She didn’t answer.
He considered putting on his police lights but that was highly, and in that moment frustratingly unethical, so he didn’t.
But he did drive like a bat out of hell.
There were no cars or trucks inside the fence or out of it when he got to the lighthouse, which meant construction was done on her property, which meant they’d be alone.
That was good.
What was bad was that after he got through the gate and drove up, got out and approached the house, there was no sound of barking coming from inside the house.
He moved to the window at the kitchen facing the sea and looked in.
No Cady, no Midnight, no movement.
He walked to the garage and looked in the side window.
No Jag.
She’d made it home, got her dog and took off.
Fuck.
He pulled out his phone, called her, got voicemail and left a message.
“You get this, you call me and you tell me where you are, Cady.”
Coert then went back to his office.
He did his best to keep his mind on work.
His best failed so he went through the motions.
And when it was time, he went to go get his girl from preschool.
They had dinner.
They cleaned up.
They snuggled in front of the TV.
He read her to sleep.
He left her with Shnookie in her bed with her nightlight on.
And he went downstairs and called Cady.
She didn’t pick up.
He felt his stomach sink.
But his mouth moved.
“Call me,” he growled into the phone.
And then he hung up.
The next morning after dropping Janie off at preschool, hearing nothing from Cady, Coert drove back out to the lighthouse.
When he did, he saw what he wasn’t in the state to see the day before.
A long, wide path of snow had been cleared from gate to garage, all along the front of the garage with narrow paths around the lighthouse.
No shovel did that, unless she spent six hours doing it. She had to at least have a mower with a snow plow.
A good one.
He also saw Cady decorated for Christmas.
But as he drove up to the gate, he wondered how she managed it.
There were large, evergreen wreaths on each side of the double gate and heavy evergreen boughs draping along six sections of the fence on either side. More boughs scalloped all around the circumference of the lighthouse, about eight feet up the sides, with even more swathed around the lighthouse door, along the covered walk between the garage and house, and around the garage. She also had wreaths on the house door he could see with big ones like the ones on the gates on the garage doors. The finishing touch was potted spiral pines on either side of the house doors with bigger ones on either side of the garage.
He suspected they were all lit at night and when they were, that would be a show of festive cheer that was classy as all hell. In fact, it was classy as all hell now.
These were distracted thoughts, mostly centered around wondering how she’d managed to do all that by herself, thoughts that were an effort not to think of what lie ahead in talking to her.
Coert stopped outside the gate, got out and moved to the keypad.
He saw he was right. The boughs and wreaths were lit.
And when they were, they were sure to be a showstopper.
He had two digits punched in the keypad when he sensed movement, so he took two steps back to look through the iron bars in a gate that dipped low in the middle.
He didn’t see Cady.
He saw a large man jogging his way. Young, in his twenties, he was Coert’s height but probably had thirty to forty pounds on him, some of this muscle and broadness of shoulders, some of it at his gut.
“Hey!” the guy shouted, still jogging toward him.
Coert looked to the house. He didn’t see any trucks or machinery but maybe the renovation wasn’t done.
“I’m here to see Ms. Moreland,” he told the guy.
“No you’re not.”
Coert’s back snapped straight.
“Pardon?” he asked when the man stopped on the other side of the gate.
The guy looked to his sheriff jacket, to him, but stood solid at the dip in the gate. “Sorry, don’t want any trouble, but gotta say, no you’re not.”
“Can I ask who you are?” Coert queried.
“Last night, the basket case Cady was and hearin’ your name when she talked to her sister on the phone, knowin’ you were the cause of it, feel like sayin’ no. You can’t ask. But seein’ as I gotta make some things clear to you, I’ll tell you I’m Elijah. I rent the apartment over the garage. And I’m Cady’s friend.”
There were things there that hit Coert hard but he focused on only one.
“Cady doesn’t have a sister.”
Elijah’s face screwed up before he replied, “See you didn’t get to know her real good when whatever went down between you two went down since she doesn’t only have a sister, she’s got three.”
Three?
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Dude . . . I mean, Sheriff, she does. I know ’em. I’ve met ’em. Okay, I did that over Skype but it still counts.”
This was interesting, all of it, primarily this guy being close enough to Cady to Skype with her “sisters.”
It was also a waste of time.
“I need to see Cady,” he stated.
“That might be true but she doesn’t need to see you,” Elijah retorted.
Coert opened his mouth but Elijah kept talking.
“Doesn’t matter anyway. She took off this morning to go down to Connecticut. The family is spending Christmas here, but she’s goin’ to meet her niece down there and her sister’s flyin’ out. They’re gonna do some girlie Christmas road trip on the way back up here to try and take Cady’s mind off whatever you did to her yesterday.”
Goddamn it.
“I don’t want trouble from you,” Elijah went on, “but seriously, Cady’s good people. She’s been, like, super cool with me. Actin’ like me hangin’ in her pimped-out studio was a lifesaver when it was me who needed a place to crash after my chick kicked me to the curb. Didn’t have the cabbage to put down a deposit anywhere, sleeping on my bud’s couch seriously sucked. I liked her, she liked me, when things got safe for her, she asked me to stay. That apartment might not be as pimp as the studio but it’s still the freakin’ bomb and she gives it to me for a song, sayin’ it’s worth it. I plow snow and help with Christmas stuff and in the summer I can mow her grass. She knows I’m gettin’ myself together after my girl tore me up and I needed a break. But it hits a guy where it hurts, feelin’ like he’s takin’ advantage of a little thing like that. She doesn’t make me feel like that. Still, it’s there and so I gotta give back where I can.”
He held Coert’s eyes as Coert stared in his, all of this knowledge sluicing through him in good ways and bad, and Elijah’s voice lowered when he continued.
“She was a mess last night, man. Like, Midnight was fah-reeked. I was too. Took forever for Kath to calm her down. And so, I don’t know why you’re here but I know from what I heard you’re not good for her, so if you give a shit about her, do me a solid, no . . . do Cady a solid and just vanish. Yeah?”
Coert’s voice had dipped too when he asked, “When’s she coming back?”
Elijah looked like he was starting to get ticked.
“Man, you are not listening to me.”
“I see you care about Cady and it’s a relief she’s had someone looking out for her, but even with that I still have to tell you this is none of your business.”
“Dude, you are not right ’cause it wasn’t you who had to stop her tossin’ stuff in her suitcase when she got home last night, doin’ that by clampin’ down on her, she was in such a state. And it wasn’t you who had to call Kath and tell her Cady was fallin’ apart. It was me. What was you is who did that to her.”
“There’s a lot happening here I suspect you don’t know,” Coert forced out.
“I got that,” Elijah bit back.
“I need to make sure she’s all right,” Coert made himself share.