A Grave Peril Page 3

  It was a long drive back, but we broke it up by stopping at a diner halfway. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches and shared a plate of fries and talked about our favorite shows as if today was like any other day. Once we were back on the road, Tracey slept until I nudged her awake when I pulled up to her apartment building.

  “Thanks for helping me today,” I told her.

  “I wasn’t much of a help.” She cringed. “I was just a big baby.”

  “Are you kidding? If you hadn’t had to pee, we never would’ve found him.”

  She smiled broadly at that. “That’s true. My bladder is kind of the unsung hero here.”

  We parted company with a possible coffee date arranged for the next day and I headed home.

  When I pulled up to my own driveway, I was surprised to see Garrett’s sedan in the side drive under the carport. He hadn’t mentioned he’d be back tonight. I was excited to have him back, but when I walked in the door I could immediately tell something was wrong. He was in the living room with the TV blaring, feet up on the ottoman, a half empty box of pizza on one side and Wookie curled up on the other. There were deep creases of exhaustion around his mouth.

  “Hey,” I said dropping my pack and walking over. “Nice to have you home.”

  “It’s nice to be home,” he replied wearily.

  I shooed Wookie onto the floor so I could sit down next to Garrett. I kissed him on the cheek and rested my head on his shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I am now.” He put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a light squeeze.

  His voice sounded heavy with worry. I decided I’d wait it out and see if he was ready to talk. If it was work-related, there was a good chance he wouldn’t share what was weighing on him, but he was back and that alone made me glad.

  “Congratulations on finding that lost hiker,” he said as I snuggled against his shoulder. “You feel okay about it? No...” He struggled to find the words. “You didn’t feel too overwhelmed?”

  “It was good. I was ready.”

  “That’s great. I’m proud of you.”

  He kissed the top of my head and we watched television together. It got late, and I dozed on and off against his shoulder. At one point I remember him leading me off to bed. In the morning, I reached for him, but the sheets were cool. I blinked at the clock. It was nearly nine, so he was most likely already on his way to the Seattle office. Then I smelled coffee brewing and bacon frying and hurriedly swung my legs out of bed.

  In the kitchen I found Garrett wearing only his boxers and standing at the stove. Wookie was at his feet gazing adoringly at the maker of bacon. Fluffy was seated on the kitchen chair, one leg in the air while he bathed himself. I came up behind Garrett, wrapped my arms around his waist and placed a kiss between his shoulder blades.

  “Good morning. I take it you’re having a work-from-home day?”

  “Yes.” He turned and kissed me on the tip of my nose. “How do you want your eggs this morning?”

  “Drowned in coffee,” I said stifling a yawn.

  “Over easy it is.”

  I poured us each a cup of coffee and set the table. I’d grown up fending for myself and breakfast was never an option. Once on my own, a handful of dry cereal wasn’t unusual since I rarely had fresh milk. I tended to drop weight when I was stressed and over the past months I’d felt my clothes get loose and the notch on my belt had changed more than once. Since we’d moved in together, Garrett rarely missed an opportunity to fatten me up when he wasn’t traveling for work.

  While we ate, Garrett asked me questions about finding the body of Douglas Prost. “How did you feel when you found him?”

  Garrett’s questions were mostly about me and not about the actual find. He’d seen me do it, and the procedure wasn’t in question. My sanity was.

  “I felt good.” Mostly. “It was kind of exciting to be back at it.” I gave him a smile of reassurance as I nibbled a piece of bacon. “It made me feel...” Good. Bad. Scared. Excited. Like I needed a drink to celebrate or drown out the dark thoughts. “A lot of emotions but, overall, it just felt good to be doing something.”

  Garrett’s eyes were sharp as he watched me answer. If he suspected there was more than what I was saying, he didn’t press further. His mood this morning was light, and whatever had been bothering him the evening before seemed to have vanished.

  When we were done eating, he gathered up our plates and took them to the sink.

  “I’ve got some news,” he said casually, as he added a squirt of soap to the dishes and turned on the water. “I’m going to be working at home for a while.”

  Something about how he said it caused my heart to skip a beat.

  “Is that right?” I waited a breath or two. “Is that a good thing?”

  He didn’t answer but I could tell by the vein of tension bulging in his neck that there was more. I poured myself another cup of coffee and waited for him to find a way to say whatever he was trying to work through in his head. After he was done scrubbing the hell out of the dishes he came back to the table, picked up my hand in his and looked at me solemnly.

  “I’ve been pulled from the case I was on. And I’m not assigned to anything else. They’ve put me on leave.”

  “But why?” This was a shock. “Put on leave” sounded an awful lot like he’d been fired. Garrett was the most moral, law-abiding and hardworking person I’d ever met. There was no way he could’ve done anything to warrant being let go.

  “It’s because of Faith.”

  He’d never spoken his dead wife’s name out loud to me before. Just the weight of it caused me to feel lightheaded.

  Chapter Three

  “I don’t understand.” I shook my head slowly. “What does...” I couldn’t bring myself to speak his dead wife’s name. I didn’t feel like I had the right. “What does she have to do with your case?”

