If. The controlling word in her world right now.
She took another sip of the Italian roast she’d brought with her from Seattle. Even a thirty-year-old Mr. Coff
ee knew what to do with good beans.
But coming back to Montana hadn’t changed the key fact. Each day brought so many questions. Why, just as they were getting used to being empty nesters, getting to know each other again as people, not just parents, had the cancer come back and killed him? Quickly, too—less than six months from that first sharp pain in his low back to the end. To the ashes she’d brought with her. She and the kids had spread a handful on Lake Washington, not far from their house in Seattle, but she’d saved some for Bitterroot Lake, where it had all truly begun.
Now Lucas Erickson was dead, too. Had the three young men been cursed? Michael and Lucas had been roommates in the dorm, Jeremy a friend, jumping at the chance to visit the girls at an old lodge on a mountain lake. What young men wouldn’t have?
Something soft swished against her bare arm. The cat. “You hungry? Me, too.”
She took another sip and glanced at Janine, sitting on the other couch staring at a phone, her striped Pendleton blanket neatly folded. The letter lay open on the coffee table. “I thought your phone broke.”
“I borrowed yours while you were asleep. Walked up toward the highway until I got a signal.” She set the phone next to the letter. “Still no reception down here.”
“Did you call Leo?”
“I called Nic.”
Nicole. “Why? What can she do from four hundred miles away? Oh. You think—”
The sound of a car outside interrupted her and she stood. Strode to the nearest window and pushed the lace curtain aside.
“Better wash another cup,” she said. “We’re going to need it.”
* * *
“I have to confess,” Sheriff Leo McCaskill said after Janine had told her story, “I don’t get why you didn’t call us. Smart to leave the building—the killer could have been hiding anywhere. But you should have called us the moment you got to safety. Or driven over, if you were too scared to stay, or your phone wasn’t working. The courthouse is only two blocks away.”
“Leo,” Sarah said, resting a hand on the kitchen table and leaning toward her cousin. “You have to understand. There’s history here.”
“So you say. But without a report …” Though Leo had the McCaskill height, he didn’t have the classic Irish coloring of Sarah and her siblings. His nearly black hair was shot with gray and his eyes were the same dark brown as his uniform shirt and the matching stripe on the outer seam of his tan pants. “Look, it’s not that I don’t believe you about the assault—what, twenty-five years ago? But history is no defense to failure to report a crime. That’s a crime itself, you know.”
At least he hadn’t said history was no defense to murder. Fingers crossed that meant he didn’t consider Janine a suspect.
“I didn’t know that,” Janine said. “And Sarah did try. How did you know we were out here?”
“You, I had no idea. When I got Sarah’s message, I tried to reply, but no luck. So I called your mother,” he said to his cousin. “She knew you were coming home, but not when. And hearing you’d already arrived from me did not make her happy. You have to call her.”
“I have to call her,” Sarah repeated, staring into her empty coffee mug. “How did you find Lucas? Did you find the gun?”
“His secretary, Renee Harper, found him when she came back from the post office. She swears he was alone when she left, and that she was gone no more than half an hour.” He swallowed the last of his coffee and set the mug on the table. “And no, no weapon. Just the body and the blood.”
He’d already taken Janine’s T-shirt into evidence, tucking it into a paper bag he’d sealed and initialed. He’d taken the letter, too.
“A lot of blood,” Janine said, her voice thick with the memory.
“And you don’t own a gun?” he asked, though he’d asked once before. The answer was the same—a shake of the head.
“Was Lucas popular?” Sarah asked, thinking of that possible run for office. “Well liked?”
“Well known,” Leo replied, his careful choice of words saying plenty. “Soon as you two are cleaned up and dressed, come into my office and give official statements. We’ll need both your fingerprints.”
“Mine, too?” Sarah asked. “Why?”
“You touched the letter, right? Getting prints off paper isn’t easy, so there’s no guarantee we’ll get a match. But at least we can eliminate yours.” He rubbed the cat’s head one more time. “And pick up some cat food.”
* * *