Chapter 1
The cold was just about freezing her nose off. Two seconds out of the grocery store and Everleigh could already feel the sting through her jeans and thick black coat. Pushing her overflowing cart—as it turned out, spending two months in prison meant most everything left in her kitchen had to be replaced—she got a wheel caught on a chunk of ice. Pushed harder and skidded over it.
Of course, frozen February would be the time she’d be replenishing. Couldn’t be summer, when the long trek to the far end of the lot could have been less miserable.
It wasn’t like she’d had any warning, any time to prepare for an absence. One minute she’d been waiting tables at Howlin’ Eddie’s, trying like hell to make enough money to pay the bills, maybe buy some Christmas presents, and the next she’d been handcuffed in front of her coworkers and a couple dozen customers. Accused of murdering her soon-to-be ex-husband.
At the point she’d been arrested, she hadn’t even seen Fritz in over a week. He’d moved out the month before. He’d been accusing her of cheating on him, when the truth was, he’d been doing other women behind her back for years. Chump that she was, she’d trusted him.
Crunch. Crunch. Her ankle-length zip-up black boots sounded against the ice and salt crystals as she pushed, lifting a hand briefly to resecure her knitted hat over her short hair and freezing ears, still halfway down the pavement from her beat-up old red Park Avenue...a car that reminded her of herself in some ways. Luxury in name only. Except that her old beater of a car used to actually be top-of-the-line. Her beginnings on the east side of town had been anything but.
Still, she’d made it across the wrong side of the tracks, from lower-income housing and basic public school to the upscale part of Grave Gulch. Meeting Fritz, falling in love with the handsome fitness-guru charmer, marrying and buying a home on the west side, his side of town...
Crunch and...her boot slid forward on a patch of ice. With one hand flailing and her heart in her throat, Everleigh gripped her cart harder, lurching against it as she managed to avoid falling on her butt on the pavement. But the sudden movement knocked the bag of baking goods, flour, sugar and chocolate chips out of her cart and onto the wet ground.
Blinking back tears, she bent to rebag her goods. Stupid to cry. She didn’t need frozen eyelashes, or reason for her nose to run any more than it already was. The plastic handle on the bag ripped when she put the flour back inside. Her fault. She’d known she should have double bagged it. And really, she’d never been one to cry over spilled milk.
Or baking goods, as was the case here.
The tears that hadn’t quite stopped weren’t because of her groceries. She knew that. It was just... everything. The buildup of two months’ worth of sitting in prison twenty minutes from home, awaiting a trial for a murder she hadn’t committed while her little house sat empty.
But even that didn’t cause emotional overflow. No, the tears were for her gram. Every waking second of the forty-eight hours she’d been out of prison, she’d been mourning for her eighty-year-old role model, heroine, example and fount of love. In an act of desperation, her grandma, Hannah McPherson, had kidnapped a police sketch artist’s child just to get leverage so the cops would reinvestigate Fritz’s murder.
Gram had been so certain that Everleigh hadn’t killed her husband—which she hadn’t—that she’d been willing to risk her own freedom to get
someone to prove it. Gram had been the only one who’d believed Everleigh hadn’t committed the crime.
Hard to believe...thirty-eight years of living in Grave Gulch, on both sides of the tracks...her entire life...caring for people, trying to be kind, doing her best...and everyone, her own mother and aunt included, believed her capable of murder—and that she was guilty!
And now the one person who’d been there for her, unconditionally, her entire life, was sitting in prison. Because while Gram’s goal had been met—the police had taken another look at her case and found that their own forensic scientist had tampered with evidence and Everleigh had been exonerated—her grandmother had committed a felony by taking that sweet baby boy. Didn’t matter that she’d cared for him lovingly during the few hours he’d been a guest at her home. She’d kidnapped a child. The little cousin of the chief of police.
And still, bottom line, she was a kidnapper, was sitting in prison facing felony charges, and there was nothing Everleigh could do to get her out.
Because while Everleigh hadn’t been guilty, Gram was...
Placing her groceries back in the ripped bag, Everleigh blinked through her tears to be able to see well enough to find two ends of plastic to tie together and get the bag back up to her cart, then lodged it securely among the dozen or so other packages still there. Frozen fingers having made the task that much more difficult, she pushed her cart as quickly as she could toward her sorry old car.
Murder or not, Everleigh would rather be the one facing another night in a cell than her grandma. Prison was no place for an eighty-year-old woman with frail bones and a heart filled with love.
She’d thought maybe, with the fault lying in the police department, and the boy’s mother being willing to not press charges, Gram would be free. But the DA still charged her.
And it wasn’t like Everleigh had any sway with the upper-echelon politicians in town.
Still...she was almost at her car, thank God...there were always silver linings if you looked for them, as Gram had always said. She might not have any pull in town, but Gram did. There’d been Free Granny posters going up all over town. There’d even been a formal protest going on when Everleigh had been released from prison two days before.
And they were still going on downtown every day, outside the police station.
Maybe... Oommfff. Someone—or something—slammed into her.
Hands ripped from the basket of her cart with the force that hit her, Everleigh seemed to fly, her feet off the ground, for a brief second before she landed with a thump on top of a heavily coated body much larger than hers. The gloved hands caught her around the waist like a football, held her in place for a brief second and then, just as quickly, let her go.
She looked up just in time to see the back of her car swiped by the front bumper of an old vehicle that hadn’t even bothered to stop.
What the hell!
Scrambling to her feet, heart pounding and her breath blowing out steam in large poofs, she saw her basket of groceries rolling off in the distance. And saw the man who’d just tackled her to the ground running after them. Almost starting to cry again as he caught the basket just before it bashed into a light post and pulled it safely back to her.
“We need to call the police,” he said, steam vaporizing around his face as he pulled out his phone.
And she recognized him. Had seen him around the police station and in court, too, as she’d arrived for the third day of her trial and found herself released instead. Clarke Colton. And of course, he’d want to call the police, being the big brother to the chief and all.
Plus, he worked for them. As a contracted private investigator.
The thought of police anywhere in her vicinity made her shake worse than the frigid temperatures.
“Someone just tried to run you down,” he said, phone to his ear.