Cold River - Carla Neggers [64]
If they thought she was holding back something that would help them find out who’d ordered Drew Cameron’s death, yes.
She couldn’t very well blame them.
She heard the swinging door open and shut and assumed it was Dominique or Beth, but the footsteps on the old wood floor had a distinctly male sound to them. Resisting the impulse to turn around, Hannah tossed the paper towels in the trash and got out of there, grabbing her car keys and her jacket and charging out the back door.
Sean followed her out to her car. “I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t even know where I’m headed.”
“To see Bowie.”
“Then you can just drive fast and beat me there.”
She climbed into her car and started the engine. Drew had told her she wasn’t one to let her emotions dictate her actions, but she had the night at O’Rourke’s when some idiots started flinging insults—and now she was again, letting the Cameron brothers get to her. They were just trying to find out answers to their father’s murder.
“So am I,” she whispered to herself, and backed out of the driveway, leaving Sean standing in the frigid air as she drove past him and out toward the hollow where she and Bowie O’Rourke had spent their childhoods.
Sixteen
Hannah checked Bowie’s place on the river first, but his van wasn’t in the short driveway. He lived in a wreck of a house that he claimed to be renovating. Wood was stacked neatly under a homemade lean-to, smoke curling out of a stovepipe chimney. This wasn’t the romanticized Vermont of postcards, nostalgia or tourists. There were a few houses strung along the river on what was now a back road, a stone wall running along one side of what used to be a more traveled road.
Keep going, and she’d end up back at the logging road at the base of the north side of Cameron Mountain where Sean had parked yesterday. Could Kyle Rigby and Melanie Kendall simply have had Drew Cameron under surveillance and followed him up the mountain? The April snowstorm would have covered their tracks. No one was sure of Drew’s exact route, but he hadn’t parked at the old logging road at the bottom of the short, steep trail down from the north side of the mountain. As near as anyone could figure, he’d taken one of the main trails that started out by the lodge.
The police didn’t believe the two killers had followed him. They believed they’d waited for him in his cabin.
Which meant they’d known about it in advance.
The wind stirred up snow as Hannah got out of her car. The river was frozen, the silence almost eerie. The landscape seemed so desolate. Or maybe it was her mood.
She didn’t linger and headed back down the road to the open stretch of the river that was light-years from the narrow, isolated hollow where she had spent the first twenty years of her life. The house where she’d grown up had been condemned and torn down. Her mother used to joke about setting fire to it, but she’d loved its quiet, pretty location. She’d commuted from home to Castleton State College, until she finally saved enough money to rent a room at the Robinsons’ house. She’d just graduated from college when her mother died, leaving Devin and Toby underage orphans. Foster care had loomed if Hannah hadn’t gone to Judge Robinson and begged him to help her figure out how to become their legal guardian.
She came to the Whittaker estate, which had always been owned by out-of-staters. Bowie’s van was parked in the turnaround by the stone guesthouse. It had been divided into two side-by-side apartments. Hannah followed an icy walk to the front porch and called to him. He didn’t answer, but she went inside anyway, finding him in the apartment where Nora Asher had lived briefly. All her belongings had been removed, and Bowie had already moved furniture out of his way and covered it up with paint cloths.
His face had blossomed into purple splotches. The bandage on his hand seemed to be free of blood.