“No, it’s definitely not preferable.”

  At that, she turned to see Detective Ansel coming toward them.

  “So you want to tell me what’s your side of the story?”

  She sighed and quickly gave him the version of what happened as she knew it.

  “Well, it certainly matches up with his. Unfortunately I don’t have anything here to go on, but we’ll have to run down who it is and how they got here,” he said. “We’ve got your contact information, so we’ll be in touch.”

  Caleb said, “I still need to look for the dog.”

  “Well, I don’t want you back in the house,” he said, “and we haven’t searched the grounds yet.”

  “Do you mind, while we still have an hour of daylight, if we take a walk around the property?”

  He frowned.

  Caleb rushed to say, “If we see anything, obviously we’ll let you know.”

  “Right,” he said. “Fine, go take a look.” He stopped, then added, “Actually, why don’t I come with you?” And they walked around to the back of the house and headed toward the fence line.

  “It hasn’t been mowed in a while,” Caleb said.

  “I’m not sure it was ever really that well taken care of,” Ansel said. “If you look closely, no grass clippings are here at all. Everything’s gone to seed.”

  “Another good point,” Caleb admitted. “So what we have is a dead body that may or may not be related to the people who were here. It’s been an empty house for a couple months, so it could have been anybody’s dumping site.”

  “How did they know about that pantry though?” she asked.

  “Unless they came in, took a look, and just wanted a room to lock up the body in,” he said, looking at her.

  She nodded. “Still a little disturbing to think that somebody would carry around a dead body, dump them, and leave them.”

  “They have to leave them somewhere, and if it’s an empty house …” Ansel said.

  “But surely the body would be found faster than just taking them out and deep-sixing them,” she said.

  “Maybe, but it’s also quite possible that somebody preferred the dumping to the digging.” Ansel shrugged.

  “I’m thinking there might be more than one dead, and that’s a little disturbing,” she murmured.

  “I didn’t mean that so much, but it’s another angle,” Ansel said. “I can tell you it looks like a shot to the back of the head.”

  “Ah.” At that, Caleb nodded. “So execution.”

  “It’s possible, particularly given how close to the border we are.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that at all,” Laysha said.

  Caleb reached out and grabbed her hand, tugging her a little closer. She went willingly enough.

  “It was pretty unpleasant to look at,” Ansel said. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, “but it still sucks.”

  “It does, indeed.”

  They did a quick trip around the property and didn’t see anything obvious. As they stopped at the far corner and looked back at the house, she turned to Caleb. “Any idea on the dog?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll come back in the morning,” he said, “and see if I can track it from the house.”

  “I still don’t understand how you can do that,” she muttered.

  Detective Lowery looked at him. “You got some experience tracking?”

  “I do,” he said, “but a lot of weather has transpired since then,” he said. “So chances of finding anything are pretty close to nil.”

  “Well, if you do find something, good luck. And, if you find anything pertinent to the case, let me know.”

  “Will do.”

  And, with that, the detective headed back to the main house.

  She waited until Ansel was out of earshot. “So will you tell me what’s really going on?”

  He looked at her in surprise.

  She shook her head. “Oh no, you don’t,” she said. “I get it. I saw the change in your stance when you saw something. I just don’t know what it was that you saw.”

  He smiled, looked at her, and said, “Are you sure I saw something?”

  “I thought so, yes,” she said. “But you’re a tricky dude. So I might have misread the cues.”

  “Nope, you didn’t,” he said. “I forgot how observant you were.”

  “I wouldn’t have said I am at all,” she noted. “So what did you find?”

  “I saw lots of hair as we moved about the property,” he said, “but I need to look closer to see exactly what’s happening here. Also a leash is hanging on the back veranda.”

  “So, they had a dog. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “Yeah, except the leash was snapped,” he said, “and it’d take a mighty strong dog to do that.”

  “I didn’t even notice the leash,” she said. “So much for being observant.”

  He shook his head. “It’s what I do. Remember that.”

  “Are you happy doing it?”

  “Yes,” he said immediately. “It’s been a good job for me.”

  “Good,” she said, “you always were the kind who wanted to help somebody.”

  “Yep,” he said, “and that’s pretty well what I do.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Are you going back into the navy? Because it hasn’t escaped my notice that what you’re doing currently is hardly what you were doing.”

  He sighed. “No, that’s quite true. And it wasn’t even that as much as,” he said, “up until the accident, I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterward. But I won’t go back. I don’t think I want to do the military thing.”

  “Can you still do that job?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s something I have to look into.”

  “At one time,” she said, “you wanted to be a police officer.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “and maybe that’s not a done deal either.”

  “I guess it depends on your injuries.”

  “I’m on my feet now,” he said, “so I’m better, but I can’t do a ton of physical work. And I probably wouldn’t pass the physical for a cop.”

  “Maybe. That makes sense,” she said, “but it’s kind of sad.”