  His wife and son were gone. Killed by a drunk driver long before Garrett came knocking on the door of my single-wide trailer asking for my help on a case. It wasn’t a topic we discussed. Ever.

  “It’s actually about her brother. Sid.”

  Oka-a-ay. I didn’t even know she had a brother.

  He released my hand and combed his fingers through his hair. “I can’t talk about the case.”

  “You can’t not talk about it either.” I blew air through my lips in a raspberry and immediately regretted the childish display that probably did nothing but reminded him there were a couple decades between our ages. “Look, I know you’re unable to talk about your case, but it’s no longer your case, right? You just said you were put on leave.”

  “I still can’t talk about it.”

  “How about this? I’m going to talk about a hypothetical situation and you can just listen.” I laced my fingers together on the table. “You’ve been working some time in an area of the FBI that deals with drug smuggling. I know that isn’t always the cases you handle but I think that’s mostly your jam.” His lips twitched into an almost smile. “So, if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that your brother-in-law’s name came up in connection with your investigation and you, being the standup guy that you are, right away had to tell your bosses about your connection to Sid and then, just like that, you bought yourself a vacation.”

  “I’m not saying you’re right and I’m not saying you’re wrong.” Garrett spoke through a sigh. “But I am saying that you’d make a mighty fine agent if you ever decided to join the Bureau.”

  “Ah-ha!” I laughed. Relief washed over me because this felt like a simple thing, but it still made me wonder about his mood the night before. It felt like there was more to this than what he was saying, and I bet all the guessing games in the world wouldn’t help me figure it out. “What else is there? I can feel something big in everything you’re not saying.”

  “This investigation is the biggest thing I’v
e ever worked on. It’s become a real rat’s nest and it’s like every stone we overturn we find another fat rat.”

  I could tell it was killing him not to be seeing the case through to its conclusion. Garrett wasn’t a guy who liked loose ends.

  “Are you home until the case is solved or until they reassign you to something else?”

  “No idea if I’m home for a day, a week or longer.”

  “In that case—” I pointed an accusing finger at him “—have you taken a look around here?” I waved my hands around to indicate our house. “Remember when you convinced me that buying a place that needed some work was a good thing? You said I’d have to wait until you had time to do everything that needed to be done. Yeah, well, get busy, mister. Don’t be such a slacker.”

  He genuinely smiled then and I felt great sense of relief as if I’d dodged something big. At least for the moment.

  I took Wookie for a run up the road and had to pause more than a few times to nod good morning and say that “Yes, it was good to see the sun” or agree to those who commented that it was a beautiful day. I’d spent much of my life on a farm far from anyone else and, even in school, I’d been the awkward kid with poor social skills and thrift store clothes that smelled faintly of mildew. All this random socializing because we now lived in suburbia was mentally exhausting.

  When Wookie and I returned to the house, Garrett was talking over the fence to Bald Neighbor. They both turned and smiled at me and I offered a half wave as I went inside. Garrett followed a minute later.

  “What’s Bald Neighbor have to say? If he’s complaining about Wookie taking a dump in his yard, let him know that I picked it up and he should fix his fence.”

  “It wasn’t about Wookie, but it was about the fence,” Garrett said. “He wants to replace the fencing between our yards.”

  “Good. Ask him if he can make it a foot higher so I don’t have to see him every time I go out.”

  “It’s going to be a joint effort. We have to pay for half.”

  “What? Then we’re definitely making it a foot higher!” I went to the sink and poured myself a glass of water. “Why do we have to pay for it?”

  “I doubt he’ll go for making it taller just because you’re antisocial.” Garrett chuckled. “And sharing the cost is just what good neighbors do.”

  “I can see it now.” I took a long drink from my glass. “It’ll be a joint trip to the lumber store, then a fence-building party, and it’ll be another celebration when it comes time to paint the damn thing.” I stuck out my tongue.

  “Actually, we agreed to just hire someone to do it.”

  “Thank God.” I put a hand over my heart and looked up at the heavens in gratitude. “This suburbia politeness bullshit is getting to be a bit much. Do you know how many people stopped to talk to me while I was out walking Wookie? A hundred at least.”

  Garrett wrapped his arms around my waist and planted a kiss on my neck. “Only a hundred? I would expect much more. You’re a bit of a celebrity around here.”

  I groaned. I’d made the papers a few times over the years and my website DivineReunions.com got a helluva lot of hits locally, no doubt from neighbors googling. But I hadn’t taken my dowsing rods out to find bodies in forever and definitely not since we’d moved in. I wasn’t so much a celebrity as the neighborhood freak.

  “If they knew you were an agent with the Bureau I’m sure you’d be a celebrity too.” Garrett only told people he worked for the government. “And Bald Neighbor and his partner only moved in a week ago and suddenly I can’t leave my house without one of them yelling at me?”

  “Yelling?”

  “Yeah, ‘good morning’ or ‘beautiful weather’ or whatever. Plus, they’re always mooning over that fancy red car of his. That Alfa Romeo Spider.”

  Garrett laughed. “They’re horrible human beings. Also, instead of calling him Bald Neighbor, try Preston. That’s his name.”

