reached for the phone, knowing that this caller wouldn’t be nagging him about taking a vacation. The mayor would be quite content for Dan to work twenty-four hours a day if it meant putting a quick and quiet end to this increasingly troublesome arson problem.
“Do something with it.”
In response to the reckless order, Paula Campbell put her hands on her ample hips and studied Lindsey curiously. “And just what would you have me do with it?”
Eyeing her reflection in the beauty-shop mirror, Lindsey shrugged. “I don’t know. Cut it. Curl it. Fluff it. Just do something so I don’t look like a twelve-year-old boy.”
Paula chuckled and reached for a towel and a cape. “No one would mistake you for a boy. Not with those pretty, big green eyes of yours—or that perfect skin. But if you want a softer look than that shaggy style you’ve worn for so long, we can certainly take care of that. You want to flip through some style books?”
“No. I trust you to know what looks good. Just make it a style I can maintain without a lot of fussing, okay?”
“You got it.” Intrigued by the challenge Lindsey had just presented, Paula set to work with enthusiasm. “What’s inspired this makeover, anyway? Someone you’re trying to impress? Some male?”
Painfully aware of the women listening openly from the three other stations in the four-operator salon, Lindsey responded with a laugh that she hoped was credibly casual and derisive. “Yeah, sure, I’m hoping Brad Pitt will leave his wife and find me on the streets of Edstown. Can’t a woman change her hairstyle without being accused of trying to catch a man? I’ve just had a birthday—isn’t that reason enough to want to make a change?”
“Well, sure—especially a momentous birthday like thirty or forty or fifty. But you just turned twenty-six, not exactly one of those numbers that usually send women running for a makeover or a facelift. So I figured it must be a guy.”
“Too bad your new boss is already taken, heh, Lindsey? That Cameron North is one fine-looking man,” the woman being tinted and permed in the next chair murmured.
Lindsey smiled. “He’s definitely good-looking—and definitely taken. He and Serena are the most blissful newlyweds I’ve ever been around.”
Lila Forsythe sighed wistfully from beneath her helmet of hair rollers. “Their story is so romantic. The way she saved his life—the way he fell in love with her before he even recovered his memories. Serena’s mother thinks it was love at first sight, you know. That’s why she wasn’t worried that they got married so quickly.”
“Love at first sight.” Paula snorted as she spun Lindsey’s chair around so she could lower her to the sink for a hair washing. “I’ve hardly ever seen it work out. Maybe Serena and Cameron will be the exception.”
Lindsey kept her mouth shut. She had no intention of confessing that her own experience with love at first sight had lasted twenty years and counting. She could just imagine Paula’s response to that scenario.
She only half believed it, herself. Maybe she was just in the habit of being in love with Dan Meadows, rather than actually in love with him. But if she left town without at least trying to find out for sure, she suspected that the question would haunt the back of her mind for the rest of her life.
Dan thought of Lindsey again during lunch, which consisted of a deli sandwich at his desk. Hazel had brought him the sandwich when she returned from her own lunch break, and had then spent five minutes lecturing him about his work habits before he’d sent her away so he could eat in peace.
He’d spent the past two hours in an intensive meeting with the fire chief and two arson investigators from Little Rock. A pile of new notes littered his desk now, but the meeting had actually accomplished very little. The consultants had looked over every scrap of evidence on the Edstown fires, including a long visit to the most recent crime scene, but the conclusions they’d drawn hadn’t been much different from what Dan and Fire Chief John Ford had already figured out. Someone around here was deliberately setting fires and covering his tracks so well there was no way to tell who he was. Yet.
Pushing a hand through his brown hair—which felt shaggy to him, reminding him he needed to make time for a cut—he wondered how long it would take Lindsey to come snooping around in an attempt to find out everything that had been said in the meeting. He’d have to be suitably vague—resulting, he hoped, in an article that the locals would find reassuring. He was sure they’d be glad to know that arson experts had been consulted—he just wouldn’t tell them the experts hadn’t provided much assistance so far.
Sure enough, it was less than an hour later when Hazel buzzed him. “Got a reporter here from the Evening Star, Chief. Are you in?”
Hearing the dry humor in her voice, he knew the reporter was aware that Dan was in. He could still say no, of course. But he might as well get this over with. “Yeah, Hazel, send her in.”
He pushed his hand through his hair again and made a halfhearted effort to straighten his desk, making sure no confidential paperwork was visible. He wouldn’t put it past Lindsey to snoop through them when he wasn’t paying close attention.
But it wasn’t Lindsey who ambled into his office a couple of minutes later. This was a man—young, tall, lanky-limbed, a lazy smile gracing his squarish face and reflecting in his cool-gray eyes.
“Well, hey, Riley,” Dan drawled, telling himself he wasn’t really disappointed that it wasn’t Lindsey. One reporter was just like another one, he assured himself. “Is Lindsey busy bugging the fire chief? The mayor, maybe?”
“Lindsey took the day off.” Riley O’Neal arranged himself loosely in one of the chairs on the other side of Dan’s desk. “Cam sent me to find out if there are any leads on the arson story.”
“Lindsey took the day off?” Dan repeated, surprised. “Is she sick?”
“Not as far as I know. Some people have lives outside their jobs, you know.”
The barb was delivered with a grin. Like everyone else in Edstown, Riley was well aware of the police chief’s workaholic tendencies—although it was hardly a trait Riley shared. Riley’s philosophy was to do exactly as much work as necessary to survive, and to spend the rest of his time taking it easy.
Thirty years old, Riley had been working on a novel—or claimed to have been—since he’d graduated from college. He hadn’t grown up in Edstown, but his maternal grandparents had lived here, as did a favorite uncle who still maintained a home here. Riley had visited often enough as a boy that nearly everyone knew him even before he took the job with the local newspaper. He asserted that he liked the slower pace of small town life. Made it easier for him to find time to write, he’d explained.
Dan had always considered Riley a bit of an eccentric, a borderline loner, and a wiseass to boot—but for all of that, he rather liked him. Besides, Riley wasn’t nearly as pushy a reporter as Lindsey was, which made it easier to deal with him when Dan wasn’t in the mood to cooperate with the press.
So there was no reason at all to be disappointed that Riley had shown up when Dan had been expecting Lindsey. After all, if Lindsey moved away, Dan would have to get used to working with other reporters from the local paper.
He would miss her, he realized again, even as he answered Riley’s questions about the arson investigation. Lindsey was practically family to him. So
