Broken Bonds - Karen Harper MIRA

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them toward town.

      * * *

      “Again, I can’t thank you enough,” Matt told her as he got out of her truck and hurried around to open her door in the small parking lot next to the sheriff’s office on Main Street in Cold Creek.

      He was feeling worse—a sudden limp caused by a leg cramp, sore muscles all over, maybe from holding himself so tense as well as his leap for life. He was also mad as hell, but he was trying to control his fury around this woman, not take things out on her.

      He figured that Charlene Lockwood was probably midtwenties to his midthirties. She was so petite next to his six-foot height. Slender, almost delicate looking, and yet she seemed as sturdy as they come, despite hands gripping the steering wheel all the way down the mountain. She emanated determination, but seemed strangely vulnerable, which, as bad as he felt, hit him like a sledgehammer. She was a looker in a saucy way with her pert nose, blue eyes and full mouth framed by sun-streaked windblown brown hair. She had a heart-shaped face and, obviously, a big heart. And no ring on her left hand, though he had more important things to worry about right now.

      Sheriff McCabe came barreling out the front door of the police station as they started toward it. “Hey, Char,” he called. “Thought you were visiting mountain kids truant from school. Listen, Tess and I don’t want you to move out, really. Oh, Matt. Things okay out at Lake Azure? You look— Are you okay, Matt? Are you and Char here together?”

      “Gabe, someone shoved his truck off a cliff on Pinecrest Mountain where I was visiting a family. I found him just before it went over.”

      Matt looked at Char. He suddenly felt dizzy. Yeah, that had happened to him. He was not someone else watching it from afar. “I’d better sit down,” he said, taking Char’s arm because that seemed natural now. “Sheriff, maybe she can come in with me—to tell at least the part she saw. I like to think I would rescue a fair maiden in distress, but it was the other way around.”

      Matt realized he was staring only at Char, too long, too close. She stared back at him. The sheriff cleared his throat.

      “Let’s go inside. You just caught me in time, but what I had to do can wait. How about I talk to you first, Matt, and then interview Char for her perspective on all this after? Do you need a doctor?”

      “Not right now. I need answers.”

      “Let’s work on that,” the sheriff said as he put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and opened the door he’d just exited. “Are you claiming it wasn’t an accident, but intentional? Did you get a license plate, a description of the driver?”

      Matt shook his head, then looked back to make sure Char had come in, too. She was talking to the receptionist, sinking into a chair.

      “It had to be a planned attack,” he told the sheriff. “I’m not certain if I was the target or my senior partner, since I was in the company truck he and his driver sometimes use when he’s in town and visits his fracking sites. I’ve never been so shocked or scared in all my life—which I almost lost.”

      He took a last glance at Char down the hall, just as she looked up at him and their eyes met again. A terrible day, he thought, but something good had come from it, too.

       3

      Matt turned down Sheriff McCabe’s offer of a doctor but did take him up on using the restroom down the hall. He leaned stiff-armed on the basin and stared at himself in the mirror. A mess. But blessed. Blessed to be alive. And, despite the terrible situation, to have met the only woman he’d felt an instant attraction to for a long time. And to have looked like this. Oh, hell, worse than that. Some local lunatic might be out to kill him and he didn’t have a clue who.

      He washed up with water and the metal dispenser’s liquid soap and dried his face and hands with paper towels. If that idiot in the black pickup with the half-hidden face had been after him, why? He must have been followed. Maybe he was being watched.

      Matt walked into the sheriff’s office and sat down in a chair across the cluttered desk from Sheriff McCord. “You still okay?” the sheriff asked. “Here, I got you some coffee and, sorry if that doughnut’s stale, but thought you might need to eat something.”

      “What about Charlene? Is she okay?”

      “As you may know, I’m married to her younger sister, and let me tell you, the Lockwood girls are tough cookies. Char said she was glad she was there for you.”

      “She’s been great, though I can tell she doesn’t like driving up there. She lived out West, but not in the mountains, I guess.”

      “She was a social worker near the Navajo Reservation for several years, an advocate for juveniles and families in the outlying areas. She left recently, still misses it, I think, though she’s glad to be back with her sisters and helping kids here. At first, she worked for my wife, Tess, at her day care center. She also helped her other sister, Kate, with her archaeological dig at Mason Mound, sifting soil for ancient Adena bone fragments.”

      “So, she lives with you and Tess but is moving out?”

      Gabe nodded and took a swig of his coffee. “Charlene Lockwood’s stubborn as they come. We tried to talk her out of it but she’s got a cabin rented, not so far from your area.”

      Matt sat up straighter. That sounded good. He didn’t want to seem too pushy. He owed her dinner at the very least. Probably he owed her his life. If she hadn’t arrived and tried to help him, he might not have tried to get out when he did.

      “So,” Gabe said, pulling out a piece of paper and taking a pen off his desk, “tell me from the beginning what happened today up on Pinecrest, any and every detail. Then, as soon as my deputy runs you home, he and I will find the site of the wreck and take a good look at it. I’ll interview Char later.”

      “Char spotted the wreck. I ought to hire her as a bodyguard— Just kidding,” he added when Gabe’s eyebrows shot up. “You evidently think she’s the one who needs that at her new cabin.”

      Gabe leveled a long look at him. “With all the outsiders in town, right. She’s very idealistic, out to help anyone, especially poor kids.”

      Maybe he had overstepped, Matt thought. He was a far cry from poor kids, and he hadn’t felt idealistic in years. Nose to grindstone, eye on the stock market and building up a big investment in the people and places of Lake Azure. He supposed, especially compared to the locals around here, he was a driven workaholic.

      “Okay. Let me tell you what happened from the beginning,” he said, and figured he’d start with the fact he was taking things he’d bought for Woody McKitrick’s family, things that were now so much ash at the bottom of a ravine where he could have ended up the same way.

      * * *

      Char was disappointed when Gabe called his receptionist in the main office to say that she should go home and he’d get her story tonight. She wanted to see how Matt was doing now, maybe drive him to Lake Azure. But Gabe was going to take Matt and Jace Miller, his deputy, to see the burned wreck of the Lake Azure truck, then he’d see that Matt got home. Matt had insisted on going to the collision and crash site, too.

      She headed to Gabe and Tess’s big, old, recently renovated house with its newly built preschool child care center addition in front. Char had stayed first with her older sister, Kate, at her fiancé Grant Mason’s large home, but the Adena dig team—college students from Ohio State University—were in and out so much it was like an open house.

      But now, she’d found an inexpensive three-room rental log house, built as a hunting cabin, ironically located not too far from where Matt must live since it overlooked the Lake Azure area. The place had a great view, not to mention a fireplace, two space heaters, electricity and indoor plumbing. The man who owned it had suffered a heart attack and wouldn’t be hunting—or just retreating to his man cave, as his wife had put it—until next year.

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