Skylar woke with a start and sat up on the couch. It took a moment to get her bearings and figure out where she was—the family room of the two-story rental house on the outskirts of Chattanooga. She must have fallen asleep waiting for Trent to show up. Since the lights had been on the last she remembered, Ivy had probably turned them out and went upstairs to bed.
Was it midnight? Later than that? Maybe she should invest in a cell phone, or at least a watch, so she wouldn’t have to rely on the stars to guess the time. The house was steeped in darkness, except for some moonlight shining in through the transoms above the windows.
And a sliver of light underneath the office door just past the staircase. Had someone broken in?
Goose bumps raised on her arms. She automatically reached for her backpack to get her gun, then swore. Her backpack was upstairs in her bedroom. Wait, she was overreacting. If someone had broken in, they would have set off the alarm. And Ivy would have been down here with her gun. Trent had asked her to do him the favor of taking her here, making sure she was safe until he arrived. And there was no reason for her not to trust Ivy.
She drew a slow, deep breath as her sleepy mind finally began to think logically. Trent. It must be Trent in the office. He’d finally gotten back from whatever errand he’d run. She rubbed her arms and drew another shaky breath. She was so tired of being afraid, of fearing the worst every time she heard a noise.
Or saw a light under a door.
Living like this wasn’t living. Trent had been right about that. She hoped that whatever he’d done tonight got them a step closer to ending the torture that her existence had become. If so, she wanted to know about it. She didn’t want to wait even one more minute.
She padded across the thick rug in her bare feet, stopping when she caught sight of herself in a mirror above a decorative table. Maybe she should go upstairs and change before seeing him. She wasn’t exactly indecent, but she didn’t normally talk to men wearing her nightshirt. Then again, she’d kept her bra on just in case he came home when she was in the family room. And the shirt reached nearly to her knees. Ivy had done well buying her some clothes for this trip, but she’d misjudged a few things—like that Skylar was much shorter than her.
This was silly. The man had seen her in shorts before and the shirt covered more than they did. When she caught herself fussing with her hair, she rolled her eyes and knocked on the door.
“Come on in, Ivy,” he called out.
She hesitated. Was he expecting Ivy? She turned to face the stairs, surprised she didn’t see her there. Maybe she should go up and get her if Trent had an appointment with—
“Skylar?”
She whirled around, pressing a hand to her racing heart. “Trent. You, ah, surprised me.”
His gaze dipped down, then quickly back up. He cleared his throat, then smiled. “You’re definitely not Ivy.”
There was a slight raspy quality to his voice that sent a flush of heat through her. Stop it. He was expecting to see Ivy, not you. “I can go get her for you if—”
“No, no. I didn’t plan on updating her until morning. What are you doing up? Last I saw, you were asleep on the couch.”
She blinked. “You saw me? Sleeping?”
He grinned again and leaned against the door frame, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “I did have that pleasure, yes, but I swear I only saw you for a second. As soon as I realized you were lying there, I went to my office to give you privacy. I’m not a voyeur.”
She cleared her throat, not sure what to say. He’d had the pleasure? Of seeing her sleeping? If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was flirting with her. Was he flirting with her? It had been so long since she’d had any kind of relationship, she wasn’t even sure she knew what was involved anymore. And suddenly she wished she did. She missed people. She missed men. And of all the men she’d met in her life, Adam Trent was near the top of the most intriguing, handsome ones. Maybe the very top.
He frowned. “Skylar? I was teasing. You aren’t upset are you?”
“Upset? No, no. Of course not. I’m just—I wanted to ask you, if it’s okay, about what you were doing tonight. I mean, if it has to do with the investigation. If it’s something personal, I certainly don’t mean to pry. I, oh shoot. I’m sorry. You used to live here, in Chattanooga, with your...with... I’m sorry. You probably needed some time, space, to...reflect. Or whatever. I should have just gone to bed instead of bothering you. In fact, I’ll shut up right now and head upstairs.” She whirled around.
“Skylar, wait.” He grabbed her shoulders, his touch firm but infinitely gentle as he pulled her to a stop and turned her to face him. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for. You’re curious about the investigation. And I have something to talk to you about anyway. Some questions to ask. If you’re up to it, I’ll fill you in on what I’ve been doing.”
“It’s not...personal?”
He shook his head. “No. Come on in. Please.” He pushed the door open wide and waited.
Not sure what to expect, she entered the office, then stopped in surprise. The room wasn’t all that large. A desk sat in front of the window with one visitor’s chair in front of it, and bookshelves ran along one wall. It was mostly neat, except for the top of the desk. Every inch was covered with papers and folders as if someone had turned on a fan and blown them all around.
“When did a hurricane hit Tennessee?”
He laughed. “Guess it is a bit of a mess. It’s a lot of information to cull through and I was in a hurry to find what I needed.”
“Did you? Find what you needed?” She stopped in front of the desk, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
“I’m not sure yet. With any investigation, it’s hard to know what’s a clue and what’s not until everything almost magically comes together at some point. And I’m not at that point yet.”
She picked up one of the pieces of paper, her eyes widening. “These look like police reports. Wait, John Lancaster? Any relation to Martha?”
“Husband. Or, he was. He died over ten years ago, well before Martha’s decline.”
“This looks like an arrest report. It’s from twenty-one, no, twenty-two years ago. Why are you looking into Martha’s deceased husband?”
He riffled through some of the papers, apparently looking for something. “Did you know Martha was the matriarch of a wealthy horse-breeding family? We’re talking multimillionaires. Uber-wealthy.”
