Hidden Falls (3 page)

The door opened and his brother stood in its opening.

“Cooper,” Jessica said. “What are you doing here?”

“Am I interrupting something?”

Liam glanced at Jessica, who was fidgeting with the ponytail at the back of her head. “It’s fine. What do you need?”

Cooper tossed himself into a brown leather recliner. “Do I have to need something in order to come see my big brother?”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “I guess I’d better go cut the tags off that dress and make sure I have shoes to go with it.”

“I’ll pick you up at seven.” Liam leaned over and kissed her cheek. “There won’t be another woman there half as beautiful as you.”

“Hmm.” She picked up her purse from the coffee table. “Flattery is not going to get you out of this. I’ll see you later.”

The door closed behind her.

“Get you out of what?” Cooper popped out of the chair, scooped up a football from the corner of the couch, and spiraled it across the room.

Liam caught the ball, but instead of returning the pass, he set it on the breakfast bar.

“Ooh,” Cooper said, “must be serious.”

“She thinks I’m working too much and not paying enough attention to her.”

“And?” Cooper plunked back into the chair.

“And what?”

“Are you?”

“None of your business.”

“Come on, Liam. Maybe she has a point. You’re thirty-eight years old. You guys have been engaged for, what, five years? What woman wants to be engaged for five years? Have you even set a date?”

“Like I said, none of your business.”

“I like Jessica just fine,” Cooper said. “And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t hate me. She gets along with Mom and Dad. What’s the deal?”

“There is no deal.” Liam picked up his bottle of water. “Jessica wants a perfect wedding. Her parents can’t afford to foot the bill for what she wants, so we both agreed we would wait until we could manage it. I’m just trying to make some money so I can make her happy.”

“Does she need a fancy wedding in order to be happy with you?”

“What kind of crack is that?”

“Just a question.”

“I thought you said you liked her.”

“I do.”

“Then enough with the marriage advice. You’re thirty-four. When are you going to get a girlfriend?”

“Oh, very smooth. Change the subject to get yourself out of the hot seat.”

Liam laughed. “It always worked when we were kids.”

“What do I need to wear to this shindig tonight?” Cooper slung his feet over the side of the chair.

“Not your uniform.” Liam sat on the couch and eyed his desk in the corner, wishing he had turned some of the papers upside down. At least the laptop screen had gone to sleep. Cooper wouldn’t know what any of it meant, anyway.

“I thought women like a man in uniform,” Cooper said.

“Not the kind of uniform where the guy can give them a speeding ticket.”

“It’s true that batting your eyes gets you nowhere with me.”

“The sheriff’s office can make people nervous.” Liam got up to take his empty Perrier bottle to the recycling bin in the kitchen. And to escape looking his brother in the eye.

“We’re supposed to make people feel safe and protected,” Cooper said. “Isn’t that what it says on our squad cars?”

“Every theory has its flaws.”

Cooper followed Liam across the apartment and sat on a stool at the breakfast bar. “You all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Liam pulled a bag of black bean tortilla chips from the cupboard just to look busy.

“Fine. Whatever.” Cooper made two revolutions on the stool. “I haven’t had a suit on in ages. Good thing being a cop keeps me fit and trim so I can wear an old one.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” Liam crunched a chip between his teeth and wished his brother would leave. His brain was spinning with numbers.

A particular number representing the total of the missing money.

Various combinations that might add up to that particular number.

Account numbers that may or may not be missing funds.

Dates.

Confirmation numbers.

Missing confirmation numbers.

Client telephone numbers.

Reports.

No matter which way Liam added it up, the outcome was trouble. Every time.

He wished he were burning the midnight oil to pay for a wedding or save for his future with Jessica. The truth was, he was hanging by his fingernails just trying to figure a way to stay out of jail. The last person he needed to confide in right now was a brother who worked in the county sheriff’s department.

“Can I sit with you tonight?”

“Huh?” Liam made himself look at Cooper.

“Can I sit with you and Jessica tonight?”

