

“Thanks, Tayron.”

“No problem. You hang in there.”

“Yeah.” Hanging
in there
was preferable to hanging somewhere else. Pennsylvania had the death penalty. Did they still execute people by hanging in this day and age?
 

She shut down that line of thought. She was not going to obsess over worst-case scenarios. She was going to do whatever it took to make sure this didn’t end badly.

* * *

Catching a ride with Jackie, Luanne took the twins to the motel for the meeting with the owners the next day. Job loss and legal expenses looming large in her future, she could no longer afford a babysitter.

Mildred and Harold were great. They gave their employees the news straight, apologized that they weren’t keeping the motel, offered to help any way they could, including glowing references. Then they handed out checks, a full month’s wages rounded up to $1,200 for the maids, the most money the majority of them had ever had in one sum.

An even bigger windfall came from Jackie, whose boyfriend was away in the army. She offered his truck to Luanne until the police released the Mustang. That put tears into Luanne’s eyes. Not a single person treated her like a criminal. The staff stood one hundred percent behind her.

She stayed a bit, asked the others if they knew a guy called Gregory, and described him. Nobody remembered a guest by that name, but so many people passed through the motel, it would have been a miracle if anyone had recognized him based on her description.

It’d been a wild thought anyway, thinking that maybe Gregory had lied at the bar, maybe he’d seen her before, at the motel, had recognized her at the bar and specifically targeted her for the roofie. She was desperate, coming up with desperate theories.

Luanne and the twins went home with Jackie, accepted the Ford pickup with gratitude, and drove straight to the police station. They nearly bumped into Susan Merritt, Chase’s mother. As Luanne was walking in with the twins, Susan was heading out, perfectly put together from her nude leather pumps to her peach, summer silk suit.

She greeted Luanne, asked her how she was doing, nothing but sympathy in her eyes. Broslin was a small town. Everybody knew about the arrest.

“Could be worse,” Luanne told her. If Mildred hadn’t paid her bail, she’d be in jail.

Chase, two steps behind his mother, flashed a wide smile at the twins. “Hey, ya, tootsies. Robbed any more candy stores lately? Because if you did, I want some of the loot.”

Mia giggled. Daisy did too, but one beat behind her sister.

Susan flashed an unfathomable look at Chase, then at Luanne, her gaze settling on the girls. “Who wants to check out the vending machines?”

“Me!” Mia squealed with excitement. Daisy simply lifted both hands in the air.

Chase shot Luanne a questioning look.

She nodded.

“I’ll return them in a bit,” Susan said and walked the twins to the break room in the back.

“Should we go into the interview room?” Chase asked, looking strong and sure as always, dark dress pants, white shirt, blue-patterned tie that matched his eyes.

He probably thought she’d come to confess.

Luanne shook her head. “I’m here to ask a favor. Is there any way I could talk to a sketch artist about Gregory? The man I had a drink with at the bar. I’d really like to find him. My memories of the evening are still pretty hazy. Maybe he could fill in some gaps.”

Chase considered her. “It’s your lucky day. We have the guy out from West Chester PD in the conference room right now with Harper and a robbery victim. They should be done in a minute. How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay. I’m not the type to lose it and kill someone,” she said with tremendous relief.

Nobody knew her better than she knew herself. She wasn’t a killer, not unless she was cornered and acted in self-defense. Or if all her abilities had been impaired, a theory she wasn’t ready to share with Chase yet, until she had actual proof. First, she wanted to find Gregory, somehow force him into admitting the roofie.

Chase watched her. “Everybody has their breaking point.”

“I wasn’t there yet with Earl.”

He nodded. “Come sit by my desk for a second.”

He walked her back, pulled a chair over, his desk piled high with files. He waited for her to sit, watching her. “Your car hit the victim. That looks pretty bad.”

She nodded. She knew how it all looked. Honestly, things looked so bad that at first even she’d believed she was guilty. But she knew better now. In her heart of hearts, she knew she wasn’t a killer. She just had to prove it.

