Page 64 of Hunted in Hope Town

Ellis’s jaw worked. He looked from Kirsten to Boyd. Then inhaled deeply. “Fine. But you need to eat some breakfast first,” he told her. When his back was turned, moving into the kitchen to scrounge her up some breakfast, Boyd winked at her.

And she mouthed a silent thank you.

They’d find a plan. They’d find a way out of this.

She had to believe that, because otherwise she might crumble. She wouldn’t crumble now. For Ellis. For herself.

For their future.

Chapter Twenty

Ellis couldn’t believe he’d been talked into this. He thought about hanging up even as the phone rang.

Boyd had Colleen’s cell from when they’d all worked together in Chicago, so Ellis hoped like hell Colleen had since gotten rid of that number. He’d get a voicemail, number not in service, something, and then this would all be moot and they could go back to the idea Kirsten’s teaching career was somehow connected to her threats.

It sounded better than this, even if he thought it was a dead end.

But they’d roped Zach in, to see if he could get a ping on whoever answered, and even more importantly, watch to see if someone tried to ping Ellis’s location in return.

“Hello,” a female voice answered suspiciously.

“Colleen?” Maybe he had a wrong number. Maybe this was all for nothing. He prayed it was.

“Who’s this?”

Ellis cleared his throat. It made him sound nervous, and he supposed he was, but it worked for their little ruse. “Ellis Sutton? From Chicago? We worked together about two years ago.”

There was a long, stretched out silence. “It’s been a long time.”

Ellis let out a breath that he hoped sounded like relief, not the inward curse it really was. “It has. I’m sure your busy, and I don’t mean to bother you, I’ve just been…making the rounds to catch up with everyone.”

She didn’t answer right away, but when she did, she sounded just as Ellis remembered her. Sharp, confident, straightforward.

“Really? Where did I come in at?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, am I twentieth on your list? Have you talked to everyone at the Chicago office before you got down to me? Who was your first call? Just wondering where I rate.”

“Well, uh, Boyd was my first call,” Ellis said, figuring the truth or as close to it as he could get was best.

“Yeah, that tracks. Then who?”

“Well…then you.”

She didn’t say anything to that. The silence stretched out and out, until Kirsten nudged him from behind.

“Uh, Boyd said you’d moved to South Carolina,” he said, purposefully getting the state a little wrong.

Colleen hesitated. “Raleigh, actually. Got away from cops for a while. Into the private sector. Things are more…lucrative here.”

Ellis didn’t like the way she said lucrative, at all. But he had to stuff that reaction down. “Yeah, I get it. Well, no I don’t. I’m still doing desk work. Up in Anchorage though.”

“Yeah, Tom told me you’d gone to Alaska. I guess grief makes people do weird things.”

“Yeah, yeah it does.” And they were talking about Kirsten, but he thought about all the ways he’d run away from the woman he’d loved in his own marriage. Through work. Through distance. Through whatever.

It had been fear, yes, but it had been grief too. A grief he’d never really allowed himself to deal in. All the grief from his childhood he hadn’t wanted to contend with. Running away was better.