Carla Neggers - Cold Pursuit

“A.J. and I had a couple of beers the other night and watched it start to finish at least three times.”

“You did not.”

“Okay. Six times.”

The screen door creaked shut as he headed out, laughing.

After he left, Jo checked the card tucked among the lilies.

Thank you for your willingness to save my life.

Someday I’ll make amends. Charles P. Neal.

She sighed and told herself she was glad there hadn’t been a real gun. No one had been seriously hurt that day. The rest didn’t matter.

On her drive north, Jo had tried to be optimistic and thought of the various ways that being in Black Falls would do her good. She could go for runs in the fresh, crisp northern New England air. She could watch the last of the leaves fall off the trees. Wait for the first real snow. Watch the birds migrate for warmer climates.

Listen for bats in the rafters and avoid her nearest neighbor.

She got busy unpacking before she could change her mind and load up her car again and head to Montreal or Buffalo-anywhere, she thought, that would put her more than a couple hundred yards from Elijah Cameron.

Ten minutes later, Jo was already bored with unpacking. She opened a bottle of merlot, poured herself a glass and took it outside, crossing the dirt road and heading down to the lake.

She stood on a rounded boulder and sipped her wine. The sky was almost dark now. The air was frosty, and the landscape had the stark, empty feel of November, so different from the warm spring afternoon when she’d walked among the cherry blossoms with Drew Cameron.

She hadn’t told anyone-family, friends, colleagues or, most of all, Drew Cameron’s three sons and daughter-about the strange visit two weeks before his death.

She could see him now as they’d walked along the Tidal Basin. He’d surprised her when he’d shown up at her apartment and asked her to go with him to see the cherry blossoms. He was alone-A.J. was working nonstop at the lodge, Elijah was deployed to parts unknown, Sean was in southern California making money and Rose was off with her search dogs, picking through the remains of a string of Midwestern tornadoes.

The brown flannel shirt Drew wore was too warm for early April in Washington, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. Surrounded by the stunning pale pink blossoms, the hard-bitten man Jo had once blamed for helping to ruin her life had startled her further by asking if she was okay these days.

“You’ve never married, Jo,” he’d said.

“I’m only thirty-three.” She’d laughed. “There’s still time.”

“I guess things are different now. Elijah’s never married, either, but I don’t think he ever expected to live this long. I’m not saying he has a death wish or anything. He’s just being practical.” Drew had paused, his face lined with deep wrinkles as much from a life spent mostly outdoors in the mountains he loved as from age. “We Camerons are a practical lot.”

Uncomfortable with his seriousness, Jo had gone for another lighthearted remark. “I don’t know that moving to Vermont in the middle of the Revolutionary War was all that practical. Then staying there. Your ancestors could have cleared out and joined the westward expansion.” She’d caught a falling cherry blossom in a palm and smiled at him. “Taken a flatboat to Ohio or something.”

“Harpers got to Vermont before any Camerons did.”

“Not all of us Harpers stayed,” she said.

“True. Jo, there are days…” He’d hesitated and gazed up at the cherry trees and the cloudless sky. It was one of those rare, glorious early-spring afternoons in the nation’s capital. Finally, he’d shifted back to Jo, with tears in his eyes. “I wake up on cold mornings and see the grandchildren you and Elijah should have had. They’re as clear to me as you are right now. They line up in front of my bed and look at me as if I did something wrong.”

Jo had needed a moment to collect herself. She hadn’t expected such words-such an image-to come from Drew Cameron. But she’d sensed his pain, his age, and however much she’d hated him in the past, blamed him for the way he’d humiliated her at eighteen, she couldn’t hate him then. “Don’t torture yourself,” she’d said quietly. “I’m happy. Elijah’s happy-”

“I keep dreaming I’m going to lose him.”

“Mr. Cameron…Drew…”

“I wake up in a cold sweat, Jo. My heart pounds and I can’t go back to sleep. I know he’s going to die over there. I don’t know what he’s doing, exactly-he tells me what he can. But it’s dangerous. And he’s not going to survive.”

Jo had crushed the cherry blossoms in her palms and dropped them on the walk. Drew Cameron wasn’t a worrier. She doubted there was a Cameron ever born who was. They were action oriented and forward looking. They didn’t brood-they didn’t dwell on those things they couldn’t do anything about.

Like keeping a son at war safe from harm.

Jo was unable to fathom Elijah dying young. He would always be the devil-may-care teenager she’d promised to love forever.

Except it hadn’t worked out that way.

“It’s natural to worry,” she’d told his father, “especially given the nature of Elijah’s work.”

“I’d give my life for Elijah,” Drew had said simply.

“He knows that. Come on. Let’s look at the cherry blossoms.”

“Jo…”

She had never seen him-maybe any Cameron-so openly emotional, but every instinct she had told her why he had come to see her. She’d stopped, staring out at the Tidal Basin as she spoke. “You did what you thought was right when you broke up Elijah and me and kicked him out of your house. There’s nothing for either of us to forgive.”

“Will you still think that if he’s killed?”

“Have faith.”

They’d continued their cherry-blossom tour in near silence, and Jo couldn’t help but imagine what the children the usually stolid man next to her claimed to have seen looked like. How many of them were there? Were they boys, girls-a mix?

Did they have Elijah’s deep blue eyes?

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask Drew to describe them.

She’d fallen for a bad boy and a Cameron all those years ago, and he’d left her for the army. There was no going back.

When Jo received word of Drew’s death on Cameron Mountain and Elijah’s narrow escape in Afghanistan, she had thought back to that eerie conversation among the cherry blossoms and wondered if, somehow, Drew had gotten his wish-if he had, at least in his own mind, exchanged his life for his son’s.

It wasn’t a conversation she intended ever to have with Elijah or any Cameron.

Recent evidence to the contrary, she did know that some things needed to be left unsaid.

She jumped down from her rock and decided to resume unpacking.

But when she returned to the cabin, she dug out her cell phone and checked the signal. Weak. She tried her boss’s direct line, anyway.

Deputy Special Agent in Charge Mark Francona picked up on the second ring and sighed. “What?”

“I’m in Vermont,” Jo said. “How long do I get to stay in exile?”

“Who is this?”

“Jo Harper.”

“Jo who?”

Click.

Despite his enormous responsibilities and straight-as-an-arrow professionalism, her boss had a peculiar sense of humor.

On the other hand, maybe he was being serious.

Jo flipped her cell phone shut and dropped onto the ratty couch. She stared up at a dusty picture of a trout on the cheap wood paneling above the old propane heater.

Maybe, in his own way, Francona was trying to tell her that the sand was running out of the hourglass on her Secret Service career, and she’d be stuck in Black Falls forever.