Protector (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 3) (11 page)

“I’m gonna look around,” he said.

There wasn’t much, though they wandered around the area for an hour. Ellie found shattered safety glass. Garrett found a hubcap, but they also found an ancient-looking wood burning stove and a cache of fast food cups.

No solid clues. Nothing to really go on.

The sun lowered in the sky. Garrett looked around one more time, at the scars in the mountain where his parents’ car had fallen, at the valley where they’d been when they died.

“We should go,” he finally said. “It’s a tough hike back up.”

Ellie just nodded.

He let her go first, after pointing out that he could catch her if she fell, but not the reverse. It was steep and rocky, and the footholds were precarious to say the least, so it was slow-going.

A third of the way up, Ellie stopped to catch her breath. She looked down into a gully, carved by rainwater.

Something glinted back. The sun was at exactly the right angle, otherwise she’d never have seen it.

She squinted at the light, leaning down. She couldn’t quite make out what it was, but it was something oddly shaped and
very
shiny.

“What is it?” Garrett asked.

“I don’t know,” Ellie said, and pointed.

He frowned and scrambled down, yanking it from the dirt, then brushing it off.

Slowly, he held it up.

It was a side-view mirror, bright red paint still on the back.

“I guess we know what made that gouge in the cliff up there,” he said.

“Maybe,” Ellie said. “What color was your parents’ car?”

“Silver,” Garrett said.

That could be from anything
, Ellie reminded herself.
It’s a terrifying road, and I’m sure Garrett’s parents weren’t the first ones to get in an accident on it
.

Still, it was circumstantial. It was
something
. There was
something
about their death that Boudreaux, the man behind everything, wanted to make disappear.

Until now, it had worked.

When they reached the Jeep again, Ellie was breathing hard and covered in sweat. Garrett’s shirt stuck to him, and he fanned it out in front of him.

Take it off
, Ellie thought, then squeezed her eyes shut.

You’re visiting the spot where his parents died. What’s wrong with you?

“To Obsidian?” she said, getting into the passenger side.

“To Obsidian,” Garrett said.
 

For a moment, he rested his hands on the steering wheel and stared off into the distance, his eyes taking the path his parents’ car had taken, all those years ago.

“I guess you get to meet Seth,” he said, and started the car.

Chapter Eleven

Garrett

What if he doesn’t let us stay
?
Garrett thought.
What if he’s pissed, like really, really pissed off at me, still?

He swallowed as the road in front of him descended, the valley floor coming up to meet them, until suddenly they were on flat land again, driving through a low evergreen forest.

Seth had been married for nearly four years, he knew that much. To a woman from West Virginia named Juliana who worked for the US Geological Survey. They still lived in the house where they’d all grown up.

“You know the story of the prodigal son, right?” Ellie asked.

“The one in the Bible?”

“Yup.”

Garrett just nodded.

“He’ll forgive you, is the point,” Ellie said.

“He’s not my father, he’s my brother,” Garrett said. “The Bible’s also got the story of Cain and Abel.”

Ellie just rolled her eyes in the passenger seat. In the back of the Jeep, Garrett could hear the red rear view mirror clunking around whenever he went around a bend.

Soon, he could see the big farmhouse through the trees, the tall red sandstone mesa lurking behind it.

“This is us,” Garrett said. His voice sounded nervous to him, almost high-pitched.

Nearly ten years
, he thought.

For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he’d stayed away.

“This is gorgeous,” Ellie said. “That’s the mesa the mining company tried to destroy?”

“Yup,” said Garrett. “Copper Mesa. Pretty as hell, but there’s fuck-all to do.”

She laughed.

“I promise no one will make you live here,” Ellie said as Garrett put the Jeep in park.

They paused for a moment before getting out.

“You’ll be fine,” Ellie said, and put her hand on the side of Garrett’s face. Garrett put his hand on hers and laced their fingers together.

She was
right
there, and every cell in his body screamed
kiss her
.

Instead, he pulled her hand from his face and kissed her knuckles. Ellie frowned, uncertainty coming into her big brown eyes.

