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If anything, the joke had always been, and always would be, on Kelsey.
* * *
She’d grown up well—it was an understatement, but it was all his mind would articulate in that moment. “It’s good to see you again, too, Kelsey.”
Her eyebrows raised slightly and she shook her head. Then turned to walk away.
And then the lights went out. The hum of the electricity in the building—lights, air circulation—was gone all at once, but the gasps from people who’d been plunged into darkness without an explanation filled the void where silence would have been.
Sawyer didn’t move. It was just darkness, no need to panic simply because it was unexpected—although some people were concerned, judging by the sound of shuffling feet.
He tensed as something or someone brushed his left hand. He tried to move it away, but the glancing contact turned into a firm grip from a soft, small, feminine hand.
“Sawyer?”
It was Kelsey’s whispered voice. It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. A moment ago, she’d seemed eager to get away from him and now she was holding his hand? Surely she wasn’t that scared of the dark.
“Yeah.” He matched her low volume. “It’s me.”
“I need to get outside. You always carried a flashlight and a pocketknife in high school. Any chance you’ve got that flashlight now?”
“I’ve got one.”
“Great. Take me to the front door?”
It was less a request than a command, but considering the fact that nothing about this situation made sense, Sawyer wasn’t questioning anything at this point.
He pulled the small flashlight out of the inside pocket of his suit—glad he hadn’t been able to drop the habit and leave it at home. He’d dated a few girls over the years who had made fun of his tendency to be prepared, but Sawyer liked to think it came in handy now and then.
He shone the light on the floor in front of them. Kelsey didn’t release his hand, but allowed him to lead her across the mostly empty middle of the room. It seemed most of the people had pushed themselves back against the walls. There were a few other glowing spots of light in the room—apparently, despite the request from the museum board for people to leave cell phones at a table in the entryway, some people were still carrying theirs.
Finally, they reached the door.
“Thank you.”
She released his hand and then she was gone, running across the lawn with her red hair, curled at the ends, flying behind her, holding her dark blue dress up above her ankles with one hand so she could run.
* * *
Kelsey hadn’t run far from the blanketing darkness of the house when she ran almost straight into Clay. “Did you find anything?” she asked.
He nodded slowly, his face in the moonlight showing no signs of his usual lightheartedness or humor. “We did. Kelsey, it’s Michael Wingate. He’s dead.”
“The curator?” Her eyes widened as she tried to make sense of what she was hearing now, what she’d seen earlier and how they were connected.
“Blunt force trauma to the head is what we’re guessing right now. We won’t know for sure until the ME gets him to the lab.”
“Right, of course.” She nodded.
“Kels? You’re going to have to come to the station. Because if you were in that room and saw some kind of altercation on the balcony, you were the last one to see—or rather, hear—Michael alive before whoever killed him.”
“I’m coming in as a witness, right? Not a suspect.”
The look on Clay’s face said all she needed to know. Treasure Point may be the place that raised her, the happy home for her growing-up years. But almost from the day she’d turned eighteen the town had been nothing but kryptonite for her, some ridiculous weakness that rendered her powerless and made her feel sick. She wished she could just turn around and leave right now. But that wasn’t an option.
She needed this assignment in order to secure her place at the Harlowe Company, a prestigious antiques insurance company in Savannah. But Kelsey also needed this job to finish as quickly as possible, needed to get her feet as far away from this particular bit of red Georgia clay as she could. Treasure Point was nothing but trouble for her.
“Did you hear me?”
No, she hadn’t heard anything Clay had said after she’d seen the facial expression that answered all her questions. “I didn’t. What did you say?”
“If it was up to me, you’d only be a witness. But I’m afraid Davies is wanting to treat you as a suspect.”
Suspect. The word she’d only narrowly managed to avoid in the case that caused her departure from Treasure Point not too many years ago. She hated when her integrity was questioned.
“Let’s go, then.” She glanced toward the museum. “Although with that lights-off stunt not too long after what I saw on the balcony, there’s a good chance I’m going to need to be back here soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something is likely missing or vandalized. It’s going to be my job to assess that.” Her words came out tight, pointed. She felt bad that she was directing them at Clay, one of the nicest guys she’d ever known. But the prospect of being questioned about a crime she didn’t commit was enough to put anyone in a lousy mood.
