She nodded, cleared her throat. “I need to report a missing person.”
Gabriel blinked, clearly not expecting her to say that. Then again, this was Last Ride, where the usual crimes were escaped longhorns, pranks by bored teenagers and book-club squabbles.
Rosalie could practically see Gabriel mentally working this out. Because he’d no doubt already heard gossip about her, too. He likely knew the gist of her broken engagement the year before from her cheating ex, Reggie Dalton, who was making outrageous gestures to win her back.
“The person’s been missing a while,” she went on, “so I guess it’s probably not urgent or anything.”
“Who’s missing and just how long isa while?” Gabriel asked, sounding all cop now.
Rosalie decided to answer the second part of that first. “Just a guess but I’d say he’s been missing for fourteen years, eleven months and fifteen days.”
Gabriel did another of those blinking double takes. Judging from his dumbfounded expression, he didn’t know what the heck was going on.Welcome to the club.Neither did she.
“Let me start from the beginning,” she said, regrouping. “You might remember the Last Ride Society drawing.” But when she got a blank/what does this have to do with a missing personlook from him, Rosalie backed up even further with her explanation. “The founder of the town, Hezzie Parkman, set up the Last Ride Society so that future generations of Parkmans would research the tombstones in the local area. Every quarter, a Parkman heir’s name is drawn, and the heir in turn draws the name of a tombstone to research.” She paused. “I’m the heir this quarter, and I drew your great-uncle’s name.”
Hamish Clyde McCloud.
He’d been Gabriel’s grandfather’s brother, along with being a mean-as-a-snake failed rancher who had undoubtedly also failed to tell anyone “I love you,” and that included his wife/Gabriel’s great-aunt, Carmen. In fact, gossip had it that Carmen and Hamish had spent five decades of marital misery before Hamish had passed away at the age of seventy-two.
“In addition to needing to do a research report on your great-uncle, I’m required to take a photo of his tombstone,” Rosalie went on, pulling her phone from her pocket. “I drove out to the cemetery and found this. I’m guessing the grave caved in from those bad storms we had a couple of nights ago.”
She showed him the photo and wished she’d done a little more of a lead-in to this jaw-dropping news. Because the grave was nearly empty. No coffin, no trace of a coffin, nothing except a small metal box the size of a deck of cards.
“I wasn’t at your great-uncle’s funeral,” she went on. Rosalie figured not many were. “But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t cremated.” Few people in Last Ride were because there was no crematorium, and that would mean sending the remains into San Antonio or some other city.
Making a sound of agreement about the noncremation, Gabriel took her phone, using his fingers to enlarge the photo, and she stepped to his side as he zoomed in on the box. Something she’d already done, but because of the dirt, it was impossible to tell what kind of box it was.
“Is it possible Hamish was buried elsewhere? Or for some reason the body was moved later?” she asked, knowing that was a long shot.
“No. I went to the funeral, and I saw the coffin being lowered into the ground. It was to be Hamish’s final resting place,” he verified. “I went to the service for Aunt Carmen’s sake,” he added. “She only had me and my folks.”
Bingo. Rosalie had been right about so few people attending the service to say their last goodbyes to Hamish. Gabriel and she had still been together then, and the funeral had happened just a couple of weeks before graduation—and their breakup. But Gabriel had insisted she not go with him to the graveside service because she’d been studying for finals. Probably had insisted, too, because he’d already been trying to put some distance between them.
Gabriel glanced up when the door opened, and Azzie came in. She was still scowling and snarling at the last of the “protesters,” but she issued a friendly nod when her attention landed on Rosalie.
“You’re here about Hamish’s grave?” Azzie asked. “Derwin got a call about it when I was out there trying to settle the squabble,” she explained after Rosalie raised an eyebrow to question how she’d already learned that.
Rosalie checked the time. It was barely a half hour since she’d discovered the empty grave and taken the photo, and there’d been no one else at the cemetery then. Obviously, though, someone else had seen it and had blabbed about it to Derwin Parkman—another distant cousin—who’d then reported it to Azzie.
Blabbing about the grave to Derwin wasn’t as far out in left field as it seemed, though, since he was the current president of Sherlock’s Snoops, a group of people with too much time on their hands who fancied themselves as crime solvers. This wasn’t a crime. Probably. But it was a mystery.
“If you and Rosalie want to go back out to the cemetery to have a look, I can hold down the office,” Azzie suggested, and she slid a glance from Rosalie to Gabriel.
A glance accompanied by a sliver of a smile.
Crud. This was matchmaking. A weird attempt at that, considering the destination. But it gave Rosalie some insight into things to come. Plenty of folks would just assume that Gabriel and she would hook up again. And those plenty of folks would be wrong.
Probably.
Gabriel was a hot cowboy cop, but she was still dealing with Reggie’s attempts at a reconciliation. There was noprobablyfor that. A reconciliation wasn’t going to happen. Ever. But talk about a rekindling between Gabriel and her would only cause Reggie to escalate his efforts. After threatening him with a restraining order, he’d quit his dozen-plus calls and texts a day, but she was still trying to get him to stop sending her flowers and candy.
“I can go alone,” Gabriel told Rosalie. “No need for you to go back out there and see it.”
“I need to see it,” she insisted. “I was so shocked when I saw the grave that I forgot to take a picture of the headstone.”
Gabriel made a suit-yourself sound, told Azzie he’d be right back, and he motioned for Rosalie to follow him out the back exit and to his truck. No way to miss his limp. Not super pronounced, but it was there and was a reminder of why he’d likely come back to Last Ride. He probably wouldn’t have qualified for duty in the military or a big-city police force.
And that made her ache for him.