The Homecoming (35 page)

Kara had always had a low boredom threshold. Which was why, after she’d awakened to an empty house shortly before noon, she decided that she’d pampered herself long enough. She went into the bathroom, took a long, hot shower, and washed her hair. Then she put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers, and went into the kitchen to make some coffee.

Her mother called again while the coffee was dripping through the machine. After assuring her one more time that truly, she was doing fine, Kara was relieved to discover that Danny appeared to be out of the woods and the three of them would be heading home from Portland later this afternoon.

When she warned her mother again about the mess the state police had made, Faith blithely told her not to worry and that Sax had arranged for a company from Salem who cleaned up crime scenes to take care of the damage.

“Well, he certainly seems to have everything under control,” Kara said dryly.

“Doesn’t he?” Was that a chirp?

“How’s John?” Kara asked.

“Absolutely fabulous.” Definitely a chirp. Or at least the closest thing she’d ever heard to one coming out of her mother’s mouth. “We need to talk,” Faith said, turning serious again. “When I get home.”

“Sure.” Kara guessed this was going to be where her mother was going to explain that she and John had become an item.

Which, Kara thought, meant that, as much as she disliked the idea, she’d better give Sherry a call and start her looking for a new place. Because while the house certainly had more than enough room for three adults and one small child, at this stage of a budding relationship, her mother and John O’Roarke definitely didn’t need a pair of chaperones living under the roof with them.

Insisting yet again that she truly was feeling much better, she cut off the call. Then, after downing two Motrin she found in Sax’s medicine cabinet, she called the office.

“You’re supposed to be resting,” Maude said.

“I am. As a matter of fact, I’m sitting on the Douchett porch, watching a pod of whales.”

“Good. Stay there.”

“I’m the sheriff.”

“Good thing you reminded me. Else I might’ve forgotten that little fact.”

“Look.” Kara let out a long breath. “John’s in Portland with Danny, who is, by the way, apparently on the road to recovery.”

“I know. John called in three hours ago.”

And didn’t that make her feel like a slacker?

“He also told me it’d be okay to have Kyle go ahead and talk to that anchorwoman from KEZI in Eugene,” Maude revealed.

“Our Kyle?” The green-as-grass recruit?

“You know any other?” Maude asked. “You’re the one who hired him, after all.”

“As a deputy. Not a news spokesperson.”

“From what I hear, you’re not exactly in any physical shape to appear on television. John’s out of town; your other deputy, Marcus, who’s nearly as green as Kyle, checked himself off the duty roster because his wife went to the hospital in labor an hour ago. You know I’m too damn blunt not to say what I think about the yahoo who shot Daniel Sullivan, which probably wouldn’t be the best PR move for the department. Which leaves you two choices: Ashley, aka Dispatcher Barbie, or Kyle. Since the anchorperson’s a woman, and Kyle’s real pretty, I’d say John chose the best candidate.”

“Have the reporter do a phone interview,” she decided. “With me.”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Maude said. “She’s already in town and has met Kyle. And she wants to put him on the air. I think she’s going for the female audience.”

“I could order him not to talk to the press,” Kara said, thinking out loud. She was, after all, the boss, even if Maude mostly seemed to forget that crucial fact.

“You could. But then she’d just go talk to the state cops who’ve been going door to door, trying to find a witness who saw the guy break into your mother’s house.”

“They’re still on the case?”

“They might not have gotten excited about your bleached-out old skull. But yeah, even they’re taking the attack of a fellow police officer seriously. Of course, they also have a real tendency to hog the camera. And maybe spin the story to make it look like you’re not up to protecting your own town.”

It was, Kara thought, a distinct possibility. Local and state cops, who were on the same side when it came to fighting the bad guys, also had a built- in distrust of one another. And she knew small-town law enforcement officers, such as herself, were often perceived to be inferior.

“And even if you could get them not to hold a press conference, which John already told them not to do, by the way—and backed it up with a call to their boss, some guy he and Ben used to go steelhead fishing with every year—that reporter would have no choice but to go around town sticking her microphone in front of folks on the street to get their takes on what happened. Hard to control your message that way.”

