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I turned with a start. It was the cop. It didn’t make sense, but my skin crawled. Kevin couldn’t possibly have known I was headed here and already involved the cops.
“Yeah.” My hands started to shake, and I clasped them behind me.
He squinted.
“So what?” Callie asked him.
Shifting my gaze to the ground, I probably seemed nervous enough for him to wonder if I’d escaped from a nearby prison. Chatting with any strangers, much less the local police, was something I’d intended to avoid.
His hand shifted to his belt. “Sorry. But I don’t recognize you, Miss…”
Good job staying under the radar, Angie.
“Give us a break, Dev. She’s Grace’s sister,” Callie said dismissively, turning away from him.
He nodded. “Okay. Have a nice evening Callie, and Miss…” He let it hang there, an obvious second invitation to give him my name.
I kept my mouth zipped.
Callie filled the awkward silence. “I’ll drive you. Just leave your car here for the night and throw your bags in the back.”
“Okay.” After the long day, I would have agreed to anything that would get me to a bed. I loaded my two duffel bags into the bed of her pickup and put the more important computer case at my feet in the cab.
The cop was gone, and I could breathe again.
“Have you seen Grace’s cottage?” Callie asked as we left the parking lot.
The wordcottagestruck me. “No. This is my first time.” Grace had always talked about herhouseby the lake.
“They love it,” Callie said. “But it’s a little cramped for my taste. Will you be watching the kids the whole time she’s gone?”
“That’s the plan.”
“And then?”
“It depends.” Having just met Callie, that was as far as I would go.
She turned off the road onto a gravel drive. “It’s just around back.”
The drive wasn’t anything my R8 couldn’t handle.
Just as the lights of a house came into view, Callie stopped. “This is where you need a truck.”
She turned right, off the flat gravel drive and onto a muddy trail with foot-deep tire ruts. She’d been right, my sports car wasn’t suited to off-roading like this.
Eventually, she stopped. “Here we are. The kids are going to go bonkers when they see you, so be prepared.”
When I climbed down from the truck, her headlights illuminated something much closer to a shack than a cottage. “This is it?”
“Like I said, it’s not my cup of tea.” She hefted one of my duffels.
I took the other and my computer.
There was a light on inside, but the door was locked when we reached it.
“She was going to put the key under the rock,” I said, recalling our conversation.
“Which one?” Callie asked. There were a dozen at least.
