Page 51 of Guilty as Sin
“Oh.” He made change. “Really? I heard you were.”
Time to learn something. “I keep wondering,” she said, “why anybody cares. New resort, old resort. Does it really matter, in the scheme of things?”
He stared at her. “Well, yeah,” he said slowly, “it matters. Yeah, it does. It matters a lot.”
A woman came into the store, but the guy didn’t look around. Paige said, “Tell me why.”Don’t argue. You’ll learn nothing that way. Neutral face, neutral voice. You’re gathering information. You might be a little bit slow, so somebody has to explain very carefully. Sorry, Lily.
The cashier said, “My son’s sixteen. My daughter’s fourteen. Where are they going to get a job up here? And, OK, the station. I’m hanging on, but that’s about it. Why? Because we’re not big enough, and we’re not fancy enough, that’s why. Everybody wants Sun Valley, or Aspen, or whatever place. We’ve got to be something, or we’ll be nothing.” He nodded like that finished the discussion. Like it was a catchphrase.
“Something or nothing?” Paige probed.
“You really don’t know? Seriously? I mean, you haven’t even heard this?”
The female customer was over by the counter now, one hand on her hip and her fingers drumming. The guy behind the counter indicated with his head at her and said, “Raeleigh could tell you, I bet. Anybody could tell you.”
Raeleigh Franklin,Lily had said.Owns the Timberline Motel.“I suppose it would be more business for the motel,” Paige said to the woman, still going for neutral, “but if the resort put in a bigger lodge, wouldn’t people just stay there?”
“We’ve got to be something,” the woman said, “or we’ll be nothing.” There they went again. “The resort’s old, and it’s not good enough, bottom line. It’s not going to draw from anyplace farther away than Missoula. If we aren’t going to be fancy, we need to be family,or we’ll go right down the tubes. We’re going already.”
“And family’s a cross-country resort?”Family?Paige didn’t think a town named “Sinful” was going to find its best shot at success in the family market.
“No. It’s everything,” Raeleigh said. “More runs. Better lifts. A bigger lodge. More money to develop the shoreline along the lake for the summers. Mountain biking, too, especially on the cross-country trails.” She glared at Paige, and you didn’t need to be a mind reader to get that Lily was standing in the way of imagined hordes of eager mountain bikers anxious to sleep off their heroic efforts on the blissfully comfortable mattresses of the Timberline Lodge. “Brett Hunter can do everything we can’t. This is our best shot, and everybody knows he needs your twenty acres, or he won’t do it. Are you coming on Wednesday?”
She was all but in Paige’s face, but it wasn’t so much hostility Paige was reading as desperation. Was it really this bad, this important? Paige didn’t know, but that was clearly the party line. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be there.”
No wonder Lily had wanted to run away.
There weren’t any hidden cameras at the store. That would have been too easy. Anyway, why would there be any connection between Jace’s stalker and Lily’s hater? The motivations were entirely different.
And all the same, when she’d gone to the grocery store, when she’d stretched and massaged her leg, had taken a long, hot bath and massaged it more, when she’d cooked dinner and eaten it alone, looking out the window at the looming mountain and trying not to think that it was waiting to crush her, she… needed some distraction.
She wondered what Lily was doing. She wondered what Jace was doing. She considered turning on the TV and watching Rafe Blackstone be sexy and charming. Instead, she downloaded his brother’s second book.
Which was seriously creepy. A kidnapped girl, not quite seventeen, the daughter of one of Sawyer’s buddies. A web of human traffickers moving the girl from place to place. And too many secrets, slowly revealed. Sawyer three steps, two steps, one step behind the kidnappers as the team fell around him one by one.
The breathtaking moment when Sawyer discovered that his friend wasn’t anything close to what he’d thought he was. That this was revenge, and it was going to be bad. Sawyer fighting on two fronts now, racing against time to get to the girl before she was sold. The scene cutting out to a girl with long blonde hair lying on her side on a metal bench, her hands bound in front of her, desperately picking at her bonds, then rubbing them against the bench’s support until her wrists bled while she listened to disembodied sobbing from the next cell.
Paige could taste the girl’s fear, and her resolve, too. She could smell Sawyer’s urgency, his crackling alertness to the cold air around him as he crept, one careful, silent foot at a time, through a metal air shaft on elbows and knees he’d padded with his clothing. His silence as he listened to voices on the other side of a panel, as he waited for his chance.
The voices faded. Sawyer shifted position. Slowly. Carefully.
Kick it open,Paige begged him. In another part of the building, the girl heard footsteps approaching her cell.Go go go.
The phone rang in her hand.
She jumped six inches off the bed. The room was completely dark. It had to be after midnight. And she’d known even at the moment the phone had rung that it wasn’t Lily.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded breathy. Stupid. It was abook.She was acop.
“Ms. Hollander, this is Secure Alarm Services. Did you accidentally activate the alarm on your property?”
“What?” It was a whisper. She was already off the bed, pulling her revolver out of the drawer, and was across the room and toward the walk-in closet. Away from the stairs.
“Your property on 115 North Main,” the woman said. “We have an alarm. Do you want us to alert the police?”
“Yes.”It was at the shop. Not here. Not at the house.And all the same, she disconnected, set the phone on the floor, got both hands on her weapon, and focused her senses.
The wind in the trees louder now, halfway between a hiss and a roar, masking anything else. No vibrations in the wooden floor, not that she could feel, but the cottage was solidly built. No car noise, or she’d have heard it, surely. She’d have seen the difference in light as the headlights swept across the yard, too.
