not your cat. He probably has a home and just mooches from everybody else in the area.
Nobody else in the neighborhood had claimed him, but who would? The wiry tom was missing the tip of his left ear and he had extra toes on each foot. Plus, he ate like a horse and stole everything he could get his mouth around. Unfortunately, he’d decided that Wade deserved to be the recipient of his purloined bounty, which meant once a week, Wade took a basket full of the cat’s haul around the neighborhood so people could reclaim the stolen socks, shoes, lawn tools and, on one humiliating occasion, a pair of women’s thong underwear.
“Ernie?” he called to the darkness, peering through the rainy gloom.
There was no movement outside in response.
The hum of his cell phone vibrating on the coffee table gave him something else to think about. He shut out the rain and grabbed the phone. His brother Jesse’s name stared back at him on the display. “Hey, Jesse.”
“Just got in from Georgia. No luck.” His brother sounded tired. Cooper Security had recently joined the hunt for Air Force General Emmett Harlowe, his wife, Cathy, and their grown daughter, Annie, who’d disappeared almost three weeks earlier from their vacation cabin in the north Georgia mountains near Dahlonega. Jesse had spent the last three days in north Georgia, following up the dwindling leads.
“The Harlowes couldn’t have disappeared into thin air.” Wade sank into his chair again, grimacing at the twinge in his bum knee. “Their cabin wasn’t that isolated, was it?”
“It’s pretty far off the beaten track,” Jesse admitted. “Nearest cabin is over a mile away. The last time anyone remembered seeing any of them was August nineteenth. That’s several days before they were reported missing.”
“No surveillance cameras in the area?” Wade asked.
“The police have checked every place in a fifty-mile radius.”
“Have you tried talking to General Marsh again?”
Jesse’s grim silence was an answer in itself. When he finally spoke, it was in a low growl. “He won’t take my calls.”
“Surely he’ll take Evie’s.”
“I don’t want to put her in the middle between the company and her father,” Jesse said firmly. “I hired her for her accounting skills, not her relationship to Rita. And definitely not because of her father.”
Wade thought his brother was being overly sensitive, given his tumultuous past relationship with Marsh’s eldest daughter, Rita, but he knew better than to push him. Jesse had his own way of doing things, and arguing made him dig his heels in that much more firmly. “I could try calling him myself,” he suggested.
“Do you think it would get you anywhere?”
Wade doubted it. He might not have the baggage of a failed engagement with Rita the way Jesse did, but it wasn’t likely the general would talk to him, either. The family lived less than a quarter mile away, along the lakeshore, but they were hardly friendly neighbors.
Still, there were lives at stake, the missing Harlowes included. It was worth a try. “I won’t know until I give it a go,” he answered Jesse’s question.
“Well, don’t try it tonight,” Jesse warned. “The general’s one of those early to bed, early to rise types. And New York’s an hour ahead.”
“New York?”
“Oh, right. I didn’t mention that. Evie said the general and his wife are in New York City with Rita. Trousseau shopping.”
Ouch. “Rita’s getting married?”
“Yeah. Some N.Y.U. professor she met when he was doing lectures at Emory. They hit it off and now she’s gotten a job as a history lecturer at some high-priced private prep school in Manhattan.”
Jesse hid it well, but Wade knew his brother still had some unhealed scars from his broken engagement to Rita Marsh, even though the relationship had ended years ago. Wade supposed Rita’s upcoming marriage might make a few of those old scars bleed again.
Poor idiot.
“I’ll email you the phone number. You can try him in the morning,” Jesse said. “I’ve got to check with everyone else and see where we are on the rest of the caseload. Talk to you later.”
Wade hung up and stared at his outstretched leg. It looked almost normal now, only the slightest bulge in the knee joint betraying the grievous injury that had nearly cost him his leg. Several surgeries and a knee replacement had spared him the fate of all too many of his fellow Marines. Though, considering how well some of his old military buddies were doing, artificial limbs and all, he had begun to wonder if the efforts to keep his leg had been a fool’s errand.
The torn muscles, tendons and ligaments, along with some nerve damage, meant the leg would never be the same. He’d had to leave the Marines, unable to meet the fitness requirements anymore.
Jesse had taken him on at Cooper Security because he was a Cooper, not because there was much he could offer the company in his current state. He wasn’t brainy like Isabel or cagey like Rick. He didn’t have a special skill set like Shannon’s computer genius or the analytical skills of his sister Megan. Before his injury, he’d been a bear of a man, strong and athletic, able to outrun and outfight anyone who challenged him.
All that was gone now.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
He pushed to his feet, ignoring the pain in his leg, and headed for the back door again. He might not be Super Marine anymore, but he could stop grousing about what he couldn’t do and go get a poor, wet old tomcat out of the rain.
The rain had stopped while he was talking to Jesse, but a damp fog remained, curling around his neck like phantom fingers. He shook off a little shiver and called out the door. “Ernie!”
This time, at the sound of his voice, a gray apparition appeared out of the dark woods, streaking across the backyard and coming to a stop at the edge of the patio. Now sheltered by the metal awning, the cat took his time stalking across the concrete patio, his bushy gray tail twitching in the air.
He came with another gift, Wade saw with dismay. It looked like a red and gray scarf.
It was only when Ernie got closer that Wade saw red splotches on his pale gray muzzle, as well.
Ernie laid the gift at Wade’s feet and purred softly.
Wade grimaced as he bent to pick up the scarf, his bum knee growling with pain. He let his good leg take most of his weight as he shook out the wet scarf. The drops of water that hit the patio at his feet were stained red.
Lifting the fabric to his nose, he sniffed. The metallic odor of blood hit him hard.
“Ernie, are you hurt?” Draping the scarf over the back of one of the outdoor chairs, he picked up the cat, even though he knew Ernie didn’t like being handled. The cat wriggled but let him examine his red-stained muzzle without scratching or biting. The red came off easily, and Wade could see no sign of any injury to the cat.
But the blood seemed fresh. Had he caught a mouse or