Damn
. Once again the dispatcher had a point.

“We’ll split the difference,” Kara said. “I’ll do a phone interview with her. And Kyle can show her the crime scene. Since I don’t want our conversation to go out over the police band, I’m going to call him as soon as I hang up and let him know that in no way is he allowed to make any suppositions.”

“I told him, since it’s not as if you have a lot of clues, other than those bullet fragments your mother dug out of Daniel’s skull, just to ask for anyone who knows anything about the incident to come forward,” Maude advised her. “Then shut his pretty mouth.” She paused. “But it’s a good compromise,” she allowed. “And one your dad would have thought of.”

The compliment, coming from a woman who’d yet to give her one in the six months she’d been sitting behind her father’s desk, shouldn’t mean so much.

But, dammit, Kara thought, as she dialed Kyle Murphy’s cell phone, it did.

Shelter Bay First Coastal Bank was situated at the highest point in town, in a huge redbrick building faced with four white pillars, which, to Sax’s mind, had always looked ridiculous hovering over the small community of brightly painted coastal cottages. It had been founded by Joshua Gardner, Gerald’s great-great-grandfather, who’d seeded the family fortune during the Great Depression by foreclosing on fishing boats, businesses, homes, lumber companies (including acres of timber), sawmills, and all the land they sat on up and down the coast.

If it had been up to future generations of Gardners, the entire coastline would be nothing but glass-front condos and pricey vacation rentals, but fortunately locals had always been adamant about overdevelopment, often forgoing easy profits to protect one of the most pristine environments in the country.

“Old Joshua was definitely overcompensating for something,” Sax decided as he parked the car in front of a bronze statue of the bank’s founder gazing out to sea, as if, having run out of things to buy up in coastal Oregon, he was looking for new opportunities overseas.

The inside of the bank was just as ostentatious, the marble walls covered with gilt- framed paintings. Some were of local scenery, but the majority were portraits of various Gardner males, including the one Sax had come here to see today, striking leaders-of-capitalism poses.

He was not the least bit surprised when Gerald kept him waiting thirty minutes past their scheduled appointment time. When his secretary—an Angelina Jolie look-alike whose collagen-enhanced lips made her appear to have stumbled into a nest of Africanized bees and come out the worse for the encounter—finally ushered him into the office, the banker didn’t even bother to look up from the papers he was studying.

Sax waded across the plush red carpet and sat down in the seat across from the wide ebony desk. A nearly empty desk, making him wonder exactly how much work went on in here.

Knowing that he was being played, but refusing to rise to the bait, Sax just sat there, looking out the window at the expansive view of the town, the bay, and the iron bridge leading toward the coast.

Finally, after another five minutes of silence, during which time Sax wasn’t offered so much as a glass of water, Gerald Gardner looked up.

“Douchett,” he said.

“Gardner,” Sax responded as the guy gave him one of those up-and-down appraising looks.

Sax had dressed for the meeting in a pair of ironed jeans, a blue, open-necked dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows, and a pair of classic, black-and-white Converse All Star Chucks.

He’d been planning to spit-polish his single pair of black dress shoes, but Cole, who knew more about getting loans because of his fishing charter business, had insisted the trick to getting money was not to go in looking as if you needed it.

Gerald, on the other hand, was wearing another one of those high-priced suits and silk ties, which made him look ridiculous in a town where people tended more toward jeans, T-shirts, Gore-Tex vests, and rain slickers.

Another silence ensued.

Again, utilizing his vast store of patience, Sax waited. And stared right back at him.

The banker was the first to look away, glancing back down at the papers in the manila folder. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s all in there.” Sax gestured toward the folder he’d dropped by the other day after lunch with Trey at the VFW.

“You want to refurbish Bon Temps.”

“That’s right.”

“And your collateral is your grandparents’ house?”

“The house and the oceanfront land. Which I bought from them when I came home.” Admittedly for far less than they could have gotten by selling it to a developer.

