Page 41 of Crosshairs

The kid needn’t worry. He wasn’t going to grab him. “Yeah,” he said, putting warmth in his voice. “A friend of mine. I lost his address, but he has a ruby-red truck. You seen one in the neighborhood?”

The boy started shaking his head, then his eyes widened. “Wait ... yeah. I saw one this morning. Early.”

“Where?” He kept himself from snapping the word.

“On this street. It was going that way.” The boy pointed in the direction Maddox had just come from.

“Don’t happen to know who owns it, do you? Might be my friend.”

He cocked his head to the side. “I don’t think so, unless your friend is a woman.”

Maddox tamped down his irritation. “Could’ve been his girlfriend.”

He thought about offering the boy money, but that might send him running to his parents.

“If you made it worth it for me, I could show you where I last saw it.”

The little punk. “What do you think it would take to be worthwhile to you?”

“Ten bucks?”

Maddox swallowed a chuckle. He’d thought about offering him twenty. “You got a deal.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Oh, you want the money first.”

He nodded, and Maddox pulled a ten from his pocket and held it out the window.

Faster than he could blink, the boy snatched the bill from his hand. “It’s parked on the next street over. House is on the corner,” he called over his shoulder and took off on his skateboard.

If that was the case, Maddox had quit too soon. He turned around in the next drive and drove to the end of the street and hung a right. Old, ritzy houses. At the next corner, he turned again, and at the next crossroad he saw the pickup in the drive of a two-story antebellum house. A darker red Tahoe SUV sat parked beside it.

Just like he figured. The woman who’d ruined his life had it made.

23

Ainsley knelt beside the bed and used her pen to check the scattered papers again. A sheet of yellowed paper peeked out from between two sheets. “What’s this?” She carefully separated the yellowed paper from the others and picked it up with her gloved hand before laying it on the bed.

They both leaned over to read it, their shoulders touching, the contact like a magnet pulling her closer. It didn’t help that the clean linen scent of his aftershave brought back memories of him holding her in his arms.

“Look,” Linc said. “It has a date. October 16, 1870, so it’s not from the journal that went missing. If this is what I think it is ...”

She jerked her mind back to the task at hand. The cursive letters covered only one side of the paper with flowing strokes. “Maybe a page from one of the diaries she’s been looking for. Can you read it?” she asked, hating that her voice sounded breathy.

He was quiet a minute. “I’m pretty sure it’s written by a woman, and she’s recording a visit from someone named Elizabeth.” Linc looked up at her. “According to some of the papers I’ve helped Cora with, Elizabeth was married to Robert Chamberlain.”

“Their great-grandmother and great-grandfather! Cora said the diary she found earlier was written by Charlotte Elliott, her great-grandfather’s sister and Zachary Elliott’s wife.”

He scanned the room. “Did Cora say there were two?”

“Yes. Maybe he stole the other one.”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“Whoever left the wet carpet in the library,” she said impatiently. “And maybe he was responsible for Cora’s fall.”

“We keep saying ‘he,’ but we could be talking about a woman,” Linc said.

---