All Shook Up (23 page)

“Huh-uh. I wanna go with Grandpa and J.D.”

“All right, then.” She kissed his forehead, looking past him to J.D. “Where are your keys, dear?”

J.D. fetched them and walked her out to the car. “It has power brakes and steering, and the rest is pretty standard,” he said. “Actually, for an old car, it’s amazingly free of quirks. Ignore the gas gauge, though; it’ll read ‘Empty,’ but it’s not. The gauge has been broken for as long as I’ve had the car, so I always keep the tank filled.”

Sophie slid in and started the car, holding the accelerator down briefly and making the engine roar. She gave him a cheeky grin, buckled up, and familiarized herself with the Mustang’s controls. Then she put it in reverse and carefully backed out of his slot. With a wave at the three males, she slid the stick shift into first gear and drove down the road.

“Let’s go!” Tate said the moment the car disappeared from view, and he raced back around the cabin.

As they headed out after him, J.D. looked over at Ben. “Thanks,” he said. When Ben regarded him questioningly, he added, “For coming to get me. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. You deserve to know the reason your canoe sank like that. If it was my boat, I’d sure as hell want to know why.”

“Yeah, I do want to know. I didn’t realize how much until you told me someone had brought it up.” Hands thrust in his pockets, he rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “I owe you.”

“Good.” Ben reached into his chest pocket and fished out a cigarette. “Then you won’t bitch if I light up before we catch up with Tate.”

“Hell, I don’t owe you
that
much.”

Ben laughed and lit up, moving downwind.

Tate and two young men in wet suits were on the dock when J.D. and Ben arrived. One of the divers was securing his rowboat to a piling while Tate peppered him with questions. The other hauled in the line they’d used to tow J.D.’s canoe. J.D. stepped up to help him lift the boat out of the water and they carefully set it, bottom up, on the dock.

He thanked the two young men and shook their hands, then turned his attention to the canoe while Ben talked with them. Squatting on his heels mid-thwart, he stroked his hand over the canoe’s curved side.

The boat was a little waterlogged, but in surprisingly good condition for having been underwater twenty-four hours. He rolled it over to examine its length.

The cedar was so swollen from having been immersed that he couldn’t visibly locate a problem area, and after several moments of searching, he blew out a frustrated breath and tipped the boat back over. Then, starting at the stern, he kneaded his fingers along the keel line.

“Found anything yet?” Dru’s voice caused J.D. to start in surprise, and he looked up to see her stepping onto the dock.

She walked over and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Uncle Ben called to let me know Jake and Collin had brought your canoe up. Have you learned anything to help you figure out why it sank?”

“Not yet.” He went back to palpating the keel line inch by inch, aware of her moving off to greet Tate and
her uncle. Aware, too, of a warmth that spread throughout his chest at the steadfast support shown by this confusing Lawrence family.

The wood beneath his two middle fingers suddenly depressed, and J.D. backed up and kneaded the area again. He felt definite sponginess, and a smear of candy-apple red paint rubbed off in a tacky curl beneath the press of his fingertips. “What the hell?” he murmured.

“Find something, son?” Ben squatted down across the canoe from him.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure what.” He felt a little farther along the keel line. “Damn, here’s another one.” He rubbed at the new spot with his fingers and paint scrubbed away there, too. “I wish I had my tool belt on me. I could use a knife or a chisel.”

Ben fished a pocketknife out of his khakis and handed it over. “Will this help?”

“Yes. Thanks.” He glanced up at Dru as she joined her uncle, then extracted a blade and began scraping the paint away from the first area.

“What is it, J.D.?” Tate demanded, pressing against his back to peer over his shoulder.

“I’m still trying to figure that out. Back up a little, will you, buddy? You’re casting a shadow.”

“But I wanna—”

“Tate, back up,” Dru said firmly. “Come around to our side. You can still see what’s going on, but you won’t block J.D.’s light from over here.”

J.D.’s gut churned uneasily as he cleared a patch of paint away from the first site. Hoping his suspicions were wrong, he moved up to the other depression he’d
located and scraped the paint away from there, too. Then, swearing under his breath, he sat back on his heels.

“What is it, son?”

J.D. met Ben’s gaze across the width of the boat. “It’s subtle, but it sure looks as if these leaks were deliberately carved between the ribs here and here”—he pointed out the spots with the tip of Ben’s knife—“and then painted over.”