Anyway, Clay was probably thinking along the same lines already. Cutting the lights was a common gambit for upscale thieves, allowing them to snatch something that had, only moments before, been in plain sight. Perhaps the curator had caught a thief in the act of tampering with the wiring prior to the blackout. Was that why he had died?
She reminded herself not to jump to conclusions. She’d barely met the curator and had been away from town too long to know the current gossip. There could be a dozen reasons someone might have wanted the man dead.
Before she could apologize, before Clay could reply, another man walked their direction, tall and a little intimidating. Lieutenant Davies.
“He read you your rights yet?”
Kelsey couldn’t stifle her laugh. “Rights? Davies, I used to work with y’all. I know my rights and if you have a brain in your head, you’ll realize I’m innocent.”
“Are you verbally assaulting an officer?” His serious face didn’t change. He’d always been a man who’d done his job well, but personally he and Kelsey had never gotten along.
She shook her head. “You know I’m not. But you also know I’m not a killer.”
“I guess we’ll see. I’ll spare you the cuffs, anyway, as long as you move slow. Let’s go get in the car.”
Kelsey followed him without another word. She climbed into the back of the police car—definitely a first for her—and looked out the window, at the museum, for as long as she could before they drove out of view.
Straight to the place where she’d first started to realize she might not be good at everything she put her hand to. She’d already faced disgrace at the Treasure Point police station. Was she about to face murder charges there, too?
TWO (#ulink_9dc2327d-4eaa-5338-ad81-ab163b839cdd)
Sawyer had gone back inside after watching Kelsey exit. But though the lights had come back on in short order, the party atmosphere had already vanished. All the guests had been herded into the main gallery, where the police had announced that no one would be allowed to leave until everyone had given a statement.
That had been over an hour ago. A young police officer Sawyer didn’t recognize had taken down his contact information and asked him some questions about the party—what his connection was to the museum, what he had seen and heard, who he had talked to. The kid had been annoyingly vague when Sawyer had tried to ask some questions of his own—namely, asking what on earth was going on. Clearly something wasn’t right here. But none of the guests he’d spoken to in the past hour had the slightest idea what the problem was, and the police were being very closed-mouthed.
He wanted answers, and while he seldom used his family name to his advantage, he started looking around for a Treasure Point police officer who might give him some information.
There. Clay Hitchcock. No use of his family name would be necessary, since the two of them had been friends, had played football together back in high school—Sawyer was the quarterback to Clay’s receiver.
“Clay!” Sawyer jogged in his direction. “I need to talk to you.”
“Is it about all this?” He gestured around him. “Because otherwise it needs to wait.”
“I’m not sure. Kelsey...”
“What about her? Did she tell you something?”
“No, she didn’t. I just... She seemed really shaken up when the lights went off. She went from acting like she hated me to asking for my help and I don’t understand what happened or where she went. I haven’t seen her since then, which is weird, since I know y’all aren’t allowing anyone to leave.”
“You spoke to her after the lights went out? What did she want?”
“Just for me to use my flashlight to help her find her way to the door.”
“So you helped her and then?”
“She ran.”
Clay nodded. “I saw her after that. She’s at the station now.”
“The police station?” Sawyer frowned. “Is she okay?” Nothing about this was making sense to him.
“She is for now. Or she will be soon. But at the moment, she’s answering some questions for us.”
“I don’t understand.”
Clay shook his head. “I’m sorry, man. It’s all I can say for now.” He started to walk away, then glanced back at Sawyer. “You and Kelsey were talking? I didn’t realize you were friends.”
They weren’t, apparently, judging by her attitude toward him. Though he supposed he hadn’t helped matters by failing to recognize her before she gave her name. Sawyer shook his head, being honest with both himself and Clay. “We’re not, really.”
“But you didn’t mind helping her?”
“Right.”
Clay ran a hand through his hair, looked around. “Listen, I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but something about this doesn’t feel right to me. I think they’ll let Kelsey go soon and I can’t help her because I’m needed here. We’ve taken everyone’s statements and I was just about to announce that everyone’s free to go. Do you think you could go to the station and offer to give her a ride, make sure she’s okay?”
