Love Inspired Suspense June 2021--Box Set 1 of 2, page 10
Silence fell between them again and something caught in his throat that felt even deeper and stronger than the feeling that had surged through him when he’d impulsively held her in his arms and kissed her.
How was I ever blessed enough to have a woman like Poppy love me? How was I ever foolish enough to let her go?
He let the boat slow and just drift gently in the water, feeling like there was something he should say to the incredible woman standing beside him, but not even knowing where to start.
“I’m sorry I left you to arrange our future and plan our wedding on your own,” he said. “You just seemed so good at organizing things. I just felt useless, like you didn’t need my help. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
She blinked and for a long moment didn’t reply.
“For the record,” she said finally. “I never once doubted that if I was in crisis and really needed you that you’d be there for me. I knew, even after we’d gone our separate ways, that if I was in trouble I could call on you. You’re really good at having people’s backs.”
Then she frowned.
“Is that a bad thing?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to have to be in a crisis for you to be there for me,” she admitted, a tinge of something almost like defiance filling her voice. “Yes, you were the kind of man who’d rush to help a friend in need. I liked that about you. I even loved that about you. But I needed the kind of man who’d also celebrate my success when I had an amazing day at work or who’d switch off his phone long enough to sit on the couch with me, watch a movie and eat pizza.”
He smiled almost ruefully. “I seem to remember us eating a lot of pizza,” he said.
But how many times had their dinners and date nights been interrupted by a friend calling his phone or even showing up at the door?
More than he liked to remember.
“I didn’t want you to only be there when it counted or when you thought I couldn’t handle it,” she said. “I wanted all that everyday quality time that comes from sharing life with someone. Even if it meant boring meetings with people explaining how to get a mortgage or how many people could fit in a seating plan. I’m guessing Danny loves spending time with you. Not because he always feels useful or needed, but because he feels loved.”
She paused and pulled her hand from his.
“I’m sorry, that’s not the best analogy,” she added. “After all, he’s still a toddler. But maybe a better one is that I really, really love team meetings and hearing my colleagues brief their cases, even if I don’t have all the answers or I don’t end up doing anything more than sit there and cheer my teammates on while they solve the case.”
“Both of those are good analogies in their own way,” Lex murmured.
“You care about the same things I care about,” Poppy said, and something seemed to break in her voice. “You want to save people’s lives, rescue animals and protect the natural world. All I wanted was for us to be a team. I didn’t want you discussing your doubts with everyone else and avoiding all the tedious parts of being in a relationship. I loved you and wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, including the hard and boring parts.”
His heart caught in his chest. Somehow hearing Poppy say that she’d loved him impacted him every bit as much as it had in the past, even if those feelings were gone. Water flowed beneath them and wind rushed past. Towering islands rose from the depths around the small boat.
“Maybe you were right and it was for the best you called off the wedding,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to be married to a man who’s only there for me when my life’s on fire.”
“I didn’t tell you I’d met your boss and gone to a trooper recruitment event because I felt embarrassed,” Lex admitted. “When the woman you admired so much told me I wasn’t cut out for the career you loved, I was afraid you’d think less of me. It took a long time for me to really process what I think she was trying to tell me.”
“Which was?” Poppy asked, and he was thankful she hadn’t questioned why he’d seemingly changed the subject.
“Your boss told me that I shouldn’t apply to be a state trooper just because somebody else wanted me to,” he said. “She said her hunch was that I tended to follow the lead of other people instead of making decisions for myself. It stung, but she was right. And to be fair, she also said a lot of great things about my skills and abilities, too, which helped.”
The dock loomed ahead, and he steered the boat toward it.
“When Johnny first moved to Gustavus he stayed with us,” Lex added. “I gave him a set of keys to the bed-and-breakfast, which was mostly symbolic because nobody ever really locks their doors here. When he moved out, I didn’t ask for them back and let him know he could return if he ever needed to. Then, when he told me he’d heard about the blue bear poaching down at the watering hole, I asked for them back.”
“That’s more than fair,” she said. “Especially if he was going to dodgy places or hanging out with potentially dangerous people.”
“It’s not like he was ever going to use them,” Lex said. “It was just my way of taking a step and drawing a boundary, of deciding what I did and didn’t want around Danny.”
He blew out a hard breath.
“Bottom line is, I don’t think I made a lot of deliberate choices like that back when we were together,” Lex said. “I waited for you to ask for what you needed instead of trying to step up and figure it out for myself. I jumped up and ran whenever my friends called without pausing to even ask if there were other options, like drawing a line and telling them to call someone else, sleep it off, walk or call a cab. Your boss gave me a wakeup call, Poppy. I didn’t fight for myself back then. I didn’t fight for us.”
Her lips parted like she was about to say something more. Then he heard her phone chime and watched as she pulled it out of her jacket pocket. She blinked as she read the message.
“Okay,” she said, looking from the screen to his face. “That was Will. He says he’s managed to interview what feels like half of Gustavus in the past few hours and has some unexpected news.”
