Page 31 of Buried Too Deep

Phin studied the dog, who lifted his head to stare at him, growling menacingly.

“It’s okay, Blue,” Cora said. The growling immediately ceased, but the staring continued.

It was easy to see how Blue had come by his name. The dog was a blue merle color and his eyes were a strikingly light blue. He looked like a cross between a boxer and a pit bull.

“What breed is he?” Phin asked.

“Catahoula Leopard.” Cora’s speech changed, emphasizing her New Orleans accent, sounding more like Burke. “State dog of Loo-siana. Go ahead. Let him sniff you.”

He went down on one knee next to Blue and let him sniff his fingers. He got a single lick for his trouble before Blue yawned and went back to sleep. Phin looked up at Cora. “He must have been really riled up to have barked that night. Doesn’t seem like he’s got a lot of energy for random barking.”

“No. That’s why I went down to check things out. He never barks at night. This neighborhood is usually quiet.”

Phin gave Blue a soft scratch behind his ears before rising. “I noticed the garden in the back when I was checking out the kitchen.” It was surrounded by a six-foot wall and he’d noticed the gate across the driveway when they’d pulled up. “Does the gate lock?”

The garden was large for the neighborhood. There was a small swimming pool as well as a koi pond. The pool had been covered for the winter, but the koi had been swimming happily, even though the temperature was brisk.

“It does, but I rarely lock it. Like I said, the neighborhood is usually quiet. I started locking it after the first break-in. I guess they didn’t mean Blue any harm, even though he barked at them the first time. Someone was here while I was working at the library, but they left Blue alone.”

“That’s good, at least.” He moved to the bookshelves that lined one long wall. The shelves were heavy with books. Most were decades old. Some looked centuries old. But there was a section of paperbacks with creased spines. There were fiction books of all genres, although the bulk seemed to be sci-fi and fantasy. There were also nonfiction books, mostly DIY fix-it books but also a ton of cookbooks.

“Yours?” he asked, looking over her shoulder.

Her smile was self-deprecating. “I am a librarian.”

He tapped the spine of a book that had been a bestseller a few years before. “I like this one. I have it at home on my own keeper shelf.”

Her smile bloomed. “You like to read?”

“Kept me sane when I was serving. People would donate books to the troops and I read every single one I could get my hands on.” His mouth quirked up. “Even read some romances.”

She grinned, delighted. “Me too. You can borrow any of mine that you’d like.”

“Likewise,” he offered, then realized he was still staring at her.

And that she was staring back at him.

Heat rising in his cheeks, he gestured to the portraits that covered the rest of the walls. “Your ancestors?”

She nodded. “I’m the sixth generation of Winslows to live here.” She sighed. “I might just be the last. This house costs the earth to maintain.”

“I know. Burke spends a small fortune on his house in the Quarter every year, apart from what he pays me to keep it up.” Which was separate from his salary at Broussard Investigations, and honestly, more money than Phin thought he was worth. “Are you going to keep it?”

She looked around sadly. “I don’t know. My grandmother passed away about two years ago. It’s a lot of work to just keep it clean. I kind of let the house go that first year. No time or money. I had…other priorities.” She glanced at a framed photograph on the mantel over the fireplace. The young man in the photo bore a strong resemblance to Cora, curly red hair and all. “My brother was ill.”

Was.

Phin gentled his voice. “He passed?”

She swallowed. “Yeah. A year ago. He’d had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and we thought he’d licked it with chemo. But it came back. He needed a bone marrow transplant, but we never found a match. Everyone we knew tried to donate, but…” She shrugged. “And then it was too late.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, saying a silent prayer of thanks that all his siblings were alive and healthy. He hadn’t seen them in five years, but he followed their lives, largely with Stone and Delores’s help.

“Thank you.” She laughed bitterly. “I looked so hard for my father when John Robert’s doctor told him he needed the transplant. My mother was dead by then, and my grandmother and I weren’t matches. I thought, ‘If only I can find my father. He’ll donate. I know he will.’ I searched and searched, but I could never track him down. Meanwhile I kept getting le—”

She cut herself off before she could say letters, then sighed. “I even donated DNA to one of those genetic tracing websites, hoping he’d done the same and I could track him—or his new family—that way. But he was dead all along.”

Phin didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing at all.

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