Chapter Eight
COLD FURY COURSED through Cole at whoever was threatening Annie. Close on fury’s heels came frustration. He couldn’t stand seeing her so crestfallen.
His fingers tightened on her as he drew in a rough breath. “You’re too damned determined to assume the best of everybody.”
She needed to grow up, and in a hurry.
“You’re the most softhearted person I’ve ever known, you know that?” Pure light. Hopelessly unfit for living in a harsh world. He wanted to shake her and snap her into reality. He wanted to protect her.
Maybe if he stopped acting like a Neanderthal, she’d let him.
He dropped his hands.
“I’ll see what I can do about the fence.” He pivoted while she still stood there, wide-eyed at his outburst. He stalked toward the collapsed section, calling over his shoulder, “You call the cops.”
Whoever was messing with her like this had to be a sick and evil man. A sick and evil man Cole meant to hunt down and deal with before he left Broslin.
He glanced back. Annie had wrapped her arms around her midsection. Her gaze cut to the fox, then back to Cole. She looked as if someone had punched her in the gut. “I don’t think the police will care about someone moving roadkill around.”
He turned and took a step back toward her, then decided to stay where he was so he wouldn’t put his hands on her again. “You’ve been stalked. Then dead animals were left for you to find.” He gestured at the fence behind him. “And now destruction of property.”
Because she still wasn’t reaching for her phone, he added. “It’s called escalation. Whoever wants to terrify you is escalating. Do you understand? Next step could be to harm you physically.”
A shudder ran through her.
Damn if the thought of someone trying to harm her didn’t make Cole’s blood boil. He didn’t enjoy scaring her, but he would hate it even more if she got hurt. “Call the police.”
When she pulled out her cell phone at last, he resumed walking toward the fence, but he kept an eye on her.
She made the call while heading back to her garage, probably to feed her animals.
When she passed out of sight, Cole assessed the damage—more than he could fix here and now. He noted the supplies he’d need: a hole digger, two posts, a ten-foot section of chain link. The rest, he could probably reuse from what lay on the grass. He began separating what he could salvage from what would have to go to the dumpster.
He kept going until he saw a police car pull up. Had to give credit to the cops; even though it wasn’t an emergency call, the cruiser was there in less than ten minutes. Cole left the fence and went to join Annie.
Detective Harper Finnegan was in his midthirties, built and sharp-eyed, but with plenty of small-town friendliness. Smart too. He took Annie seriously on the first try, without Cole intervening.
Then the detective turned his attention to Cole, dropping a few degrees on the friendliness meter. “And how are you involved in all this, Mr. Hunter?”
His expression wasn’t accusatory, but Cole could see where Finnegan was going. Cole was handy. If the whole trail of nastiness could be pinned on him, the detective could be home for lunch. Nobody wanted to do things the hard way if an easy way was readily available.
Cole shot Finnegan a look that let him know Cole and easy didn’t live in the same area code, in case the man was prone to delusions. “I am helping Annie with her animals.”
Annie said, at the same time, “He’s from Hope Hill.”
They began walking back to the fox.
“How long have you been in Broslin?” the detective asked, clearly not intimidated by the fact that Cole probably had thirty pounds of muscle on him.
“Five days. Came up from Chicago.” Cole watched as Finnegan mentally matched that fact against the months-long harassment and made the decision that Cole likely wasn’t involved in the mystery of the roadside carcasses.
But because he was apparently a decent detective, he didn’t drop the issue quite that fast. “Is that your truck in the driveway?”
“Rented it this morning.” Best to give the man whatever he needed. No need to start a pissing contest. The sooner they were done here, the sooner Finnegan could go after the real perpetrator.
“When I first got here,” Cole said, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted a car, how much I’d leave the facilities. But it’s a pretty nice little town. They keep telling us to interact with the local community. Civilians and civilian life and whatnot.”
Not that any of that had been on his mind when he’d decided to stop by the car-rental place. He’d been thinking along the lines of wanting to help Annie.
The detective nodded. “Let me grab a bag.”
As he strode off toward his cruiser, Annie turned to Cole. “Do you think he’ll figure out who did this?”
“Probably not.” Cole silently swore. “Whoever hit the fence wouldn’t have gotten out, so there wouldn’t be fingerprints. The ground is grassy, so the cops can’t take a tire mold. And even if the guy grabbed the roadkill with his bare hands, you can’t take fingerprints off fur.”
