Cold Pursuit (3 page)

Elijah pushed open the screen door and glanced back at her. “You really can't tell a toy gun from a real one?”

“Go ahead, Elijah, have your fun. Yes, I can tell. That's not why I got hit.” She set the bananas on the two-foot cracked Formica counter in the bare-bones kitchen area. They'd be mush by morning. “It doesn't matter. Charlie and the rest of those kids are all safe.”

“You did your job,” Elijah said.

“That's the way I look at it.”

His eyes stayed on her for a fraction longer than she found comfortable. “Didn't know I was back, did you?”

“No.”

She returned to the box and saw that she'd made a mistake in packing the three cartons of yogurt she'd had in her fridge. They were squished now, and ten hours in her trunk couldn't have been good for their contents.

Thinking about yogurt gone bad wasn't enough to distract her from the man standing in the doorway.

“I heard you were wounded,” she said, raising her gaze to him. “You're okay now?”

“Never better.”

His response was classic Elijah. Jo had never met anyone more resilient. Most of his years as a Special Forces soldier were clouded in mystery and the subject of much speculation in Black Falls. Even with her high-level security clearances, Jo doubted she could find out the specifics of the April firefight. She'd heard that a bullet had nicked his femoral artery, a highly dangerous injury. He could have easily bled to death.

According to her sister, he was evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in southern Germany, and only when he was out of danger had his family informed him of his father's death. Beth had heard the story straight from Rose Cameron, Elijah's younger sister, who had flown to Germany to be with her brother.

“But he already knew,” Beth had said. “No one had to tell him.”

Jo suspected that one look at Rose's face probably had been enough for Elijah to figure out the bad news for himself.

“I'm sorry about your father.” She ran a finger along the delicate edge of a dark maroon lily. “I had no idea he planned to leave me this place. I never asked him for anything, Elijah. Ever. He didn't owe me.”

His expression was unreadable. “That doesn't seem to be how he saw it, does it?”

She resisted comment. To get into a discussion about Drew Cameron now, after her long day and lousy week, in the very cabin in which he had discovered her and Elijah as teenagers and changed the course of their lives, made no sense.

“Thanks for delivering the flowers,” she said.

“Anytime. And relax. Give yourself time to heal.” He grinned suddenly. “I hear those airsoft pellets sting like hell.”

“Funny, Elijah.”

“You haven't seen the video, have you?”

“No, and I don't intend to.” A colleague had brought his personal laptop to her desk to show her two-minute video, but his battery had run out. Her one stroke of luck all week, as far as she was concerned. “You have?”

“A.J. and I had a couple of beers the other night and watched it start to finish at least three times.”

“You did not.”

“Okay. Six times.”

The screen door creaked shut as he headed out, laughing.

After he left, Jo checked the card tucked among the lilies.

She sighed and told herself she was glad there hadn't been a real gun. No one had been seriously hurt that day. The rest didn't matter.

On her drive north, Jo had tried to be optimistic and thought of the various ways that being in Black Falls would do her good. She could go for runs in the fresh, crisp northern New England air. She could watch the last of the leaves fall off the trees. Wait for the first real snow. Watch the birds migrate for warmer climates.

Listen for bats in the rafters and avoid her nearest neighbor.

She got busy unpacking before she could change her mind and load up her car again and head to Montreal or Buffalo—anywhere, she thought, that would put her more than a couple hundred yards from Elijah Cameron.

 

Ten minutes later, Jo was already bored with unpacking. She opened a bottle of merlot, poured herself a glass and took it outside, crossing the dirt road and heading down to the lake.

She stood on a rounded boulder and sipped her wine. The sky was almost dark now. The air was frosty, and the landscape had the stark, empty feel of November, so different from the warm spring afternoon when she'd walked among the cherry blossoms with Drew Cameron.

She hadn't told anyone—family, friends, colleagues or, most of all, Drew Cameron's three sons and daughter—about the strange visit two weeks before his death.

She could see him now as they'd walked along the Tidal Basin. He'd surprised her when he'd shown up at her apartment and asked her to go with him to see the cherry blossoms. He was alone—A.J. was working nonstop at the lodge, Elijah was deployed to parts unknown, Sean was in southern California making money and Rose was off with her search dogs, picking through the remains of a string of Midwestern tornadoes.

The brown flannel shirt Drew wore was too warm for early April in Washington, but he hadn't seemed to notice. Surrounded by the stunning pale pink blossoms, the hard-bitten man Jo had once blamed for helping to ruin her life had startled her further by asking if she was okay these days.

“You've never married, Jo,” he'd said.

