“It could get worse.”

Grant felt guilty immediately, seeing the way Kat flinched at his words. A part of him wanted to step closer and pull her into a comforting embrace. But he didn’t dare until he could be sure she didn’t have anything to do with her husband’s disappearance.

His mouth twisted in something like amusement. Yeah, imagine how she’d react if he tried to take her into his arms. It would probably be like trying to cuddle a feral cat. Teeth and claws would fly, and he’d bleed.

“Yes,” she said, so quietly he scarcely heard her. “The way people looked at me back then, I knew what they were thinking.” Her eyes met his. “What you were thinking.”

Grant shook his head. “I was doing my job, staying open-minded. No more, no less.” That was a lie, of course, but she wouldn’t welcome the truth.

“And is that what you’re doing now, too?”

His jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“But you’ll let it go if I ask you to?”

“Yes.” After a pause, he added, “For now.”

Dear Reader,

I’ve realized recently how many of my books are really about finding someone who has been missing from our lives. Never knowing what’s become of a loved one would be worse, I think, than losing him or her to a tragic accident. You might be haunted even more if you hadn’t said goodbye on good terms; if you’re gripped by guilt as well as grief.

Bone Deep started from a newspaper article about a woman who has spent years checking with police departments every time human remains were found in hopes they’d be her brother’s. But then I got to thinking… What if your loved one didn’t stay missing? What if he was returned to you after a long time—piece by piece? I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be as gutsy as Kat, the heroine in Bone Deep. Of course, it would help if I had a man as sexy and determined and loving as Grant Haller backing me up.

But back to that theme… Funny thing, but my upcoming book is turning out to be about finding that missing person, too. And, hey! I’ve never lost anyone in my own life. Really.

Happy reading,

Janice Kay Johnson

Bone Deep
Janice Kay Johnson

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of more than sixty books for children and adults, Janice Kay Johnson writes Harlequin Superromance novels about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. Her 2007 novel Snowbound won a RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America for Best Contemporary Series Romance. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small rural town north of Seattle, Washington. She loves to read and is an active volunteer and board member for Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter.

For Mom, who reads every word before anyone else does.

Thank you, Mom, for loving me, inspiring me…and helping make my writing better.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

“THIS YEAR’S SNOHOMISH County Business Owner of the Year is…” Behind the podium at the front of the ballroom, Judith Everest paused long enough to search out the five nominees in the crowd, her gaze pausing at each until she reached Kat. Smiling, she concluded, “Kathryn Riley of Sauk River Plant Nursery!”

The room erupted in applause. Dazed, Kat stumbled to her feet.

Four days later, she still glowed at the memory. To think that, four years ago, the business had been close to going under.

Too bad she couldn’t actually slow down to savor the honor the way she’d like. This was spring, for a plant nursery the equivalent of the pre-Christmas rush for most retailers. She was going nonstop.

In as close to a break as she could afford, she’d escaped to one of the greenhouses to pot seedlings. Now she gently sifted a little potting mix around a sturdy petunia, then scooped up some compost from a separate wheelbarrow with her trowel. Even though she worked without pause, with hundreds of seedlings waiting to be potted, she reveled in both the silence and the humid warmth. This was as peaceful as it would get for her until July.

And all that publicity about her being honored by the business community, reported in both the Seattle Times and the Herald, wouldn’t hurt business.

She patted the new soil into place, then set the seedling onto a flat and grabbed an empty pot from a stack of them. She dumped two inches of potting mix into the pot, tucked the next seedling in, then scooped up compost to add richness for the roots.

Snohomish County Business Owner of the Year.

Unbelievable. Four years ago, left alone and facing bankruptcy, she’d clung fiercely to dreams. The nursery had been her salvation, and look what she’d done with it even though she knew no one had believed she could handle the business at all.

Smiling, she carefully tilted the trowel to pour the dark compost into the four-inch plastic pot.

Something fell with it. The seedling quivered.

“What on earth…?” she murmured.

Setting down the trowel, Kat stripped off her gloves and pulled the long, ivory-colored rock from the pot.

Wiping the dark, damp compost from it, she realized, no, not a rock. Porous, it didn’t weigh enough, and widened at each end like a segment of bamboo. She stared down at the thing in her hand, the ball of her stomach knowing what it was before her brain caught up.

A bone. There’d been a bone in her compost.

“Kat?” The voice was loud and close.

She jerked, adrenaline shooting through her, and lifted her head. Her newest employee, a lanky nineteen-year-old named Jason Hebert, had come all the way into the greenhouse without her noticing, probably calling her name all the way. He looked perplexed.

“Are you okay, Kat? Was I supposed to not interrupt you? I’m sorry. I’ll go away…” His gaze dropped to the object in her hand. “Is that a bone?”

“It was in the compost.” She turned it in her hand. “From some animal, I guess.”

He peered more closely. “You sure? It looks like a finger bone.” He held out his own hand and waggled his fingers in a 3-D demonstration. “You know, a phalange?”

No, she didn’t. Although maybe she should, given that she thought about human remains way more often than the average person.

“I’m taking Anatomy this semester. We saw a real skeleton. That’s what this looks like.”

If this was a finger bone, it was larger than hers, Kat couldn’t help thinking. Longer and thicker. A man’s, maybe.

“You know, it’s probably dumb,” she said, giving a half laugh as if no more than mildly startled by the find, “but I’d better call the police just in case.”

“Yeah. Maybe some guy got it sliced off.” Jason sounded ghoulishly pleased.

They did operate heavy machinery at the compost facility not two miles away. She didn’t remember hearing about anyone losing a finger—especially a finger they never found to reattach—but that did make sense.

Or it was a leg bone from something small, something dog- or cat-sized. It was silly to get alarmed because a community college student who’d once seen a real human skeleton had identified this bone. Still…the unease that made her queasy decided her. If it was a human bone…

Oh, God. Hugh.

With an effort she suppressed the sickening mix of dread and…not hope. She couldn’t be feeling hope. Since Jason was still hovering, Kat asked, “What was your question? Can it wait while I make a quick call about this?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. It was just Ms. Lindstrom, about the garden club meeting. But she said something about needing a flowering plum or maybe cherry and went out that way, so she’s probably forgotten.”

Annika Lindstrom was one of their best customers and the owner of a spectacular garden that was the centerpiece of many a garden tour. She and Kat weren’t quite friends, but close enough that she wouldn’t be insulted if Kat didn’t immediately appear.

“I’ll find her when I’m done.”

“Oh, and that guy from the Globe. He was here, but I think he got a phone call and left.”

Mike Hedin was the editor of the local weekly newspaper. She’d been half expecting him to want to talk to her about the award.

“Okay, thanks,” she said. Sending Jason back to work, she took the rear door out of the greenhouse, stepping from tropical warmth into the crisp air that still felt like winter.

The temperature in her small office at the back of the main nursery building was somewhere in between. Setting the bone in front of her, she sat at her desk and reached for the phone.

Halfway through dialing, it struck her. How many times had she called police jurisdictions throughout the state to ask about remains found buried in some backyard? What were the odds that she, of all people, had actually found a human bone? God. The local police would probably think she’d gone completely around the bend.

A giggle escaped her throat like a hiccup, and she covered her mouth, swiveling to make sure the door was still closed and nobody had heard her. Sternly, she told herself this wasn’t exactly funny, just…ironic.

“Fern Bluff Police Department.” She knew the bored sergeant who answered the phone.

“Martin, this is Kat Riley at the nursery. I’ve found a bone in the compost. It’s probably from an animal, but, well, one of my employees is taking an anatomy course at the college and he thinks it looks like a human finger bone.” A little ashamed of herself, she thought, That’s it, blame poor Jason. “So I thought I’d better report it.”