  “It’s a dumb name. Don’t they even work? They’re always around.”

  “Phil runs some kind of bookkeeping business from home, and I think Preston said he’s on vacation at the moment. You’d know this stuff if you had a friendly talk with them.”

  “Whatever. I’m getting in the shower,” I told him.

  “There are worse things than having nice neighbors.” He swatted my ass as I walked away.

  In the shower I leaned my forehead against the cool tile and let the water hit the map of keloid scars that covered my back. They were a visible reminder of a horrific upbringing. Only Garrett got to see those old wounds and knew the horrors that caused them. While the hot spray pounded between my shoulder blades I practiced one of the one-minute meditation exercises that my psychiatrist thought would erase the ricochet of violent thoughts that occasionally flooded my mind. If I was completely honest, the exercises did help. A little. Particularly when those dark, quicksand, traumatic thoughts from the past popped into my head and a little voice whispered to me that one glass of wine couldn’t possibly hurt.

  When I stepped out of the shower, I walked naked into our bedroom. Garrett came into the room just as I was snagging a T-shirt and jeans from my drawer, but I never had a chance to get dressed. His arms circled my waist and drew my body against his. We stumbled into bed, his mouth still on mine and our hands exploring each other in now familiar but tantalizing ways. Afterward, as we lay breathless in the tangled sheets, I turned to him.

  “I could get used to you being home every day if this is going to be the morning routine.”

  Garrett kissed me and murmured an agreement against my mouth. His phone rang, and he rolled away to answer it. He talked in monosyllable responses as he got up and pulled on a pair of sweatpants, then his tone changed to anger as he walked down the hall to his den. I got dressed and went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee before feeding Wookie and Fluffy. The cat rubbed up against my legs and purred while I filled his bowl. Wookie growled low in his throat.

  “Jealousy does not look good on you, big guy.” I laughed and rubbed the Rottweiler’s large head. “Besides, you’ll always be my first love.”

  “Hey, I’m standing right here,” Garrett said as he walked in the room. “I’d like to think that I’m your first love.”

  He’d replaced his sweatpants with jeans and a button-down shirt and walked over to grab his windbreaker from the closet. His words were light but his face was dark, like he was forcing himself to sound nonchalant.

  “Nope. You’re my second love.” I watched as he put on his runners. He wasn’t exactly dressed for work, but he was sure in a hurry to go somewhere. “I thought you weren’t working?”

  “I’m not. Not really. Just meeting up with someone,” he replied vaguely. “Something I’ve got to get out of the way.”

  “There goes my dream of home repairs,” I said in mock despair.

  “Once this case is done—” he walked over to me and took me in his arms “—how about we do something special.” He kissed my neck, then lifted my left hand and tenderly kissed my ring finger. “Not a big wedding.” He kissed my finger again. “Just a quick couple of I Dos.”

  “Garrett...” I pulled my hand away and put my arms around his neck. “We’ve talked about this...”

  “I know.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “Can’t fault a guy for trying.”

  He smiled but there was an underlying worry in his eyes that made me frown as he went out the door with a quickie backward wave.

  Wookie and I shared a look.

  “Yeah, something’s not right with our guy.” I scratched the dog’s ears. “Whatever it is, let’s hope he figures it out.”

  I settled onto the couch with my laptop and my coffee. Like always, my inbox was full of unopened requests to find loved ones from here in Washington all the way to Florida and every state in between. It made me feel sad and a little guilty about taking so much
time off. Yesterday hadn’t been so bad. Why had I waited so long to go back to work?

  Because you were only clinging to your sanity by a thread, a little angry voice in my head whispered.

  The voice was right.

  Douglas Prost’s mother had sent me a very nice email. The police had confirmed the body found was that of her son. The coroner’s initial investigation included suppositions that he’d fallen into the drainage ditch and hit his head on the culvert. She’d sent the rest of my payment and wished me well.

  It felt great and I was tempted to leap into taking another case, but I also wanted to pace myself. I wasn’t going to decide about my next body search today. In the months I’d been away from finding the dead, I’d spent a little time fine-tuning my skills. I’d read up on grave dowsing and a couple times I’d gone out to do some fieldwork. Small graveyards scattered around the state were excellent places to dowse because they were usually vacant from prying eyes. I’d practiced with rough dowsing rods made from branches but now that my rods and backpack were back in action, it would be fun to use those. With the weather today promising to be another sunny April day, a graveyard field trip was a good way to get outside.

  Early afternoon I packed up my backpack and locked up the house, making sure to set the alarm. As luck would have it, all the neighbors seemed to be out doing yardwork so just walking to my car involved a couple of friendly waves and forced smiles. A few ladies who always walked our suburb wearing designer yoga gear called me by name as they pointed out the obvious about the nice weather. One of them made a comment about my nice backpack. It was plain, old and worn so it was just their way of wondering what I was up to. Maybe the dowsing freak was going to find a body. Thankfully, politeness overtook their curiosity, so I didn’t have to ask a direct question. Let them imagine my bag was filled with the magic rods and maps leading to bodies. That wouldn’t be far off anyway.