under their feet, his expression grim.
“Sometimes, I can barely remember what she looked like,” Sara continued when he didn’t speak. “Isn’t that strange? She was Donnie’s sister, and I saw her all the time, but when I try to remember things about her, it’s all fuzzy and distant, like I’m looking at the past through a frosty windshield. I wish I could blame the head injury from the crash, but the truth is, I don’t think I really knew her at all. She was just Donnie’s sister, the one who didn’t want us to bother her or mess with her things.”
“I remember her.” The words seemed to spill over his tongue before he could stop them. His gray eyes slanted her way, narrowing as if he’d said something he regretted.
“Do you know who fathered the baby she was carrying?” she asked.
His gaze snapped up to hers again. “No.”
She knew it hadn’t been Cain’s baby. DNA tests had established that much. But short of court-ordering every male who’d ever had contact with Renee to take a DNA test, the question of her baby’s paternity had remained as open a question as the identity of her killer.
“She wouldn’t say,” he added so softly that for a moment, she wasn’t sure she’d actually heard him speak. But when he turned to look at her again, he added, “She made it clear she didn’t want anyone else to know.”
She stepped closer, lifting her face toward him. The rain had almost stopped, but the wind had picked up, blowing damp strands of her dark hair across her face. One strand snagged on her lips, and Cain’s gaze dropped to her mouth. For a moment, his eyes darkened, and something crackled between them like electricity.
Then he looked away again, his gaze drawn back to the waterfall.
“Did you love her?” She hadn’t realized she was going to ask the question until it tumbled from her lips.
He turned his head slowly, his eyes narrowing as they met her gaze. “I wanted her. I don’t reckon that’s the same thing, though.” His shoulders slumped after a moment and he turned to put his hands on the bridge railing. “I wanted her to be happy. And she wasn’t.”
No, she wasn’t, Sara thought. She might not have a strong memory of Donnie’s sister, but what she did recall was that Renee had been full of life and laughter, even when she was being the imperious older sister—except for those last few weeks of her life.
Sara supposed learning she was pregnant must have been terrifying for a girl like Renee, whose parents had put her on a pedestal and made big plans for her life. College, marriage, a career if she wanted it—the Lindseys had been determined to give their children a charmed life, especially their smart, beautiful firstborn.
Renee would have felt the heavy weight of those expectations and dreaded having to tell her parents the truth.
“She wasn’t dating anyone as far as her parents and Donnie knew.” Sara wondered if Cain Dennison was willing to be any more forthcoming now, all these years later, than he’d been right after Renee’s death. Sara couldn’t bring Donnie back, but maybe she could finish what he’d started before his death. Maybe she could find out the truth about what had happened to Renee.
She’d been a good detective once, before the accident. And she had a lot of time on her hands now, while she tried to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
“I knew she was seeing someone,” Cain said. “I just never knew who.”
Sara couldn’t hide her surprise. “You never told the cops that.”
He slanted a look at her. “They didn’t ask me that.”
“And you didn’t volunteer the information?”
“The cops thought she was dating me. Secretly, of course.” He laughed, though the sound held little in the way of mirth. “Because Renee Lindsey wouldn’t dare date a Dennison in the open.”
“But the two of you spent a lot of time together.”
“We were friends.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that was enough for you?”
He shot her a narrow-eyed look. “Did your daddy send you to interrogate me, Detective Lindsey?”
“My daddy doesn’t tell me what to do. And, by the way, it’s just plain Mrs. Lindsey now.”
One dark eyebrow arched over a pale gray eye. “Since when?”
“I turned in my badge last week.”
“Your decision?”
The decision had nominally been hers, but she knew it had been a matter of time before her bosses let her go. She hadn’t been able to throw herself into her work the way she’d needed to. Donnie had haunted every inch of the town they’d once called their home, until he was almost all she could think about. Donnie, her questions about his death and her own guilty fear that whatever had happened had been her fault.
“Close enough,” she answered.
He cocked his head, his gaze sliding over her slowly, as if to adjust his assessment of her now that he had this new piece of information. “What are you going to do now?”
She shrugged. “I have some savings that didn’t get eaten by the medical bills. Donnie had some life insurance. I’ve got a little time and space to decide.”
“And you came back here to do your thinkin’?”
She smiled at the first hint of his mountain accent coming into play. He’d been gone from the mountains awhile, just as she had, but highlanders like the two of them could never completely escape their roots.
“My granddaddy died last winter. He left me his cabin. My dad says there’s a lot of work to be done on it, and I should probably just sell it. But I don’t have to decide right away.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling Cain even this much about her plans. He might as well be a stranger to her, and what little she did know about him and his past didn’t exactly paint him as a trustworthy confidante.
“And you figure it’s as good a place to do your thinkin’ as any?”
“Something like that.”
He nodded slowly. “Looks like we’re both back for a while, then.”
“So this isn’t a short visit for you?” She felt a flicker of unease. Purgatory, Tennessee, was a place with a long memory, and there were a whole lot of people in this town who still believed Cain Dennison had gotten away with murder.
Her father included.
Carl Dunkirk had never been happy about the sheriff’s decision not to pursue Cain as a suspect in Renee’s murder. He’d seen Renee’s pregnancy by another man to be a damned good motive for murder rather than exculpatory evidence.
If Cain planned to stay here long, he might come to regret it.
“I have a job,” he said after a moment, not looking at her.
“Doing what?”
He glanced at her. “This and that.”
“Are ‘this and that’ legal?”
His mouth curved, the first hint of a smile since she’d confronted him. The twitch of his lips carved a dimple in his cheek, sending an odd flutter through the center of her chest. “You think I’d tell you if they weren’t?”
She tried a different tack. “I heard you joined the Army when you left town.”
“You heard that, did you?”
“It’s not true?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Did you like the service?”
“Liked isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” he said after a pause.