  “It is, but, considering everybody else in my unit died,” he said, “I’ll take what I’ve got.”

  “Oh my. I didn’t know. So sorry to hear that.”

  Caleb shrugged.

  But he also turned from her. Hiding his reaction, his emotions.

  “It is what it is.”

  Yeah. He was like that. She switched gears. “And that’s another thing about you,” she said with a bright smile. “You always had that positive attitude.”

  “I did, but the divorce changed a lot of that for me. The two years of our marriage, all we did was fight. I’m struggling with the idea of even seeing her.”

  “Is that because you still care?”

  “No,” he said, “not in the way you think. Care in the sense that I want to rescue my brother from her clutches, yes. She cheated on me, then let me think it was my baby, and that’s hard to forgive.”

  “Got it,” she said. “I just wondered if you … still loved her.”

  “Hell no,” he said, “not in any way, shape, or form.”

  Laysha smiled because such conviction was in his tone that she actually believed him. “Anybody else in your life?”

  “No time, no interest,” he said. “I’ve only barely recovered from all the surgeries,” he said. “Maybe, at some point in time, I’ll get back into the relationship thing, but I haven’t been in too much of a rush.”

  “Still because of her?” she asked curiously.

  “To a certain extent, yes,” he said. He turned, looked at her, and asked, “Why all the questions?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a teasing voice. “Maybe I’m checking out all the girlfriends in my head to see who’d suit.”

  He rolled his eyes at that. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not gonna be set up again.”

  “Ah,” she said with a smile. “Well, maybe it’ll just be the two of us then.”

  “You know what? I’m damn fine with just the two of us,” he said. “Because, when you think about it, in many ways, it’s only ever been the two of us. Everybody else seemed to go off and do their own thing.”

  “So did we,” she reminded him. “They just all seemed to do a better job of it.”

  He laughed at that. “I hate to say it, but you’re quite right.” He paused. “We’ll go home,” he said, “and I’ll come back early in the morning and see what I can find.”

  “Good enough.” As she led the way back, they detoured around the cops until they got to the vehicle. She loaded up the dogs, and, once inside, she said, “It’s kind of sad that somebody lay here dead, and nobody knew, nobody cared.”

  “Well, the people who cared probably don’t know he’s dead,” he said quietly. “Leave it to the police. I’m sure they can figure it out.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “it’s hard to walk away though. I want to know who he is and what he was doing here and if he had any family to mourn his death.”

  “Well, that’s fine. We can stay in touch with the detective. He might tell us something.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “Just think about it. It’ll be one of those cases of ‘read it in the news.’”

  “Maybe.” He looked at her and said, “You have good skills hunting down information,” he said, “just because of your job. So don’t let anybody stop you from doing what you want to do.”

  She smiled. “I hear you.”

  “I’m still surprised you’re at the law firm,” he mentioned, as they drove back home again.

  “The paycheck’s decent,” she said. “Not as much as if I were a lawyer. But I get to walk away at the end of the day and come home and work on the house.”

  “Right,” he said with a smile. “I forget the house is your current love.”

  “Yep, likely to be my only one too,” she admitted.

  “Nobody in your world?”

  “Nope, not since the divorce.”

  He gave a laugh. “We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”

  “Yep, like always,” she said with a smile. “We’re a great match.” And she left it at that.

  Laysha’s words had a prophetic meaning to them because he had wondered, at one point in time, why the hell the two of them weren’t together. Instead they’d both gone off in different directions. There was absolutely everything to love about her. And he figured he’d been half in love with her since he was even a teenager. But then, somehow, he got hooked up with Sarah, his ex-wife, and Laysha had hooked up with Paul. It’s almost as if they were busy being busy in order to avoid what they were really feeling. He wondered if that was even true or whether that was just more made-up bullshit in his head.

  One of the thoughts that did cross his mind as he drove them back to her place was that this was a hell of a time to figure it out. They just had themselves to deal with right now. No interfering family members. Sure, he would have to show up for the wedding and be good for a little while. He still couldn’t believe that he came all the way across the country because Laysha had asked him to. It had nothing to do with the wedding. But maybe him coming for Laysha said an awful lot about how he felt about her.

  He acknowledged these feelings again. He didn’t want to before because he couldn’t risk ruining this perfect friendship in his life. Instead here he was, sitting with her, wondering how to take it to the next step. And even that thought surprised him because it hadn’t occurred to him, until it came up this time, what he was looking at doing. It’s almost as if he’d been biding his time all these years. And here he was now, looking at how to make something of his past that he had walked away from a long time ago—when he shouldn’t have.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning Laysha woke up and stretched, delighted to have some time off so that she could get back to work on her house. As she got up and went downstairs, the emptiness of the house made her feel funny. She walked to the spare bedroom door, which was open, and found the bed was empty. “Well, you said you would leave early this morning, but I wasn’t thinking you were leaving that early,” she muttered.

