Serena Mckee's Back In Town Read online

Cameron nodded in reply, his jaw tightening. “To a bastard that didn’t appreciate her, or the son they had.”

  “You have a nephew?”

  He nodded. The smile that slowly slipped into place was genuine, and because it had nothing to do with her, there was no pain in it. “Ethan’s a great kid. He and Kirk make a hell of a team.”

  “Kirk?” Mention of the man surprised her. “Kirk Callaghan? But he left town.”

  As Serena remembered the story, Cameron had told her his best friend had left for parts unknown to make his way in a world that had to be more receptive to him than his family was. Kirk had left Bedford more than two years before her aunt insisted on taking her away to Dallas, to start life over where no one knew her history.

  No one had been more surprised to see Kirk return than Rachel, and no one had been more pleased. Not even Cameron. “Well, Kirk’s back. Been back for some time now.” He smiled again. “Long enough to marry Rachel and increase Bedford’s population by one more.”

  Kirk Callaghan, married. The town’s rebel, a family man. It seemed almost too hard to believe. Maybe there was such a thing as a miracle now and then.

  At least, she amended, a small one.

  He saw the incredulous look on Serena’s face. “Yeah, I know, hard to believe. But life has a way of arranging itself, no matter what we think.”

  Cameron looked around once more, satisfying himself that he had done all he could for now. He still didn’t like the idea of her staying here alone.

  Not his business, he reminded himself. He could only give her fair warning and check things out as much as possible.

  It was time to get going. He had an early day tomorrow. Court was at nine. One of his collars was finally up for trial, and the assistant D.A. wanted him to testify. Before that, he had to go in to complete some paperwork Olson had been complaining about.

  “Well, I’d better go. Everything looks as secure as it can be, given the circumstances.” He edged his way to the door, needing to leave, calling himself a fool for wanting to stay. He stopped in the doorway. “I’ll look in on you from time to time.” He didn’t know if she wanted him to or not. Couldn’t tell by the look in her eyes.

  He used to be able to look into her soul that way, but the curtain was drawn now.

  Still, whether she wanted him to or not, he would. This wasn’t a tiny town any longer, but word was still going to get around fast that she was here. People would start dropping by, not all of them welcome. He wondered if she was up to that.

  Even though it wasn’t a smart thing to do, he allowed himself to linger a moment longer, filling his senses with her. “In lieu of a security system, you might think about getting yourself a dog. A big one.”

  When her feelings deadened, it had left her with nothing to give, not even to something as small, as undemanding, as a pet. Besides, she didn’t want to be responsible for taking care of anything beyond herself. Serena shook her head.

  “You don’t have to worry, Detective Reed.” Serena rolled his title around on her tongue and almost smiled. It still struck her as incredible. “I’m perfectly safe here. I don’t believe in ghosts, and besides, even if I did, those ‘ghosts’ are my parents. They would never harm me.”

  Cameron looked at her pointedly. Serena was shutting him out. Again. “They harmed each other,” he reminded her.

  With that, he turned away. The door closed solidly behind him before he had a chance to take even a single step.

  Cameron exhaled loudly. For lack of another target, he raised himself on his elbow and punched his pillow. It didn’t help.

  Nothing helped.

  The bright blue numbers on his digital alarm clock announced to anyone interested that it was six o’clock—6:00 a.m. Dawn was creeping into his room on slightly woolen feet. He’d gotten maybe two hours of sleep at best, and those had been broken up into increments of no longer than twenty minutes. Sometimes as little as five.

  It wasn’t fair. He’d thought he was over her. Long over her. The saying that you never forgot your first love was something that they made movies about, but it wasn’t supposed to be true. Not for a man, anyway. And there had been women after Serena. Not a legion of them, but a fair share.

  He laughed at himself. Maybe a fair share, but not enough to sufficiently obliterate her memory from his mind. Not even enough, Cameron thought as he sat up, giving up the battle, to matter. He wasn’t sure he even remembered all their names.

  Rachel would. She’d gone out of her way to try to match him up with women she thought he might hit it off with. Rachel had known how he felt about Serena, though they never talked about her. Just as, when they were growing up, they’d never talked about Kirk, but Cameron had always known that Rachel had had a king-size crush on him.

  Crushes were for children. What had existed between Serena and him was something totally different. Something, he’d been so sure, that was meant to last.

  Showed how astute he was.

  Cameron half stumbled, half shuffled, as he made his way to the bathroom. Pawing around for the light switch on the wall, he flipped it and then glared at his reflection.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  His eyes looked bloodshot, he thought, and he looked as if he had a hangover, without having had the benefit of tying one on the night before.

  He was going to look like hell in court tomorrow.

  Today, he amended, annoyed with himself and the world in general. He slapped down the single-edged razor on the counter and grabbed the can of shaving cream, shaking it violently. Right now, he looked more like a drug pusher than the man on trial, who, Cameron knew, would be decked out in what was probably his first suit, purchased by the lawyer who’d been appointed to defend him.

  Cameron shook his head as he ran water over his razor.

  What the hell was going on these days? People who didn’t belong here, who didn’t live here or watch their kids go to school here, were coming in to pump garbage into kids’ bodies, selling them tales about feeling good, feeling no pain.

