CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We turned down the first country road and rode only until Ricky could pull over. Then we walked into the forest. We didn’t go out of sight of the road. Just found a fallen tree and sat on it.

“I’m not going to say that was easy,” he said after a moment. “Looking through that doorway. Seeing…”

“I’d completely forgotten that was—”

“I know. And I knew it was coming. I’ve always known it was coming, no matter how much you doubted it. But I wasn’t ever going to be ready. I see that now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t, Liv. Please. You have nothing to apologize for, and it only makes me feel bad, knowing you feel the need to say it. You don’t. So I’m just going to talk for a few minutes, okay?”

I nodded.

“You and I…” He shifted on the log. “I don’t know where we were going. Nowhere, if I’m being honest. If I look ten years down the road, where would we have been? Me as leader of the Saints, and you as the wife of a motorcycle gang leader, with the stigma of that, the danger of that?” He shook his head. “It isn’t the life for you, and you’d be miserable. So what’s the alternative? I quit the club? You’d never let me do that because then I’d be miserable. Where we were? It was fucking fantastic. But it didn’t have a future.”

He looked at me. “What we have now is just as good, and it has a future. I’m gonna miss what we had. I do miss it, every damn day. But I’d miss not having you in my life a hell of a lot more.”

“Ditto.”

He smiled. “Good.” A quiet moment. Then he glanced over. “Do you regret it? Us being together?”

“Never. We had to try. We had to know.”

“That’s what Arawn never got. He knew Matilda loved him, and he knew it wasn’t in the same way she loved Gwynn, yet he couldn’t help thinking it was only different because Gwynn got his chance, and if Arawn had, things would have been different. He was wrong. Matilda wanted to be with Gwynn. You want to be with Gabriel. You aren’t her, and he’s not him, but what you each are feels the same way. If that makes any sense.”

“It does.”

“So…” His gaze dropped to my ankle and I knew he was thinking of the tattoo there, the moon for Arawn, for him. “I’ll understand if you want that removed.”

I looked at his forearm, where he had a small tattoo of the sun and moon entwined. Matilda’s symbol. “Do you want yours removed?”

“Course not. I knew when I got it that I almost certainly wasn’t going to keep you. It’s a marker in my life, for something significant. You were. You still are. I hope you always will be. The tattoo stays.”

“Ditto,” I said. “To all of that.”

Gabriel had cleaned the parlor while we were gone. We were in there now, with coffee and Rose’s cookies, talking about the sluagh and Seanna and where we’d go from here. It wasn’t until it began snowing—in the parlor—that I realized I’d drifted off to sleep.

In my dream, we were still on the sofa, me sitting sideways with my back against Gabriel, Ricky in the opposite corner, sprawled with his head propped on a pillow as he talked. And it was snowing. Not pretty little flakes but huge gobs of snow, and I was getting annoyed because it was piling up, and then I couldn’t hear Ricky because, well, snow.

When I reached out to brush the flakes away, my fingers touched paper instead. Small scrolls rained down like clumps of snow. I unrolled one to see a name.

“Greg Kirkman?” I said. “Who’s Greg Kirkman?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Gabriel said, almost muffled by the paper piling around him.

“Um, yeah, that’s what I said.” I took another scroll, opened it, and read the same two words. And then another and another.

“Who the hell is Greg Kirkman?” I said.

Gabriel sighed, setting the paper fluttering. “Yes, exactly.”

“No, really, I’m asking you guys.”

Ricky brushed the drift of papers away from his face. “Um, no. That’s your job, right? You were supposed to—”

“Shit!”

I jolted awake, my hands brushing aside imaginary papers. “I forgot to research Greg Kirkman.”

In answer, I got Ricky’s snores. He was where he’d been in the dream, slouched in the corner of the sofa. I was curled against Gabriel, his arm around my waist.

I slid out of Gabriel’s grip just enough to rise and press my lips against his. I couldn’t help it. I’d often wondered what it’d be like to wake up and lean over and kiss him. To watch those inky lashes flutter against his pale cheek and see the first sliver of those insanely blue eyes and know that he wouldn’t jump up in horror, which was kinda important for a proper morning kiss fantasy.

So I kissed him. And those lashes never even fluttered. But his lips did part, just a little, kissing me back, still deep in sleep. I moved against him—

That’s when Ricky snored, and I remembered we weren’t alone.

I slid out and headed for the kitchen, Lloergan padding after me.

I’d barely opened my laptop browser when I sensed Gabriel behind me. I was about to say something, but he continued to the counter and silently started the coffee machine. I slipped from my chair, eased the kitchen door shut, and crept over behind him. Then I slid between him and the coffee machine, put my arms around his neck, and gave him a proper kiss.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I had to finish that.”

“I was hoping you would.”

“So you weren’t sleeping?”

“I was. But the advantage to not dreaming is that if I wake thinking you were kissing me, I can be quite certain you actually were.”

“I couldn’t resist. You’re very kissable.”

He chuckled, shaking his head.

“Let me guess,” I said. “No one’s ever told you that, either?”

“Certainly not. But I’m glad you think so, and I’ll make every effort not to disillusion you.”

“Good.” I gave him a peck on the cheek and then headed for the table. “I woke up realizing we’d forgotten to research the name Seanna gave my father.”