Liam shrugged. “I’m not in charge of the seating chart.”

“Listen to me, Liam. I don’t want to walk in and sit with strangers at a banquet. I’m serious.”

“I’m listening, and I seriously hear you saying you can’t get a date.”

“Maybe I don’t want a date.”

“Yeah. That’s why you’re desperate to piggyback on mine. Fine. Wear the black suit.”

“Thanks, bro.” Cooper gripped the football on the counter in one hand, hustled across the apartment, spun around, and threw a pass.

Liam caught it and automatically tucked it safely against his chest. Once Cooper pulled the door closed behind him, Liam let out his breath and dropped the ball.

He had work to do. He still had six hours before he had to get dressed up, eat dinner, and applaud a man he admired—and whose business might be Liam’s best shot at putting his life back together.

1:37 p.m.

Ethan Jordan, MD, swung his car off of Interstate 70 with mild trepidation. With only one stop for coffee midway through the five-hour drive from Columbus, Ohio, he had made good time. Several hours remained before the banquet. After an overnight on-call shift during which he performed two emergency neurological surgeries, he should have slept more before embarking on the drive, but he had been anxious to get out of beeper range and past the point where his surgical chief might decide to revoke the weekend off. He had made do with a two-hour nap, a cold shower, and the black coffee that seemed interchangeable with the blood coursing through his veins.

His chest tightened when he took the exit. He had not been home since Christmas during his junior year of college, and he cut that visit short by claiming he had to get back to work at the part-time job that kept him in books and pocket change during his years as a student. The sleek black Lexus Ethan drove now was a far cry from the banged-up, used blue Chevy that he nursed through college, medical school, and most of his residency. The new vehicle was his one splurge in the face of the educational debt he carried—though the car was also in his possession by debt.

He could have gone home if he wanted to, except that Hidden Falls had stopped feeling like home a long time ago. Each move through his education took Ethan farther from the sleepy central Illinois town. Although he would have said the growing distance was not intentional, he welcomed the relief it brought him.

As Quinn used to say, “Not to decide is to decide.”

And Ethan had never decided to come home, so he never had.

Everything that disappointed him in Hidden Falls was behind him. Everything that shamed him dropped off the map of his life. A few things pained him to release, but the relentless rigor of studies and jobs and exams and residency left him little time for regrets.

Ethan wished he regretted not seeing his parents during these years, but in reality he did not. And being within the city limits of Hidden Falls now did not mean he would see them this time either. Quinn was a popular figure in town and had been for decades, but a town population of just over ten thousand people and the price tag attached to the banquet to honor Quinn meant not everyone who lived in Hidden Falls would attend. And his parents would be at the bottom of the list. They had next to no interest in Quinn even when he was a friendly neighbor and a favorite teacher of their son. Why should they care about the banquet now?

Ethan blew out his breath and tried to breathe normally. It was ridiculous to feel like an embarrassed child. He graduated at the top of his college class, the top of his medical school class, and was five years into a six-year neurosurgical residency. In a few more years, his earning power would be beyond his parents’ ability to imagine.

It should be enough. So why wasn’t it?

Ethan avoided the main highway going into town and instead circled Whisper Lake first. He had his camera—he never went anywhere without it—but he didn’t expect to have time to take photos of the lake or the falls it fed into. For now he would settle for soaking up the ring of burnished red and golden leaves shimmering in sunlight and the brilliance bouncing off the gently sloshing water at midday. The lake had been his escape when he was young, a refuge from confusion and discontent. In the intervening years, he had visited countless other lakes and rivers and falls, but no setting ever tugged at his spirit the way Whisper Lake and Hidden Falls had.

Completing his lap around the lake, Ethan aimed the Lexus toward the high school. From the outside, nothing looked different. It was the same block of unadorned white brick it had always been, with the same worn red sign in front.