He watched the detective check out the front of the rented pickup for damage. He was thorough. That gave Cole some hope.
Finnegan grabbed a black garbage bag and gloves from the trunk of his cruiser.
Annie’s full lips turned down at the corners. “Why are we going through all this, then? I don’t want to waste Harper’s time.”
Harper. They’re on a first-name basis. Cole hadn’t caught that when the detective first showed up. He’d still been back by the fence.
So Annie and Finnegan knew each other. Cole set that thought aside for later. For now, he focused on the fact that Finnegan might work harder for a friend.
“I wanted you to call so there’s a record.” Cole watched the man approach. “So if you need help in an emergency, they’ll know you’re being stalked and threatened. I want them to take you seriously and haul ass.”
“I’ve been threatened?” She turned from Finnegan as he bagged the fox. And before Cole could answer, she said, looking at him at last, “Yes, I feel threatened. I haven’t thought of it like that. Nobody left me a threatening message on my phone or anything.”
Cole gestured toward the bagged fox as Finnegan carried the carcass back to his cruiser. “There’s your message.”
When she shivered—a heartbroken, devastated look on her face—he had this crazy impulse to put his arm around her, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t want that. She’d flinched earlier when he’d grabbed her. He was a big-ass guy, they barely knew each other, and they weren’t exactly friends. And she was on his right. He couldn’t raise his right arm as high as her shoulders.
He kicked at a rock, sending it flying through the tall grass.
When she began walking toward the driveway and Harper Finnegan—who stashed the fox in his trunk—Cole followed her.
“Are you staying here?” the detective asked Annie as he slammed the trunk closed, glancing toward the yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. “Leila saw the show. Sounds like it was a mess.”
“I’m staying at Hope Hill until Ed Sanders can fix things up.”
“Good idea.” The detective stepped around the back of his cruiser as his radio went off, the lights flashing red on the unit. “If you see anything suspicious, or if you feel like something’s off, making you nervous, call the station. Trust your instincts.”
He waited until Annie nodded before getting into the car and responding to the call. Since he had his back to them, Cole couldn’t read what he said.
After Finnegan left, Cole turned to Annie. “Is this a small-town thing? Everyone knowing everyone?”
“I don’t really.”
“You knew Ed.”
“Everybody knows Ed.”
“You know Leila.”
“Leila is the dispatcher at the police station. I met her at the Christmas bazaar last year. We both volunteered.”
Of course they did.
“You knew Harper Finnegan.”
“I know most of the cops. Murphy Dolan, my boss, used to be a cop at the PD. Then he and Kate, his girlfriend, moved away. When they moved back, they decided to build the rehab center. She’s a therapist too. She won some kind of a grant, and they started with one building. The town did most of the other fund-raising, I think. All that happened before I came back. But since Murph used to be a cop, the guys in the PD helped out a lot. They still stop by sometimes to talk with Murph.”
“Is Finnegan one of your exes? He responded to the call pretty fast.”
“What? No. We just have a good police department.”
The shoulder tension Cole hadn’t been aware of relaxed. He chose not to examine the reasons behind that.
“Esmeralda wants to go out,” Annie said. At his raised eyebrow she added, “She’s rattling the garage door.”
He stilled. Listened. Couldn’t hear a damn thing.
She kept talking. “They all need to get out. They usually spend the day outside. But the donkey is the troublemaker.”
She had a one-eyed donkey, named Esmeralda, who was a troublemaker. For some reason that made Cole want to smile. For the last couple of months, his default mood had been teeth-grinding frustration. Annie Murray was definitely softening him.
In some ways. Certainly not in others.
She might look all innocent, but he was beginning to think she was as dangerous as naval combat.
He stepped toward his truck. “Let’s go get what you need for the fence.”
She tilted her head, exposing her graceful neck. He made himself look at her lips so he could read when she said, “Don’t you have any appointments?”
Looking at her full lips made him want to—
Patient—therapist. Keep your head straight, Sailor. “Not until after lunch.”
She still hesitated. “You don’t have to do this.”
Abandoning someone in trouble went against everything he was. “True. I could be lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking dark thoughts. Or I could be outside, with another person, being social, enjoying some physical exercise. And restoring something, which, as we know, also restores one’s soul. As my therapist, which one would you say is better?”
She got into the truck without another word.