“Well, let me get the chief for you.”

“That’s not necess—”

The quality of the silence told her she was on hold. Kat muttered a word she wouldn’t have said in front of a customer. He hadn’t even waited for her protest!

But she guessed it made sense for him to call the chief. Fern Bluff had grown with stunning speed these past several years, since software giant Microsoft had opened a Snohomish County campus on the outskirts of town. The police force had quadrupled in size, as had crime, but even so she suspected Chief Grant Haller was the only member of the force with any real experience with homicide.

Besides…the sergeant knew about Hugh.

Martin came back on a moment later. “The chief says to tell you he’ll be out to take a look.”

“Fine,” she said. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone, hating how short of breath she suddenly was, how dismayed. She didn’t see Grant Haller often outside chamber of commerce meetings or the like. She’d armored herself against those occasions. But that moment at the banquet last week had shaken her. When her name had been announced, out of the several hundred people present, he was the only one she seemed able to focus on. He’d dipped his head in acknowledgment of her triumph, then given her an odd, wry smile, his eyes warm. Heart drumming, she’d realized he was still interested. She hadn’t dreamed, hadn’t thought…

But now she had, and now he was on his way here. And she wouldn’t be seeing him in the midst of a crowd at a city council meeting, but rather in the close quarters of this office, her sanctuary.

Breathless, she thought, I’m not ready. But she had no choice. This wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted to talk about in front of half a dozen customers lined up to pay for their flats of early spring bedding plants.

This. Oh, God. She’d almost forgotten. She looked down at the bone, lying on her desk blotter, bits of dark compost still clinging to it like soil from a grave. Unable to help herself, she laid her hand next to it, comparing the length and thickness to her own finger bones. It could be a man’s.

It could be Hugh’s.

Kat shuddered and withdrew her hand, curling it into a fist she pressed against her belly. No! How many times had the compost been turned and bagged or loaded into trucks and replaced over at Wallinger’s? At least yearly, they must get down to bare ground and start over with yard debris and Christmas trees and fallen branches from the road cleanup crews, grinding it all up, mounding it fifty or more feet high, letting it gently steam as it rotted. No part of those mounds had been there for the nearly four years since Hugh’s disappearance.

Anyway, how likely was it that her husband had ended up dead in the compost pile two miles down the road? Without a single bone turning up until now?

She blew out a breath and sat back, the ancient oak office chair squeaking. Thank God for the voice of reason. She’d really worry about herself if she started seeing bits of Hugh everywhere.

I may be obsessed, she thought, but I’m not crazy. Not yet.

GRANT WOULD HAVE BEEN GLAD of an excuse to get out of the station and away from the spreadsheets he’d been peering at on his computer, if only the bone had turned up someplace else.

He was both surprised, and not. Every damn thing involving Kat Riley was complicated for him, even though Grant had known for a long time that he should give up any hope that whatever they’d briefly had would go anywhere, whether they were both single or not. Clearly, she wasn’t going to let it, not obsessed as she was with the husband who had driven away one day in his rattletrap pickup, supposedly to check out a rhododendron wholesaler up Chuckanut way, never to be heard from again.

Downtown’s half a dozen lights all turned red against him, a not uncommon occurrence as they were the old-fashioned kind that were indifferent to the presence of any real cars on the road. Like most other remnants of small-town life, they were slated to be replaced in the next year. He’d once found them annoying, but now felt almost nostalgic.

He was able to speed up once he hit the outskirts. City limits had been generously drawn, and took in a wide swath of river valley and wooded country upriver. The nursery sat on low ground, taking advantage of rich soil deposited by floodwaters, but also at risk when the water rose every couple of years.

Grant pulled his squad car into the parking lot and had to wait for someone to reverse out before he could park. The place was bustling, staff helping customers load bags of peat moss and compost into car trunks and the backs of pickups. He wasn’t even out of his car before he spotted a city councilwoman and a school board member. Out of habit and since he was wearing his uniform, he nodded at folks he knew and didn’t know as he crossed the lot and entered the nursery, which involved threading a strategic maze of tables bearing brightly colored pansies—even he recognized them—and pots of tulips and daffodils as well as cedar window boxes and tubs. Shrubs, set in big pots here and there, were breaking into bloom and scenting the air.

Was there any chance at all that Hugh Riley’s body had been right here at the nursery all these years, missed in the intensive search he and his men had conducted?

If it had been… His jaw tightened. If this bone was her husband’s, Kat Riley would have to be the principal suspect in his death.

Yeah, but then why would she have called today to report finding this bone? Why not make it quietly disappear?

Because one of her employees had seen it, Grant remembered. He’d talk. She couldn’t dump it.

Damn, he hoped this bone wasn’t human.

One of the employees spotted him and when he said he was looking for Kat, called to a skinny teenage boy who had an air of suppressed excitement. Grant would lay money he was the budding forensic anthropologist.

“She said she’d be in her office,” the boy told him importantly.

Grant nodded. “Thanks.”

In the years since she took over management of the nursery, Kat had made big changes, including the expansion of a small gift area into a spacious indoor shop that included an attached conservatory with tropical plants for the house. He bet she’d done well with Christmas shoppers, since she now stocked the work of a dozen local artisans as well as gardening tools and gadgets, a vast selection of pots and garden statuary, seeds, bulbs and fertilizers.

He had to be directed to the door to her office, which, almost hidden behind a rack of hand tools, said Employees Only. When her husband disappeared, Grant had spent plenty of time out here, but what had been her office then was now part of this expanded gift area.

He lifted his hand to knock, then hesitated. Damn it, why her? He kept thinking that eventually he’d feel only indifference when he saw her, but that hadn’t happened yet. The sight of her last week at that banquet, wearing a peach-colored sheath that bared a mile of legs and the top swell of her breasts, had been like a gut punch. He’d almost bent over at the pain.

Kat Riley was tall and lush and vibrant. Some people might have called her thick, glossy hair “brown,” but it had a copper gleam in sunlight and some strands as pale as dried cornstalks, others as dark as mahogany. He’d sat directly behind her once at a chamber meeting and, lost in fascination with her hair, missed ninety percent of what was said.

No loss, of course, and thank God no one had asked him a question.

She had great cheekbones, deep blue eyes and a mouth he thought would have gentle curves if she ever let it relax. He wasn’t sure her face was entirely symmetrical. The details didn’t seem to matter. Some combination of physical characteristics and personality and—hell, who knew?—chemistry made her irresistible to him.

Once, he’d thought she felt the same.

He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders and knocked.

“Come in,” she called.

When he opened the door, it was to find her standing behind her scarred oak behemoth of a desk as if she, too, had braced herself.

She looked at him coolly. “You didn’t have to come yourself.”

Stung by how obviously she wished he hadn’t come himself, he only shrugged. “I was arguing with my budget. Any excuse.”

She nodded, the movement a little jerky. “This is a waste of your time anyway. But I have a kid working here who’s taking Anatomy at the college, and when he saw the bone he was just sure it was human.” She rolled her eyes, as though to say, Of course, I never thought anything that stupid.

Not surprising she was sensitive about having to make this kind of call. She’d spent the past four years riding every law enforcement department in western Washington about any human remains that turned up, making sure they remembered that her husband had never been found, dead or alive.

He’d been peripherally aware of the bone lying there right in front of her, but now he said, “Well, let’s see it,” and reached across the desk.

The moment he really looked, Grant knew. Well, crap. He turned the small bone in his hand, seeing the way she stared at it as if it were a black widow spider. Oh, she knew, too, on the same gut level he did.

