Falling in Love on Willow Creek by Debbie Mason

Chapter Fourteen

Chase stared at his partner, who simply shrugged like what he’d just told Sadie was no big deal. But it was a big deal. To Chase, and to her. “Sadie, I can—”

She held up a hand. “Don’t bother. There’s nothing you can say that I want to hear.” Her eyes met his. They were cold, and the expression on her face was one of icy disdain. “You’re not staying with me and my daughter at the cottage.”

Chase took a step toward her, raising his hands when she backed away. “Look, I know you’re upset, and I don’t blame you. But you need protection, Sadie.”

“Call one of your FBI buddies or get Gabe to assign one of his deputies to protect us. I don’t care who it is, as long as it’s not you.”

Before he could respond, she sent him one last killing glare and then stalked out of the office and slammed the door.

“Ouch. If looks could kill, you’d be dead, buddy.”

“Thanks to you. That was a bullshit move, Black.”

“It was your call, remember? You’re the one who blew our cover.” He grinned. “So looks like you’re staying with Mrs. M, and I’m playing house with Sadie and the demon spawn.”

“No, we stick to the plan,” Chase said, barely resisting the urge to wipe the smirk from Black’s face. “Once Sadie has a chance to cool down, I’ll explain to her why it has to be me.”

“Let me know when you plan to give her the news. I want a ringside seat.”

As the hours ticked by without Sadie responding to his texts or his attempts to call her, Chase debated skipping the last two hours of his shift and heading back into town. He’d manned the visitors’ center for the morning, helped rescue two lost hikers by midafternoon, and now was on trail-maintenance duty, so he figured he’d met his park ranger responsibilities for the day.

He glanced at the wildflowers in the meadow as he walked toward the cottage on Willow Creek and wondered if they’d make an acceptable peace offering. But then he remembered the look on Sadie’s face seconds before she slammed the office door, and he knew he had to do better. Black would be of no help, and it wasn’t like Chase could call any of Sadie’s friends to ask for advice. If Chase played it right, her grandmother might have a suggestion. After all, she seemed to believe he and Sadie were dating.

He crossed the dirt road and headed for the rock under the weeping willow. Pulling out his cell phone, he checked the screen. Nothing from Sadie or Black. His partner was ignoring him too. Chase sat on the rock and called Black. He answered on the second ring.

“Seriously, Roberts. I’m working here. I don’t have time to respond to your hourly texts. Nothing’s changed. She’s still pissed at you, and at me.”

“Did she at least talk to her grandmother about you renting a room?”

“Oh yeah, she took care of that all right. She told Mrs. M I love to listen to opera, play Monopoly, and watch the Hallmark Channel.”

“Sounds like you’re lucky she didn’t tell Agnes you’re also a vegetarian who likes to play hair and makeup,” Chase said around a smile.

“Don’t even joke about that. I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s not as sweet as she looks. She has a vindictive streak a mile wide.”

Chase would rather her be mean and vindictive than sad and hurt. Although he had a feeling that, under her icy disdain this morning, there’d been a boatload of hurt and betrayal. She’d trusted him.

“I can’t wait to see what she has in store for you,” Black continued. “I’m guessing she hasn’t responded to you yet.”

“No, she hasn’t.” He gritted his teeth. He hated to ask his partner for a favor, but he didn’t have a choice. “If you can get her alone, you need to impress upon her how important it is that our cover isn’t blown. To that end, I’m the only one who can stay with her without raising suspicions.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll see what I can do.”

Chase blinked, surprised. “I expected you to put up more of a fight.”

“Well, you’re the only one who the members of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department might not consider a deterrent if they wanted to make a move on her. Now I have to go.” His partner disconnected.

Despite the sunshine glinting off the creek and warming the place where he sat on the rock, the potential danger to Sadie and Michaela left Chase cold. He leaned against the tree and closed his eyes. They needed to bring in Elijah sooner rather than later. The gurgle of the creek and the chirping of birds alleviated some of the tension in his chest. It made it easier to think, to come up with a plan to bring Elijah in. He’d need Sadie’s help to do so.