“I'm only thirty-three.” She'd laughed. “There's still time.”

“I guess things are different now. Elijah's never married, either, but I don't think he ever expected to live this long. I'm not saying he has a death wish or anything. He's just being practical.” Drew had paused, his face lined with deep wrinkles as much from a life spent mostly outdoors in the mountains he loved as from age. “We Camerons are a practical lot.”

Uncomfortable with his seriousness, Jo had gone for another lighthearted remark. “I don't know that moving to Vermont in the middle of the Revolutionary War was all that practical. Then staying there. Your ancestors could have cleared out and joined the westward expansion.” She'd caught a falling cherry blossom in a palm and smiled at him. “Taken a flatboat to Ohio or something.”

“Harpers got to Vermont before any Camerons did.”

“Not all of us Harpers stayed,” she said.

“True. Jo, there are days…” He'd hesitated and gazed up at the cherry trees and the cloudless sky. It was one of those rare, glorious early-spring afternoons in the nation's capital. Finally, he'd shifted back to Jo, with tears in his eyes. “I wake up on cold mornings and see the grandchildren you and Elijah should have had. They're as clear to me as you are right now. They line up in front of my bed and look at me as if I did something wrong.”

Jo had needed a moment to collect herself. She hadn't expected such words—such an image—to come from Drew Cameron. But she'd sensed his pain, his age, and however much she'd hated him in the past, blamed him for the way he'd humiliated her at eighteen, she couldn't hate him then. “Don't torture yourself,” she'd said quietly. “I'm happy. Elijah's happy—”

“I keep dreaming I'm going to lose him.”

“Mr. Cameron…Drew…”

“I wake up in a cold sweat, Jo. My heart pounds and I can't go back to sleep. I know he's going to die over there. I don't know what he's doing, exactly—he tells me what he can. But it's dangerous. And he's not going to survive.”

Jo had crushed the cherry blossoms in her palms and dropped them on the walk. Drew Cameron wasn't a worrier. She doubted there was a Cameron ever born who was. They were action oriented and forward looking. They didn't brood—they didn't dwell on those things they couldn't do anything about.

Like keeping a son at war safe from harm.

Jo was unable to fathom Elijah dying young. He would always be the devil-may-care teenager she'd promised to love forever.

Except it hadn't worked out that way.

“It's natural to worry,” she'd told his father, “especially given the nature of Elijah's work.”

“I'd give my life for Elijah,” Drew had said simply.

“He knows that. Come on. Let's look at the cherry blossoms.”

“Jo…”

She had never seen him—maybe any Cameron—so openly emotional, but every instinct she had told her why he had come to see her. She'd stopped, staring out at the Tidal Basin as she spoke. “You did what you thought was right when you broke up Elijah and me and kicked him out of your house. There's nothing for either of us to forgive.”

“Will you still think that if he's killed?”

“Have faith.”

They'd continued their cherry-blossom tour in near silence, and Jo couldn't help but imagine what the children the usually stolid man next to her claimed to have seen looked like. How many of them were there? Were they boys, girls—a mix?

Did they have Elijah's deep blue eyes?

She hadn't been able to bring herself to ask Drew to describe them.

She'd fallen for a bad boy and a Cameron all those years ago, and he'd left her for the army. There was no going back.

When Jo received word of Drew's death on Cameron Mountain and Elijah's narrow escape in Afghanistan, she had thought back to that eerie conversation among the cherry blossoms and wondered if, somehow, Drew had gotten his wish—if he had, at least in his own mind, exchanged his life for his son's.

It wasn't a conversation she intended ever to have with Elijah or any Cameron.

Recent evidence to the contrary, she did know that some things needed to be left unsaid.

She jumped down from her rock and decided to resume unpacking.

But when she returned to the cabin, she dug out her cell phone and checked the signal.
Weak
. She tried her boss's direct line, anyway.

Deputy Special Agent in Charge Mark Francona picked up on the second ring and sighed. “What?”

“I'm in Vermont,” Jo said. “How long do I get to stay in exile?”

“Who is this?”

“Jo Harper.”

“Jo who?”

Click.

Despite his enormous responsibilities and straight-as-an-arrow professionalism, her boss had a peculiar sense of humor.

On the other hand, maybe he was being serious.

Jo flipped her cell phone shut and dropped onto the ratty couch. She stared up at a dusty picture of a trout on the cheap wood paneling above the old propane heater.

Maybe, in his own way, Francona was trying to tell her that the sand was running out of the hourglass on her Secret Service career, and she'd be stuck in Black Falls forever.