  Pain was part of life. If there was no pain, how would you know when the good stuff came along?

  He’d known, he thought, dragging the razor through the flurry of shaving cream on his cheek. He’d known. For him, the “good stuff” had come first. And then the pain had followed.

  Cameron winced. He’d nicked himself. The snowy bank on his cheek began to turn pink and then red. If he didn’t get a firmer grip on his thoughts, he was going to wind up slicing his throat. And then the defense would win its case because of a lack of any real corroborating testimony. Wilkins’ lawyer would get the chance to toss out what he strongly insisted was only circumstantial evidence.

  Cameron stopped, the razor frozen in midair.

  Circumstantial evidence.

  Was that why Serena had come back to Bedford, to McKee Hill, so suddenly? Not because her aunt had died, leaving her the house, but because of something that had to do with her parents’ deaths?

  Fully awake now, Cameron hurried through the rest of his shave, showered in five minutes and quickly got ready. He shoved a cold pastry into the pocket of his jacket, promising himself a real breakfast, with coffee, later on in the day, and got into his car. He had somewhere to be before he got to the office.

  Serena had always believed in rising early. It was more peaceful in the morning, before the rest of the world joined in, with its noise and its clutter.

  Before her mother was up to criticize and to ridicule.

  Serena sighed as she tried to pick a path through the garden. The sun had managed to bake everything except the weeds. Those flourished, in some places as high as her waist, and choked everything that dared to lay claim to the same space.

  It had been so pretty here, once. She’d loved the garden, with its bright colors and sweet scents. She’d especially loved the heady perfume of the glossy privet bushes in the spring, when they blossomed and became covered in white flowers.

  In some ways, it had been like
her own personal kingdom. Her mother had never ventured out here, especially in the spring. Too many bees and insects around. Carolyn had hated insects, hated anything she couldn’t control. Serena had thought the flowers were worth the risk of encountering occasional bees. Not having her mother around had been an added plus.

  Like the house, like everything else in her possession, to Carolyn Tyler McKee the garden had just been for show, to make her the envy of the country-club women she feigned affection for. She reveled in their envy.

  Now all the flowers were gone, systematically destroyed by weeds that had managed to tenaciously survive, no matter what the conditions.

  Serena stopped, a smile curving her mouth, when she saw the single pink rose, surrounded by towering weeds, pushing its way to the sun. Stooping down, she pulled at one of the weeds. It steadfastly refused to be uprooted. Serena wrapped both hands around it and yanked harder, cutting her hand on the hoary, spiny stem as she tugged on it.

  She could feel the stickiness seeping along her palm, but she absolutely refused to allow the weed to win. When she was much younger, her father had teasingly referred to her as his little flower. Flowers had a right to live, too.

  The weed gave, sending her stumbling backward. Serena caught herself, then sighed triumphantly. Sometimes, flowers learned how to survive, even when weeds surrounded them, bent on their destruction.

  She tossed the weed aside, then pulled out another and another, until the rose was free to grow, unrestricted.

  Rising, momentarily satisfied, Serena dusted off her hands. The trace of blood smeared down her palm.

  She frowned at it as she rubbed it away.

  It still felt as if the weed were right there, irritating her skin.

  A short, staccato blast of a car horn startled her, and she jerked her head up. There was a car standing before the tall, black gates. A silver sedan.

  Who—?

  And then Cameron got out, and she realized that she’d known he’d be back all along. Serena shoved her hands into her pockets and came forward to meet him, squelching the desire to run into the house.

  He’d hopscotched all through her dreams last night, nudging his way into the murky dream that continued to haunt her, night after night.

  As she looked at him, pieces of the dream, their dream, returned to her. They’d been in the garden, the same garden she was wandering through now, except it had been the way it once was, manicured, seductively lush beneath the shade of night.

  The way it had been that night they made love. The night she thought a brand-new world had opened for her.

  His hands had been gentle, almost timid at times, reverent at others, worshiping her body, awakening it to pleasures she had never even imagined. She’d arched against him, eager for the sensations he created, eager to sample intimacy with him and press it to her breast.

  He’d made love to her slowly, passionately.

  Serena had woken up shaking, desperately trying to push the dream away, even as she savored the memory of that night.

  She’d forced herself into the shower and stood as needles of ice assaulted her skin, piercing the remnants of the dream. Of the memory.

  She couldn’t allow herself to remember, didn’t want to remember. Didn’t want to go back to being that same naive girl.

  Serena wound her fingers around the gate now, her eyes on his face. Cameron looked as if the night had been as raw for him as it had for her.

  “Forget something?” she asked.

  Cameron surprised her by pushing open the other side of the gate and walking in. He’d managed to get it to move again. “Yes. The truth.”

  Her eyes on his, she stood her ground. “What do you mean?”

  Was she going to insult his intelligence by playing games? He set his jaw hard.

  “You didn’t come back to live here, Serena. You always hated this house. You told me you thought of this as your mother’s house.”

  She lifted her chin defensively. He was the last person she owed any explanations to.