As he mulled over how to win back her trust, something wet touched his hand and then the weight of his phone disappeared. “What the…?” He opened his eyes to see a golden retriever grinning at him around his cell phone.

Chase came to his feet slowly so as not to startle the dog. “Okay, come here. Give me back my phone, and I’ll give you a treat.” He patted his thigh. The dog cocked his head, and Chase could have sworn he was laughing at him.

Chase picked up a stick. “How about catch? You want to play catch?” He threw the stick, but instead of taking the bait, the dog ran alongside the creek. Chase sprinted after him.

“Finn! Come here, boy!” a woman called. She sounded like she was half a mile up the road.

“Over here!” Chase yelled in hopes that the dog’s owner would have more luck getting his phone. The dog turned and barreled toward him.

Chase smiled, relieved, and bent to retrieve his phone. “Good boy. That’s a good—ugh.”

The dog headbutted him in the stomach, hard. Chase lost his breath and his balance. Arms pinwheeling, he slipped on green-slime-coated rocks and landed flat on his back in the creek. The fast-moving, surprisingly deep and frigid creek. Finn bounded in after him without Chase’s phone in his mouth. Chase might have been relieved if the dog hadn’t landed on top of him, pushing him under. From beneath the icy, crystal-clear water, he saw the dog peering down at him. Chase wrapped his arms around the retriever and managed to get himself in an upright position. From the other side of the creek, an older woman frantically waved her arms. “Save him. Please save him!”

Chase didn’t know if she was talking about the dog saving him or him saving the dog, but he didn’t have time to think about it. The current was pushing them toward a line of boulders jutting out of the creek. Keeping one arm wrapped around the dog’s neck, Chase used the other arm to swim toward shore. His limbs were stiff—numb from the cold—and his clothes were weighing him down. It wasn’t until the dog got in on the act that Chase made any headway. Finn towed Chase to shore, depositing him on the rocks before racing to his owner.

“My poor baby,” she crooned, then lifted her gaze to Chase as he dragged himself the rest of the way out of the water. “Thank you for saving him. I don’t know what I’d do without him. How can I ever repay you?”

There was no way he was going to tell the woman that Finn had saved him. If it weren’t for her dog, Chase wouldn’t have almost drowned. “All in a day’s work, ma’am. But I’d suggest you keep your dog on a leash from now on.”

After promising to do as he suggested, the woman set off with her dog trailing after her. Chase waited until they’d reached a car parked on the side of the road before going in search of his phone. It was lying on the grass. Other than some teeth marks and slobber, it looked none the worse for wear. Apparently, it was still working, because there was a text from Black on the screen.

She’s not happy about it, but she agreed to you providing her protection. You owe me, partner. Dinner from Zia Maria’s on Main Street for starters. I’ve called in the order.

An hour later, Chase walked into Zia Maria’s on Main Street. It smelled like heaven and Luciano’s, his favorite Italian restaurant in DC. In comparison to the fine-dining establishment he’d frequented with his grandfather for the past two decades, this was a tiny hole in the wall with terra-cotta tiles, the candles in wicker-wrapped Chianti bottles casting a warm, friendly glow on the red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Two of the restaurant’s ten round tables were occupied by diners.

The men at one of the tables were around his grandfather’s age. Chase imagined the judge sitting with them, enjoying the easy camaraderie of lifelong friends, instead of sitting with the residents of the exclusive retirement home where he currently resided.

Chase was his grandfather’s only visitor at the retirement home. The judge had devoted his life to his legal career. He hadn’t wasted his time making or keeping friends. The couples that his grandparents had socialized with had been more her friends than his. They’d drifted away when his wife died, long before Chase and his brother had moved in with him.

Chase worried how his grandfather was faring without his twice-weekly visits. The judge still refused to take his calls. He’d been angrier about Chase’s demotion than he had been.

Chase stuck his hands in the pockets of the jeans that Black had insisted he buy. The other agent had shaken his head when Chase unpacked his suitcase at the no-name motel off the highway where they’d rented two adjoining rooms last week. According to Black, Chase needed jeans to fit in, not suits and chinos.

