Cold River - Carla Neggers [34]
“No one’s judging her, Rose,” Jo interjected.
Rose didn’t back down. “Being up at the cabin, seeing for herself where Devin and Nora and you and Elijah were almost killed, had to be emotional for her.”
Elijah opened the heavy door to the dark crypt and looked inside. “Rigby knew what he went up the mountain to do. Things worked out the only way they could. Him dead. Jo and those two kids alive.”
“And you, too, Elijah,” Rose said.
He glanced back from the threshold of the crypt and grinned at his sister. “Well, yeah. Goes without saying.”
That was Elijah, Sean thought. His soldier brother was a survivor, something their father had believed and in which he’d found comfort—until the final weeks of his life. He’d called Sean in early April. “I just don’t have a good feeling,” his father had said. “I think Elijah’s in Afghanistan, but who knows? Sean…I’d trade my life for Elijah’s. For yours or A.J.’s or Rose’s. I swear I would.”
Sean had tried to reassure him. “We know that, Pop. Don’t worry.”
“Elijah’s seen combat. He can’t talk about most of it, but he’s never been seriously wounded. What if his luck’s run out?”
“Not Elijah. He’s the luckiest man alive.”
“He’d be here in Black Falls if I hadn’t kicked him out—”
“Or in a prison cell, or the ground. Elijah wasn’t on a good path, Pop.”
“Jo would have straightened him out if I hadn’t interfered. If I’d just let nature—fate—take its course.”
Drew Cameron hadn’t been an introspective man, but his fear for his soldier son’s safety had been real and deep—and, as it turned out, warranted. Elijah had survived the firefight and his life-threatening injury. By October, he was back in Black Falls, the hometown he’d never wanted to leave. A month later, he’d confronted the killing partners hired to murder his father on Cameron Mountain.
Sean had never thought much about staying or leaving Vermont. He’d thought in terms of objectives. What did he want? What did he have to do to get it? He was thinking in those terms now. His main objective was to figure out what Hannah was up to before he left for California with her brothers.
“If Hannah is withholding information,” Jo said, “she needs to start talking. Now.”
Elijah walked across the lane to the edge of the woods. “If this network of hired killers is planning more murders and Hannah can help—”
“She’d want to,” Rose said, not letting him finish.
“Not me,” Ryan “Grit” Taylor said in his light Southern accent as he ambled up the lane. He had a small apple in one hand. He bit into it. “I’d keep my mouth shut and bake cookies. Stay the hell out of this mess.”
Sean had noticed the Navy SEAL arrive in a car he’d borrowed from A.J. at the lodge. Dark, wiry and ultrafit, Grit had lost his lower right leg in the same firefight that had nearly taken Elijah’s life in Afghanistan in April. A member of Grit’s team, another SEAL named Michael Ferrerra, had been killed. While in rehab in Washington, Grit had helped Elijah look into Alex Bruni’s hit-and-run death. He’d flown back and forth between Washington and Vermont in the past five weeks, but basically he’d been camped out in one of Jo’s run-down cabins on the frozen lake below the lodge.
Jo frowned at him. “Why?”
“Fear. No good options. Make a wrong move and end up a target of unknown killers. Make a wrong move and end up irritating a Cameron or Harper.” Grit pointed his apple in the general direction of Jo and the Camerons. “You people are scary.”
“You don’t know Hannah Shay,” Jo said.
“I’ve been to Three Sisters Café. Hannah wears a green apron and bakes cupcakes, and she’s studying to be a lawyer. Small. Prettier than she thinks she is.”
“And hard as nails,” Sean said. “She’s not afraid of us.”
“I am,” Grit said. “I’ve had quite the immersion into you hard-bitten Yankees since November. You don’t let up. Really scary.”
Elijah rolled his eyes. “Eat your apple, Grit.”
Myrtle Smith picked her way along the