At the farm store, Maddie behind the counter looked like she’d been expecting them. “Harper was here.” She stopped to fan herself. “We had a shoplifter. He said . . . I mean Harper, not that good-for-nothing Miller kid . . . that your fence was down. We have everything in the back.”
“Thanks, Maddie.” Annie headed that way like a woman on a mission, focusing on the fix instead of on her problems.
Maddie stopped her and said, “If you don’t mind used . . . Harry Ormuz was here for nails when Harper came in. Anyway, Harry said he’d just pulled out a perfectly good split-rail fence at a job over on Ridge Road. They’re putting in a pool, so they need a full four-foot fence. He hated throwing out all that good wood. It’s all in his backyard. He said he won’t be home, but you can swing by and take as much as you want. You know where he lives.”
So they ended up buying only a roll of chain link and renting the hole digger. Annie spent only half of what Cole figured she would.
She gave him instructions to Harry Ormuz’s place, a few blocks away. Cole felt weird walking onto private property and taking the fence posts. Maybe that too was a small-town thing.
They weren’t halfway across the front lawn when a giant black dog raced around the house and charged straight at them.
Cole reached for Annie to shove her behind him, but she was already running forward. His heart stopped when she dropped to her knees and let the dog jump and slobber all over her.
“Hey,” he called after her, his hands on his hips, “are therapists supposed to give patients heart attacks?”
She grinned back at him, hugging the behemoth dog for all she was worth.
“Could have warned me.” Cole came up next to them, holding his hand out for the dog to sniff. Good-looking dog, he noticed, once his heart wasn’t jumping out of his chest.
Annie kissed the beast on the top of its head. “This is Mouse. Tossed from a car when he was a puppy. He had a broken leg when I found him. Harry adopted him from me.”
Why Cole hadn’t expected this, he had no idea. Of course the dog was one of Annie’s. Cole patted the massive head that reached above his waist. “Mouse?”
“He was tiny when I found him. He fit in my cupped hands. You should have seen him. He was the sweetest thing ever.”
Looking at the dog the size of an elephant calf, Cole had trouble believing he’d ever been that small.
Mouse jumped circles around them, his tongue lolling like a big doofus. He practically sighed in pleasure when Cole scratched him behind his ears.
They spent more time with Mouse than they should have before they finally loaded up the fencing, the dog underfoot the whole time. He barked at the truck as Annie waved at him through the window when they left.
“A big dog like that would provide more security at your place than the llamas,” Cole said as he pulled away from the curb. “A pig and a one-eyed donkey aren’t going to do much for you, no offense.”
A wistful look came into her eyes as she turned to him. “It’d be nice to have a dog. But they’re adopted out so easily. If I keep one, every bag of food, every vet bill . . . I’d have to take that money from the animals nobody wants.”
“You mean you might not be able to take in another litter of skunks.”
She was hopeless. Yet there was something in her stubborn dedication to all things living that touched his hardened soldier’s heart. Her company was like a feather drawn over an old, puckered scar that had only a little feeling left, just enough to appreciate the soft caress of that single feather.
There. He’d never had thoughts like that before he’d met her. Her weirdness was definitely contagious. She softened him and made him think about things he wouldn’t normally think about. Being with her was like . . . reading poetry. And why he would think of that, he couldn’t fathom. He hadn’t read poetry since high school, dammit.
The two of them couldn’t be more opposite. She’d saved countless lives, and he’d taken them. They had nothing in common.
Then a strange little thought unfurled in his mind: Maybe a world that had people like him in it needed people like her. Maybe they balanced out the cosmic scales.
He found the thought reassuring. He also discovered that the twin boulders of anger and regret that usually sat on his shoulders felt lighter when he was with her. Annie Murray threw light into all his dark places.
Another damn stupid thought he couldn’t believe he was thinking. Yet he couldn’t deny that he liked spending time with her. He enjoyed her company more than he’d enjoyed anyone else’s in a long time. She did make him feel better.
He wanted to return the favor, help her if he could, with whatever he could.
He would start by fixing her fence.
Of course, he ended up needing her assistance.
Since the accident, every time Cole forgot that he was now a cripple and was confronted with his limitations, he’d flown into a dark rage. But the hours with Annie, having her by his side, didn’t feel like a bad thing.
