Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [30]
“Her father’s worried?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
Elijah picked up his own stone, immediately skipping it out across the cold, quiet water, away from the two ducks on the far shore. It skipped once, twice, three times. “What’s with you and Nora’s father?”
“Thomas? Nothing, really. We ran into each other cross-country skiing in February and realized we’re both from Washington.” She continued rubbing her stone, as if it might suddenly produce a genie and grant her three wishes. “We stayed in touch.”
“He’s from a prominent Virginia family.”
“Yes, he’s quite the gentleman.”
“Ah. No wonder you two didn’t stick. You like your bad boys.”
She ignored him and tried skipping her stone across the pond, but it went straight in. “I never have gotten the hang of skipping stones. You must have shown me how to do it a million times.” Using the toe of her running shoe, she scraped another stone free from the dirt. “Just to set the record straight, there was never anything between Thomas and me.”
“So you didn’t hit the self-destruct button because he got engaged?”
“I fell for a prank and intercepted a barrage of airsoft pellets. If I’d wanted to self-destruct, I could have picked a more efficient way than getting nailed with a fake gun.” She scooped up her stone and rubbed the dirt off it. “Elijah, if what you’re up to has anything to do with Ambassador Bruni’s death, I need to know.”
“Why?”
She narrowed a look at him and didn’t answer.
He asked, “Have you checked with your friends in Washington about what happened this morning?”
He noted a thinning of her lips as she curved her arm, reared back and tried again, flinging her stone with ferocity if not much finesse. It skipped once. An improvement. But she still didn’t meet his eye.
Elijah put two and two together. “You tried checking with friends. No one took your call.”
“It’s not that simple.” She rubbed her hands together, brushing off the dirt from her rocks. “Elijah, people in town say you’re not satisfied with the official explanation of your father’s death. If you have reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident—”
“I’m just here skipping stones.”
She steadied her gaze on him. “Take whatever questions you have to the police, Elijah. Let them get the answers.”
Her words hit him in all the wrong places. He picked up another stone and shot it across the water, getting close enough to the ducks for them to move toward the opposite bank.
He turned to Jo, looked her straight in the eye. “Maybe I’ll buy your dad a cup of coffee and tell him I’m thinking about sleeping with you again.”
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her fleece jacket. “Go ahead, Elijah. Give me your best shot. I’m not a besotted teenager anymore.”
“Not a teenager, Jo. Still besotted.”
“Ha. Don’t you wish.” But he thought he heard just the slightest catch in her voice. She glanced around at the stone guesthouse, which, like everything on the estate, was bucolic, perfect. “Nora’s sense of trust must have taken a hit when her mother had an affair and then married one of her father’s best friends.”
“It couldn’t have helped when her father didn’t do anything about it.”
“Like what, shoot him?”
“He was passive.” Elijah started up the slight incline to a stone walk. He’d parked his truck in the turnaround on the side of the road. Time to get out of there, before he really did something he regretted. But he turned back to Jo and finished his thought. “Nora needed to see him stand up for himself. He didn’t have to fight. He could have forgiven her mother and Bruni. Instead he weaseled out of doing anything.”
Jo cocked her head back and gave him a knowing look. “Elijah. It wasn’t the same for us—fifteen years ago we were kids.”
“I should have fought for you, Jo,” he said suddenly, not exactly sure where the words came from. “Think of what might have been if I had. Even if I’d ended up in the army and you in the Secret Service—”
“We’d have split up in six months.”
“That’s not what you believe.”
“Forgiving yourself is a lot harder than forgiving someone else.”
He took two steps back