E
lijah grabbed a neatly split, perfectly dried log from the two cords of wood he'd had delivered at the top of his driveway. He felt no pain or even residual stiffness in his right thigh where he'd been shot. He had tied on a tourniquet himself that long, bad night to stem the bleeding and keep on fighting.

He hadn't expected to live. The Special Forces medic who'd treated him, and later his doctors, had said it was a miracle he hadn't bled to death.

He didn't believe in miracles.

A sudden cold wind blew up from the lake. Even if it took until midnight, he wanted to get the wood stacked tonight.

His help, in the form of two teenagers, apparently had deserted him.

It was dark now, the pines and naked birches and maples on his hillside black silhouettes against the star-sprinkled night sky.

Jo had gone back inside with her glass of wine or whatever it was she'd stood on her rock drinking.

Through the trees, he saw a light come on in her rat heap of a cabin.

Having the Secret Service next door was a complication he didn't need when he was on the hunt for answers, but Elijah figured he didn't have much choice in the matter—and at least Jo was easier to look at than the three agents who'd stayed in the cabins a few weeks ago when he'd just arrived back home.

It wasn't until last week, on a solitary hike up Cameron Mountain, that he'd flat-out decided he didn't have the full story behind his father's death in April.

Just as he was starting to push for answers, Jo had to get herself into trouble in Washington and turn up on the lake.

Elijah grabbed more logs. He'd switched on the lights in the lower level of his home, but even so, it was a dark night. He pictured Jo at ten, freckle-faced and full of mischief, scrambling up a tall oak on the lakeshore to cut the rope to his tire swing. He'd sailed out over the water. By the time he swam back to shore, she'd lit out. He never did catch up with her.

He pictured her skinny-dipping in an isolated cove on a chilly fall night at fifteen. He remembered her mortification when he'd stumbled onto her. Then her anger as she'd pelted him with a rock.

Those turquoise eyes of hers.

And he pictured her at eighteen, whispering to him in the moonlight. “I love you, Elijah. I'll love you forever.”

She'd long since come to her senses.

He'd been a sucker for Jo Harper for as long as he could remember.

He took his load of logs to the lean-to he'd built on the front lower level of his house, under the deck, and lined them up side by side. When he'd bought his five hillside acres three years ago, he hadn't even considered that it didn't have any lake frontage. He'd expected the adjoining acreage to stay in the family. He'd worked on his place whenever he could get back to Black Falls, clearing the land, building his post-and-beam house. It was nothing fancy, but he was satisfied with the results.

As he returned to his woodpile, he heard a rustling in the fallen leaves up on the steep, rocky trail from Black Falls Lodge. In another two seconds, Devin Shay burst from the shadows and trees, panting and out of breath. “Hey, Elijah.”

So his help hadn't deserted him entirely after all. “You're late,” Elijah said. “Grab a log. Where's your girlfriend?”

“Right behind me. She's not—We're not…” Devin shuffled over to the heap of cordwood. “Nora and I are just friends.”

“It's dark. Does she have a flashlight?” Devin didn't, but Nora Asher hadn't grown up in Black Falls and couldn't know every rock and root on the lodge trail.

“There's nothing in the dark that's not there in the light.” Devin grabbed a log in each hand. He was lanky and surly—and trouble. “Isn't that what you always say, Elijah?”

The kid wasn't being funny, Elijah decided. He was being a jerk.

Seven months ago, Devin had found the frozen body of Elijah's father on the north side of Cameron Mountain. It was three days after he'd disappeared. Rose had been up on the mountain with her search dog. A.J. and his wife, Lauren, were out there. Sean had flown in from southern California. The Vermont State Police search-and-rescue team had launched an official search. But it was a high-school senior who'd located Drew Cameron. The autopsy indicated he'd died of hypothermia.

He had, literally, collapsed in the snow and gone to sleep.

Devin seemed chastened when Elijah didn't respond. “Nora's right behind me,” he said.

“I'm here, I'm here,” she called cheerfully, bounding out from the trail. “Don't be mad, Elijah. I told Devin not to wait for me. Sorry I'm late.”

Elijah eyed the two of them, both eighteen, both insecure and unreliable. But any similarities ended there. Nora was short and a little overweight, attractive with her dark, curly hair and big smile. She'd had her pick of colleges after graduating from her expensive Washington, D.C., prep school in May, but she'd dropped out of Dartmouth College over in New Hampshire six weeks ago and moved to Black Falls to get a job and experience “real life” for a year. That she was living rent free in a guesthouse on an expensive Vermont country estate owned by family friends didn't seem to interfere with her concept of “real life.”