“Which is?”
“He’ll explain when he sees us.” She hesitated. “All I know is he says it looks like Johnny was lying to you.”
NINE
They docked the boat and drove back to the house, small talk filling in the spaces between the silence and Lex’s spinning mind. Fat and intermittent raindrops had started hitting the windshield again. Stormy was curled up in the back seat of his truck, and the woman who in less than two days had turned his life both inside out and upside down sat beside him on the passenger seat. Poppy’s face was turned toward the window. His eyes traced the lines of the back of her neck.
Despite the fact she was sitting just inches away from him, he’d never missed her more.
When they reached the house, they found Will’s truck in the driveway and the front door locked. A bit flustered, Lex searched his pocket a moment before coming up with the carabiner of mostly work keys that had his house keys on it, as well. He couldn’t remember ever being locked out before and wondered if it had been his mom or Will that had done it.
They found Will in the living room sitting by the fire with Scout lounging at his feet, but they both jumped up when he and Poppy came in. Stormy made a beeline for her water dish and Scout sauntered over to join her.
“Hope it’s okay I locked the door,” Will said, leaving Lex to wonder if he looked either confused or annoyed. “It’s instinctual, and the back door was already locked.”
“Probably a smart move,” Lex told him. “We should keep the back sliding door locked, too. The windows all have safety latch locks to keep them from being opened more than a few inches. But before this, those were there to keep furry critters from sneaking in.” He sighed. Had it really come to this? “Poppy said you’ve got news.”
“I do,” Will said. “I do need to brief our boss and told Lorenza I’d call as soon as you got back and Poppy was ready. But I wanted to give you a heads-up about something first.”
“Okay.” Lex braced himself for whatever the trooper was about to say. “Lay it on me. Poppy says you think Johnny was lying to me?”
“Absolutely everybody I spoke with today agrees that Johnny Blair has not been to the watering hole, touched a drink of alcohol or hustled a game of pool or darts in over four months. So, that can’t be where he found out about poaching blue bears.”
Lex dropped into a chair, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of him.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Yup,” Will said. “Trust me, it’s hard to get that many different people to lie about the exact same thing without one of them cracking.”
“Will is a really tough investigator,” Poppy interjected. She sat down on the couch, opposite Lex. “He’s naturally suspicious and doesn’t fool easily. I’d trust his conclusion.”’
“Thanks,” Will said. “I’m going to tell the team that, in my professional opinion, Johnny was telling the truth when he told you he hadn’t been to the watering hole in months, and lying through his teeth when he told you that’s where he heard about the blue bear cubs being poached.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news from your standpoint, but that’s what I think and that’s what I’m telling the boss. There’s more I’m going to brief the team on, but that’s the main thing I wanted you to hear from me.”
Lex wasn’t sure how Poppy knew he needed a few moments to process the news. But she stood and walked over to the kitchen, where the two K-9s had been joined by the kitten and were now all chasing each other around the island, their paws slipping and sliding on the tiles like children on a frozen lake. She let the lot of them outside into the backyard, then went into her room and came out a few moments later in clean jeans and a T-shirt, with her lightly damp hair around her shoulders.
Will set his laptop up at the dining room table and started the video call. As before, Poppy and Will sat at the table in front of the screen, while Lex stood behind them. It was a much smaller group this time. Only Lorenza and Eli joined from the day’s earlier meeting, along with a petite woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and a stylish gray business jacket who Poppy introduced as Lorenza’s assistant, Katie Kapowski. All three of them shared one screen, with Lorenza in the center and the other two hovering on the edges.
“Nice to meet you,” Lex said to Katie. “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your aunt and I hope they find whoever has been stealing her reindeer.”
Katie smiled. “Thank you.”
They listened as Will gave a brief rundown of the results of his interviews in Gustavus today, along with the same conclusion he’d reached that Johnny had been lying through his teeth to Lex when he told him he’d overheard someone talking about the blue bear poachers.
“So, where else could Johnny have learned about the poaching?” Lorenza asked. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. Her keen gaze seemed to fix on Lex’s face.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “As I mentioned before, we hadn’t been close in a while. I do know he was dating Ripley and working at her brother’s small tourism charter flight business.”
“Well, whatever his source, he wanted to keep it from you,” Will said. “Johnny has a record. Is it possible he was contacted by criminal elements from his past wanting his help? Maybe he turned them down and told you, and they killed him for it.”
Sadness swelled inside Lex’s core. “It’s very possible.”
“Is it also possible he was working with them and double-crossed them after the first poacher was murdered or for other reasons?” Lorenza asked.
“I don’t know,” Lex admitted. “I hope not.”
He felt Poppy reach her hand back subtly and squeeze his fingers for a moment before letting them go.
“What do we know about the charter airline?” Lorenza prodded.
