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Maybe it was the way he’d touched the truck with such reverence. Maybe it was because he, too, let his choice of transportation be a way to connect with someone he’d loved. Whatever it was, Becca felt an immediate kinship spring up between them. For the first time, she allowed herself to hope that maybe things weren’t as they seemed.
BECCA KEPT the Mini Cooper well back from the billows of dust Ryan’s truck churned up on the dirt road. She couldn’t decide whether it would be wiser to go slow over the washboard surface and save the car’s alignment, or go fast—thereby missing most of the bumps and saving all the jostles to her neck and shoulders. They were stiff from the three-hour ride from Atlanta.
She’d stopped just long enough to get a room at the local motel, with its 1960s decor and its view of the pitted parking lot. Becca could have gotten a room at any of the el-cheapo but known motels in Dublin, but her dad had always advised to get a room close to the investigation. You picked up things that way, and you didn’t waste time in transit.
Up ahead, she saw Ryan’s brake lights pop on and the truck pull off on a narrow drive. It wound through two big pastures dotted with cows that seemed undisturbed by the truck.
Now she saw the tin roof of the farmhouse glinting in the setting sun. When she pulled to a stop, she gave the single-story house with its steeply pitched roof an appraising look.
The house was white-framed, with a deep wraparound porch graced by restrained gingerbread trim, a swing and some rockers. The biggest chinaberry tree Becca had ever seen shaded the porch. A cracked and uneven walk curved between two beds full of red and yellow and orange roses.
This could be Nana and Papa’s.
The homeplace wasn’t just like Becca’s grandparents’, of course, but the simple, unfussy style of the house was akin to many of the farmhouses in the south. Becca closed her eyes, sniffing in the late-evening air.
Yep. There it was. The redolent scent of honeysuckle.
“You gonna stand out here all night, or are you coming in?”
“Uh, sure.” Becca was embarrassed that Ryan had caught her reminiscing. She closed the gap between them. “I was just admiring the house. It’s beautiful.”
“Tara, it’s not, but I like it. Gramps built it himself, just after he came home from the Pacific theater. He was in World War II.”
“He seems to have been quite a guy.”
“He was.”
Again she heard that prickle in Ryan’s voice, that note of defensiveness. But before she could address it, the front door swung open.
“Ryan, that you? What you doing coming in the front door? Oh! You got company!”
The words, strong and vibrant and with a country twang, held a note of pleasure and came from the tall woman at the screen door. Her hair was thick and white and scooped up in a bun. Her tanned face seemed curiously smooth, except for a few deep crevices.
“Mee-Maw, this is Becca Reynolds. She’s a crop-insurance investigator.”
Amusement rippled over the old woman’s features at the sour warning in Ryan’s voice. “Well, Ryan, I guess everybody’s gotta do something to keep body and soul together. Child, come on in. My grandson did invite you to supper, didn’t he? Or did he completely forget his raisings? I sure hope you like chicken-fried steak.”
“I do appreciate the offer, but I can get something in—”
“Hush, child. You won’t get anything at all like my chicken-fried steak in town, so you might as well come on in and wash up. I was just getting ready to put it on the table, so you can get the ice in the glasses, how ’bout that?”
Ryan grinned at Becca. “Told you. When Mee-Maw gets her mind set on anything, you might as well just go along with it.”
A hint of the supper wafted out, and suddenly Becca did want to sample Mee-Maw’s cooking.
Or maybe you just miss your grandparents. Don’t get too close, Becca.
Aunt Mala’s whimsical nature—and the promise of a good homecooked meal—got the best of her. “Sure,” she said, deliberately not looking at Ryan. “That sounds great. Just point me in the direction of the glasses and the ice.”
“C’MON, CHILD, you know you can eat more—one little piece of steak is all you’ve eaten. There’s plenty more.”
Becca shook her head. The “little” piece of steak that she’d eaten was twice what she’d needed. To go with it, she’d tucked away a mountain of mashed potatoes floating with gravy, butter beans and thick slices of tomatoes.
“No, ma’am. I couldn’t hold another bite. Besides, it’s getting late, and I’d like to take a look around before dark.”
“Pshaw, honey. It won’t get dark until nearly nine. But you two young folks go ahead. I’ll get the dishes.”
