Page 20 of Colton's Secret Weapon
And had never felt so alone in her life.
She couldn’t seem to access the spirits that she knew never left her side or the air around her.
“Can we check Dad’s house again?” she asked even before Mitchell had his door shut. “Just in case?”
Nodding, Mitchell looked at her, and she didn’t want to hear his words when he opened his mouth to speak. Had to restrain herself from covering her ears.
An action she’d allowed herself many times in her life when she knew something was going to come at her that she didn’t deserve and chose not to take in.
“And then I’m going to call my cousin, Kansas,” he told her, the hint behind those words ripping through her.
She’d known what was coming. Turning a blind eye to the truth was different from deflecting mean-spirited opinions that bore no merit. Life had to be lived with eyes open. With awareness. Or there’d be no true joy. Or real peace.
Kansas was a cop, too. Just like Mitchell’s brother.
“She’s search and rescue,” she said quietly, stepping into the facts slowly.
Mitchell’s long look was speculative. She withstood it. He nodded.
She could be heading straight into hell. He needed to know if she was going to be okay.
She wasn’t. Not if they didn’t find Whaler.
Was this the time when she lost the ability to believe and her spirits left her?
Would Mitchell stand in the fire with her? Or would she be there all alone? She couldn’t ask the question. Not even of herself.
So she nodded.
And he started the car.
Chapter 7
Whaler wasn’t at home. With a quick look around, Dove determined that he hadn’t been there since they’d looked for him there earlier that morning. On the way over, she’d called several people she knew that kept in touch with Whaler. The guy who rented space from him at the marina to sell bait to Whaler’s customers. Both of the men who still worked for him. The woman Dove had hired to clean her father’s house twice a month. And his doctor of forty years. She reached the man just as he was leaving church.
No one had seen or heard from the business owner since Saturday afternoon.
Mitchell was itching to call Kansas in, had been ready to do so for more than an hour, but Dove insisted on checking out one more place. “He might have stopped for a bite at Roasters,” she said, standing in the middle of her father’s living room as though she couldn’t decide where to put herself. “One of my mom’s friends works there, and when he’s particularly lonely, he’ll go order some pie and chat with her in between customers. Not that he’d be eating pie, as drunk as he was…”
Her voice dropped off, and Mitchell paused on his way to the front door. He looked at her face and felt a rush of the horror he read there, as an almost physical being.
“I never should have left him in that state,” she whispered, eyes wide and almost blank as she stared at him. Her long amber waves fell around her as her shoulders closed in on her petite, shapely frame, and Mitchell was directly in front of her before he’d had the thought to go there.
Taking both of her shoulders in his hands on instinct, he straightened them, bending his head until he could see into her eyes and then raised himself, pulling her gaze up with him. “From what I hear, you’d never leave him at all if you didn’t leave him in that state,” he said clearly. Succinctly.
Staring at him as though through the eyes of a frightened child, she nodded. Nodded again. And he felt her muscles engage beneath his fingers, pulling her together. Upright. Ready to stand on her own.
“Let’s go to Roasters,” he said then, as though nothing had just happened between them. Needing to convince himself that it hadn’t.
He was just out of his comfort zone. Reading far too much into normal, everyday occurrences that were happening in the midst of disruption, coating their time together with uneasiness.
Time that he hoped would be drawing to an end before afternoon hit but held out little hope when no one at Roasters remembered seeing Whaler since Friday.
He’d just pulled out of the parking place on Main Street, not far from the café, and had turned the corner to take them back down toward the marina when he heard Dove gasp and then shout out, “Stop!”
His foot was already pushing hard on the brake by the time she’d finished the command. Shooting forward against his seat restraint, he turned to look over at her.
“That’s my dad’s truck,” she said, her voice breathless-sounding. And hopeful, too.