“The hell you say. You think someone’s deliberately—?”

“Yeah, and there are probably more, because I remember the water coming up through the bottom in several places.”

“Why would anyone want to hurt your boat, son?”

J.D. shrugged, because it
didn’t
make sense. Yet he was still uneasy, and his gut urged him to go with his instincts.

“Okay, let me put it this way,” Ben said. “Why would anyone want to hurt
you
?”

J.D. stilled, thinking of the Lankovich trial and Robbie Lankovich’s threats. For some reason, his thoughts then segued to his car, and to—

“Shit!” He surged to his feet and stared at Ben in horror. “Sophie!”

B
en swore too, then said, “My car is closest.” The two men took off at a dead run for the switchback trail up to Ben and Sophie’s house.

Dru and Tate ran behind them, although she didn’t have the first idea what was going on.
What
about Sophie? she longed to demand, but she was conscious of her son well within earshot as he raced along the trail ahead of her.

Ben headed straight for his Buick when they reached the garage, but J.D. put out a hand to stop him. “If my car suffered a failure of any kind, we might need some basic equipment for a rescue. You’ve got a well-stocked garage and workshop—help me find what I need.”

It took only moments for them to do so and to throw the gathered items into the trunk. Then all four of them piled into the car and Ben cranked the engine over and
rapidly reversed the car out of the garage. Slamming the gearshift into drive, he turned and roared off down the road.

When they took the first curve on what felt like two wheels, J.D. reached across and gripped Ben’s arm. “Slow down,” he ordered firmly. “You won’t do Sophie any good if you end up wrapping your car around a tree.”

From the backseat Dru heard her uncle take a deep breath and blow it out. The car slowed to a more reasonable speed as he let up on the gas.

Leaning forward between the men, she sank her fingernails into J.D.’s hard shoulder and demanded, “What’s going on?”

His face was carefully expressionless when he turned to face her, but she saw the uneasiness in his eyes, and her anxiety escalated tenfold. J.D. wasn’t the type to worry unnecessarily.

“It looks as if someone sabotaged my canoe,” he said flatly. “And if they did that, it stands to reason they might have messed with my car, too.”

“
Why
?” she demanded in outrage, but then immediately waved the question aside. “Never mind that for now. What does it have to do with Aunt Sophie?”

“Your aunt drove my car to town.” Succinctly, he explained why she’d done so.

When he’d finished, Ben took his gaze off the twisty road long enough to shoot a rapid glance at J.D. “Dru asked a valid question,” he said. “Who would want to sink your boat or sabotage your car?”

“I’ve been racking my brain over that very question, and the only person who comes to mind is Robbie Lankovich,” J.D. said.

“The guy you sent to jail? His kid, right? The one who considers himself a wise guy?”

“Yeah. When I blew the whistle on Lankovich senior, Robbie made a lot of threats. Idle threats, I thought at the time.”

Then he swore beneath his breath and hunched in on himself. “This doesn’t make sense. If Robbie had wanted to get me out of the way, it would have been a helluva lot smarter to attempt it
before
his old man came up for trial. But that’s pretty much Robbie all over: he’s such an ineffectual fu—screwup—you can discount three-quarters of what he says.” Arms folded across his chest and hands tucked into his armpits as if he were cold, he said, “Still, he’s a crazy son of a bitch—and the only person I can think of who might have a grudge against me.”

Dru glanced over at Tate, who had been unnaturally quiet, and saw him sitting tensely, straining against the shoulder harness that held him in his seat as he stared out the window.

Suddenly he grew alert. “Grandpa! There’s J.D.’s car!” Then he grew still. “Oh, man,” he whispered. “That’s not good.”

Dru’s stomach gave a lurch. Dear God. It looked as if Sophie had tried to turn onto a cutoff road, but had taken the last sharp curve too widely to make the turn. The car had overshot the cutoff and listed crookedly off the shoulder just beyond. The front tire on the driver’s side had gone clear over the verge, and the back tire had nearly done the same. Sophie sat stock-still clutching the steering wheel, seemingly frozen by the
sight of the hillside that dropped steeply away just outside her window.

Ben swore softly beneath his breath, but J.D. said in a cool, commanding tone, “Pull up behind her, but stay off the shoulder so you don’t disturb anything that might shake loose.”

Then he turned and pinned his gaze on Dru and Tate. “I need both of you to remain very quiet and to stay away from the Mustang until we’ve pulled your aunt to safety. Can you do that?”