“It’s very small,” Poppy said. “Two small planes, one that can carry two passengers and one that can carry four. It caters to tourists with money who want a private tour of the glaciers. Most are wealthy foreigners who fly into his small airport on their personal jets and then take a tour at a much lower altitude with Nolan in his prop plane. Then they leave again without ever coming into Gustavus. The only staff are Nolan, who runs it and flies, Ripley, who does admin, and Johnny, who did mechanical stuff and odd jobs. So, he could’ve overheard a client talk about poaching the bears and not wanted to risk losing his job.”
Lex wasn’t sure when Poppy had looked into Johnny’s employer, but he wasn’t surprised that she had. She’d always been thorough.
“Have you spoken to Nolan?” Lorenza asked.
“The airline was closed when I swung by there this afternoon,” Will told her.
“And I just called Ripley from my room a few minutes before this meeting started,” Poppy said. “She confirmed what I knew about the airline and told me it was closed today because they only opened when they had customers. She said she’d send me a list of recent clients tomorrow.”
Lex thought about the large and thin figures in camo gear who’d tried to steal their boat and an odd thought crossed his mind. Johnny hadn’t been covering for his girlfriend, had he? She and her brother couldn’t be the poachers?
“Do you think she’s lying about Johnny’s death and how she got locked in the cupboard?” Lex mused.
“I think she genuinely loved Johnny and she’s scared,” Poppy said, “but there may well be more she either can’t remember or is choosing not to tell us.”
“Do they have an alibi for the boat attack today?” Eli asked, leaning into the frame.
“Only each other,” Poppy replied. “Ripley says she and Nolan spent the entire day together.”
“But neither Ripley nor her brother have any form of criminal record,” Will leaped in, as if anticipating Lorenza’s next question. “Ripley’s long-term ex-boyfriend, Kevin Wilson, is another story, though. He’s been arrested multiple times for aggravated assault, and recently served eighteen months for assaulting Nolan and threatening Ripley. He got out of prison three weeks ago.”
“Do we know where he is now?” Lorenza leaned forward.
“Not yet,” Will said. “He skipped parole and disappeared.”
Lex’s mind flashed to the food wrappers in one of the cabins in the national park and his suspicion somebody had been squatting there.
“You’re thinking something,” Poppy said to Lex. She turned back and looked at him over her shoulder. “The image of you on the screen might be small, but I can still tell when wheels are turning.”
“I’m thinking about the fact that before Johnny was murdered, before we discovered the poachers were after blue bears and knew somebody had started stalking my home, I thought we had a problem with squatters camping out in a cabin on the national park,” Lex said. “It’s possible Kevin came here, looking for Ripley, and was hiding out in the cabins. He could be involved with the poachers.”
“We’ll look into it,” Will announced. “And if Kevin Wilson skipped parole, came to town and is working with the poacher to capture bear cubs, we will find him.”
“Anything new online about the bear cub sale?” Poppy asked.
“Not yet.” Eli shook his head. “It still lists the sale as taking place tomorrow. But I’m guessing they don’t have the second bear cub, otherwise they’d be posting about it.”
On that small shred of hope, the video call meeting ended.
Then conversations about poachers, killers and crime faded into the background as Gillian came home with little Danny, and somehow the house returned to the gentle domestic life of any other afternoon, even with the added guests. Lex played “town” with Danny outside in the backyard sandbox, building houses out of blocks and roads out of sand. Poppy sat by the window on her laptop and watched. After a while, Poppy came out with a small plastic jug of water and helped them add a lake and a river to their town.
Then Gillian called them in for dinner. Lex took Danny to wash the sand off him and made it back to the kitchen in time to help Poppy set the table. They sat down to eat, holding hands as they said grace, with Danny to Lex’s one side and Poppy on the other. Conversation darted around the table as they chatted about fishing, hiking, baking and movies, like the topics were shared balloons they were all batting back and forth to keep from touching ground.
Finally, night fell, and he went upstairs and put Danny to bed. When he came back downstairs, he found Poppy, Stormy and the kitten curled up alone in the living room by the fire, just like they had been the night before when he’d come close to kissing her.
“Your mom says to tell you that she’s gone to book club,” Poppy said, looking up from her laptop. “And Will and Scout are heading to the watering hole, in case any of the locals feel more chatty at night.”
So, they were there alone again in his living room, with the weight of the case, their past and the impulsive kiss they’d shared earlier hanging between them.
“Also, I wanted to say thank you for sharing your life with me today,” she added. She closed her laptop and set it down on the couch beside her. “It’s felt really nice chilling with you and your family this evening.”
Yeah, he thought, it had been. More than nice, it felt natural. And it hurt in a way he couldn’t put into words to know that in a day or two she’d be leaving again and going back to her life in Anchorage.
The thought of Poppy ever giving it all up to stay in Gustavus was unthinkable. And no one who genuinely cared for her would ever ask her to. Lex took a deep breath and looked down at where she sat, her hair loose around her shoulders and her features highlighted by the fire flickering in the low evening light. If only he knew how to begin to tell her just how much he regretted letting her go, despite all the incredible growth and blessings God had brought into his life during their time apart.
