Cold River - Carla Neggers [106]
“Everyone did, Vivian.”
She tightened her throw around her as she stared at the fire, obsessed with the thought of the killers in her home. Kyle Rigby and Melanie Kendall had sat here in front of the fire pretending not to know each other.
“You can go back to New York,” Lowell said.
Just the sound of his voice irritated her. “I won’t leave you here alone. We’ll both leave soon. And how would I feel safer by myself in New York?”
“We could hire bodyguards—”
“That’s ridiculous.”
He peeled off his work gloves and set them on top of the wood box. “Are you warming up to the idea of having a dog?”
“No.”
“You could be right. Rose Cameron’s golden retriever is extraordinary, but she has the time, skill and patience to train him. I wouldn’t want an adult dog—I’d want a puppy. I don’t know that I could train one to turn out like Ranger.”
“You couldn’t.” She looked up at Lowell as he dusted bits of bark off his hands. “You just like the idea of a dog. Having a golden retriever trailing behind you here in Vermont fits your image of yourself as a country gentleman.”
“Ranger is a beautiful animal.”
She returned her gaze to the fire. “What if we’re a loose end for these killers? What if we know something and don’t realize it?”
“It’s been a long day. Come have a drink.”
“What if your precious Hannah is involved?” Vivian didn’t move, just drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her throw around them. “What if she and Bowie O’Rourke are working together? She’s tried to put her past behind her, but what if she can’t? What if he knows something about her that she doesn’t want the rest of us to know, and he’s using that to manipulate her? Or vice versa. She knows something about him.”
“This is all a matter for the police,” Lowell said patiently. “We’re not from Black Falls. We weren’t close to Drew Cameron or even to Alex Bruni and the Ashers, for that matter. We certainly weren’t close to Melanie Kendall or Kyle Rigby. We were just being hospitable.”
Vivian hardly heard her husband’s words. He just wasn’t a fighter. “Sean Cameron will take care of Hannah. I have no one who will take care of me.”
“We’re out of coffee and we need milk,” Lowell said.
Of course he wouldn’t reassure her. She watched red-hot coals fall from a burning log. “Lock the door on your way out.”
As he drove down the winding road along the river, Lowell turned up the heat full blast and flipped on the seat warmer. The snow squalls had covered the road with an inch of fresh powder, but the sanders had been out. His car’s headlights were all that penetrated the darkness. There was no moon. The dark mountains loomed around him, and somehow the stars seemed farther away than they did in New York—when they could be seen at all—but they were also brighter, sharper against the black night sky. He and Vivian had talked about taking a class in astronomy and learning the constellations.
More lights appeared as he came to the village. Christmas lights still lit up the town green. He pulled into a space in front of the library and looked across Main Street to Sean Cameron’s brick house and the café.
The café was lit up, and he could see Zack Harper, Beth Harper, Scott Thorne, Dominique Belair—he whispered their names as if they were his friends. He was only forty-eight, but he suddenly felt old. Vivian would say she wanted to meet people in Black Falls and be involved in the community, but she also recognized that they were destined to remain apart from them. “They’ll never let us in,” she’d say, “and that’s not what we want, anyway.”
Yet Lowell longed to walk over to the café and be a part of relationships formed in childhood. He and Vivian and their children and friends lived in a bigger, more open world than this one small, insular Vermont town. He didn’t romanticize Black Falls. He knew its shortcomings. He didn’t care—he wanted this simple life made up not of people scattered across the country, even the globe, but who lived nearby, who had to deal with each other because