Dru said, “Yes, of course.” Eyes huge, Tate stared at J.D. and nodded.

“Good.”

Everyone climbed out of the car as soon as Ben shoved the gearshift into park and yanked up the emergency brake. Then he headed directly to the Mustang to assure Sophie they’d soon have her out of there. Dru wrapped her arm around her son and, stoically resisting the siren voice within that urged her to race over there to add her reassurances, started to lead him across the road. J.D.’s voice calling her name halted her.

“I know you want to help,” he said, striding up to them. He thrust out a handful of flares. “So maybe you could set these up for me around the bend. Hopefully they’ll slow down anyone speeding down the hill, which will prevent us from compounding our problems.”

Tate’s face lit up at the prospect of something constructive to do, and Dru suspected her own expression mirrored her son’s. She accepted the flares and Ben’s disposable lighter, then rose on her tiptoes to give J.D. a quick peck on the lips. “Thanks.”

It didn’t take her and Tate long to position and activate the flares above the sharp curve. They returned to see J.D., lying on his back with a metal hook gripped in one hand, wriggle his way beneath the Mustang’s back end. The hook was attached to a length of chain that disappeared beneath Ben’s Buick.

Dru’s breath caught in her throat as she watched. The car was in an extremely precarious position. She was almost afraid to expel the air in her lungs, for it seemed as if one strong exhalation might send the Mustang crushing down on top of J.D.’s chest or tumbling over the hillside, sweeping him and Aunt Sophie along with it.

J.D. was equally aware of the Mustang’s insecure grip on the mountainside. But if it took him out before he could hook the chain to the car’s axle, it was no more than he deserved for putting Sophie in danger. He sucked in a deep breath and focused on his task. It went without a hitch, and a moment later he crawled out from under the car and signaled to Ben, who returned to the driver’s seat of the Buick.

“Okay,” J.D. called, pushing to his feet. “Take it nice and slow.” Bending, he looked through the passenger window at Sophie. “When you feel the tires grab the road, turn the steering wheel to the left,” he instructed her. “We’ll have you out of there in two shakes.”

She stared at him with tension-widened eyes and tipped her chin infinitesimally to acknowledge that she’d heard.

Ben reversed the Buick at an angle across the road, and the chain between the two cars rose up off the
ground and grew taut. Gravel crunched beneath the Mustang’s back tire as it inched away from the verge. The front tire spun uselessly in space for several stomach-dropping moments, but then caught on the shoulder and grabbed. Sophie followed J.D.’s instructions.

Ben didn’t stop the Buick until the Mustang was well away from the edge of the drop-off and back on the road. Then, with a shout, he jumped out of the car and raced to his wife as J.D. assisted her from his car.

Ben swung Sophie into his arms and held her fiercely. A moment later he pushed her back far enough to peer into her face. “Are you all right?” he demanded. Instead of waiting for an answer, however, he immediately jerked her back in his arms and pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “Jesus, I was scared,” he confessed. His grip on her tightened further. “It feels so good to hold you.
Are
you all right?”

“Yes. No. I’m not sure.” Near-hysterical laughter escaped her. “I still don’t know exactly what happened, Ben…but for a while there, I thought I was dead for sure.” Her teeth chattered and she pressed herself nearer, as if to absorb as much of her husband’s body heat as possible. “Everything was okay when I set out, but then the engine started to cough and cut out, and suddenly it just plain quit—there was no power at all. The steering and brakes barely functioned, and it was like trying to maneuver a hippo with sheer muscle power.” Her shivering increased and she burrowed closer, clutching Ben’s sides. “Ah, God, don’t let me go, okay? I was so scared.”

Dru and Tate threw themselves into the huddle, and
J.D. watched the family hug and kiss and touch for a moment before he turned away to disengage the chain from the two cars. He tossed it in the trunk of the Buick, then moved Ben’s car out of the road in case a vehicle suddenly came whipping around the curve. Once it was safely to the side of the road, he walked over to his own car to see if he could determine what had caused it to lose power.

It didn’t take him long—Sophie’s description of the way it had coughed and cut out made him check the gas tank first thing. It was empty, with no discernible leak.

The group hug broke up, and with an arm slung around Sophie’s shoulder, Ben urged her toward their car. “Let’s get you home,” he said gruffly. He turned to J.D. “Did you get a handle on what happened?”

