Blown Away (17 page)

“Love you, too,” Cari echoed, then hung up the phone.

I
t wasn’t until two days later that Mike and Cari were actually able to leave for Bordelaise, and even then, it took them until midmorning to get away. He’d had two overseas calls to make, and then Songee had stopped them on their way out the door with a picnic basket filled with food for the motor home.

Cari had seen the concern on the housekeeper’s face and had been unable to look at her for fear of reading accusation in her eyes. There was no getting around the fact that it was Cari’s fault Mike Boudreaux was involved in the mess that was her life.

Finally they had everything they thought they would need loaded into his Range Rover. Mike was still treating her as if she was fragile goods, although Cari knew she would find the strength to face what lay ahead.

Once they passed the city limits, her anxiety grew as to what she was getting into.

She wanted to be safe again, and to do that, she had to make her stand against Lance.

Miles passed. The sun rose higher in the sky, and she glanced over at Mike as he drove. He was unusually quiet, which made her anxious. She didn’t know if he was regretting his promise to help her, or if he was thinking about the business duties he was leaving behind. Either way, she felt guilty. Her situation had put him in an untenable position. As Susan’s friend and employer, he’d offered her shelter. Then one thing had led to another, and now he, too, was involved in a convoluted web of lies. She glanced at him once more, then looked away. What was done was done. There was no going back.

Cari didn’t know that Mike was stewing in concerns of his own, concerns that had nothing to do with his own safety and everything to do with hers. He and Aaron had come up with a long list of ways to insure Cari’s safety, but being a witness to a murder, albeit after the fact, was still a dangerous position in which to be.

Aaron’s text this morning had given him a measure of relief. Mike’s motor home was in place. Aaron had set it up, stocked it with food and connected to the utilities. He’d found what was left of Cari’s dog after his arrival last night and buried it beneath some trees that were still standing. And, at Mike’s request, he was going through the debris in the hopes of recovering some family memorabilia. It
wasn’t much, but it was all Mike could think of to do. The bulk of the search for the body was going to fall on Cari’s shoulders. She was the one familiar with the area. And if Lance Morgan figured out what was going on, she was the one who would be in danger.

As for her charade, he wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that she’d fooled Morgan, despite the fact that the man hadn’t seemed suspicious. Mike knew that if she’d ever been his fiancée, no disguise would have fooled him. He already recognized her from her scent alone. He knew the shape of her face, the sound of her voice, the lilt of her laughter and the depth of her grief. She was sad, but she was strong. And she seemed as attracted to him as he was to her. As far as he was concerned, falling in love with her was a done deal. He’d never believed in love at first sight—but it wasn’t the first time his beliefs had been challenged, and Carolina North had challenged him from the start.

They were about ten minutes away from the highway turnoff leading to her property when his cell phone rang. He saw Cari flinch as he picked it up, noticed it was Aaron and answered quickly.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Is Miss North with you?”

“Yes, why?”

“How far away are you?”

“Less than ten minutes.”

“Then it can wait. I’ll talk to her when you get here.”

“About what?” Mike said.

“It’s something I just found in the debris, and if you ask me, it’s pretty damned amazing.”

“Okay. See you in ten.” Then Mike flipped the phone shut and laid it back down on the console between them.

“Is everything okay?” Cari asked.

“I think so. Aaron said he wanted to talk to you about something he found, but when he realized how close we were, he said he’d just wait and show you himself.”

“Show me what?”

“I don’t know,
cher.
But I asked him to go through the debris and see if he could find any family memorabilia that hadn’t been ruined, so maybe it’s something like that.”

Cari’s vision blurred. “Oh, Mike…”

He sighed. “I know today is going to be hell for you, and I can’t bear to see you cry. I was just hoping to give you something tangible as a remembrance of you and your family.”

“Well, right now these aren’t sad tears, and it’s not my fault you keep turning up on your damned white horse to save my day.”

A lopsided grin tilted the corner of his mouth. “So…
cher
…are you saying I’m your white knight?”

“Yes, I am saying that,” Cari said. “And just so you know, my editor, Leslie Wainger, would tell me that was such a cliché and to find another way to say it.”