Nora set to work on the wood. “Come on, Devin,” she said. “Let's get this done.”

Devin hung back, watching her as if he couldn't imagine what was so great about stacking wood. He had been in the back of a cruiser a few times, particularly since graduating—barely—in June. Elijah had gotten into plenty of scrapes at that age. Jo's father, the local police chief, hadn't cut him any slack, and not just because of Jo, or because Elijah was a Cameron, or because he deserved it. “I'm trying to save you from yourself, son,” Chief Harper would say as he'd slapped on the handcuffs.

Wes Harper was retired now. The new chief didn't have the same connections to the town he served. If Devin stepped too far out of line, he'd be up on charges. His weakness seemed to be standing up to bullies, which Elijah could appreciate—but he was also convinced that Devin hadn't told everything he knew about what had happened on the mountain that spring.

“Devin,”
Nora said, impatient. “Come
on
.”

Finally he sighed, glowered at Elijah and got to work.

Devin stacked the logs quickly and ably, automatically crisscrossing them to keep them from toppling over, but Nora had to think, pause, figure out just how to arrange the logs in her arms, how many she could manage at a time, how to unload them without dropping one on her foot. She was enthusiastic, Elijah saw, but inexperienced. She'd been like that in an all-day winter hiking class A.J. had talked him into teaching at the lodge a week ago—eager, naive and yet also a little snotty.

Elijah lost patience after fifteen minutes. “Go on. I'll finish.”

They didn't argue with him. He fetched a flashlight off his deck steps and handed it to Devin for the hike back to the lodge. “I can drive you up there if you want.”

“We prefer to walk,” Nora said before Devin could answer. She brushed bits of bark and sawdust off the sleeves of her expensive jacket. “I love the Vermont night sky. The stars are so bright.”

Devin shrugged. “I never noticed.” He nodded toward Jo's cabin through the bare trees. “Is some new Secret Service agent here?”

Elijah kept his expression neutral. “Jo Harper.”

Nora looked startled, and Devin grinned, his first show of humor since arriving. “Did she get fired?”

“The Secret Service equivalent of being sent to her room.”

“Beth says Jo's such a good shot now, she can take the eyes out of a crow.”

“Good to know.”

“What about you, Elijah? Are you that good a shot?”

He didn't answer. Devin was being a jerk again.

“A lot of people in town think you're still special ops.”

“People can think what they want to think.”

Nora seemed to go a little pale. “I hate war,” she said. “Sorry. I just do.”

Elijah picked up several good-size pieces of dried bark that had come off some of the logs and would work well as kindling. “Understood.”

She blushed. “I didn't mean—I just…” She dropped whatever she meant to say and turned to Devin. “I'm ready if you are.”

Elijah paid them in cash, and as they returned to the hillside trail, Devin flipped on the flashlight, directing the beam of light at the ground. “See you, Elijah. We'll get here on time if you ever have any more work for us.”

After they left, Elijah walked down to the lake in the dark, the ground familiar to him, the clean, cold air welcome after breathing in wood particles. He heard an owl in the woods off to his left, and to his right, he saw a bat against the starlit sky, beelining for Jo's cabin. He couldn't resist a smile. Whether the bat went into the cabin or not, he couldn't tell.

So many nights in faraway places, he had imagined himself as he was now, on the edge of the lake on a biting fall night. Sometimes Jo would be there with him. Not always, but when she was, he would see her clearly—the sharp angles of her face, the spray of freckles on her cheeks and nose, the spark of her eyes. He would hear her laugh and be soothed by her smile. He hadn't considered it a vision or a fantasy. Just Jo being with him out here on the lake.

He'd often wondered if she ever thought about him and had hoped she didn't.

He turned away from the lake. Jo's cabin was dark now.

His father had only bought the lakefront property a few years ago, after finally wearing down old Pete Harper, the original owner, an eccentric ninety-year-old cousin of Jo's grandfather, who had since died.

Elijah returned to his woodpile. He'd gone out to his father's grave in his first days back home. Still recuperating in Germany, he'd missed the funeral. As he'd stared at the simple stone marker, he'd understood, at least in his own mind, that whatever had occurred on Cameron Mountain last April still required a reckoning. Answers. Justice, even.

He knew himself, and he wouldn't stop until he had a clear picture of everything that had happened in Black Falls that spring.

His father would expect no less of him.

But Jo Harper was back in town, and as Elijah reached for another log, he debated which was the bigger problem—that she was as pretty as ever, or that she was a federal agent with a gun and the power of arrest.

Not that it mattered. Either way, Jo had never been one to break rules.

Except, of course, with him.