He didn’t tell her how many bones he’d seen. Didn’t like to think about the killing field in Bosnia where they’d dug up forty-eight complete skeletons. A few men, mostly women and children. Most of his nightmares involved human skeletons, whole or shattered to fragments.

“I’m no forensic scientist,” he said, “but I think your kid’s right. It looks human to me, too.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered, and sank into her chair as if her legs had lost strength. Her unblinking, shocked gaze stayed riveted on the bone in his hand. “How could it be…?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get it looked at to be sure, then ask some questions.” He set it down on the desk and pulled a small spiral notebook from his breast pocket. “Where did you find it?”

He relaxed a little when she explained that it had been in compost she’d shoveled into a wheelbarrow that morning from the piles in back that were regularly replenished by Wallinger’s. Grant’s men had dug through those heaps of compost, bark and shavings after Hugh’s disappearance. No body. So this bone had nothing to do with her. Cruel chance had made her the one to come across it. Hell, most people probably would have thought, animal bone, shrugged and tossed it out.

And maybe it was an animal bone.

He had her walk him to the greenhouse where the wheelbarrow sat, and with her permission combed through the dark, damp compost carefully to be sure the rest of the finger wasn’t in it.

“Show me which bin you got this batch out of.”

Back outside, shrubs in big black pots marched in rows, evergreen separated from deciduous, all carefully labeled so purchasers would know the eventual size, sun and soil needs and time of bloom. Then flowering trees, some already budding, were heeled into ridges of shavings. Half a dozen customers prowled out here on the back forty. He knew several of them, including Pete Timmons, one of his own deputies who happened to be off today. Pete returned his nod, but eyed Kat speculatively. She clearly noticed, because her cheeks flushed.

Grant was most surprised to see George Slagle, who owned the lumberyard and hardware store in town. There’d been talk that George resented Kat’s nomination for Business Owner of the Year, considering his revenue was likely two or three times hers. And Grant knew his house had been landscaped by the builder and probably maintained by a yard service. George was no gardener.

Some woman Grant didn’t know spotted Kat and called, “Can I ask you something?”

She smiled and held up her hand. “Give me a minute and I’ll be right back. George, nice to see you.”

George nodded, looking a little unhappy.

She was good, Grant mused. She must be thrumming with tension, but she’d exuded the friendliness and helpfulness that brought return customers.

Behind the last greenhouse, a row of bins, each five or six feet wide and maybe eight feet deep, had been constructed with railroad ties. Lower fronts allowed access. Kat pointed to one, with the compost getting low.

“Go help that woman,” he suggested. “I’ll dig through this.”

She bit her lip, nodded and left him to it.

He should have asked her for gloves, but shrugged, grabbed a shovel leaning against the dark ties and stepped into the bin.

Trying to be systematic, he lifted one shovelful at a time, moving compost from the back to the front. As he poured compost from the shovel, he watched closely.

Nada.

His arms and shoulders ached by the time he was confident he’d examined every damn inch of that pile. Since he’d moved it to the front, he had to climb over it to get out, his shoes sinking into the soft, damp heap.

Damn it, despite a temperature in the high thirties, he was sweating and filthy. He’d better go home and shower before he went back to the station.

Kat appeared as soon as he leaned the shovel against the ties. Seeing the anxiety in her eyes, he didn’t make her suffer.

“Nothing. May turn out I’m wrong and it’s from an animal. If not…” He shrugged. “Chances are, we’ll never know how that one bone ended up in there. I’ll go talk to them at Wallinger’s, though. They might’ve had an accident, or know of one at a logging site or with one of the road crews.”

Relief leaped into her eyes. “I was thinking that earlier. It would be easy to stick a hand into a shredder.”

He nodded. “That’s my best guess. Not something we’d necessarily hear about.”

“Yes.” She gave a long exhalation as tension left her body. “Okay. You’ll take it, then?”

“I’ll take it.” He already had; he’d slipped it into an evidence bag and then his pocket.

“And you’ll let me know?”

“Minute I hear anything.”

“Okay.” Shyness wasn’t usual for her, but she was plainly feeling it. Still, she met his eyes. “Thank you.”

So now she was grateful he had come, Grant realized, which meant she’d been more scared than she would want to admit.

“Coming out here’s my job.”

“You could have sent someone.”

“I want to find Hugh as bad as you do.”

Seeing the turmoil on her face, he cursed himself immediately for baiting her that way. Their history had no place here, and neither did his longing for something that wasn’t going to happen. “That’s the only major open case on our books,” he explained. Let her think that’s all he’d meant.

After a moment, she managed to suppress her reaction and give a jerky nod. “I’ll walk you back.” Her gaze lowered, seeing his hands. “You popped a blister.”

He’d acquired several blisters. The one that was now flattened and seeping burned. “Don’t worry. I’ll wash it up at home.”

“I should have found you some gloves.” Kat sounded contrite. “I didn’t think.”

“Don’t worry,” he said again. He nodded at the nursery around them. “Business looks good.”

“It’s been great. Didn’t even slow down this winter as much as usual, maybe because of the mild weather.”

“I was surprised to see George Slagle here.”

“He’s planning to put in a row of trees to screen the lumberyard from Legion Park.”

Beautification didn’t seem George’s style, but who was Grant to say?

Changing the subject, he said, “You’ve turned this nursery into something special.”

“Hugh and I made plans years ago.”

He didn’t believe it. She’d probably made plans, and her husband had nodded agreeably. Hugh Riley had been known for charm but not ambition. Grant had never been one of his fans, although the fact that he coveted Riley’s wife might have had something to do with that.

They’d arrived out front. “What smells so good?” Grant asked, at random.

“Daphne mezereum.” She pointed out a small shrub with pink flowers just opening and no leaves.

“I wouldn’t mind one of those in my yard,” he said at random, wanting to hold her in conversation.

Eyebrows raised, she glanced at his blisters. “They can be fragile.”

So, okay, she could tell he wasn’t any kind of gardener, but, irked by her pitying tone, he said, “I’ll take one.”

Next thing he knew, she’d deftly turned him over to a brisk, wiry woman who lectured him on planting it right away, digging a hole bigger than the root-ball and filling it with compost and peat moss. Kat herself vanished long before he handed over his debit card and winced at the total, then drove away with bags of both peat moss and compost in his trunk and the shrub on the floor next to him, its sweet smell damn near sickening in the confines of his car.

No wonder business was booming if all the customers were as easy to manipulate as he’d been.

Putting the car into gear, Grant shook his head at his own idiocy. He didn’t want to plant anything, but now he’d spent so much money, he had to take care of the shrub as though it were a baby. Planting it would have to wait until Sunday, though. If it could sit safely in a plastic pot at the nursery, it could sit a few more days at his house.

So…home to unload, shower and put on a clean uniform and at least one bandage, then up to the community hospital to find Dr. Arlene Erdahl, the pathologist, and get answers about the bone in his pocket.

He might be ninety percent sure it was human, but he was praying for the other ten percent. Despite what he’d told Kat, he had an uneasy feeling about this. No human bones had turned up in Fern Bluff since he signed on as police chief. Now, assuming one had, it was at the nursery owned by Hugh Riley.

Who so happened to be the only person who had gone missing locally in Grant’s tenure.

He never had believed in coincidences.

CHAPTER TWO

“OH, DEFINITELY HUMAN.” Sitting behind her desk, Dr. Arlene Erdahl turned the single bone over in her hand. “Likely male, because not many women have hands the size this suggests.” She held out her own as a comparison.

Grant nodded. He’d guessed as much.