  She hadn’t even woken up when he left. That gave her an odd feeling. It was weird to think that somebody could walk around her house, and she wouldn’t notice. She set about making coffee and feeding her four dogs. She made breakfast, all the time looking out the window to see if Caleb would come back anytime soon. Yet she didn’t want him to feel like he had to check-in because that was too pushy and nosy and clingy.

  As it was, she bustled around, talking to her dogs, cuddling them a bit, then getting ready for the day’s work that she had planned to do in the upstairs guest bathroom. She was serious about getting that vanity in today, had actually hoped to have it all done before Caleb arrived but didn’t quite make it.

  As she lined up everything that she needed, she heard the dogs barking downstairs. She walked downstairs, expecting to see Caleb, but instead nobody was there. And the dogs weren’t barking like it was a friendly visitor; instead they raced from one end of the house to the other, as if they saw somebody and then lost them. She stepped outside, the dogs with her, Caleb shouting in her head to get back inside. She walked around on the veranda but couldn’t see anybody. She called the dogs back inside and said, “Come on, guys. I’m not sure what’s going on, but let’s go upstairs.”

  With her phone in her back pocket and her gloves on, she headed upstairs with her plumber tools. She managed to connect the vanity, get it settled into place, opened up the cupboard beneath, and tightened down all the piping. With that done and properly level, she caulked the back joint to keep water from flowing over the countertop against the wall and going down, and then she segregated the dogs from her workspace and started in on her tile work. She had done enough now that it was second nature to get set up.

  By the time she was done with the tile backsplash that she had planned around the vanity—just behind the wall close to the toilet—she started in on the tiling of the floor. She wanted to get the whole room done, then close the door. Although it was inconvenient having Caleb share her en suite bathroom, this guest bath did need a day at least, if not two, as it set.

  She frowned at that, wondering at the sense of doing this when Caleb was here. She got it done without his help. But now, for sure, when he wanted a shower, he had to use her bathroom, since he was only here a couple days.

  When she finished with the last bit of tile on the floor, she was happy at how quickly it had all come together. She stood up, cleaned off the caulking on her knees, and walked downstairs to wash off. She set the rest of her tools off to the side and worked away at cleaning her hands, elbows, and arms. It didn’t seem to matter what she did, she ended up covered in whatever.

  By the time she was as cleaned up as she could get from washing at a sink, she grabbed a cup of old coffee, threw some ice cubes into it, and walked out onto the veranda with the dogs, giving them a pee break. It was almost two o’clock and still no sign of Caleb. She frowned at that and quickly sent him a message. When there was no answer, she got even more worried.

  Hearing a sound, she walked around to the front of the house to see his truck driving toward her. She stood here with a smile on her face, sipping her iced coffee.

  He hopped out and said, “Sorry. I had just taken the turnoff onto your street, and I figured it was faster to get home, than stop and answer your text.”

  “Not a problem,” she said. “I just finished tiling the upstairs bath.”

  “Good for you,” he said. “I was coming back to help.” He stood by his rental, the door still open.

  “Oh, there’s more work to be done. No problem,” she said with a fat grin.

  “We can pick one job now and get started.” He grinned back at her. “What about the upstairs bedrooms and hallway? Were you redoing all that hardwood?”

  “I wanted to get it all redone,” she said, nodding. “That would only leave paint and new windows upstairs.”

  “And what about the attic?”

  “I want to install one of those drop-down stairs,” she said, “but I haven’t got the funds for that yet.”

  “Well,” he said, “I might need a bite to eat first.” And he leaned into the front seat and grabbed two bags of groceries. “I was hungry and stopped and bought a bunch of groceries too. Did you get lunch yet?”

  She shook her head. “No, but whatever you’ve got in mind, I’m signing up for quite happily.”

  He laughed. “As I recall, you used to be a big eater.”

  “I still am,” she said. “I lost a lot of weight over the divorce because I felt so guilty, but I’m slowly pulling back out of that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I think I went the opposite. I inhaled everything, but, because of my heavy fitness routine, I didn’t really gain any.”

  “Oh, I ate a lot too,” she said, “but the emotional stress was always one of those issues for me, where I lost weight. Same as when I got sick.”

  “I remember that.”

  As they walked into the kitchen, she asked, “Did you have any luck tracking the dog?”

  “Nope, not a whole lot,” he said, “but I did come up with a couple different avenues to keep looking.”

  “In what way?”

  “I talked to the neighbors. They said they heard some shots the day the dog went missing.”

  “And they actually remember that specific day?”

  “Yes, because they saw the dog tear out across the property at the same time.”

  “Wow.” She stopped, thought about it, and said, “But the gunshot wasn’t the one that killed the same guy we found in the storeroom, right? I mean, he hasn’t been in that house for a couple months?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, “but I don’t really know. The decomp was extensive though. And it is hot inside the house, being closed up and with no AC running. So the heat deteriorated the body inside, even while stopping the bigger wild animals from getting to his body because it was closed up in the house.”