a baby when she’d gone to the grocery store one evening and later had been found dead beside her car on the side of the road. She’d been strangled, and her murderer had never been found.
Sometimes Joshua wondered what his life would have been like if he’d had a mother, if he’d been raised by a woman instead of by his father and the cantankerous Smokey, who had run the house like an army barrack.
He’d heard stories about his mother, a beautiful woman who had given up an acting career to marry his father and build a family here in Cotter Creek. But he knew her only from photos and didn’t have a single memory of his own.
“Meredith told me about your mother’s death.”
Joshua stiffened at the sound of Savannah’s voice. The woman was as tenacious as an Oklahoma tick on the back of a hound dog. He turned around to look at her, noting how the sunshine sparked in her hair. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to listen to me, that’s all. Just hear me out with an open mind. Did you know that Charlie went grocery shopping an hour before his death? Did you know that he bought a gallon of butter pecan ice cream? Why does a man who is suicidal buy groceries that nobody will eat?”
She talked fast, as if afraid she wouldn’t get everything out before he walked away from her. “Joshua, Charlie knew I was coming to interview him. He would have never killed himself knowing that I was expected to be there, that I would be the one to find him like that. Charlie would have never done that to me.”
As much as Joshua didn’t want to get caught up in what he’d considered her drama, her words gave him pause. “Maybe he went shopping then got depressed. Maybe he wasn’t suicidal until five minutes before he picked up his gun.”
She shook her head, red curls bouncing. “At least three times a week I spent the evenings with Charlie. I’m telling you the man wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t suicidal. He had plans, big plans. He was going to plant a flower garden next spring, fill it with all the flowers his wife had loved. He was thinking about taking lessons to learn how to play bridge.”
Joshua wished he had touched base with Charlie more often while he’d been in New York. He’d called every couple of weeks, but the calls had been brief, too brief.
“It’s not just Charlie,” Savannah continued. “There have been others deaths…too many.”
He suddenly remembered her parting words to Ramsey the day of Charlie’s death, that something was rotten in Cotter Creek and she intended to get to the bottom of it. “What deaths? What are you talking about?”
She glanced around, then looked back at him. “It’s too complicated to go over all of it now.”
“Why me? Why are you coming to me with all this?”
She frowned, the gesture wrinkling her freckled nose with charming appeal. “For two reasons. First of all you’ve been out of town for a while. I figure you’ll be more objective about things than any of the other locals. Secondly, you’re a West and that holds a lot of weight in this area of the country.”
“Meredith is a West, why not enlist her help?” he countered. He tried not to notice her scent, a spicy musk that was intensely pleasant.
“I told you the other day that Sheriff Ramsey was lazy and incompetent. The man is also a raging sexist. He wouldn’t pay any more attention to Meredith than he has to me.”
Despite his reluctance to the contrary, he was intrigued. “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.
She glanced over her shoulder to where Winnie stood in the distance, obviously waiting for her. “I can’t go into it all now. Besides, I have some research at the newspaper office. I’d like you to see it.”
He had a feeling she wasn’t going to stop bothering him until he agreed at least to see what she thought she had. “Okay, just tell me when and where to meet you and I’ll see what you’ve got.”
Her features lit with relief. “We need to meet at the newspaper office, but I’d rather do it when Mr. Buchannan isn’t there. He always leaves the office at around eight in the evenings. Could you meet me there tonight about nine?”
Somewhere deep inside him, he knew this was probably a mistake. But, since returning to Cotter Creek, he’d felt unsettled. He’d grown accustomed to the fast pace of the city, of having places to go and things to do. In truth, he was bored, and he told himself that was the only reason he was agreeing to meet her.
“All right, nine tonight at the newspaper office,” he said.
She smiled. The look softened her features and transformed her from arresting into something close to beautiful. “I’ll see you tonight. And Joshua, thanks.” She turned and hurried toward Winnie.
Joshua stared after her, wishing he could take back his agreement to meet her. He had a feeling he’d made yet another mistake in a long string of mistakes that had been made in the past year and a half.
Chapter 3
The Cotter Creek Chronicle office was located on the bottom floor of a two-story brick building on Main Street. The front of the building was a large picture window, at the moment as dark as the night that surrounded Savannah as she parked her car in front.
It was eight-forty-five, and Main Street was completely deserted. Most of the shops and businesses closed their doors at eight-thirty. The only nightlife Cotter Creek had to offer was a couple of taverns on the edge of town.
She turned off her car engine and tapped a pale pink fingernail on her steering wheel, a surge of excitement filling her.
Finally, finally she had somebody who would listen to her. She certainly hadn’t been able to get her boss, Raymond Buchannan, interested in her theories. All he wanted from her were fluff pieces that would please a more feminine audience.
“I write the news fit to print,” he’d told her the last time she’d broached him about the multitude of deaths in the Cotter Creek area. “I reported what happened in each of those deaths, and there’s nothing left to report.”
Nor had Sheriff Ramsey or Mayor Aaron Sharp been interested in what she’d had to say. This town definitely had a good old boy network and she had several strikes against her. First, she was a woman. Second, she was an outsider. And last, she had a feeling that most everyone in town thought she was here only to make a name for herself and have a body of work to take to a bigger newspaper job.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It had taken her only a week in this dusty Oklahoma town to fall in love with Cotter Creek. She had no intention of going anywhere. In fact, she had broached the topic of buying the paper from Raymond Buchannan when he decided to retire. If he ever decided to retire.
She had enough money in a savings account to be able to meet whatever price Buchannan settled on when he did decide to sell. Thankfully her parents had begun investing for her when she was a baby, and on her twenty-first birthday those funds had become available to her. Over the past four years she’d tried not to touch that money unless it was absolutely necessary, believing that it was her nest egg for the future.
At exactly nine o’clock a big black pickup pulled into the parking space next to hers. Joshua got out of the
