give me that look, Eli. If I die before Chopper does, I’ll leave him to you.”
“Still a cop here. I can’t have pets.”
“No pets, no women. You’re not a cop, you’re a monk.”
“Who said anything about no women?”
“No women of consequence, then. Now, you take my last serious relationship versus the last woman I had sex with.”
“Jesus, Rooney.”
The old man drank from his thermos before offering back a mostly toothless smile. “You think because I’m old I don’t have sex?”
“Yes—no. Dammit, I don’t think about it one way or the other.” Ever.
“Why not? I’m human.”
“You’re also my great-grandfather, and I do my level best to keep thoughts of sex, parents and grandparents out of my head.”
“You’re a prude, Elijah. Doesn’t bother me to picture you with a woman.”
The first bolt of lightning shot down deep in the hollow. “Are we actually having this conversation?”
“I am.” Rooney peered into his thermos. “Seems to me you’re doing more avoiding than conversing.”
Eli swerved around a barely visible pothole. “What I’m doing is trying to figure out how anybody’s sex life, mine included, relates to me checking out a bulldog.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“What, have sex or check out the dog?”
“In a perfect world, both, but I’ll settle for the dog and enjoy thinking about you and Ty firing daggers at each other while you picture, but deliberately don’t talk about, the lovely Sadie Bellam.”
“You have a wide streak of mean in you, old man.” But a slow grin removed the sting of Eli’s remark. In any case, glaring down his resentful cousin would be hell-and-gone preferable to visualizing Rooney naked with a woman.
As the wind picked up, and the truck began to buck, even his garrulous great-grandfather stopped talking. The road, such as it was, became a river, complete with currents, broken branches and sinkholes that could rip out the undercarriage should Eli happen to hit one. That he didn’t was more of a miracle in his opinion than a testament to his driving skills.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside his second cousin’s shabby dockside bar, Two Toes Joe’s. He saw Rooney safely through the door, turned down a mug of coppery green beer—old Joe really should have his lines changed—and jogged back to his still-running truck.
The dashboard clock read 9:30, which surprised him since it seemed to have been dark for hours. If he’d believed in omens, as at least three-quarters of his relatives in the area did, he’d check out the dog—couldn’t not do that—then say screw an early arrival for Rooney’s birthday and return to New York. Return to sanity, and more important, the safety of a no-Sadie zone.
What had flared between them last April had been unexpected and intense. Sadie had been a kid the last time he’d seen her. Seven years old and shocked speechless over the murder of her cousin Laura, who’d also happened to be his stepsister.
Although the residents of both Raven’s Cove and Raven’s Hollow had been horrified, few had been as badly shaken as he and Sadie. How could anyone who’d never had the misfortune to do so possibly understand what it felt like to discover the body of someone you loved? And not merely discover, but, in Sadie’s case, literally stumble over.
Her family had left Raven’s Hollow six months later. His had stuck it out for another six years, searching for a closure they’d never received.
To this day, Laura’s killer remained at large. A handful of suspects and numerous persons of interest had been questioned and released. Over time—two decades at this point—what had started as a countywide manhunt had been reduced to a dusty homicide report in the back of the sheriff’s filing cabinet. Clues gathered at the scene had resulted in nothing, and, as they so often did in situations like these, the case had gone cold.
For Eli, the memory of Laura’s murder had dimmed but never disappeared. Not completely. Every similar crime he worked to solve these days took him back to her death. When that happened, the raw pain and guilt would slam through him as hard as it had done the evening he and Sadie had met in the hollow.
On a less grisly note, Eli couldn’t deny that, even at seven years of age, Sadie Bellam had been a beauty. Fast-forward twenty years, slide her into a clingy silver dress, and she’d quite literally stripped the breath from his lungs. He’d prowled around the edges of that Boston reception hall, watching but not approaching her for thirty wary minutes, until one of her aunts had swept in and sealed the deal by insisting they dance.
The idea of taking the memory deeper tempted, but unfortunately, a gust of wind upward of forty miles an hour had other ideas. It grabbed his four-by-four and sent it sliding toward a deep gully. Eli rode the wave, felt the kick of wind abate and urged the truck back onto the road.
It had been a sunny seventy-eight degrees when he’d left New York City. The clear skies had held to Bangor. Then, less than ten miles from the Cove, a mass of boiling black clouds had rolled in and let go.
He glanced left as thunder rumbled up and out of the hollow. Jagged forks of lightning split the sky overhead. His truck, three years old and heavy as hell, shuddered through another blast of wind.
Only a seriously disturbed person would stay out in this. Would be out in this. The dog could have waited while he went head-to-head with a glass of Joe’s toxic beer.
Without warning, twin beams of light appeared directly ahead. They slashed through the murk, momentarily blinding him. Swearing, Eli jerked the steering wheel hard, felt the truck’s back end fishtail and had to compensate to keep the entire vehicle from tumbling into the ravine.
He might have won the battle if something—tree, car or possibly both—hadn’t become a sudden and solid roadblock in front of him.
Using his forward momentum, together with muscle and brakes, he went for a one-eighty turn. But the mass was too close and the road too slick for him to gain the traction necessary to execute it.
The collision sent his head and shoulder into the side window. A clap of thunder underscored the hit, but the sound was nothing more than a murmur in Eli’s mind. By the time the truck stopped moving, the storm, the night and the hollow had faded to black around him.
Chapter Four
“Eli, can you hear me?”
A woman’s voice reached him. Possibly Sadie’s, possibly not. She was far away but definitely calling his name. Did that mean he was alive? Because if not, he’d gone someplace dark, wet and incredibly uncomfortable.
“Eli, damn it, open the door!”
Someplace where the angels—at worst, he hoped, angels—shouted orders, and every thought was coated in a bloodred haze.
The haze pulsed for several seconds before subsiding to a repetitive
