Page 35 of Fire Peak

“I have no idea. I’m not an actual police officer, you know.” Nonetheless, he used his phone to take a picture of the object.

“You could have mentioned that after you chased me into town.”

She had a point. “How long are you going to hold that against me?”

“As long as it suits me. So what are you going to do about this thing?”

“I’m on vacation,” he said firmly, sitting back on his haunches. “I did my part, sacrificed my jacket, now it’s someone else’s problem. Who’s the owner here?”

“April Whitfield. I already called her, she should be here soon.” Charlie rose to her feet and brushed ash off her hands. “Sorry about your jacket. You should go find Hailey, she’s probably worried about you.”

He climbed to his feet. “Sorry I can’t be more help.”

“What on earth?” A woman’s voice made them both turn around. From her deep, frontier-rough voice, he would have expected someone about six feet tall, maybe wearing cowboy chaps and aiming a six-shooter. Instead, she was tiny but dynamic, a sixty-ish woman with short gray hair and perfect posture. He’d seen her before, he realized, that first night at The Fang. “What is that thing?”

“Someone threw a smoke bomb through a window,” said Charlie, putting a sympathetic hand on April’s arm.

The woman shook it off. “Foolishness.” She turned to Nick. “Who are you?”

“Random dinner guest.”

“He threw his jacket on the smoke bomb,” Charlie explained. “If it was meant to set a fire, he stopped that.”

“You’ll be compensated for it,” April said briskly. “Your next dinner here is on the house. Charlie, see to it. Clear out now, I’ll get someone to clean up this mess.”

“Don’t throw it away,” Charlie said. “It’s evidence.”

April shot her a look, then kicked the whole mess, jacket and smoke bomb, toward a pile of shattered glass.

“Go on. Check on our guests, Charlie.”

As they made their way toward the foyer, he exchanged a glance with Charlie, and saw that she too found April’s reaction to be odd.

“Was that weird?” she whispered under her breath. “That seemed weird.”

“Weirder than a smoke bomb? Or the hostess crawling across smushed olives?”

“It’s all weird.” She paused as they reached the door to the foyer. “Then again, this is Firelight Ridge. Weird is relative.”

He started to push through the door, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

He paused. They both glanced back at April, who was on her knees picking up glass from the floor.

“Awfully quick to clean up the scene of the crime, don’t you think?” she whispered. “Wouldn’t she at least want to document it for insurance?”

He didn’t disagree.

“Come on.” She beckoned him to follow her out the door and into a small coatroom off the foyer. Before he stepped into it, he scanned the room for Hailey, and found her happily chatting with a family who’d been seated near them.

“What’s up?” he asked Charlie as he joined her in the coatroom.

“You didn’t plant a listening device here at the lodge, did you?”

In the confined space of the coatroom, her scent—something light and citrusy—went right to his head. It made him grumpy. “When the hell would I do that? We just got here and I’ve been a little busy since then.”

“I didn’t think so, I just needed to confirm. What about a CCTV camera mounted across the street from Lila’s hardware store? Did you install that when you were looking for me?”

“Absolutely not. I tried to call you back at The Fang that day when I left, but I couldn’t get a message through. I put cameras at the airstrip and the road out of town, that’s it. Someone else put that one up.”

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