Night's Landing. Carla Neggers
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cradling the receiver. Was Nate Winter another deputy U.S. marshal? She knew very little about her brother’s work. He knew even less about hers. Historical archaeology—he’d say he didn’t even know what it was. Traditional archaeology studies prehistoric people and cultures. Historical archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology that studies people and cultures that existed during recorded history.
She’d given Rob that explanation dozens of times.
He chased fugitives. Armed and dangerous fugitives. She knew that much.
Had one just shot him?
Her teeth were chattering, and she was pacing. Gulping for air.
“Ma’am?”
Ethan Brooker, her parents’ new property manager, walked slowly up the porch steps, his concern evident. He had on his habitual overalls and Tennessee Titans shirt, his dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, at least a two days’ growth of scruffy beard along his square jaw. He was tanned and muscular and had a black graphic tattoo on his huge right arm.
“Miss Sarah, you don’t look so good.” He spoke in an easy, heavy West Texas drawl. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I need—” She took in another breath, but couldn’t seem to get any air. It was as if her entire body was trying to absorb the shock of Rob’s call. “I need to wait for a phone call. My brother…” She couldn’t finish, just kept trying to get air into her lungs.
The old porch floor, painted a dark evergreen, creaked under Ethan’s weight. He was a year or two older than she was at thirty-two and taller. Her parents had found him down on the dock fishing when they were home for a few days. Trespassing, really, but he’d explained that he’d just moved to Nashville and was looking for work. Since they’d come home to a leaky ceiling in the living room and an overgrown yard, they offered him a job. He’d worked hard every day since Sarah had arrived in Night’s Landing a week ago. He lived in Granny Dunnemore’s old cottage down by the river, close to the woods between the Dunnemores and the Poes.
Granny had lost a husband in a logging accident, a son in World War II. Her surviving son’s first wife had died after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. Granny had built the cottage for herself after insisting he and his very sick wife move home.
Sarah knew the story of how her father had almost withered away here in Night’s Landing after his wife’s death, until he met her mother, twenty-two years his junior, the young and vibrant Betsy Quinlan, a woman even Granny Dunnemore had come to believe had changed the Dunnemore luck.
Sarah could feel her heart thumping in her chest.
Not another Dunnemore tragedy…not Rob…
“What about your brother, Miss Sarah?”
Ethan was invariably polite and deferential. She suspected he was a country-western musician looking for his big break in Nashville. She’d heard him playing acoustic guitar on the cottage porch early in the morning and late in the evening.
“Ma’am?”
“Rob—he’s been shot.”
The words felt no less surreal now that she’d said them herself.
Biting back tears, trying to breathe normally, she told Ethan about her brother’s call from New York, Nate Winter, his promise to call her as soon as possible.
“What a shame, Miss Sarah. What a crying shame.” He shook his head and exhaled forcefully, as if it would ease his own tension. “Who’d want to shoot two people like that?”
“Rob’s a deputy U.S. marshal. They’re called deputies. I didn’t know that when he first started. A U.S. marshal heads up each district—they’re not deputies. They’re appointed by the president. I—” She didn’t know what she was saying. “I don’t know what Rob was doing.”
“The marshals must have an office in Nashville. They’ll send someone out here. You just sit tight.” Ethan spoke with confidence as he withdrew a faded red bandanna from his back pocket and wiped away the dirt and grease stuck between his fingers and under his fingernails. “You’re your brother’s closest kin in the country, aren’t you? The marshals will take good care of you.”
Sarah’s stomach twisted. “My parents. They’re in Amsterdam. Oh, God. Who’s going to tell them?”
“Let the marshals do it. You don’t have enough information yet. If you try calling now, you’ll just scare them, maybe unnecessarily.”
Ethan’s steady manner helped her to regain her composure. She felt as if someone were standing on her chest—she couldn’t get air—and made herself breathe from the diaphragm, counting to four as she inhaled through her nose, then to eight as she exhaled through her mouth.
“Rob was able to talk,” she said. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Why don’t you go inside and throw some cold water on your face? That always helps me when I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me.”
Cold water. She wondered if she looked as if she was going to pass out.
“Go on,” Ethan said calmly. “I’ll go down to the cottage and get cleaned up, then come back here and stay with you until the marshals get here or this deputy you talked to calls back.”
“You don’t think he will, do you?”
“Not if he was shot, too, ma’am. Doctors and FBI will have him sewn up. Now, go on. One step at a time, okay?”
Sarah nodded. “Thank you. Rob and I are twins. Did you know that?”
“I think your mother told me that, yes, ma’am.”
“She almost died when she had us.”
Supposedly. It could have been another in a long string of Dunnemore enhancements. Although not a blood Dunnemore, Betsy Quinlan had fallen right in line with that particular Dunnemore tradition. Even letters and diaries from the nineteenth century that Sarah had uncovered in her Poe research had mentioned the Dunnemores and their zest for drama and adventure. They’d made so many bad, romantic, impractical decisions that had led to disaster—which was exactly how their father had viewed Rob’s decision to become a marshal. A bad decision that would lead to disaster.
But Sarah didn’t know why she’d mentioned that their mother had almost died in childbirth—why she’d even thought of it.
Ethan didn’t comment and walked back down the porch steps with the same deliberateness as he’d mounted them. He paused, glancing up at Sarah as if to make sure she hadn’t fallen apart in the few seconds he’d had his back turned. She couldn’t smile. She couldn’t do anything to reassure him.
“A splash of cold water, Miss Sarah,” he repeated. “It’ll help. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She managed to pull open the screen door and step into the front room with its walls of squared logs and thick, white caulking, with its old furnishings and frayed knitted afghans, its threadbare rugs, its wall of framed photographs. Her gaze landed on an oval portrait of Granny Dunnemore at eighty, in her pink sweater and cameo pin, a woman who’d endured so much sorrow and tragedy, who’d nonetheless stayed strong and kept her spirit, her faith.
Sarah ran back to the kitchen and turned on the faucet in the old sink.
“I’ve been shot. I’ll be okay.”
Crying, she splashed her face with cold water and prayed those wouldn’t be her brother’s last words to her.
An hour after Sarah’s brother took a bullet in Central Park, two deputy marshals arrived at the Dunnemore house in a black government car. They came all the way around to the front porch, which afforded Ethan Brooker the opportunity to wish her luck, ask her to give her brother his best and slip out the back door.
He