She’d had a rough morning, but she was all right. She was smiling, working without complaint, talking about the birds and the trees and her animals. She filled up the space around her with sunshine. She was an oddity, a curiosity. Which was why Cole kept watching her. He had to watch her to read her lips.
Keep telling yourself that.
When they finished with the fence, the job not half-bad, she let out her animals. The one-eyed donkey, Esmeralda, brayed her fool head off in delight, kicking her feet in the air.
Annie laughed. Cole strained to hear the sound. He couldn’t, not a single note.
A strange feeling spread through his chest. Someone else might have called it longing, but Navy SEALs didn’t long. Jesus.
As she caught his gaze, her expression switched from amusement to concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Hungry.” He said the first thing that came into his mind.
“Want to grab a sandwich before we head back?”
“Depends. Is it tofu? Because—” He bit off the rest. When was the last time he’d teased anyone? He couldn’t remember.
Before he could think too much about it, she asked, “How about organic ham and local cheese on rye bread with some greens?”
His stomach growled in answer.
He followed her inside the house through the back door. “Since we’re in here, I take it Ed found no structural damage?”
He took two more steps before he stopped in his tracks. The wall between the kitchen and the living room had been knocked down and left there. Drywall and broken two-by-fours sat in dusty piles.
She turned from the rubble as if it hurt to look at the mess. Hell, it hurt him, and he had nothing to do with the place.
“No structural damage,” she said. “Let’s eat outside anyway. I’ll grab the food from the fridge.”
Her backyard was pretty simple, about a quarter of an acre, all fenced in, all grass, unmowed. She probably left it like that for her animals. She also had half a bale of hay tossed out there in the middle, and a lone picnic table with attached benches on the gravel patio.
“Won’t the ham upset the pig?” he asked as he helped her carry out the packages.
“If she asks, we’ll say it’s tofu.” She gave a soft sigh. “Dorothy belonged to an old couple. Some neighborhood boys stole her one night. They had the brilliant idea of cutting a rack of bacon out of her.”
“She squealed like a pig and escaped?”
“Something like that. I talked with Edna and Al and offered to keep Dorothy while she was healing since they both walk with walkers. Catching her to disinfect the wound and change bandages wasn’t going to happen. By the time she had healed, Al was in the hospital with a stroke. Edna asked me if I could keep Dorothy permanently.”
Maybe the pig sensed the true origins of the lunch platter on the picnic table, because she stayed away.
The llamas and the donkey came over to investigate. The llamas moved on after a few seconds, but Annie had to shoo Esmeralda away from the bread.
The back fence stood about fifty yards from her back door. Right behind it, a massive cornfield began. The corn was still green, seven or eight feet tall in places.
Cole didn’t like the lack of visibility. Someone could be skulking fifty yards from Annie’s house, and she’d never know. Someone could hide in that corn and watch her. While Annie sat at her weatherworn picnic table, Cole strode to the fence and walked the perimeter.
The menagerie followed him, as if they were going for a walk together. When he stopped, Esmeralda tried to nip his butt.
“Hey.”
The donkey blinked her one eye at him, the picture of innocence.
Cole pointed a warning finger at Esmeralda, then turned toward the house. The tarp would do little to keep someone out. The four windows had curtains, but none were drawn. At night, with the lights on, if someone was standing where Cole was right now, he could see right in.
One window belonged to the kitchen, over the sink. He wasn’t sure about the others. Was her bedroom window on this side of the house?
He turned toward the cornfield. He didn’t know much about farming. When did they cut corn? The sooner the better.
His gaze snagged on a spot where the weeds were trampled.
A faint path led into the corn. Deer trail?
Maybe deer regularly cut through the corn and jumped Annie’s fence here, then cut through the property. Maybe they helped themselves to some of the hay she put out for the llamas and the donkey.
On Cole’s side of the fence, he couldn’t see if the track continued, since Annie’s animals walked all over the backyard, trampling every square inch.
Annie waved at him from the picnic table, her expression warm, her movements graceful. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t read them from this distance. He didn’t need to. The body language was enough. She was telling him to come and eat.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he called back to her. Then he jumped the fence.
He hurried forward on the narrow path that cut through the corn in a fairly straight line. He came out at the side of a country road a couple of minutes later. Could be the deer crossed the road here.
Or this could be where a stalker got into his car after watching Annie. Cole’s muscles tensed. His instincts were sounding the alarm, but he had been trained to see danger everywhere. Dr. Ambrose had been talking to him about tuning down those instincts, adjusting to a civilian environment.