“I knew she was well-off, but she didn’t talk much about herself. She always steered our conversations toward current events, or asked questions about me.”
He glanced up. “About you? Like what?”
She held her hands out in a helpless gesture. “Nothing and everything. She was a truly caring person, always wanting to know how I was doing, how my job was going. We talked about my dad, my mom, places I’d lived. Small talk, really. Typical stuff two friends would say to each other. Are you sure her family breeds horses? She never mentioned horses.”
Nodding, he shuffled a few more piles of papers around. “There they are.” He picked up a stack of photographs and sorted through them. “Here you go. Recognize her?” He set one of the pictures down on top of some papers at the edge of the desk.
She stared down at the picture of a smiling man and woman on horses in the middle of a green pasture. Behind them were endless lines of white three-rail fences and what she could only call a mansion in the distance. It was just as bleached-white looking as the fences.
Pulling the visitor’s chair close to the desk, she sat studying the photograph. “This is definitely Martha. No question. She was so young and vibrant here. You get used to seeing someone ravaged by disease and it’s a shock to see them like this, healthy and happy. Is this her husband? John?”
“Fiancé, in that picture. But yes, that’s John Lancaster. They were married for forty years before he died of a massive heart attack.”
“She never mentioned a husband. I knew she was a widow, but she never talked about him.”
“Did she talk about her children? Or her grandchild?”
She set the picture down. “Grandchild? She definitely never mentioned one.”
“Randolph. He’s still in high school. His parents are Richard and Phoebe. They must not be close either or I think she’d have mentioned him.”
“She’s not the only one who didn’t volunteer information. You never answered my initial question. Why are you looking into Martha’s dead husband? I can’t imagine this is related to my case.”
“Me either. And yet, here we are.”
“I don’t understand.”
Holding the rest of the pictures in his hand like a deck of cards, he sat back. “You remembered hearing crows before someone shot at you. Something, or someone, had disturbed them before he fired the first bullet.”
“Okay, and...?”
“When Ethan and I walked into those woods today, we disturbed some crows too. I remembered some birds return to the same nesting areas year after year. Later, I searched online and confirmed crows do the same thing. It’s not a stretch to believe they’ve used that same nesting area for years. They’re far enough back in the woods that it makes sense that the gunman probably passed through there on his way to try to kill you instead of him arriving in some vehicle, then driving away in the chaos without someone seeing him. If he hadn’t gone through the woods, the crows wouldn’t have put up a fuss until after the gunshots, not before.”
“Meaning he relied on my routine, knowing when to expect me to come out of the building and got there just in time. That would explain why no one else saw him hanging around.”
“Agreed,” he said.
“Seems logical, including the crow part. But I’m still waiting to hear what that has to do with Martha.”
“Patience.”
“No one’s ever accused me of being patient.”
He grinned. “I’m definitely getting that vibe. Ethan and I followed a barely discernible path through the trees, but it was there. Probably hasn’t been used in a long time but had been in the past. It ended at a horse pasture surrounded by white three-rail fencing. When I asked Ethan if he knew whose land it was, he said it belonged to the Lancaster family. And if we were to head up over the far hill, we’d be in the back yard of a white two-story mansion.”
She slowly picked up the picture. “Like the one here? And those fences, are they the same?”
“They are.” He pulled another photograph out from the stack and pitched it onto the middle of the desk. “That’s a current picture of the Lancaster mansion. It’s my theory that whoever shot at you came from the Lancaster property, through those woods, and escaped the same way. There’s a shed of sorts out there with four-wheelers. I looked and saw the keys were in them, probably because the property is remote and they wouldn’t expect someone to bother them. It’s far enough away from the road that no one would hear them if someone started up the engine. The shooter could have driven one across the pasture and over the hill and disappeared long before the police got there.”
“What you’re saying is that the gunman probably used the Lancaster’s property as an escape route and stole one of their four-wheelers to get away?”
“That’s my theory, yes. It’s why I went to the police station instead of driving you here this afternoon. I spoke to our Hamilton County liaison. He got me all of this, copies of files the police already had on the Lancaster family, including property records so I could verify the place I saw today really was theirs. I wanted to see if there was a police report about someone stealing a four-wheeler from them. There wasn’t.”
“Maybe the gunman ditched the four-wheeler on their property, so it wasn’t really stolen. Once they found it, they didn’t see the point of reporting it.”
“Perhaps.”
“You have another theory?”
“Not a theory so much as another possibility.”
He sifted through the stack of pictures and pulled out two. Leaning forward, he set them in front of her, side by side, facedown.
“We didn’t get a chance today to visit the two other crime scenes where someone tried to run you off the road, and the gunman chased you into the Cherokee National Forest. But I reviewed the police report from the road incident. You saw the gunman better than at the hospice facility. He had dark brown hair, slightly curly. He was thin, had a light complexion. Did the man who went after you in the forest fit that description too?”
She slowly nodded. “I never got a really good look at his face, in any of the incidents. He was either too far away or I was too busy trying to get away. But, yes. The general description could fit all three attempts on my life here in Chattanooga.”
He flipped both pictures over, revealing two similar-looking men.
She drew a sharp breath and pressed a hand to her mouth. Both of them fit the vision she’d carried in her head all these years of the man who’d tried to kill her. Her hands shook as she picked up the pictures and took a closer look. Then she set them down and wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Either of them could be the shooter, at least the one or ones here in Chattanooga who went after me. Who are they?”
“Richard and Scott. Brothers. Martha Lancaster’s sons.”