Dr. Erdahl was a brisk woman with a stocky build and close-cropped graying hair. Grant put her at about fifty. Murder victims went to the county coroner, not the pathologist at the hospital in Fern Bluff, but she was always willing to answer questions when he called or stopped by. Her husband was an E.R. doc, an interesting pairing. One fought to keep people alive, the other explored them once they were dead.

She took a magnifying glass from a drawer and scrutinized the bone. “No sign of trauma. If this finger was cut off, it happened below the knuckle. Age…? Not juvenile, no obvious osteoarthritis… Twenties to possibly mid-forties, tops. More likely this came from an individual in his twenties or thirties.”

He didn’t want to push his luck, but asked, “I don’t suppose you can tell which finger it is?”

She set down the magnifying glass with a decisive movement and handed the bone to him. “Gut feeling, not the pinkie. Likely the second or third digit.”

“Ah…middle fingers?”

“No,” she said patiently. “Your first digit is your thumb. Index finger is second.”

“Oh.” Grant contemplated his own hand. So. Some one had lost either the finger he pointed with, or the one he used to give people the bird.

Unless, of course, that person was dead, and this bone had become separated only after death.

“Given the lack of tissue, whoever this came from—” she nodded at it “—either lost the finger at least a couple of years ago, or has been dead that long. But I’ll tell you what. That bone hasn’t been in a compost pile for two years.”

Jolted, he asked, “What makes you say that?”

“Look at it. The most interesting thing about it is the lack of any stains or discoloration. It’s more likely to have been kept in a drawer than buried unprotected in the ground.”

Grant stared at the single finger bone lying in his hand. He should have noticed how pure the ivory color was. “What the hell…?” he muttered.

“I’ve heard of instances where someone’s cut a finger off accidentally and kept it.”

“Yeah, so have I. But then how did it end up in the compost at the nursery?”

“A joke?”

His gut tightened. Remembering the shocked expression on Kat Riley’s face and the tremble in her voice, he said grimly, “If it’s a joke, it’s a nasty one.”

He thought about that as he walked to his car. A joke—if you could call it that—meant the bone had been planted there for her to find. But from what she’d said, it hadn’t been lying on top of the compost in her wheelbarrow, or on the worktable. In theory, she could have dumped it in a plant pot without ever spotting it. Which would have meant a nice surprise for someone else.

An innocent explanation would violate his rule regarding coincidences, but shit did happen, right?

He took the bone to Wallinger’s the way he’d planned. It got in that damn compost somehow, and Grant would be a lot happier to find that had happened here rather than at the nursery.

Fred Wallinger himself came out of the office. A backhoe was turning one steaming pile of compost behind them, while a couple of guys were feeding yard debris into a shredder that crunched up its meal, choked occasionally, and spewed digested bits in a plume.

They had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. A middle-aged, bulky man wearing quilted coveralls over a red buffalo plaid wool shirt, Wallinger shook his head at Grant’s question about stray fingers. “Haven’t heard of any such thing in a long time.” He grunted. “Well, ’cept over at Northland. Guy lost four fingers to a saw. Maybe six months back? Didn’t you hear at the time? You could ask over there. Seems they might have reattached ’em, though. Doubt they lost any.”

The sawmill, the only one left in Fern Bluff despite the town’s logging past, was less than a quarter of a mile down the road.

A logging truck rumbled past as Grant parked and got out, breathing in the tangy smell of sawdust. The piles of logs went on and on and on, a giant’s version of pick-up sticks.

He stepped into the office and found the receptionist, a busty blonde, happy to talk to him. She abandoned her headphones and computer and leaned against the short counter, arms crossed on it.

“Oh, that was Wally Camp.” Her eyes widened in remembered distress. “It was awful! I guess he just got distracted, and that saw sliced clean through. He’s on disability right now.” She lowered her voice. “From what I hear, he’s not going to be able to come back.”

“Were they able to reattach his fingers?”

“Only two of them.” She wrinkled her nose. “The other two were practically ground up, is what I heard.” Her tone brightened. “But at least he didn’t cut off his thumb, too.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

She did, and shared it.

Wally lived a good fifteen minutes outside of town, deeper in the Cascade foothills. The two-lane, yellow-striped road wound along the river by new developments of outsize, suburban houses that looked misplaced in this rural setting even if they did sit on five-acre lots, dairy farms held on to by stubborn old-timers and second-growth forest. Not far above, snow clung to the trees, defying the promises of spring at the nursery.

He found the address scrawled in white paint on the side of a dented mailbox and turned onto a rutted dirt driveway that led to a run-down, single-wide mobile home and rusting metal shop or garage. A couple of enormous mixed-breed dogs came howling from a hole beneath the porch to circle his car, froth splattering the window and claws scratching the paint job as he slowed.

Since their tails wagged furiously as they waited for him to get out, Grant took a chance and opened the door. Apparently he was the high point of their day. He petted, told them they were good dogs, and they happily bounded ahead of him across the frozen yard to the trailer.

He’d have thought the pandemonium would bring someone out, but when he knocked a voice yelled over the din of a television, “Leave it on the porch!”

“Mr. Camp?” He knocked again.

After a long pause, the door opened. Grant’s first thought was to wonder why this kid of Wally Camp’s wasn’t in school. He’d seen the traffic near the high school as he went by and knew this wasn’t a holiday or in-service day.

But then he saw the hand, dangling at the kid’s side as if he no longer knew quite what to do with it.

Wally, a scrawny redhead, had to be older than he looked.

He’d better be, Grant thought with quick pity. Other wise, who the hell had let him operate a saw?

Though it was now late afternoon, Camp looked as if he’d barely rolled out of bed. He hadn’t shaved in days, leaving patchy growth on his gaunt jaw. From the odor wafting out, he hadn’t remembered to shower, either.

“I thought you was the UPS guy,” Wally said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Wally Camp?”

“That’s me. Dad’s not here, if’n it’s him you want.”

Huh. He had arrested a Camp one time, after a bar brawl, if his memory served him. Robert? Ray? Grant could see the family resemblance. Apparently Wally was used to cops coming calling.

“No, I’m here about your hand,” he said.

“My hand?” Wally echoed, forehead creased. Then his voice quickened with hope. “You mean, you think the mill committed some kind of crime?”

Grant shook his head, pity seizing him again. Along with it came uneasiness that made him want to back away. He should have phoned, not come in person. He didn’t want to see this kid’s misery.

“No. Sorry. We’ve had a finger bone show up where it shouldn’t be, and I understand you’re the only person in town who has lost any fingers in the recent past.”

Wally Camp gave a bitter laugh. “So I’m famous now, huh? Too bad that don’t pay the bills.”

Grant regretted having raised the subject at all. He could see that the kid’s hands weren’t big enough to have bones the size of the one in Grant’s pocket.

Obligated to say something, he asked, “You getting physical therapy for that hand?”

Wally gave a dispirited shrug. “Yeah, but what’s the use? Doctors say the nerves ain’t growing the way they was supposed to. And it’s my right hand.”

Grant wanted to be gone so bad, keeping his feet rooted to the porch required a physical effort. “You’re getting disability, aren’t you?”

“I’m twenty-three. What am I gonna do for the rest of my life?”

What decent answer could he give? It wasn’t any help to say, “one of these days that mill’s going out of business, too, and then you’d be starting over anyway.”

Because at least he would have been starting over with two good hands.

“Did they even try to attach your other two fingers?” he asked.

Wally shook his head. “They was chewed up pretty good. I heard ’em say there wasn’t nothin’ left to save.”

Grant thanked him for his help and left, accompanied to the main road by the two dogs, who cheerfully pretended to be chasing him off their property.