Cole was no longer at war. He was no longer a POW. He no longer had to be vigilant 24-7. He could sleep, and nobody was going to drag him from bed in the middle of the night to pull out his fingernails.
He turned and hurried back to Annie, hating the fact that not only could he no longer trust his body and his hearing, he couldn’t even trust his instincts. In captivity, his instincts had kept him alive. Now, back home, among normal people, those hair-trigger instincts made him paranoid and antisocial—according to his shrink.
By the time he jumped the fence again, the food was all laid out, and Annie waited for him with an expectant smile.
God, what a picture—a painting of domestic bliss.
To live like this—uncomplicated, a picnic in the backyard with a smiling woman, without sounds and images from hell playing in his mind on an endless loop . . . That some people had this on a daily basis boggled the mind. Cole had never envied others, but just now, just for a second . . .
“How good is your self-defense training?” he asked, to give his thoughts a new direction.
“Spotty.” She handed him a plate. “The police department gives classes for free every couple of months. Officer Flores does it. Gabriella. She teaches good stuff, but I don’t practice enough. The guys at Hope Hill taught me a couple of pretty neat tricks too,” she added. “Sometimes I work out at the gym. It’s an employee benefit. But I’m pretty much a one-trick pony. The move I used on you on the walking trail is the only move I can do well.”
“I think you could be good at it, if you put in the time.”
“It’s not my thing.”
No. She wasn’t a fighter.
“Who owns the cornfield?”
A subtle change washed over her features. Wariness came into her eyes, and some other emotions he didn’t recognize.
“My grandfather. He’s got about forty acres. Gramps can’t work the land anymore, so he rents it to another farmer.”
“Your grandfather lives around here?”
“The farmhouse is on the other side of all the corn.”
“Must be nice to have family close by.”
“You’d think so.” Her smile strained. “How about a drink? I have peach iced tea.”
He had no right prying into her family business, so he didn’t. “Iced tea would be great.”
She brought him a bottle and sat.
He picked up his sandwich. “Do you know there’s a trail through the corn?”
“Sure. Deer. I use it too sometimes to cut through, if I don’t feel like driving around.”
He chewed. There. A reasonable explanation. One of those cases where he saw danger when he shouldn’t have.
“Thanks for all the heavy lifting,” she said.
“Not bad for a broken man?”
She put her sandwich down and put on her serious-therapist look. “We don’t use terminology like that at Hope Hill. It’s not helpful. Nobody is broken. Broken is a machine term.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She winced. “Sorry. Can’t turn it off. I’ll stop lecturing now.”
“Go ahead. I don’t want you to bust something by holding it in.”
She grinned. But then, too soon, she grew serious again. “Do you view yourself as a killing machine?”
“I was a sniper.”
“So here’s the thing.” She pushed her plate away, gearing up. “Back when machines were first invented, they replaced a lot of workers. Machines were just plain better, faster, and more efficient. The whole machine terminology—output, optimum performance, downtime, and all that—was soon applied to people. Especially in business. And then the military. A machine does what it’s told without asking questions. Produce, produce, produce. Or fight, fight, fight.”
“Sounds familiar so far.”
“But people are not machines.” Her gaze held sincere compassion that touched a cold spot inside his chest and warmed it. “You have an arm that doesn’t work the same as your other arm. You have trouble with hearing. You are still you. There is nothing wrong with you, even if you can’t produce like someone else can right now. You can do other things. You are not measured in terms of output. You are an incredibly complex, unique, creative, and curious human being with a soul. Your value to the world cannot be measured in machine terms like units of production.”
Something inside him shifted. For the first time, he truly caught a glimpse of the world as Annie Murray saw it. And damn if he didn’t want to live in that world. She drew him. When her face lit up like this, she had a kind of ethereal beauty that made it impossible to look away from her.
“I’m guessing,” he said, “that ecotherapy principles are the opposite of the machine view?”
Her responding smile was radiant.
Cole didn’t have the heart to add any snarky remarks. For the first time, he actually didn’t have any snarky remarks.
“I’m willing to consider there might be something to all this,” he said, wanting to keep that smile on her face.
“Does that mean you’re willing to go into our sessions with a completely open mind?”
“I’ll think about it. But I’m still not hugging a tree.”