“If I kiss you now I’m not gonna think about anything else for an hour,” he said.

Ellie blushed.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, pressing her knuckles to his lips again. “But you drive me to
distraction
.”

“Then stop being distracted and get out of the car,” she teased.

“You’re a harsh taskmaster,” Garrett teased.

Ellie trailed him up the porch steps. The front door was open, just a screen door between him and his childhood home.

Shit, where do I knock?
Garrett thought.
There’s still no doorbell. Just on the frame, or...

Before he could knock anywhere, a small child wearing just a diaper careened into view, making a high-pitched noise.

When it saw Garrett, it stopped dead and stared, mouth open.

“Violet, get back here,” a woman’s voice called. “I swear, you’re allergic to clothes...”

Then a woman with wild, curly red hair came into view, grabbed the toddler, and then looked up and yelped.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh my god, I didn’t see you there,” she said, lifting the kid to her shoulder. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Can I help you?”

Garrett cleared his throat and opened his mouth, his stomach roiling.

He really,
really
hoped it was Seth’s wife and kid, not some stranger.

Before he could get any words out, the woman stepped closer, looking at his face intently.

* * *

When Jules herded them into the kitchen, Seth was just standing there, drying his hands on a dishtowel, barefoot and wearing an old t-shirt.

He looks the same, just older
, Garrett thought.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Seth said, and enveloped his little brother in a giant bear hug.

After a moment, Garrett closed his arms around his brother and let the other man hold him tight.

“You didn’t mention you were coming,” Seth said.

“It was kind of spur of the moment,” Garrett said.

Seth finally released him, patting him hard on the arm, looking him up and down.

“You look like you did okay,” said Seth, finally.

Then he seemed to notice Ellie, standing off to the side.

“Seth,” he said, shaking her hand.

“Ellie,” she said, sounding very professional.

“Girlfriend?” Seth asked.

“I’m a private detective working on a case with Garrett,” Ellie said quickly, turning a faint shade of pink.

Seth nodded, but Jules, still holding the squirming Violet, raised her eyebrows and looked skeptical.

“Well, welcome to Obsidian,” Seth said. “Dinner’s in twenty minutes, you got time to stay?”

“What’s for dinner?” Garrett asked.

“Why, did you come all this way to turn around if it’s meatloaf?” Seth asked, grinning.

“
Your
meatloaf, yeah,” Garrett said.

“I’ve improved that recipe a lot,” said Seth, and Garrett laughed, then looked at the women.

“He put tuna fish in it,” he explained.

Ellie just wrinkled her nose slightly, looking nervous, but Jules laughed out loud.

Seth shrugged.

“I was trying to make it exotic,” he said. “And I’m not the one who nearly burned his eyebrows off re-lighting the pilot on the heater that winter.”

“That was pretty exciting,” Garrett admitted.

He’d singed the inside parts of his eyebrows, and it had taken them
forever
to grow back in.

“Remember when Zach nearly set the house on fire when he tried to make a pizza with the plastic wrap still on?” he asked.

“I swear the kitchen smelled like burnt plastic until last year,” Seth said.

Jules put Violet down, and she ran in a circle around the adults, then grabbed her dad’s legs from behind and peeked at Garrett and Ellie.

She really looks like Seth,
Garrett thought, a deep pang of sadness stabbing through him.

I can’t believe I didn’t know he had a kid.

“Holy shit!” Violet exclaimed.

Seth looked at Jules, who made a face.

“Sorry,” she said.

* * *

After dinner they sat in the living room. Violet — now wearing pants — played with a small army of dump trucks, backhoes, and stuffed animals as Garrett and Ellie explained everything.

He left out the part where they kissed on the balcony. Or in the car.
That
didn’t seem relevant.

“If they catch you,” Seth said, slowly. “What are they going to
do
?”

“I don’t know,” Garrett said. “I think they just want to stop me from finding out what really happened to mom and dad, since I can’t — uh... I don’t have that gene,” he said, and glanced quickly at Ellie.