That led to a tussle between Ryan and Becca to see who would take the kitchen cleanup task away from Mee-Maw. It at once felt odd and right to Becca to think of her target’s grandmother as Mee-Maw, but that was the name the woman had insisted she use.
“It’s what everybody calls me,” Mee-Maw had said. “The only Mrs. MacIntosh I ever knew was my mother-in-law—God rest her soul, ’cause I don’t want that old battle-ax comin’ back from the grave!”
Ryan ungraciously conceded that Becca could at least assist him with the dishes. They worked in silence. His familiarity around the kitchen told her that he’d done this before.
Maybe Dad was wrong. Maybe Ryan’s not involved. I’m wasting my time here. It’s Murphy I should be going after.
According to Ag-Sure’s people, the insurance company was betting that the dodder vine had been planted intentionally. Since Ryan and Murphy had been the first in the area to submit a claim, Ag-Sure had tagged them as the most likely suspects.
Now Becca wasn’t so sure. Maybe it wasn’t a scam.
The last pot dried and put away, Ryan picked up a platter of table scraps. “Let me just feed Wilbur and I’ll show you whatever you need to see.”
“Wilbur?”
“That ol’ dog!” Mee-Maw shook her head. “He’s an old sooner that came wanderin’up last winter, nothin’ but skin and bones. Ryan found him slippin’ round the hog pen, survivin’ off what food he could steal from my sows. I named the old mutt Wilbur after that pig in Charlotte’s Web.”
“So you have hogs and cows?” Becca’s research hadn’t turned up this.
Ryan shook his head. “After Gramps passed away, the guy who helped us took off. Guess he didn’t think I could make a go of the farm. Anyway, it was too much work for one person, taking care of hogs, so we sold them. But we kept Wilbur. The name suits him—he sure thought he was a pig.”
Hmm…a disappearing hired hand. That’s a bit convenient. I wonder if this hand knew about the scam and was persuaded to get himself lost. She filed away the thought and commented, “I thought dogs weren’t supposed to get table scraps.”
Ryan chuckled. “Tell that to Wilbur—or whoever fed him scraps to begin with.”
Becca followed Ryan out the kitchen door. A big brown dog loped up the back steps. He sat down on his haunches, pawed the rough floorboards of the porch and whined.
“Here you go, boy.” Ryan dumped the scraps into a stainless steel bowl. Wilbur thumped his thick tail hopefully. “Okay, eat.”
“Wow. You’ve got him trained. My old dog would be all over me.”
“What sort of dog?”
“A collie. We lost her to cancer last year.”
“We? You’re married?”
Was that disappointment she detected in Ryan’s tone? Becca shook her head. “No. I live with my dad. Kind of weird, I know. But it’s just been me and him forever—my mom died when I was young. It’s his firm that I work for—so we just, um, decided it was simpler to live together. Makes it simpler.”
Becca hoped she hid her shame at having returned home.
“Hey, you’re talking to a grown man who still lives with his grandmother.” Ryan shrugged. “I did the single-bachelor deal and the roommate deal and the live-in deal…and, you know, Mee-Maw beats ’em all when it comes to cooking and sharing a roof. Besides, this way, I get to keep an eye on her. It’s been hard on her since she lost Gramps.”
Again that feeling of kinship sprang up. They had so many things in common that, in other circumstances, they might well have hit it off from the start.
Becca covered her conflicted emotions by scratching Wilbur behind the ear. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ryan look away from her face to do a discreet check of the rest of her. Her mouth went dry as he surveyed her with unabashed interest.
“Ahem, well. Where’s that nickel tour you promised?”
“Right. Let me put this up.”
She stayed outside while he washed the final dish. Back outside, he rubbed his hands together—working man’s hands, she noted, but with nails neatly trimmed and clean.
“So…where to?”
“Let me see this vine everybody’s complaining about.”
“Sure. But can we take a detour so I can feed the fish in the pond?”
“No problem. As long as I can get out of here by dark.”
She fell in step beside him, crossing the backyard to the pond that lay in a pool of golden sunset. “Oh, my. This is gorgeous.”
“Yeah. It is. The rest of the world can keep its beachfront condos—this is my favorite place on earth. Me, my hammock and Wilbur at my feet.”
Becca thought about Rooster and his hammock and his similar sentiments. Must be a man thing.