He felt lousy about the visit and kept thinking, Bet I made his day.

Since he’d failed to find the owner of a missing finger, his speculation inevitably circled back to Kat.

Grant made himself be analytical. Did Kat know damned well where that bone had come from this morning? Would it have vanished immediately if her employee hadn’t unexpectedly walked in on her?

If so, she was an amazing actress. Grant would swear she’d been shaken to her core.

Hugh Riley had disappeared from the face of the earth that morning four years ago, after driving away from the nursery just before 10 a.m. He didn’t get pulled over by the highway patrol or cross the Canadian border, he didn’t use his ATM card, he didn’t show up at any nursery or plant farm, including the one he’d supposedly planned to visit. Not one single witness had reported seeing his truck. He pulled out of the nursery, turned west toward I-5, and apparently crossed into some other dimension.

A single tear had slipped down her cheek that day as her voice sank to a whisper. “He didn’t signal. That’s one of my pet peeves, when other drivers don’t. I watched him go, and was irritated because he didn’t signal.” Her teeth sank into her lip so hard, Grant had expected to see blood. “And there was hardly any traffic. He didn’t even have to wait, so no one else would have seen his blinker anyway. It was just…” A shudder racked her, and she didn’t finish.

Just his usual carelessness? Just a slap in my face, because he knew I was watching and liked to piss me off?

It hadn’t seemed to matter, what she didn’t say.

And still didn’t.

Grant’s problem was, he hated not being able to figure out where this damn bone had come from. But like it or not, that was police work. Hell, that was life. Not all mysteries got solved.

Live with it, he told himself.

“THE PATHOLOGIST AT THE hospital says the bone is human,” Kat told Jason Hebert. “Right now, Chief Haller is leaning toward thinking someone lost a finger accidentally.”

“Whoa.” Her young employee curled his hands into fists, as if making sure none of his fingers were hanging out there in danger. “That would really suck, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would. Fortunately, we don’t use many power tools here. Now, hadn’t you better get back to work?” She nodded at the handcart loaded with forsythia that he had been hauling to the front. With their early, cheerful yellow bloom, they sold as fast as they could be put at the entrance to draw attention.

“Oh.” He blushed and bent to pick up the handle. “Yeah. Sure. I just wondered. You know.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said, smiling. “It was a weird thing to find.”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “Too bad it wasn’t in the bonemeal!”

She pretended to laugh, and he must have been convinced, because he chuckled as he pulled the heavy cart away.

God. She wished Grant would discover some county road worker had lost a finger accidentally, as he’d suggested when he was out here. She wanted to know where the damn thing had come from, so she could put it out of her mind. She wanted, with a passion that startled her, for that bone not to be her husband’s.

Kat picked up a sign that had fallen from beside a bare-root rose and thrust it firmly back into the shavings. And I thought I wanted to find Hugh.

Had the search become habit more than a real need to know what had happened to him? Maybe when people disappeared from your life, you should just let them go. Maybe her mother had been right after all, not even trying to find Daddy.

With a sick knot in her belly, Kat knew that if Hugh had been murdered and his bones turned up somewhere in a shallow grave, she’d have to relive the original investigation and the suspicion that had, inevitably, focused on her. Back then, it had made her furious and kept her from sleeping at night, even though she knew she had nothing to do with Hugh’s disappearance and nothing to feel guilty about except maybe not having a better marriage. She’d gotten so she hated Grant Haller, constantly showing up with a few more questions.

If that finger bone was Hugh’s… But it couldn’t be. That made no sense at all. Finding it in her compost was cruel mischance, that’s all.

But the queasy feeling stayed in her stomach as she waited to hear from Grant.

George Slagle was back at the nursery today. It seemed he’d wanted her personal advice on what tree to choose.

“That kid who was trying to help me probably knows more about rock bands than he does plants,” George said dismissively. “They’re going to cost a pretty penny if I put in a whole row of the damn trees, and I don’t want something I’m going to have to tear out five years from now.”

“That’s smart of you,” she said. “I do teach all my employees about the plants I sell, but I’m glad to help you, George.”

“You have problems yesterday?” His eyes had an avid glint, as if he wanted to be the first one in town to know her troubles. Was he back today to be nosy and not because he wanted to buy those damn trees? “I saw Chief Haller’s car out front.”

“Nothing big. You know how it is.” She shook her head, hoping he’d assume she was talking about shoplifting. “He bought a nice daphne yesterday for his own yard while he was here.”

Apparently her suspicions were unfounded, because she was able to turn his attention to ornamental trees. She wasn’t surprised to find that he had his mind set on the typical spring flowering cherry or pear; he wasn’t interested in foliage or fall color. He liked pink. She steered him to a prunus cultivar with a columnar shape and semidwarf stature that wouldn’t outgrow the narrow strip or make passage on the sidewalk impossible, and promised delivery of eight trees as soon as he had the holes dug. He hinted that she might give him a price break, as a fellow chamber of commerce member, and she deftly sidestepped.

After he left, having paid full price but still smiling, Kat’s oldest—in both senses of the word—employee murmured, “I think he was flirting with you.”

They were having a momentary lull at the cash registers, although through the open double doors Kat could see several customers filling flats with annuals.

Flirting? “Is that what he was doing? Oh, ew.” She frowned at Joan. “You didn’t hear me say that.”

“Deaf as a post,” her friend and right-hand woman promised with unfailing cheer. “I’m just saying.”

“He’s got to be sixty!”

Batted eyelashes were incongruous on Joan’s round face. “May-December relationships can work, you know.”

“Am I May?”

“You just turned thirty-three. You might even be June. And, hey, at sixty, he’s not December, either. Maybe October.”

“God.”

Joan leaned an ample hip against the counter. “Were you planning to tell me about that finger bone?”

“Didn’t I…? No,” she said, remembering, “you weren’t here yesterday. Well, I gather Jason has beaten me to it.”

“And it really is human?”

“So Chief Haller says.”

“You’re okay?” Joan asked, tone tentative. “You’re not thinking—?”

“I’m fine. And no, I’m not thinking. Shoot,” Kat added. “I never connected with Annika yesterday. I’d better give her a call.”

“She was by half an hour ago when you were with George. She left flyers for the garden club meeting.” Joan gestured toward the table that held reference books, business cards for other nurseries and informational bulletins.

Kat glanced that way, then said, “I’m going to be in the office for a few minutes, then in greenhouse four if you need me.”

Kat hadn’t been back in the greenhouse since yesterday, her taste for potting seedlings having evaporated. But the work had to be done, business was slower today, and as long as she was brooding she might as well occupy her hands with something useful.

Once she made it there, she discovered that nobody else had taken up where she’d left off. Kat put on her gloves and resumed work.

It had to be the uneasiness she couldn’t shake that made her so conscious of how alone she was in the big greenhouse filled with long, plank tables covered with tiny, potted seedlings and seed trays. The quiet that yesterday had seemed peaceful today felt…thick, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She strained to hear anything at all and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get her iPod out of her car to keep her company. But she knew she wouldn’t use it; with earbuds in, she really wouldn’t hear anyone coming. As it was, she remembered her start of near-terror yesterday when Jason had gotten so close without her even hearing the creak of the old door swinging open and closed.

Sitting so that she could see the doors at both ends of the greenhouse, at least peripherally, she reached for another seedling, another empty plastic pot, and kept working.

The rhythm freed her mind to begin circling old doubts, as if on a looped tape.

She knew what people had said, out of her hearing, when Hugh disappeared. They speculated about their marriage and why a man as expansive and outgoing as Hugh had married someone so cold. Maybe running away was the only way he could escape her, they’d said.