“Greg Kirkman. He disappeared twenty years ago.”

“Uh, okay. So only one of us forgot.”

He handed me the first cup of coffee. “I did a quick search during a spare moment, found that much, and then promptly forgot about him. Which might be even more grievous than your oversight, considering that I discovered he disappeared under mysterious circumstances and then forgot.”

“We’ve been busy.”

His lips twitched.

“I meant with the sluagh and all the associated drama. But, yes, that too. It’s very distracting. We might have to stop until the case is solved.”

He snorted, not even glancing over to see if I might be serious.

I sipped my coffee and typed one-handed while he brewed himself a cup. When he sat across from me, I glanced up. His eyes were half lidded, that drowsy, unfocused look I’d only seen when he’d been drinking. Or after sex.

“Too sleepy to even read over my shoulder?” I said.

A glimmer of a smile. “I’ll enjoy my coffee. I know you’ll tell me when you have something.”

That, too, was a milestone, not just that he didn’t feel the need to watch over my shoulder, but that he wanted to relax with his coffee, not gulp it down as a mere vehicle for the caffeine required to jump-start his day. In that moment, Gabriel seemed happy in a perfectly average way, pleased by nothing more than a quiet morning, fine coffee, and agreeable companionship. It looked good on him. It really did.

It only took a moment to confirm that he was right about Kirkman. The man had gone missing almost twenty years ago.

“A month before the Tysons killed Amanda Mays and Ken Perkins,” I said. “I don’t like the timing of that.”

“It may only mean that Seanna was clever enough to find an open missing person case from the same time period. That would allow her to suggest she had evidence to wrongly accuse your parents of killing Kirkman. Which is exactly the sort of scheme she’d attempt.”

“Clever enough to find a case fitting the time frame. Yet not clever enough to realize that Kirkman doesn’t fit the pattern. They were convicted for killing couples.”

“She could suggest he was murdered with a secret lover. It’s a ridiculous stretch, but…” He shrugged.

“Typical for Seanna.”

“Yes.” No hint of anxiety or discomfort touched his eyes, as if that coffee contained a generous shot of Irish whiskey. He took my cup and rose to make another, saying, “Keep looking.”

“Yes, boss.”

I searched while he fixed me a second coffee and added chocolate chip cookies.

“Little early for sweets, isn’t it?” I said.

“Carpe diem.”

I had to sputter a laugh. For Gabriel, eating cookies for breakfast was indeed seizing the day.

“So, Greg Kirkman,” I said. “Thirty-two years old when he disappeared. Never married. Last seen in Chicago. He went out drinking with friends, got in his car, and disappeared.”

“Did his route cross any bridges or inconveniently located steep embankments?”

In other words, after that night of drinking and then getting behind the wheel, had the police thought to check anyplace where Kirkman’s car might have plunged off the road?

“Actually, that is a possibility,” I said. “Kirkman lived outside the city. He was a construction worker and had built his own house in the forest.” I ran searches as I spoke. “Which was apparently about five miles from here.”

That had Gabriel’s coffee cup lowering, his eyes focusing. “Any connection to Cainsville?”

After a few minutes of searching, I shook my head. “Nothing’s jumping out. It seems he’d built the place only a few years before he vanished, and he hadn’t made any local ties. Only one of the regional papers even mentioned his disappearance.”

“City business.”

I nodded. Even growing up in the suburbs, there’d been some of that mindset. What happened in the city stayed in the city—that foreign and vaguely sinister place best suited for quick visits to take advantage of the superior shopping and dining. Even after a few years in this region, Kirkman would still have been considered a Chicagoan.

I kept searching, both casting my net wider and zooming in on specifics.

“Lived alone, never married, no local connections,” I said. “No known girlfriend or boyfriend. Something of a loner, but sociable enough if he was drinking with friends.” More keystrokes. “Or maybe not. Got a longer article here. I missed it because they misspelled his name as Kirkson.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes.

“Yes, not exactly fine journalism. It’s the archive of a local crime magazine. I use the term loosely. It was one of those mimeographed newsletters mailed out to a couple hundred subscribers. The guy writing it might not have been professional enough to fact-check names, but he fancied himself an investigative reporter and seems to have done some serious digging on this case. He interviewed the guys Kirkman had been drinking with. They were coworkers from a construction job, and they said Kirkman didn’t usually join them, but he had that night.”

“Hmm.”

“Yep, anytime someone acts out of character—and that action leads to trouble—it could be significant. Which may only mean that it’s significant in the sense he decided to be more sociable and paid for it with his life, because he wasn’t accustomed to driving after a few drinks.”

“True.”

“It’s also possible that this amateur sleuth, in his zeal to tell a good story for his subscribers, made shit up.”

“Also true.”

“The guy wrote a couple more articles on Kirkman’s disappearance. I’ll need to double-check them against more reliable…” When I trailed off, gaze still fixed on my screen, Gabriel walked behind me to read over my shoulder.

“Hmm,” he said.

“Exactly.”

It was a quote from Kirkman’s neighbor, who said she’d seen a police car in Kirkman’s drive twice in the weeks before his disappearance. When the intrepid reporter contacted the state police, they refused to comment, saying it was part of an ongoing investigation.

“And of course it’s Saturday,” I said. “Which means contacting our police sources will cost extra.”

“Do it anyway.”