His smile widened. “Then you tell that Leslie I said no dice. As a kid, I dreamed of being a knight in shining armor and riding up on a white horse to save the princess in the tower, then living happy ever after.”

Cari swallowed back tears. “Am I your princess?”

“Hell yes,” Mike said softly, then reached across the seat and took her hand.

Cari shivered, then threaded her fingers through his and tightened her hold.

Mike felt her trembling, sensed her fear.

“Don’t worry,
cher,
” he said. “I won’t let you go.”

Cari sighed, then pointed. “There’s the turnoff.”

Mike took it.

Cari shivered again. The last time she’d been on this road she’d been out of her mind with sorrow and fear. It was daunting to know she was coming back the same way.

Lance had mentally moved past the night he’d drunk himself into a stupor. Once he’d come to terms with his suspicion, that Carolina North was still alive, he’d started thinking of what had to happen next. But before he could make any firm plans, he heard a rumor in town that left him confused.

In the hardware store he’d run into Jim Bob Greeley, who’d told him about a stranger coming in to pick up some electrical equipment. According to Jim Bob, the man had just parked a motor home on the North property, so that Susan Blackwell would
have a comfortable place to stay while overseeing the cleanup of the family land.

He’d been stunned by the news and had second thoughts about his conclusion. Maybe the Susan who’d come to the funerals was really Susan after all. If it
was
Cari, why would she come back around people who knew her well enough to see through her disguise? Then he remembered the cinnamon allergy and panicked all over again. Ultimately, the only way he could be sure was to stake out the property and get a really good look at her.

Jim Bob hadn’t been sure about the timing of Susan’s arrival, but Lance knew how to get around that. It was less than twenty minutes from Morgan land to the North property as the crow flew. All he had to do was get out his four-wheeler and take a little ride. And if someone saw him in the vicinity, the ride was perfectly innocent. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t done countless times before, looking for missing livestock.

Still, the news had shortened his trip into Bordelaise. Instead of stopping in at Mama Lou’s Crab Shack for lunch, Lance had picked up a couple of burgers at the only fast-food place back in business and headed for home. He’d eaten the burgers as he drove, washing them down with a bottle of Pepsi, and ended the meal with a mint they’d tossed into the sack. It wasn’t exactly his choice of dessert, but it was the only sweet available.

Once home, he’d changed into his usual work clothes: Wellington boots, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and one of his father’s old Panama hats. The outfit would make his excuse all the more believable, should he be seen. All he needed was a pair of binoculars and he was good to go.

A short while later, he was on the four-wheeler and heading into the woods behind the barns.

Cari’s first glimpse of where the family home had once stood was numbing. Instead of the rambling, single-story lowland house surrounded by massive trees and her mother’s famous azaleas, it looked like a war zone. Some of the trees were missing their topmost branches, while others had been completely uprooted. The house and contents had been reduced to lumber and ruin, and strewn as far as the eye could see. Her car was still upside down out in the pasture, near most of the barn roof, along with the carcasses of some dead cattle.

Then she saw Mike’s motor home. It wasn’t exactly what she’d expected. It was huge and outwardly elaborate, a top-of-the-line showpiece of blue and silver. She could only imagine what it looked like inside. As he pulled up beside it and parked, she took a deep, shuddering breath, then clenched her fists, reminding herself of why she was there.

Mike hadn’t taken his eyes off her since the moment they’d stopped. He’d known this would be dif
ficult for her, but now that he saw it for himself, he felt sick to his stomach. That she’d lived through this was nothing short of a miracle.

But when he saw the muscles in her jaw clench, he could only imagine what was running through her mind. Desperate to shift her focus, he took her hand.

“
Cher…
Look at me.”

Cari shuddered as she responded, only to find she was looking at him through a blur of tears. She swallowed around the knot in her throat as he tightened his grip.

“We will get through this together,” he said softly. “I promise.”

She nodded, then pulled loose from his grasp and swiped angrily at the tears.

“Let’s go find your security chief. I need a piece of good news.”

She got out of the Range Rover on her own and was already circling the motor home by the time Mike caught up with her.