Chase glanced at the menu written in Italian on two chalkboards that hung from the redbrick walls to the side of a long line of customers waiting at the counter. The lineup as much as the basil-scented air gave Chase hope that the food would be as authentic as the atmosphere.

“Look, look who it is,” a diminutive woman cried from behind the counter, waving the customers in line to the side with a wooden spoon stained with tomato sauce. She wore her dark hair in a bouffant style similar to the one his grandmother used to wear.

He turned to see who she was talking about. There was no one behind him.

“Come, come.” She gestured him to the front of the line. “Eh,” she said when someone grumbled a complaint. “He’s a hero. Nessa, she say he saved Finn. You know how much she love that dog. Come, come.”

Chase apologized to the people in line. Most of them didn’t seem to mind now that they learned he’d “saved” the dog. He wondered what they’d think if he told them the truth.

“You’re a good boy,” she said to Chase, her smile as bright as the sauce splattered on her white apron. “You take care of our Sadie, and now, you take care of Finn. Eh, look at that face.” She put down her wooden spoon and reached up to grab his cheeks between her strong fingers. “What a handsome boy.” With her fingers still clamped on his cheeks, she turned his face to the customers in line. “Just like a movie star, eh? If I was younger, I’d give our Sadie a run for her money.”

She let go of his cheeks and patted his face. “She needs someone like you. A good man.” She wrinkled her nose. “The bambina’s daddy? He no good.” Then the disgust cleared from her expression, and she clapped her hands. “Now, what can Zia Maria get for you? We gotta fatten our Sadie up, eh? Too skinny. It’s the depression. It happens after you have the bambino sometimes.” She leaned to the side to look past him. “You had it, eh, Nina? You too, Marge.”

Apparently, Nina and Marge weren’t the only women in the restaurant to have suffered from postpartum depression, and for the next fifteen minutes, every one of them shared their experiences and advice with Chase.

“Ma, you’re backing things up,” a man called from the open kitchen, sliding a pizza into the wood-fired oven.

“I’ll write it all down for you,” Maria told Chase, holding up a pencil and pad of paper. “You make her listen. She pretends everything’s okay, but we know it’s not so. Too proud, that one. She won’t even let her friends help. But you, she’ll listen to you.”

He highly doubted that was the case, but he appreciated Maria’s faith in him, just as much as he appreciated her advice.

They were right. Sadie wasn’t just exhausted; she was depressed. He hadn’t recognized the signs until he heard their stories. It wasn’t something the baby books he’d read had touched upon. They were focused on the baby’s development, not the mother.

From behind him, a new voice chimed in. “You’ll have your work cut out for you, Mr. Knight. Sadie’s as stubborn and as proud as her grandmother.”

He turned to the woman with the long, straight coal-black hair at the back of the line, recognizing her from the Highland Falls Herald. It was the town’s mayor, Winter Johnson.

“The mayor is right. Agnes, she’s too proud to tell us her store, it is in trouble. It’s Elijah’s fault. Her grandson,” Maria confided to Chase. “He was a sweet boy, smart but not, how you say, smart about the people. Our Sadie and Agnes”—she wiggled her baby finger—“he had them wrapped so tight he say jump, they say, how high.”

“Ma.” Her son rattled off something in Italian.

“A little like your Marcello, eh, Maria?” an older man at one of the tables said.

“No pizza for you, Ed,” Marcello yelled from the kitchen.

Everyone laughed, and Maria waved her spoon at her son. “This is important, Marcello. You want Agnes to lose her store or what?”

“If you keep talking and not taking orders, we’ll be in the same boat. Bring it up at the next business-association meeting. Abby will be there. She’ll figure something out.”

“Okay, okay.” Maria shrugged. “What he say, it is true. Abby, she’ll know what to do. Mayor, you’ll take care of that, eh?” Once Winter Johnson confirmed that she’d put it on the top of that month’s agenda, Maria waved Chase off to the side. “I got the order for the store. The nice boy, he said you’d pick it up. I’ll make yours. I know what Sadie likes. Better, I know what she needs. You too. Don’t worry, Zia Maria knows what you’ll like,” she said before calling out orders to her son for what sounded like every customer in line.