He leaned back in his chair. “Have you found a good lawyer yet?”

She shook her head. “I’m staying with the public defender.” The severance check from the motel wasn’t enough to hire an attorney.

He hesitated for a moment. “So I have a second cousin who’s a criminal defense lawyer.”

Of course he did. “Who has second cousins? I don’t even have first.” She tried to lighten the mood between them, because he was looking at her in a way that she didn’t know what to do with. “Frankly, that just feels like bragging.”

A ridiculously hot smile turned up the corners of his lips. He tugged open his desk drawer and pulled out a business card, handed it to her. “Just in case. He could cut you a deal on the fee.”

Even as she thanked him, the conference room door opened, three men coming out, Harper Finnegan in the lead.

Chase rose. “All right. Let’s see about a picture.”

The process didn’t take as long as she’d thought, and by the end she had a pretty good likeness of Gregory. She could only hope it would help her find him. Gregory had to know
something
. She had no other lead. Zilch.
 

“Do you need a ride home?” Chase asked once the artist left. He’d been in and out of the conference room, doing his job while keeping an eye on her.

Maybe he was observing her for clues, hoping she’d slip up and say something incriminating. But his attention didn’t feel like a setup. She could swear he actually cared. About her. She wasn’t sure what to do with that conclusion.

“I have a car,” Luanne told him. “A loaner.”

Interest glinted in his deep-blue eyes. “From?”

“Jackie.” She headed toward the break room for the twins.

His phone rang, so he didn’t follow her, just sent her on her way with a wave.

The twins were munching on pretzels and singing songs from
Cinderella
, Susan joining right in. Luanne watched them from the doorway for a minute without interrupting, thinking how different Chase’s childhood must have been from hers.
 

Then she shook off her old longings for a big, happy family. She had the girls. And she would keep the girls. She was
not
going to prison.
 

She thanked Susan for her help, then headed home with Mia and Daisy.

Things to do, people to see. For one, she wanted to give a copy of the sketch to Tayron so he could show it around at Finnegan’s. She was going to take a copy to the motel too. Maybe seeing the face would trigger a memory the guy’s name hadn’t.

She had a month until her trial to track down Gregory.

* * *

The first suspicious incident happened the following Saturday. Luanne was coming home from her library job—they hadn’t fired her despite the murder charges, miracle of miracles. At the intersection at the end of her street, a yellow moving truck barreled by her, not stopping for the stop sign, nearly wiping her out. Only some quick maneuvering saved her, landing her on the sidewalk. The jerk didn’t stop to make sure she was okay. Everything happened so fast, she didn’t even see the driver’s face.

Thank God, Jen had the girls. She’d volunteered to watch them for free on Saturday afternoons until Luanne could afford to pay for babysitting. Jen was a good friend. She might not have kept Luanne’s confidence with the whole Chase-is-bad-in-bed thing, but they’d been teenagers at the time. She’d apologized a hundred times, and Luanne had long ago forgiven that misstep. God knew she’d made plenty of mistakes of her own.

Not at the intersection, though. She had the right of way there, the moving van clearly in the wrong. But, at the time, she didn’t think much of the almost accident. Plenty of bad drivers drove the roads. She’d had other near misses over the years.

But two days later, when she walked to her car in the morning, half-asleep, for her cell phone she’d forgotten in the car the day before, she nearly fell into the sewer opening next to the curb. Somebody had stolen the grate. She could have broken her neck for sure. The thought that Mia or Daisy could have fallen down into the dark hole made her break out in a cold sweat. She called the township to complain.

The idea that someone was trying to kill her didn’t occur to her until the following day at the supermarket, where a soda tower of twelve-packs fell on her, knocking her to the ground. She banged her head on the floor, getting knocked out for a second.

At least her health insurance was still good until the end of the month, so she could go to the emergency room and get checked out for a concussion.

“You’re lucky one of those twelve-packs didn’t bash your head in, falling from ten feet high,” the nurse told her, an older Hispanic woman, Juanita, according to her name tag.