“Careful,” he said, as she sidestepped a precarious jumble of splintered lumber.

Cari shrugged it off. “That stuff is a lot scarier when it’s coming at you faster than the speed of sound.”

“Have mercy, woman,” Mike muttered, as he took her by the hand. “Maybe you don’t need coddling, but I do. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that you lived through this.”

Cari didn’t answer, but she didn’t pull away,
either. For Mike, it was enough. A few moments later he saw Aaron coming out from behind what was left of the barn, then wave.

“There’s Aaron,” Mike said.

From this distance, the only thing Cari could tell was that he wasn’t quite as tall as Mike, and that he was bald. As he came closer, she guessed his age in the mid-forties, and knew if she was stereotyping him for one of her mystery stories, she would have guessed by the way he carried himself that he was ex-military. Good. She might be needing both muscle and firepower.

All of a sudden a gust of wind rattled through the area, loosening a strip of sheet iron that had been caught in the limbs of a tree only feet from where Cari was standing. Before she could react, Mike grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the way, just as the metal came crashing down behind her.

He spun her around and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, thanks to you,” she said, then looked back at the ragged piece of sheet metal and shuddered.

At that moment Aaron came running up. “Wow! That was close!” he said, and slapped Mike on the shoulder in a familiar gesture of hello. “Quick moves, boss man.” Then he eyed Cari curiously. He knew her story and was seriously impressed with how she’d taken the heat off herself until she was well enough to fight back.

He nodded at her. “Ma’am.”

“Carolina, this is Aaron Lake. Aaron, for obvious reasons, Cari’s answering to Susan.”

Aaron grinned. “I’ll just be calling you ‘ma’am,’ ma’am. That way I won’t forget and get myself—or you—into trouble.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Lake,” Cari said.

“Aaron, please. Now…are you ready for some good news?”

Cari’s chin quivered once, then lifted. “Yes…please.”

“You guys follow me, then. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Cari fixed her gaze on the back of Aaron’s shirt as he walked away, then, despite her earlier moment of independence, unconsciously reached for Mike’s hand. She needed all her strength and his, too, to walk through this place without coming undone.

The pile of furniture and drywall under which her mother had been pinned had been moved—obviously during the recovery of her body. When they passed the remnant of wall where her father had been impaled, she stumbled but wouldn’t look. There was no need. She saw the scene every night when she closed her eyes. As they approached the clearing where she’d found Susan’s body, she noticed variegated shades of earth and realized that despite the rains that had followed the tornado, the ground was still saturated with her cousin’s blood.

Jesus, help me
, she prayed. She tightened her grip on Mike’s hand as they walked. When she realized Aaron was talking, she made herself focus on what he was saying.

As they approached the ruins of the barn, he began to gesture with his arm. “Over there is where I was walking when I saw it…sitting out in the open without a scratch on it. I grew up in Oklahoma, and I’ve seen tornados do some crazy things just like this, though. Once, when I was a kid, an entire natural gas plant blew away just down the road from my house. Me and my dad were down there looking around afterward, and he showed me a piece of prairie grass that had been driven through a telephone pole without breaking the grass, like thread through the eye of a needle. Dangedest thing I ever saw. Threaded that grass through solid wood, leaving about six inches sticking out on either side. If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it possible.”

Suddenly Cari realized that Aaron had stopped.

“Here it is,” he said. “Look at that, will you?”

Cari stepped out from behind him, then froze.

Her mother’s china cabinet was sitting out in the middle of the barnyard, with every plate, cup and dish that had been in it still on the shelves.

“Oh sweet Lord,” she whispered, and then rushed forward and opened the glass doors, unable to believe what she was seeing. The outside of the cabinet was mud-splattered and dusty, but it was completely
intact, as were the contents. “They’re all here!” she cried, as she moved from the stack of dinner plates to the salad plates and bowls, then the coffee cups and her grandmother’s crystal glasses. In the cabinets below, the bowls and platters nested one into the other, just like the last time Maggie North had put them up. When Cari pulled open the small shallow drawers and saw her grannie’s silverware, she threw her hands in the air and then spun, her eyes shining with unshed tears.