Kat hadn’t let herself do this in a long time. Mostly, she tried not to think about Hugh, beyond the inchoate desire to know what had happened, where he was. She believed he was dead. He’d had his flaws, but he wasn’t the man to leave her in endless purgatory like this, not on purpose.

Only sometimes did her stomach clutch up and she wondered whether their marriage could have been bad enough that he’d wanted to escape and would take any way to do it. He’d always warmed and cooled toward her, going two or three months without turning to her in bed at all, then suddenly becoming the passionate man who’d wooed her in the first place. She couldn’t call it moodiness because he stayed cheerful. It even seemed to her that she was still his best friend. Just…not his lover.

That had made her wonder, but she’d never had any proof, and he’d denied it the one time she confronted him and insisted he must be seeing another woman. So she let it drop because mostly she was happy. Not rapturously so, but she had a husband and a home and a business and somewhere to belong. Was any marriage perfect?

No, she would swear Hugh wasn’t unhappy enough to run away. He had to be dead, not to have ever come home.

But then, where was his body?

Her trowel, dipped in the potting mix, seemed to grind on something.

Kat froze.

No. It couldn’t be. The bone had been in the compost, not the potting mix.

Nonetheless, her breath came fast as she adjusted the angle of the trowel and scooped whatever it was up. She turned the trowelful over on top of the garden cart full of potting mix.

Another bone lay, half-exposed. Another…what had they called it? Phalange?

No, no, no.

Heart lurching, she stared at it.

Then, in a frenzy of fear, she set it on the table and began scrabbling in the potting mix with her gloved hands, flinging soil aside, not caring that she scattered it over the floor. Within seconds, she found yet another bone, smaller. Only when she reached the wooden bottom of the cart did she stop, panting, realizing that now she had a whole finger.

The creak of the door brought her spinning around, a gasp escaping her. The heavy door bounced slightly, as it always did when the spring pulled it shut, but nobody was there.

CHAPTER THREE

“PROBABLY SOMEBODY STARTED to open the door and then noticed the Employees Only sign.” As close to hysteria as she’d ever been, Kat perched on the old kitchen stool in the greenhouse, her arms wrapped herself. Despite the warmth in here, she shivered. “Or the wind. I noticed how breezy it was earlier.”

Grant didn’t bother commenting. He didn’t need to. The damp breeze couldn’t have stirred the heavy door.

Her teeth wanted to chatter. She clamped them shut until she regained control, then said, “Or one of my employees was looking for me but got distracted.”

He watched her stolidly. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, which bothered her more than she should have let it.

Today he wasn’t in uniform. Wearing jeans, running shoes and a flannel shirt under a quilted vest, he leaned a hip against one of the potting tables, the same small spiral notebook he’d used yesterday flipped open. Kat couldn’t see that he was making many notes, even though he held a pencil in one hand.

As always, his presence produced a flood of conflicting emotions in her. As scared as she’d been, his big, powerful body was a comfort, as was his very intensity and intelligence. She felt safe because he was here.

She was also unnerved, physically conscious of him in a way she didn’t want to be, reminded that he’d evoked the same, unwelcome response in her when Hugh had still been around.

“You’re afraid someone was watching you,” Grant said.

This shudder shook her whole body. She tightened her arms around herself, as if she could keep from disintegrating.

“Yes.” Her voice came out rusty, shaking. “Or—” and this was the more appalling fear “—someone was in here already and I heard the door when he was slipping out. I’d never have seen him if he was sitting under one of the tables.”

“Waiting for you to find the bones.”

“Yes.”

He’d come the minute she called. Thank God she’d had her cell phone with her. She’d been so terrified, she hated to think what she’d have looked like if anyone had seen her burst out of here. As it was, she’d also called the front desk, and Joan had come tearing in to the greenhouse. She’d stayed protectively at Kat’s side, and now glared at Grant as if he were at fault for upsetting Kat.

“We’ll find out if an employee started to open the door,” he said. “That’s easy. If it was a customer…we may never know.”

Kat gave a stiff nod.

For the first time, his tone softened. “I think it’s unlikely someone was waiting in here. Think about it. If you’d been a little busier, you might never have come to this greenhouse today at all.”

That was logical. More logical than she’d been, in her fear. Of course no one had crouched in here waiting all day. She was letting paranoia get the best of her. Some of the tension leached from her body. “That’s true.”

“But you told me you were heading back to this greenhouse,” Joan said unexpectedly. “Remember? We were out front. Somebody might have heard you. There were several customers in there, and I didn’t look to see if anyone was behind us.”

Grant’s eyes narrowed. “Did you come straight here after you told Ms. Stover your intentions?”

Kat shook her head. “I stopped by my office. It was maybe…ten minutes before I got here.”

His gaze, intense to the point of being fierce, pinpointed first Kat and then Joan. “You’ll make me a list of anyone you’ve seen at the nursery today. And a separate one of anyone here yesterday.”

“So you think someone was in here?” she whispered.

“Not while you were. But it’s pretty clear these bones were planted.”

She couldn’t help looking at them, lying on the splintery worktable, hard to connect with a real-life human being, and yet…gruesome. She wanted to wipe the bits of compost from the bones. Like yesterday, she was unpleasantly reminded of the dark, dank soil from a grave.

“They might have all been there yesterday.”

“They might.” His jaw flexed. “I wish like hell I’d poked through this potting mix, too. But I’ll tell you what. I’m betting they were added today.”

“Why?” Joan asked.

“If this was meant to be one surprise, why not plant all three together? Why separate them this way?”

Kat thought about his point, and didn’t like the implications. “To…up the ante.” She wished her voice didn’t sound so thin.

“And to give you two scares, not just one.”

“Does this person…um, have more bones?”

He shut his small spiral notebook and shoved it in a breast pocket. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Kat swallowed. “Is there any way to check those bones for DNA?”

“I don’t know.” When he’d disappeared, the police had taken hair from Hugh’s comb, so they’d have it as a reference if needed. “The thing is, even if we can, it often takes months. I can’t demand a rush job. This is upsetting for you, but it’s not as if we have a serial killer operating here. On the scale of crimes, this is about a one.”

Months? she thought, aghast. And then she took in his dismissive one. Her spine stiffened. “If those are Hugh’s bones, and somebody kept them, then the chances are he was murdered. That’s a one, in your opinion?”

“Only in terms of urgency.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what.” Mad now, she slid from the stool and faced him with her chin thrust out. “I’m feeling a little urgent here. Whether those are Hugh’s bones or not, this feels a lot like a threat to me. I’m taking it seriously, even if you aren’t!”

“Oh, I’m taking it seriously.” His eyes still glittered with what she suddenly realized was major tem per. “Can you sit down and make me those lists right away? In the meantime, I’m going to go talk to anyone who is working today, find out if they were back here and if they saw anyone else nearby. We’ll get lists of names from them, too.”

With his anger both comforting her and ratcheting up her fear again, Kat nodded. “We’ll be at the cash registers.”

He went out ahead of them, pausing to examine the door with its rusting, wrought-iron handles, then shook his head as if in frustration. Kat guessed he was thinking of fingerprints, and realizing the pock-marked handle was unlikely to provide a good surface for lifting a print. Besides…how many people had grabbed it? Even on a glossy surface, could one print be lifted from atop thousands?

She and Joan walked to the main nursery building, heads ducked as if that would keep them from getting wet. The earlier mist had become a steady, cold rain, one that wasn’t more than five degrees Fahrenheit from turning into snow. Ah, spring, Kat thought wryly.

The few customers had evaporated, and who could blame them?

