Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 92996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
“You could have called over to Westfield and gotten some backup.”
The squint I got, like I was out of my mind, made me chuckle. “Okay, maybe not.”
“The Westfield chief of police hates me, and you know it.”
Not immediately not when Lorne initially took over the chief of police vacancy in Osprey, but now, I was thinking yes. Yes, he did.
The first problem was that Byron Dale knew, without question, that Lorne was more qualified than him. Lorne had been a homicide detective in Boston, so he had far more experience with people and situations than a small-town cop could even imagine. There was no way for Dale to compete with that.
Second, though Osprey was smaller than Westfield by at least a thousand people, that amount did not denote an overwhelming number of citizens. Meaning, they were more or less performing a similar job. Added to that was the jump in tourism, and suddenly, with the extra revenue and traffic, we had triple the volume of visitors Westfield had, with lots of people bypassing the other town altogether. The last time Dale was visiting Osprey with the sheriff—the man in charge of all of Chautauqua County—the sheriff had mentioned that perhaps Lorne needed to bring on another deputy to have an equal number with Westfield. From what my beloved told me later, Dale was pissed.
Third, and this was petty, but between the two of them, Lorne was much better-looking. Lorne was, without question, a beautiful man. And yes, I was biased, but how many black-haired men with cobalt-blue eyes, hard-hewn bodies, and deep, sultry voices did most people come across in their lifetime? If I were Dale, I’d have been jealous too.
“Hello?”
“Sorry. I agree. Dale hates you, and—”
“You’re supposed to say no, that’s not true, be the voice of reason,” he scolded me.
“Or a realist,” I teased him. “But I was going to say I’m glad the state police will be here to help.”
“Me too, but I do appreciate your willingness to camp out in my rig with me.”
“I would do anything with you,” I blurted out.
“That sounded a bit like you’d be up for getting naked in the back seat with me.”
“Which makes me sound like a ghoul since we’re standing in the house of a dead woman.”
“No,” he assured me. “When experiencing a loss, the knee-jerk reaction is to make plans, get married, or have sex. There are other options, of course, but the main thread that runs through them all is that they are life-affirming.”
“So you want to fuck me in the face of death?”
His brows furrowed. “This just proves, again, like always, that there is not a romantic bone in your body.”
“You could put a romantic bone in my body,” I said with a leer.
“Get out, go sit in the car,” he ordered, taking Argos off his shoulders and passing him to me. “Take this cat, put him in the car first, then grab your bike and put it in the back. You can’t be in here anyway when the CSI folks show up.”
“I wasn’t saying I wasn’t on board with your life-affirming activities,” I argued.
“Out,” he repeated.
“You don’t even want to talk about this?”
His silence, combined with the pointing, told me we would not, in fact, be talking about it.
FIVE
After getting my bike as directed, I loaded it into the back, then picked up Argos, who was following along behind me, got into the passenger seat, and attempted to put him in my lap. He was not having it, preferring instead to sit at my feet in the darkness.
“These are the times when I wish you could speak to me,” I told him, then wondered if he’d retreated to the footwell because I’d turned on the car for a moment to roll down the window. To me, it really felt like he was hiding, but I had no idea what he could possibly be afraid of, and then, of course, I thought back to what Thero said, and my mind started running. Because Argos was a daemon, so maybe he was sensing whatever the big bad thing was, and it was making him jumpy. When I got home—or more likely in the morning with how late it was now—I would need to hit the books in the library to see if I could find anything about sealed rifts. Perhaps there was something that could help me figure out how strong of an entity would have to cross to cause a sealing.
Sitting in the car, I ended up dozing, listening to the wind outside, the trees as the breeze blew through the leaves, until the CSI people arrived. I watched as the four-person team split up, two walking around the ruins of one side of the house while the other two disappeared into the part still standing.
I leaned my head on the frame of the door and, still watching everything, took a deep breath of the fragrant summer air and decided to close my eyes for a few minutes.