  “Maybe I see things differently now.” She looked away, her expression bordering on the disinterested. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe I really don’t care for the house. Maybe I’m here just to get it ready to put up for sale.”

  That was a crock. Serena was still lying to him. She never could do it well. Once, he’d thought that endearing, and teased her about it, saying she could never make a go of a life of crime.

  “That could all be handled through a real estate agent, Serena.” She knew that, he thought. “There was no need for you to come back.”

  She didn’t like being badgered. Her mother had always badgered her. Badgered her father, too, mercilessly, until he walked out, unable to take it any longer.

  Serena’s eyes drew into small blue slits. “Are you telling me you would rather I’d never returned?”

  Yes, I would have rather you’d never returned. I don’t want to remember what it was like, loving you. I want to just go on with my life the way it is. With one day linking up into the next, no better, no worse, than the day that came before and the day that’s going to come after.

  “No,” Cameron said aloud, “I’m telling you I want to know the reason you did come back.” He drew closer to her, close enough to threaten. Close enough to feel. “Why did you come here after all this time?”

  She wanted to step back, to escape the look in his eyes. But that was the old Serena, the one who had trusted, the one who had believed. Nothing and no one was ever going to make her run away and hide again. Or feel intimidated.

  Her eyes coolly appraised him. “Doesn’t the police department have enough puzzles for you to solve?”

  The hell with getting in early to do the paperwork. Paperwork would keep, even if Olson had wanted it on his desk as of yesterday. He’d take the damn report with him on stakeout if he had to. Martinez owned a laptop, he’d commandeer that.

  Admiration slipped in amid his feeling of frustration. She was holding her own with him. “It’s been a slow season.”

  A retort hovered on her lips. Serena swallowed it, debating with herself. She couldn’t do this alone. She already knew that. Her idea had been to turn to Uncle Dan. Even if he wasn’t on the force any longer, he was the logical choice.

  But maybe a fresh perspective would be better, the perspective of someone who could approach it as if it were a new problem, instead of one that had been closed and filed away. Someone who wouldn’t perhaps think it was a challenge to his authority if she asked to have the case reopened. Someone who wouldn’t just pat her on the head and tell her to run along, the way Uncle Dan might.

  Cameron had never been guilty of that. Only of breaking her heart.

  Serena shut the thought out. That wasn’t why she was here.

  And then, suddenly, a need arose within her. A need to confide in someone materialized, strong, full-bodied. She and her aunt hadn’t even spoken of the double tragedy, not in all those years since it happened. Not until Aunt Helen lay dying.

  And even then, it had been her aunt who talked, not Serena. Her aunt who had given voice to a crying need to reinvestigate the facts of that night. Serena had said nothing, only that she would do what she could. She’d never told a living soul what she thought about the conclusions that had been reached about her parents’ deaths.

  No one had ever asked her.

  But she had opinions, she had suspicions, and suddenly it felt as if she couldn’t hold them in any longer.

  Serena looked at Cameron. Once, they had been of a single spirit, a single mind. She made her decision.

  “I came back to prove my father innocent.”

  Cameron was sure he hadn’t heard right. The newspaper accounts had all said the police found Jon McKee with the murder weapon in his hand, turned on himself. There’d been no signs of a forced entry, no indication that an intruder had surprised them, no prints found that shouldn’t have been there. Dan Olson had been the investigating detective on the case. He’d been Jon’s b
est friend, and he had been thorough. If there had been anything, anything at all, to suggest that the facts did not speak for themselves, he would have found it. But there had been nothing.

  Why was she doing this to herself?

  Despite everything, compassion began to work its way to the surface.

  “That’s a tall order, Serena. Why now, after all this time?” She was the only one who’d been found alive that night, when Olson arrived on the scene. “Do you remember something?”

  “Something,” she acknowledged, frustration giving an edge to her voice. “Something that keeps nagging at me, slipping away before I can give it any kind of shape.” Something that was urging her on now. “My aunt asked me to clear my father’s name. She said she should have tried herself, years ago, but that she was too ashamed of what people said he’d done. All she could think of at the time was to get me as far away from everything as she could.” Serena looked up at him. “I owe this to her. To him.”

  She just wasn’t thinking straight. Before he could stop himself, Cameron placed a hand on her shoulder in a silent show of compassion. He felt her stiffen slightly, as if to keep him out.

  “There was no evidence to the contrary, Serena.”

  “You know evidence can be destroyed or hidden, or even overlooked.” Right before his eyes, the cool facade cracked. A light came into her eyes as a sense of purpose filled her. “Cameron, I know he was innocent. He couldn’t have done what people said he did. It wasn’t in him. There has to be another explanation, something Uncle Dan missed because it looked so pat the way it was. I intend to find that piece of evidence and follow it to its conclusion—that someone else killed my mother and then forced my father to kill himself, making it look like suicide.”

  He’d seen people go into denial when confronted with the guilt of a loved one. He knew it could continue for years. Cameron didn’t want to see her get hurt any more than she already had been.

  “Serena, it was an open-and-shut case. You’re only setting yourself up to get knocked down.”

  She hadn’t expected that of him. Even after everything else, she had thought he’d be on her side. For a moment, the cool facade returned.