“Ugh,” Joan said, when they hurried inside. She, at least, wore a vest. Anticipating the near-tropical warmth in the greenhouse, Kat had left her jean jacket in her office earlier despite the bite to the air outside.

They shook off the rain. Kat grabbed a notebook and they both sat on stools behind the counter. “Let’s start with today,” she said.

“George Slagle.” Joan rolled her eyes.

“He was here today and yesterday,” Kat said, explaining.

She started two sheets, labeled the top of each Wednesday and Thursday, then wrote George’s name on both. “Annika. You said she was in today.”

“Right.”

“Yesterday, too,” Kat said, and wrote her down. “Uh…I waited on Becca Montgomery. Her teenage boy was with her.”

“Billy. He’s a good kid.”

Despite the hair dyed goth-black and the tattoos spreading like a skin fungus on his lower arms. Kat had seen the way he dragged after his mother, every line of his body resisting the necessity of being at a nursery with her. He was probably petrified that one of his buddies would see him. But he hadn’t argued when his mom asked him to heft five gallon pots, so maybe he was okay.

“Jason said Mike Hedin came by yesterday,” she remembered.

“He was here today, too.” Widening, Joan’s eyes met hers. “Just after you called. I was ready to sprint back to you, but he stopped me and asked for you. I lied and said you were gone for the day.”

Mike Hedin was an odd duck, but he’d been nice to Kat. She detested this, having to suspect everyone. “Did you see what direction he came from?” she asked.

Joan shook her head. “He just…appeared. You sounded so freaked, I wasn’t noticing anything else.”

Carefully, Kat wrote Mike Hedin.

“Lisa Llewellyn was here today, remember? She bought a bunch of annuals.”

Their lists grew. Carol Scammell, a school board member, had bought a Japanese maple to replace a tree in her yard damaged by a February storm. Greg Buckmeier, one of the few male members of the garden club, trolling for the unusual perennials that were a specialty of the nursery. People neither knew.

“I didn’t take the receipts to the bank yesterday,” Kat admitted. “Which is lucky. I’ll look at the checks and credit-card slips. I’ll bet I can add more names.”

By the time they were done, they had over thirty people listed for Wednesday, eighteen…no, nineteen for today even though business had been slower. And those were only the people either she or Joan had personally waited on or noticed. Kat had had at least two other employees working both days.

Worse yet, the nursery wasn’t fully fenced. Somebody on staff would probably spot a customer who parked in the lot and came in the front entrance, but Hazeltine Road ran north-south alongside the nursery, and who’d notice a car parked on the shoulder for a brief time? A dirt lane behind the nursery led to the Schultz farm, once a going concern and now more of a hobby for Will and Martha Schultz, who Kat happened to know were still in Arizona where they wintered.

Oh, yes, it would be all too easy for someone to slip entirely unnoticed onto the nursery grounds, keeping the greenhouses between him and the main grounds of the nursery.

Only…how would someone like that know that she was the one working in greenhouse four? Didn’t whoever left those bones almost have to have seen her go in there yesterday morning and then leave her work undone when the nursery got busier?

Confused and frightened, she said, “I’ll leave this here for now. We can add to it if we remember anyone else.”

Joan nodded. “Is that rain turning to snow, or am I imagining things?”

Kat followed her gaze and grimaced. “Boy, that’s great for business.”

Even worse, she thought, would be the story coming out of human bones being found here at the nursery. People would be reminded about Hugh’s disappearance. The whispers would start again, maybe even worse because everyone would see how well she’d done without him. No, the taint of murder would not be good for business.

Which might be the whole point of this, except she couldn’t for the life of her imagine who would benefit from hurting her business. She didn’t have any real competitors, only a couple of specialty nurseries that benefited, if anything, from the success of hers. For goodness sake, she bought her rhododendrons from Mountain Rhodies and her bearded iris from A Rainbow of Iris, and happily gave both a plug in case a customer wanted more variety than she could offer. And she couldn’t imagine the garden manager at Lowe’s Home and Garden Center sabotaging her.

No, dumb idea. Something else was behind this grisly plot. Someone playing a mean game, and Kat was pretty sure she was meant to lose.

She sucked in a ragged breath. Right now, what she wanted most was to know whether those bones were Hugh’s.

HE HAD NO OBJECTIVITY whatsoever where Kat Riley was concerned, which made him a dangerous man to be conducting this investigation. Trouble was, he didn’t trust anyone else to conduct it, either.

Grant dug out the binder that held police reports and notes on Hugh’s disappearance, in case he’d forgotten anything. He hadn’t. But now, reading again the original missing persons report, he had to ask himself: Could she have made all that up?

Sure she could have. They had only Kat’s word for it that Hugh was at the nursery at all the morning of his disappearance, that he’d intended to visit the rhododendron wholesaler, that he’d driven away. Only one other person had been scheduled to work that day—the nursery had been considerably smaller four years ago—and he hadn’t yet arrived at work. Only Kat had seen her husband off.

Her story might all be so much fiction.

Grant kept coming back to the problem of where the bones had been to stay so clean. If she had her husband’s body stashed…where? In an outbuilding the police had somehow missed? Then how did that bone end up in her wheelbarrow? And why?

Just for size, he tried on the concept that she had killed Hugh in a fit of rage, say, because she’d discovered his latest affair. Okay, then why were bones appearing now? Grant would swear she was genuinely rattled. Did someone else know she’d killed him? Was it possible she was resisting blackmail, and these bones were a form of pressure on her to pay? Someone might be saying, I know what you did. I know where the body is.

He wanted to believe in her. He’d always wanted to, since the first time he met her and had been stunned speechless. Police Chief for less than three months, he was being introduced at a city council meeting when he saw Kat in the audience. He’d never thought, She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, because she wasn’t. Rachel, his wife, was conventionally prettier. But Kat had something. Some magic that had captured him from that moment.

He’d felt sick when he found out she was married, not letting himself think about the fact that he was married, too. That he’d moved out to Washington State to please Rachel, whose family was in Seattle.

What he had to face now was that he didn’t really know Kat. She was an intensely private woman who had held herself together better than he would have expected when her husband vanished. At the time, he’d told himself she knew or at least guessed that Hugh was running around on her, and, while perplexed and shocked, wasn’t exactly grieving.

But he’d been wrong. She hadn’t let go of her cheating husband’s memory for one minute, not in the almost four years. She clung to it with a fervor that bordered on obsession. She must pore over the damn newspaper every single morning looking for snippets about human remains found down in the Auburn Valley or up toward Blaine. Dissatisfied with police performance, she’d hired a private detective to find her husband and spent God knows how much before the investigator confessed to having found exactly nothing.

Had it all been more elaborate fiction, embroidery intended to convince police and townsfolk alike that she truly was the baffled, grieving wife? Or—damn it—was it possible she’d never known that Hugh screwed around on her? Maybe she’d genuinely loved the guy, and the flicker of attraction she’d felt for Grant had been one of those things, unimportant except as a source of shame for her.

His pride alone made that an unwelcome thought. Grant was thirty-seven years old, and had never in his life felt anything like this for another woman, not even the one he’d married. It was bad enough that Kat clung to the belief she was still a married woman, but he hated like hell to think she didn’t feel anything special for him at all.

But he knew it was possible. She might be uncomfortable with him only because he’d kissed her once, because she’d responded. Or, even more likely, because he’d had to consider her a suspect in Hugh’s disappearance.

Just as he had to now.