“Yeah, I can do that.” It beat wandering around here in a suit, trying to stay calm, like one of the band members on the Titanic while it went down. “Are you two dating?”
Clay laughed. “Her mom and my mom are sisters. I’d say that’s a no.”
Cousins. How had he missed that in high school? That shouldn’t have made Sawyer as relieved as it did. He didn’t remember ever being attracted to Kelsey in high school, though he’d admired her intellect and competitive spirit. Was he that shallow that the fact that she’d grown up gorgeous had made her catch his attention? Or had he just changed enough to recognize that Kelsey Jackson might be a special kind of woman?
“I’ll go see what I can do,” Sawyer said, and Clay nodded.
“Thanks, man.”
Then the other man was gone, leaving Sawyer to jog toward his truck and wonder how this night that had started out as an obligation—a somewhat boring one, at that—had turned into some kind of secret mission to make sure a woman who couldn’t stand him was all right, safe from a threat Sawyer didn’t yet understand.
* * *
Kelsey sat in the small room that passed for an interrogation room in Treasure Point. Really, it was an old office that the officers usually used as a sort of lounge. It was where the coffeepot was, and the smell of burnt coffee filled her nose and made her ready to confess anything just so she could get out of this room, out of this town and back to her life in Savannah.
Except sheer stubbornness meant that she wasn’t about to confess when she wasn’t guilty of anything. Quite the opposite, she was one of the most promising witnesses they had. So why this treatment? They’d kept her waiting in here for nearly an hour.
The door squeaked as it began to open. Kelsey braced herself. As boring as it had been to sit here, and as eager as she was to get this over with so she could leave, she was not looking forward to any line of questioning that pointed to her as a murderer, a concept so atrocious to her she couldn’t let her mind dwell on it.
But instead of Davies’s smirk, ready for an interrogation, it was the chief’s weathered, familiar face.
“Sir! What are you doing here?”
He cracked the smallest of smiles behind his facial hair. “I work here. Although I could ask the same of you.”
Kelsey looked down.
“Listen, I talked to the lieutenant. And I’ve been over to the museum to see where all of this happened, and I talked to Clay Hitchcock. Let’s start this over, shall we?”
“How so?”
“It sounds like you have some useful information about Michael Wingate’s murder.”
Murder. Kelsey shivered.
“But I’m not looking at you as a suspect. This town and this department has had enough foh-paaahs lately.”
She tamped down the giggle that his overly Southern pronunciation of faux pas had brought on.
“Tell me what you saw, Kelsey.” He pulled out the chair across from her. Leaned back.
Kelsey weighed her options. She could still ask for a lawyer and refuse to answer any questions until counsel arrived. She was taking a chance sharing everything she knew. If someone was eager to frame her, they could twist the information she gave against her.
But she knew from her time on the force that the chief was a man of honor. She wouldn’t end up locked up without a cause, and the best thing she could do was give him the story he was asking her for, just in case any of it helped. Besides, the information would clear her name for good in case anyone was wondering. The balcony should show signs of a struggle between a pair of people much larger than she was. They might even get footprints that clearly didn’t match her heels, or other pieces of physical evidence like hairs or fibers.
“I needed some air.” Kelsey began, and she told the chief about leaving the main party area, finding a darkened room, then hearing voices and the sounds of a struggle.
“I went straight to Clay and told him and he went out to investigate. The next thing I knew, the lights were off.”
“The lights?”
“All of them, sir. Someone flipped a breaker, I would guess. But what I want to know is why? It’s not as if the murderer needed to sneak up on Mr. Wingate. The murder had already taken place. And if the darkness was to cover his escape, why bother? The museum has multiple exits. Even if he looked as though he’d been in a struggle, it would have been easy enough for him to sneak away without being seen after the body fell. Why draw attention to the fact that something was going on when he had the chance for a clean getaway?”
“Maybe he panicked?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. Something about this feels cold-blooded to me. I don’t think it was premeditated, but I don’t think the pushing was an accident. I do think whoever the other man was, he meant to kill Wingate.”
“Solid reason for that?”
“No. Just gut instinct.”