But the peaceful stillness of the pond stirred some understanding in even her restless soul. She finally got what Rooster had meant by needing a little solitude—and sitting still while you had it instead of racing down a highway.
“I don’t see any hammock.”
“It’s over there. Underneath the willow tree near the dock. See the willow that’s arched over? My cousins and I—”
Becca’s breath caught. She didn’t hear the rest of what he said. She couldn’t, not over the thump of her heart. She stood stock-still and saw afresh the pond. The house. The dog who scarfed up table scraps.
She looked at Ryan, who stared back at her with a worried expression on his face. Ryan. The target of her investigation.
No.
Rooster.
CHAPTER FOUR
“ARE YOU—DO YOU NEED to sit down? You look like you’re going to pass out. You’re not a diabetic, are you?”
Ryan’s words, as well as his hand on her shoulder, yanked her out of the swirling maelstrom of her thoughts.
Tell him. Tell him you know him.
No, you could be wrong. You’d sound like a nut, or a loser—a loser who has to go online to find someone to talk to and then doesn’t even know his name. Wait. Be sure.
But Becca was sure, to-her-bones sure. She smiled at him in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “Uh, headache. I guess…the sunset?”
“Migraine?” Ryan made sympathetic noises that triggered a flood of guilt within Becca.
“My camera…I forgot it. I’ll just…walk back and get it, okay? It’s in my car.”
He would have followed her, but she waved him off. “You feed the fish. I’ll get my camera…and some medicine.”
As if to make her words true, a headache blistered forth like a blacksmith’s red-hot poker. Whether it was stress or punishment for the lie, Becca couldn’t say, but she was grateful for the time alone.
At the car, she fumbled for her camera. The bag’s heft felt dear and familiar in her hand. The camera had been one of the small things she’d managed to salvage after the debacle at the magazine. Becca pushed aside resentful thoughts of libel suits and searched for some quick-dissolve pain medicine.
She sat in the driver’s seat and closed her eyes, praying that the medicine would kick in before the pain settled for a long stay. The inner debate raged on. With some force, she managed to tick off the pros and cons of telling him the truth.
The biggest reason was her gut. It had never steered her wrong before—well, save one biggie in the form of her countersuit, but in the end, even a jury of her peers had said her gut had been right.
Maybe, though, her instinct to blurt out “Are you Rooster?” came from her distaste of lying, even by omission. Deceit never felt right to Becca.
But this situation was different.
You don’t know if it’s Rooster. You have no way to verify it, except for some story about a willow tree. He can’t have been the only one who’s ever put a hammock under a willow tree.
Yeah, right. And just what did her dad say about coincidence?
Her dad. Becca’s stomach did a nauseating roll and twist the way it did whenever she’d topped a roller coaster and prepared for the final gut-wrenching loops. Her father would kill her. Becca could imagine the scathing words her dad would say to her if she trotted back to Atlanta to tell him some sorry tale about how she knew Ryan MacIntosh was innocent because he’d turned out to be her online buddy.
Knowing Dad, he’d say it was no coincidence at all. He’d swear Ryan had targeted Becca.
The possibility niggled at her. It would explain how Becca, who never managed to win a door prize or a lottery ticket or even a church bingo game, had hit the trifecta of coincidence.
But, no. She had six months of correspondence with Ryan, anonymous correspondence. She knew him—knew him how it counted. He couldn’t be scamming her. He couldn’t be mixed up in some complicated conspiracy to defraud the government and Ag-Sure.
Could he?
Okay, so she couldn’t say anything to her dad. She had to go forward with the investigation if she wanted to keep her job.
So…
Maybe there was no fraud. Maybe it was some wildly improbable, but still true, story about a vine that had somehow gotten transported from Texas to Georgia. Truth was stranger than fiction, right?
All she had to do was prove that the story was true. All she had to do was figure out how it got there. Then not even the insurance company could fault her.
If she did it quickly enough, Ryan wouldn’t have to know now. Plenty of time to help him anonymously. Plenty of time to tell him later. He’d understand about conflicts of interest.
The tremulous panic within her subsided as she settled on a course of action. Becca drew in an easier breath. She could do this.
A tapping at the window made her jump. She opened her eyes to see a concerned Ryan crouched down, peering at her.
Right. Well, checking on her tallied with the considerate Rooster she knew.