Brooding, he faced the fact that there was a limit to how much time he could give to this. No crime had actually been committed; it all might still turn out to be nothing but somebody’s nasty idea of a joke. It wasn’t impossible to acquire bones. He’d heard that there were still whispers about Kat and her missing husband, about how much more successful the nursery had become without him. She kept to herself, too, which meant she wasn’t universally liked. And she’d gotten a lot of attention with that award. Could it have triggered enough temper that someone had decided to give her a scare?

Man, he wished that explanation would turn out to hold water. It was unpleasant as hell; finding out you were so disliked would be a shock—but not near as big a shock as some of the alternatives.

He made another trip out to the nursery, knowing it would be useless. He was right. None of the staff admitted to having been out to the greenhouse in which Kat had been working. Presumably it was a customer who’d tried the door yesterday, maybe belatedly noticed the Employees Only sign. Or she was right, and the person who’d put the bones in the potting mix had stayed to see her reaction…or had come close to being caught in the act and had hidden beneath one of the long plank tables, waiting for a chance to slip unseen out of the greenhouse.

Grant found Kat out front of the main building, rearranging a display of spring blooming shrubs designed to trap the unwary into buying something they hadn’t intended, like the sweet-smelling whatever-the-hell-it-was-called that was sitting in his driveway at home waiting to be planted. As he watched, she hefted the five- and ten-gallon pots with ease, despite her slender frame. She was filling holes, he realized, replacing plants that had sold.

He stepped forward, and when she saw him apprehension immediately deepened the color of Kat’s blue eyes.

“Are you leaving?”

“Nothing else I can do out here. I could talk to the customers you know were at the nursery both days, but if I do it will start a storm of gossip.”

Yesterday’s snow had been a mere skiff, but the temperature hadn’t risen since much above freezing. Today Kat wore faded jeans and a sacky sweatshirt as well as work gloves, not enough to maintain her body heat unless she kept moving. Even so, Grant was pretty sure her shudder was just that, not a shiver from the cold even though she also wrapped her arms around herself as she’d done yesterday when she was scared.

“The fact that you’ve been out here three days in a row already has people giving me funny looks.”

“Tell me what you want,” he said. “Do I push it now, and the hell with gossip? Or do we wait for the other shoe to drop?”

“It will, won’t it?” She hugged herself tighter.

“I’d say so. Unless someone just wanted to give you a little scare.”

She gave him a look. “Little?”

“It could get worse.”

He felt guilty immediately, seeing the way she flinched. A part of him wanted to step closer and pull her into a comforting embrace. But he didn’t dare until he could be sure she didn’t have anything to do with her husband’s disappearance.

His mouth twisted in something like amusement. Yeah, just imagine how she’d react if he tried to take her into his arms. The result would probably be something like trying to cuddle a feral cat. Teeth and claws would fly, and he’d bleed.

“Yes,” she said, so quietly he scarcely heard her. “The way people looked at me back then, I knew what they were thinking.” Her eyes met his. “What you were thinking.”

Grant shook his head. “I was doing my job, staying open-minded. No more, no less.” That was a lie, of course, but she wouldn’t welcome the truth.

“And is that what you’re doing now, too?”

His jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“But you’ll let it go if I ask you to?”

“Yes.” After a pause, he added, “For now.”

After a moment Kat nodded. “Let’s wait and see what happens.”

“Have you been working in any of the greenhouses?”

“No.” He saw the helplessness on her face and how much she hated feeling it. “Every time I dip a trowel into potting mix or compost, I’m going to expect—” She didn’t have to tell him what she expected. Her eyes searched his. “You don’t think he could be alive, do you?”

Surprised, Grant rocked back on his heels. “Do you mean, he’s the one doing this?”

“I had a dream last night.” More softly, she corrected herself. “A nightmare. Hugh was reaching for me, only he was missing a finger.”

“I didn’t know your husband well. You did. Was he capable of coming back and doing something like this just to get at you?” He’d spoken mildly, but he’d tensed at her question.

“No.” Her voice became stronger, more definite. Some of the rigidity left her body. “No. Of course not. Hugh was a nice man. He’d be horrified to think an idea like that had ever crossed my mind. It was just a nightmare.” She sighed. “Not Hugh, but somebody wants to see me upset.”

“Kat.”

Along with the sound of her name, footsteps crunched on the gravel behind Grant, and he turned to see the editor of the weekly newspaper coming toward them. Mike Hedin was thin and intense. He’d been a reporter at the Seattle P-I before getting caught in a round of layoffs that preceded the eventual demise of the city’s second major newspaper. The Fern Bluff weekly, Grant couldn’t help thinking, had to be one hell of a comedown. Hedin would never get a Pulitzer nomination from here.

“Chief Haller.” His gaze darted between them. “I’m glad I caught you. I picked up the list of this week’s police calls, and the nursery isn’t on it.”

Grant had made damn sure it wasn’t. Kat’s mystery was not going to appear in the newspaper, not if Grant could prevent it.

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “You’re out here on a cold day.” And wasn’t it interesting that he, too, had visited the nursery three days in a row.

Kat had gone very still, a small creature hoping to go unnoticed.

Hedin flushed. He was prematurely balding, and the red swept up over his bare pate. “Yes, well, I was hoping to interview Kat about the award. Just a follow-up. What strategies she thinks have increased business, any changes she envisions making this year, that kind of thing.”

Well, hell, Grant thought in stunned realization; Hedin had a thing for Kat. Face facts: he and Mike Hedin probably weren’t alone. No, she wasn’t beautiful, not exactly, but she was sexy, even on the days when she wore shapeless overalls or, like today, a man’s sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up four or five times. And, while she was very good at being friendly, she also had that touch-me-not air that could seem like a challenge.

His eyes narrowed. The sweatshirt was Hugh’s. He’d be willing to bet on it. She still wore her husband’s clothes.

Question was, why? Because they were there, and comfortable? Or as another way to hold on to his memory?

He was suddenly, deeply offended by the sight of that faded blue sweatshirt long enough to hang halfway down her thighs. Hugh Riley hadn’t deserved her devotion. Although he had left behind a house in town and the nursery out here on the flood plain. Kat no longer had a cheating husband, but she hadn’t lost her home or her livelihood along with the husband.

She had motivation to have killed him, no question. But, damn, Grant did not want to believe she had it in her.

“I’d better run,” he said, hoping his disturbing thoughts didn’t show on his face.

She looked briefly dismayed, or maybe that was in his imagination. Then her mouth curved into a smile, presumably because Mike still waited, hopeful for her attention. “Thanks for coming.” She bent to reach for a pot on a flatbed cart, but instead straightened. “Oh. Did you get that daphne in the ground?”

That was what the shrub was called. Daphne. “It’ll have to wait until Sunday.”

“If it gets too cold before then, you might want to stick it in the garage. They can be delicate before they’re established.”

So she’d said. Or maybe it was the other nursery worker who’d told him that, he didn’t remember. Grant was beginning to see the damn plant as a challenge all its own, as if Kat and her employee both doubted his ability to make the sweet-smelling shrub happy.

“I’ll be careful,” he promised, although how you could be careful when you stuck a bush in the ground, he didn’t know. As far as he was concerned, things he planted either grew or they didn’t. If they didn’t, something else would. But this daphne he’d coddle with infant formula if he had to. If it died, he wouldn’t admit it. He’d go buy an identical one somewhere else and plant it.

As if, he thought bleakly, getting in his car, there was any chance at all that Kat Riley would ever stroll in his yard wondering where that shrub he’d bought at her nursery was.

There was one upside to the appearance of those bones. If it turned out Hugh really had been dead all these years and Kat accepted that she was a widow and not a wife… Well, then, things might be different.

Assuming, of course, that she hadn’t killed him and already knew full well she was a widow.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.