“He won’t tell me what your deal is,” she said. “Apparently you and Zach have some ability that he doesn’t?”

Seth and Jules looked at each other quickly. Violet hit a dump truck with a teddy bear and laughed.

“You don’t have that ability?” Jules asked.

She looked at Garrett, then quickly at Ellie, then at Garrett again.

Why’s she looking at Ellie?
He wondered.
Is it because I haven’t told her yet?

Jules has to know I’d sound crazy. She knows that better than anyone
.

“No,” Garrett said with a shrug.

“But you know about it?”

“I’ve known since I was a kid,” he said. “Sometimes I couldn’t sleep and I’d see mom do it in the back yard.”

Ellie frowned, looking slightly scandalized.

“It’s not weird,” Garrett assured her.

“It’s pretty weird,” Jules said.

“But not like
that
,” Garrett said.

“I wish you’d just tell me,” Ellie said.

“It needs to be demonstrated,” Jules said.

“None of you are making this sound less weird,” Ellie said.

Violet stopped hitting trucks together, picked up a small stuffed dolphin, and walked to Garrett.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Garrett said.

She handed him the stuffed dolphin, her small face very serious.

Garrett held it, then looked at the toddler.

What do I do now?
He wondered. He’d never really been around kids before. Did they just go around handing out toys?

“Thank you,” he finally said.

Violet walked back to the trucks.

“That’s her favorite stuffed animal,” Seth said. “Getting to hold it is a pretty high honor.”

Garrett balanced it carefully on his knee.

“I’ll take very good care of it,” he said.

“Zach actually looked into the crash once,” Seth said. “When he was still living here, taking classes over in Blanding. For a long time, he thought it was weird too, but I think he just couldn’t find much, one way or the other.”

“There’s not a lot to go on,” Ellie said.

Seth just nodded.

“This was a math thing he did,” he said. “He thought that where they found the car was all wrong for where they went off the cliff, so he did some tests, or made a model and ran equations, or something, I wasn’t really sure at the time. But he found that they’d have to have been going almost fifty miles an hour to wind up all the way down where they did. With the gouges in the hill where they were.”

Garrett stroked the stuffed dolphin with one finger, frustrated as hell. There were so many strange parts to this mystery, so many odd details that he couldn’t quite reconcile to what had happened — but none of them
proved
anything.

Taken all together, they might point in one direction or another. But individually, he still had
nothing
. The cremation could be incompetence. The same with the junkyard that trashed the car before it got examined.

The gouge next to the road and the side view mirror could mean something, or they could be from
any
point in the last fifteen years. Just because he’d seen another car that night didn’t mean it had anything to do with his parents.

“But he ended up not really proving anything,” Seth said, and shrugged. “Even if they were going
that
fast, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means that something made them go
that
fast, in the rain, in the dark,” Garrett said. “You and I both know they weren’t driving like that for the hell of it.”

“I know,” Seth said, quietly.

Violet came back up to Garrett and looked at him, her blue eyes enormous. She had wispy red curls and Seth’s stubborn jaw line.

“Holy shit!” she said again, then gently took the dolphin back off of Garrett’s knee.

Jules closed her eyes and sighed, and Garrett forced himself not to laugh.

“Violet, please
ask
Uncle Garrett if you can have the dolphin back, don’t just grab it,” Jules said.

“Caahhve dolf?” Violet asked.

“Yes,” Garrett said.

She grabbed it and ran off again. Seth grinned and elbowed Jules in the side.

“I’m hoping the novelty of that particular phrase wears off,” Jules muttered. “Last month she taught everyone in her play group to shout a saltier version of ‘gosh darn it, Seth,’ and telling her not to say it only made her do it twice as much.”

“It’s pretty funny,” Ellie said. “And also adorable.”

“I know,” said Jules. “Momma’s gotta learn to watch her mouth.”

Violet threw a stuffed frog, then gasped dramatically.

“Oh
no
,” she said, her face totally serious. She ran after the frog.

“Anyway,” Seth said. “You think you’re close?”

“I think I have to be,” Garrett said.