The display
had
been massive, Luanne thought. It’d appeared well built and completely steady, but obviously it wasn’t. She
had
been lucky.
 

And with the sewer grate too. And the moving van at the intersection.

Oh God.

In a split second, sitting in the ER on a hospital bed behind faded green curtains that smelled like bleach, the girls playing at her feet, everything fell into place
. Click, click, click
. She broke out in cold sweat. The accidents were no accidents.
 

Who? Why?

She was in so far over her head here. For a long time now, she’d been treading water, paddling to stay afloat, but this time the waves were truly closing over her head. She felt as if she was sinking into dark, murky waters she could no longer navigate alone, sinking fast.

She thought of Chase. He was the detective on the case. He
had
offered to help. Were they really friends? She had to take the risk.
 

She called him as soon as they were back in her car in the parking lot.

He picked up on the first ring. “Everything okay?”

Just hearing his voice—strong, sure, steady—made her feel a little better. That voice was her lifeline for the moment. Since she’d been on the verge of hyperventilating, she drew a longer, slower breath, allowing her lungs to fill all the way.

“I think somebody is trying to K-I-L-L-M-E.” She spelled the words. She didn’t want to worry the girls.

Chapter Six

Chase met her at her house, sat in the tiny kitchen—the TV turned up in the living room for the kids—and listened as Luanne recounted her wild theory. She kept her voice down, glancing at the girls from time to time to make sure they weren’t listening.

He wasn’t the paranoid type to read danger into everything, but Chase had to admit that three potentially deadly accidents in one week… “Okay, suspicious. Why do you think somebody is trying to kill you? Revenge for Earl?”

He’d yet to meet a single person who liked the guy. In fact, he’d been conducting second interviews with the staff about the way they’d been treated, files he hoped the defense would put to good use at Luanne’s trial.

She sat silently, her shoulders stiff, her eyes filled with worry. And she still looked so pretty that he could have just sat there and watched her all day.

He’d tried not to think about her much over the years. Thinking about her either got him horny or wincing in embarrassment that he’d disappointed her back when he’d had his chance. Of course, when you didn’t want to think about something, you thought about it that much more. Like when someone said,
Don’t think about an elephant
, and all you could think were trunks and tusks. Except, in Luanne’s case, it’d been whiskey-color eyes and perfect breasts.
 

He leaned back in the kitchen chair. “I can’t help if you won’t level with me.”

She pressed her lips together. Which, of course, drew his attention to that sexy crease in her bottom lip.

“Just tell me everything, exactly as it happened.”

She stayed silent.

That she didn’t trust him frustrated the living daylights out of him.
Except
, he told himself, she must trust him a little, since she’d called him.
 

He made a point to relax his shoulders, stretched his legs in front of him, in the hopes that she too would relax a little. “I’m not out to get you. I don’t want to see you go to prison. Why don’t you tell me what happened that night? You’ve already been charged with murder. It can’t get much worse.”

“I can get convicted.”

“Maybe there were extenuating circumstances.”

She sat there silently for several long moments before finally speaking. “I had a drink when I got to the bar. Then I met Gregory, and he bought me another. I can’t remember anything beyond that.”

“What do you mean you can’t remember?” He watched her closely for any sign of insincerity, but he didn’t see any. She spoke earnestly, with an open body language, her eyes never leaving his.

“I was having a drink at the bar, then I was home, waking up in the morning.”

His muscles tightened. “Roofie?”

“Maybe.”

“Did he—” Did the bastard touch her?

“I don’t think so, but I don’t remember.”

And a rape kit would be way too late. More than a week had passed since.

“I wish you’d told me right away.” Frustration buzzed through him, along with an overwhelming wave of protectiveness.

“I didn’t figure it out right away. I just thought I had too much to drink. My brain barely worked, everything fuzzy.”

“So you really don’t remember hitting Earl?” He wanted to believe her, but wasn’t sure how much she was doing, saying because she was scared of being convicted, petrified of what would become of the twins. He had no doubt whatsoever that Luanne would do or say absolutely anything to keep her sisters safe.