“Looks like my tank was siphoned dry.”

Ben swore beneath his breath, then gestured toward the car. “Climb in. We’ll talk about it once we’ve gotten Soph settled at home.”

J.D. was silent on the ride back to the Lawrences’ house, but he knew what he had to do. Acid churning in his gut, he leaned forward to tap Ben on the shoulder as they neared the lodge. “Can I borrow the work truck to get gas for my car and drop off the blade assembly?”

“Sure.” Ben pulled into the drive that swept past the lodge’s big front porch and brought the Buick to a halt. “You can pick up the keys at the front desk.”

J.D. climbed out of the car and leaned down to study Sophie’s pale face through Ben’s open window. He cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry I got you mixed up in this mess,” he said sincerely, then widened the scope
of his glance to include Dru and Tate in the backseat. “Sorry I involved all of you. Give me an hour or two to get my stuff together; then I’ll clear out.”

Sophie and Tate exclaimed in startled protest and Ben said, “Now, son, don’t make any hasty decisions. Let’s talk about this.”

But it was the shock on Dru’s face that struck J.D. to the bone. He’d made a valiant attempt not to look at her, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. What he saw was betrayal staring out at him through laser blue eyes, in a face drained of color.

It was tempting to let guilt chew on him, but then a healthy dose of anger came to his rescue. Dammit, it wasn’t like he
wanted
to leave—he was doing this to keep her and her family out of the line of fire! Slapping his hand down on the window opening, he straightened. Then he turned away and strode into the lodge.

He should have known he couldn’t simply drive off into the sunset. When he opened the driver’s door to the truck a couple of minutes later and swung up into the cab, he found Dru already inside, waiting for him.

She met his gaze head-on. “You didn’t really think it was going to be that easy to just walk away, did you?”

He rammed the key in the ignition and turned it, then slammed the shift stick into gear practically before the engine had roared to life. He spared her one brief glance before he pulled out onto the road. “Trust me, sweetheart, there’s not a damn thing that’s easy about any of this.”

She didn’t respond, and he determined to hold his
tongue as well. It took him less than three minutes to cave, though. “I’m getting gas for my car, then I’m packing up and getting the hell out of here.”

He fully expected her to argue with that, but she crossed her arms over her breasts and turned her head to stare out the side window. She was silent when he pulled up behind his Mustang a few minutes later to transfer the blade assembly unit into the bed of the truck. She wasn’t any chattier the rest of the drive down to town. But instead of continuing to stare out at the scenery, she swiveled in her seat to stare at him. He was highly aware of her gaze on him every second of the ride, but still she didn’t say a word.

It made him jumpy as a cat.

It didn’t help that he was also uncomfortably aware of her lightly tanned thighs, which he caught glimpses of every time he shifted gears. The temptation to reach across the stick shift and wrap his hand around the sweet curve of the nearest thigh was damn near irresistible. He wanted to press his palm against the warmth of that velvet-smooth skin of hers one last time and feel the fit, firm muscle beneath.

But this was hard enough as it was. Touching her now would be like driving nails into his own coffin.

And that was assuming that she wouldn’t smack him upside the head should he attempt it.

Dru waited until he’d dropped the lawn-mower blades off at the machinist, filled up a gas can at the service station, and was headed out of town before she spoke. She’d been mentally assembling her arguments for the past twenty minutes, but in the end she merely said, “Don’t go, J.D.”

Muscles in his arms leaped to prominence beneath his skin, then went rigid, and his knuckles turned white where he gripped the steering wheel. His eyes were hot as coals as he swung his head around to stare at her, and what she saw in their depths didn’t reassure her.

“I have to,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous. Of course you don’t.”

“Yes, dammit, I do!” Releasing the steering wheel with one hand, he raked his fingers through his hair in frustration and looked over at her as they left the town behind. “You think this is easy for me?”

“Yes. I do. If it was so terribly difficult, you wouldn’t be so damn quick to pack your bags.”

“I don’t have a choice, Drucilla! I thought I could start a new life here, but that’s clearly not going to be possible. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let shit from my old life explode all over you or Tate or your aunt and uncle.”

A mishmash of anxiety and resentment tightened a knot in her stomach. “So you’re saying you’re leaving because you
care
for us?”

He looked reluctant to admit any such thing, but finally gave her a terse nod. “Yes.”

She snorted. “Please. People who care for each other stick together.”