Ethan should have been valedictorian. A neck-in-neck race in his final semester surprised him. Ken Lauder had never been bright. He started cheating in the third grade—off of Ethan’s papers. Ethan had learned to be more careful to cover his work and more savvy about playground conversations. By the tenth grade, Ken started to lag in the standings to a rank more credible to Ethan’s assessment of him. Then in twelfth grade he made a comeback. Ethan never believed Ken was doing it on his own, but he could prove nothing. Even Quinn, who likely believed Ethan’s protests, said there had to be proof.

In the end, Ken beat out Ethan by one-tenth of a percent. Ethan never let that happen again.

Ethan drove out to the old neighborhood. Nicole Sandquist’s house had been next door to the Jordans, and Quinn’s was directly behind. The lots were deep, but Ethan had loosened two boards in the sun-drenched wooden fence, and even in high school he managed to squirm through to use the opening as a shortcut.

He pulled over just up the block from the Jordan home and, in the sanctuary provided by the tinted windows, leaned across the passenger seat, flipped open the glove box, and extracted two envelopes. The first Ethan needed because it contained the details of the evening’s event. The second he kept because it contained the reason he had made the trip at all.

Quinn’s handwritten note.

Ethan sighed just as he had the day he first opened the envelope. Quinn had the crisp open handwriting that served teachers well. No student could claim to be unable to read the comments on a paper or the assignment list on the blackboard, and parents knew precisely what Quinn intended to communicate in the notes he sent home when he had a concern.

This note, however, confounded Ethan. The script was the same steady presentation as always, but this time Ethan did not understand Quinn’s meaning.

Of all the people and places Ethan had walked away from over the years, Quinn was his greatest regret.

No. Second greatest. Nicole would always be first.

Quinn was more than a teacher. He was a neighbor, a friend, a protector, an encourager. Ethan could not imagine surviving his adolescence without Quinn. While he might have tossed the banquet invitation on the pile of junk mail on the corner of his desk because he did not enjoy most formal events, he couldn’t do that with Quinn’s note. Ethan hoped they could talk before the evening was out, or the next morning at the latest. He needed to get back to Columbus in time to be at the hospital for rounds at seven on Monday morning.

Ethan rubbed his eyes. What he needed right now was food. He hadn’t eaten in the last twenty hours. And if he could find a motel bed, he would grab a nap before downing another pot of coffee to keep awake long enough to at least satisfy himself that Quinn was all right physically and did not need Ethan’s professional services. He stowed the envelopes back in the glove box, tugged his sunglasses off the top of his head, and pulled the Lexus out into the road. Main Street was two miles away. Ethan’s brain was already indexing the choice of small restaurants. If downtown was like everything else in Hidden Falls, the options wouldn’t have changed.

He chose the family-style restaurant because he remembered the meat loaf made with a basil pesto. His car did not yet have any scratches on it, and Ethan planned to keep it that way by purposely parking in a manner that would discourage other drivers from squeezing in beside him. With his hand around the clicker, he exited the car, let the door fall closed, and pressed the lock button. When he raised his eyes from the pavement to glance toward the restaurant’s front window, Ethan blinked twice at the petite form of a woman whose gait reminded him of the way Nicole used to keep stride with his long legs.

“Ethan?”

He blinked again. It
was
Nicole.

“I didn’t know you were coming.” She made no move toward him with affection or otherwise.

Nicole was alone as far as Ethan could see. She still had the small mole below the outside corner of her left eye, and she still let her dark hair hang over that side of her face to obscure it. He fumbled for words.

“I suppose nobody knew I was coming except the organizing committee,” he said. “I’ve been out of touch.”

She could still make his heart race by doing nothing at all.

“I heard you were in Columbus,” she said.

He nodded. “And you?”

“St. Louis. Investigative reporting.”

“You had your heart set on journalism ever since junior high.”

She laughed. “Thankfully I turned out to be pretty good at it.”

“I never doubted you would be.” Ethan took a few tenuous steps toward her, relieved that she didn’t back away. He wanted to see those emerald-green eyes up close again—he’d taken them for granted all those years living next door to her. Even through five years of officially dating, he passed up too many opportunities to look into them.