While he waited for his order to be filled along with everyone else, the conversation turned to the body discovered in the woods. It was a conversation Chase listened to with great interest. His subtle questions eventually steered the conversation in exactly the direction he wanted it to go. The customers began surmising where Elijah was lying low.

“No, he wouldn’t go to Sadie’s,” Maria dismissed a woman’s suggestion. “She cut ties with him last summer. The cocaine. Bah. That boy needs a kick in the culo.”

“So does Payton. It’s her fault he got involved with the gang on Whiteside Mountain in the first place.” Nina rubbed her fingers together, the universal sign for money. “She was always after him to buy her things. Never satisfied, that one. She always wanted bigger and better.”

“You’ve had it in for that girl since she broke your boy’s heart, Nina,” a woman said from one of the tables.

“I agree with Nina,” the woman sitting beside her at the table said. “My boy’s been friends with Elijah since they were in grade school. That girl’s been leading him around by the nose since they got together.”

“Word is she has a bun in the oven and Elijah is the daddy,” one of the older men said.

Interesting. Chase wondered if Elijah had shared the news with his sister. If he had, it might create an opening for Sadie to get closer to Payton Howard. The more Chase learned about the woman, the more she came into play as a means of bringing Elijah in.

The women in line turned to look at the older man who’d shared the news. “What? I’m just repeating what I heard at Highland Brew,” the man defended himself.

“If that’s true, he’d better stop hiding out in the woods and get himself a good paying job.”

“How’s he supposed to do that, Ed? He’s got the Whiteside Mountain Gang after him. You ask me, all of us should be praying he stays far away from Highland Falls. We don’t need anyone coming into town looking for him.”

“They’re already too close for comfort if you ask me,” Ed said. “What with the dead body in the woods and the shoot-out last night. Heard they came after Elijah.”

So it looked like Gabe’s effort to keep last night’s shooting quiet hadn’t exactly panned out. The chief had admitted it was tough to keep anything quiet in the small town. But while Chase wasn’t thrilled word had gotten out, he was relieved that Sadie’s part in it hadn’t appeared to.

“Damn fool,” the older man said. “What was he thinking bringing them so close to Willow Creek and his sister’s place?”

The older man made a good point. Something Chase planned to bring up with Sadie once she deigned to speak to him again. He figured he’d be waiting awhile.

“That’s what I said to my wife just this morning,” the man’s tablemate agreed. “Elijah’s been playing in those woods since he was a little tyke. Aside from his sister, the lad knows more hidey-holes in those woods than all the citizens of Highland Falls combined. The caves south of Honeysuckle Ridge, for one.”

Some of the other customers joined in, naming the places where Elijah Gray used to play. The perfect locations for him to lie low. Exactly the information Chase had been hoping for. He repeated the locations in his head as Maria waved him over to the counter.

“You come back for tomorrow’s special, eh?” she said after he’d paid.

“If this tastes as good as it smells, you won’t be able to keep me away, Zia Maria.” Not only for the food but for the gossip as well.

It took another twenty minutes for him to get out of the restaurant. Someone asked if he’d had a Bigfoot sighting yet, which of course he hadn’t. How could he, he asked, when they didn’t exist? It was something he shouldn’t have said out loud, because every customer at Zia Maria’s had a Bigfoot story to tell, including Zia Maria.

By the time Chase pulled his car alongside the sidewalk in front of I Believe in Unicorns, Sadie was turning the sign in the window to Closed. Their eyes met and held through the glass. She turned away. She might as well have given him the middle finger.

It bothered him that she was mad at him, far more than it should. He couldn’t become intimately involved with the sister of their primary suspect, a suspect herself in his partner’s eyes. Even if Chase disagreed with Black, it didn’t mean he didn’t have some suspicions of his own when it came to Sadie, which made his feelings for her more difficult to understand.

But understand them or not, they were there. So maybe it was for the best that she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Living under the same roof with Sadie would be easier if she kept her distance.