Page 56 of Snow River

He tended to agree—although none of this was evidence that would reopen a long-closed case.Was that what someone was aiming for?“Aren’t we missing another question?How did this book get here?You’ve never seen it before, right?”

“No, never.”With a shudder, she handed it over to him.“Are you saying someone snuck in here and planted this book?Why?”

“You said you thought the dress was a message.This could be another one.”

“But what?What are all these messages all about?”

He decided to test his theory out loud.“Maybe someone wants us to take another look at the Snow River Murders.”

“But why?Everyone involved is dead and gone!Including you, Allison Casey!”Her voice rose to a higher pitch and she flung her arms wide.“If you have something to say, just come out and say it, coward!”

For an eerie moment, he thought someone was going to answer.Of course no one did, but it showed just how rattled they were both getting.

“I want you to stay with me for a while,” he told her.

“I can stay with Molly and Sam, or Ani and…” She trailed off, then nodded before he could point out that would mean driving on the icy winter roads back and forth to work.“Okay.”

She looked so spooked that he drew her close to his side.“I’ll bring you breakfast in bed.Foot massages every night.I have a killer DVD collection.”

Nuzzling her head against his chest, she murmured, “You don’t have to sweeten the deal, you know.You already have the best secret weapon.”

“Oh, is that what you’re calling it?”He shifted his hips so his crotch brushed against her hip.

She giggled.“I was talking about Jack Daniels.But sure, I suppose that counts too.”

26

Just like that,they were a family of four—Bear, Lila, Jack Daniels and Goldilocks.Neither Jack nor Goldilocks seemed aware of that fact, or indeed of each other.

But Lila, with her innate wariness of cats, decided to keep an eye on the big orange fur ball.If he ever figured out that the tiny being in the glass bowl would be a yummy snack, Goldilocks wouldn’t stand much of a chance.

She and Bear worked up a list of things to research.

Number one: find out if anyone else recognized the man in Paulina’s drawing.

Find out everything she could about the mysterious “Nancy.”Too bad she hadn’t gotten her last name from Paulina.

Find out who else had stayed in the hardware store over the past forty years and if they still had access.

Locate the nearest thrift stores that sold housedresses from the eighties, or, alternatively, find out who would have the sewing skills to create one.

Try to find anything that connected the murder of Rita Casey to the murder spree from the eighties.

Most difficult of all—who would have had access to the FBI files that had supposedly been burned in a fire.

They divided up the tasks.Bear wanted to take most of them, because he’d shifted into ultra-protective mode after that night of the crash.She couldn’t blame him.In one night, she’d knocked herself unconscious, been scared by a dress hanging from a cable, and gotten freaked out by a cookbook.

Acookbook.

It was almost embarrassing, especially because she couldn’t swear to the fact that there had never been a cookbook in the store before.Maybe it had been there all along, and she’d obliviously knocked it to the floor while doing Pilates or something.

Not that she minded having a magnificent softhearted man hovering over her.But she wasn’t a helpless child, and she was fully part of whatever was going on, and she refused to be shut out.

Once she’d gotten that sorted out with Bear—all credit to him for understanding and accepting—she tackled her part of the list.

First, she met with the man in charge of renting out the hardware store.Frank Stetson was a carpenter who doubled as a handyman, road maintenance guy, town manager, and vendor of fishing licenses.Lila had met him before, when she’d first moved into the hardware store.

She found him shoveling gravel into a pothole near the general store.A thin layer of snow covered the road, left from the couple of inches that had fallen last night.

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