The cliff house had originally belonged to the elderly widow of a timber baron for whom his grandmother had worked as a housekeeper/cook. Sax’s fisherman grandfather had also moonlighted as the widow’s gardener and handyman. Having no children of her own, their employer had willed the home to them, which was how they’d ended up with such a pricey bit of real estate. His grandfather had wanted to just sign the deed over to him, but Sax had insisted on buying.

Gerald studied the papers again. Yet more gamesmanship, which had Sax wondering why the hell he’d bothered to come here in the first place. He just should’ve gone to Eugene, or Corvallis, or Salem. The only problem was, judging from the banks he’d called, credit appeared to be tighter than a tick. He’d hoped perhaps small-town connections might prove more helpful.

He’d already realized, while forced to cool his heels out in the waiting room, that he’d been dead wrong.

“Then you also paid for that home and business for your parents.”

“Not much to spend your pay on in Iraq or Afghanistan. I had enough saved to handle things.”

“Yet the purchases left you without all that many accessible funds.”

“The house and the land it’s sitting on are damn valuable. Even in today’s economy.” Hadn’t he been approached by half a dozen real estate speculators hoping to flip it and turn a pretty profit once the market picked up again?

“And you’re willing to risk losing it? For a dance hall?”

He made it sound like a brothel. Sax had realized, when he’d first seen those signs on that parade car, that Gardner still held a grudge over Lucien Douchett’s keeping him on the bench. And now that Trey had revealed that the banker had asked Kara out, only to be turned down, the obvious fact that Sax and Kara were still close must have grated.

But even that probably hadn’t rankled as much as the fact that, whether Sax wanted to claim the designation or not, he was a hero. While Gardner was a banker. Not exactly the most popular occupation in the country these days.

“If I considered it a risk, I wouldn’t be putting the land up as collateral,” he said mildly.

“Yet you’ve never been to college.”

“Actually, I was studying music at Berkeley when I left to fight for my country after nine-eleven.”

“Music.” He didn’t bother to conceal his scorn. “Did you happen to take any business courses?”

“Nope. Not a one.”

Gardner shot his cuffs, exposing diamond studs set in what looked like platinum. “Yet you expect First Coastal Bank to give money to someone with your lack of cash reserves. And no experience?”

“I’ve never expected anyone to give me anything.” Sax wanted to punch the guy’s supercilious face. “That application is for a loan. Which I intend to repay. On time. With interest.

“As for experience, I grew up over Bon Temps. I was washing dishes there when I was six, standing on a stool to reach the shelves. I was busing tables at twelve, and cooking at fifteen. I learned math helping my parents balance receipts at the end of the day.

“So yeah, maybe I don’t have a framed diploma in Latin from some fancy business college, but I’m definitely not without experience.”

“Working for a restaurant is a great deal different from actually running one,” Gerald said. “I’m sorry.” He closed the folder. “First Coastal just doesn’t consider you a viable risk.”

He’d seen it coming. But pride—and a Cajun stubbornness that went all the way to the bone—had him seeing it through.

He stood up. Plucked the folder holding the balance sheet he’d spent most of the night working on from the glossy top of the desk. “First Coastal,” he said with his most winning smile, “can eat my shorts.”

“Way to go, Sax Man,” Randy said as he walked out of the bronze door of the bank. “That’s telling the fat douche bag.”

“It was a stupid, sophomoric thing to say,” Sax muttered.

“But you enjoyed the hell out of it,” Cowboy drawled.

“You bet,” Sax agreed.

“So where are we going now?” Randy asked as they all climbed into the Camaro.

Sax knew better by now than to suggest his teammates stay behind.

He headed down the hill toward Harbor Street.

“I’m suddenly having myself a craving for cupcakes.”

An hour later, Sax’s blood turned to ice when he returned to the house and found Kara missing. He also came as close to panic as he’d ever been when he viewed her purse, which she’d insisted on dragging from her mother’s house to the hospital with her, on the kitchen table.