Danger on Her Doorstep

“I’ll help,” Gideon offered.

Though she appreciated his offer, Maggie shook her head. “I don’t want to waste your time with sorting through things. There are plenty of projects upstairs that could use your skills—” She stopped midsentence as Gideon’s hand touched her arm. In the dank chill of the basement, the brush of his fingers felt warm against her skin. She looked up to see his obsidian eyes glittering down at her.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d just like to help. Pro bono. I know Bernie closed this case, but in my mind, there’s something down here. I want to try to find it. For your dad.” Gideon’s voice grew a little deeper, a little huskier, and Maggie wondered if maybe his flint-hard exterior guarded a soft heart. “This project is for the children’s hospital, right? I can’t take money from sick kids.”

Her mouth fell open slightly, and she was distinctly aware of his hand on her arm. Still. Wishing her thoughts would catch up with his words, Maggie struggled to clarify. “You’re not going to charge me for the time we spend sorting through the stuff in this basement?”

“No.” His tone told her she’d gotten it wrong.

Had she misunderstood?

Gideon continued. “I’m not going to charge you for my time, period. Let me work on your house for free. I’m still drawing pay as sheriff. I can’t in good conscience allow you—”

“I can’t in good conscience allow you to volunteer your time and expertise,” Maggie cut him off and stepped away. She pulled her arm away from his touch, which, slight and simple as it might have been, somehow felt too intimate coming from the handsome lawman, especially when he was making such a generous offer.

But even as she stepped away from him, Gideon followed her, his broad shoulders cutting into her personal space. She wanted to take another step back, but she was hemmed in by piles of junk on three sides. Gideon looked down at her, his expression far too compassionate.

“Maggie, please. I can’t sleep at night. I messed up a lot of things. I missed the clues that should have told me my brother was running drugs. If I’d have gotten here sooner, maybe your dad wouldn’t have died. I have enough regrets in my life. Can you just let me do something that will bring me some peace?”

His powerful shoulders loomed at eye level, but what drew her gaze were his eyes that glittered with unshed tears. Maggie got the distinct sense the hardened sheriff didn’t let many people see this raw, vulnerable side of him. Something tugged at the depths of her heart.

The Bromley family had never been churchgoing folks that she’d ever known of. Was it possible that Gideon was facing all these trials without a faith in God to fall back on? She couldn’t imagine going through what he was in the midst of, let alone enduring it without God.

His voice rumbled close to her, his tone almost pleading. “If your father was murdered, then his killer is still out there. I need to catch him.”

At that reminder, Maggie glanced to the shallow window that looked out on the underside of some bushes outside. Was the killer still out there?

Gideon continued with steady words. “I don’t want to frighten you, but, Maggie, your father placed that phone call from his cell phone as he was working in the backyard of this house. In order for his killer to have overheard that conversation, he would have had to have been watching and listening very closely.”

Fear trembled through her, and Gideon’s steadying hands grasped her shoulders. This time, instead of pushing him away, she reached for him, and let her small hands settle over his shirtsleeves. Gideon Bromley had always frightened her. But her father’s killer frightened her even more.

“Do you think he’s still out there, watching and listening?” Her question came out as a hollow squeak.

As she watched, the muscles in Gideon’s stony jaw tightened and flexed. His determined eyes looked hard. “If he is, I intend to catch him before he can hurt anyone else. Will you let me help you?”

What could she say? She suspected Gideon needed her help almost as much as she needed his, if the hardened man was ever going to be at peace. So really, the decision was a simple one. “I’d be grateful if you did.”

Gideon set to work right away, methodically going through every last trinket and scrap of paper. Much of it didn’t appear to have ever been touched—which made it less likely to have been the suspicious object Glen had called him to report. To his relief, Maggie appeared to be just as organized as he was about her approach to the search.

“Do you think this has any value?” she asked, holding up a dusty green bottle.

“I doubt it.” Gideon shrugged. “Maybe if you knew what it was called.”

“Probably not worth the time it takes to sort it out.” She slid it into one of the contractor-strength trash bags they’d found upstairs. “This bag is about full. What do you think I should do with it?”

Looking around at the mountain of things they’d be throwing away, Gideon decided. “I’ll hire a roll-away Dumpster. We’ll probably generate a lot of debris through the construction process, so we might as well have one on-site.”

Once the Dumpster arrived, Gideon was surprised with how quickly they began to fill it. Though he felt encouraged by the progress they were making clearing out the basement, with every bag of trash they hefted outside, he was left with fewer possible clues. Nothing he saw seemed suspicious. He began to wonder if the killer might have had time to remove whatever it was before Gideon had arrived and discovered Glen Arnold’s body.

As Maggie toted another bag outside, Gideon’s eyes roved over the room. Nothing looked suspicious to him. Doubts taunted him. Was he pursuing an empty lead? No. Between Glen’s final words and the certainty in his gut, he knew there had to be something in that basement. And his instincts had always served him well as sheriff.

“Gideon?” The breathless way Maggie spoke his name from the doorway sent a shot of fear through him. When he wheeled around, the stark-white frightened expression on her face sent his adrenaline racing into overdrive.

“What is it?”

“I think the killer may have returned.”

FOUR

Maggie tried to remain calm as she led Gideon back outside to show him what she’d found. If whoever had killed her father really was watching them, she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing how much their actions had disturbed her.

“What is it?” Gideon asked again as they stepped outside.

“I’ve been tossing the trash into this end of the Dumpster,” Maggie explained in the calmest voice she could muster. “I’m too short to see inside it from the ground, but I was thinking after all the bags we’ve thrown in there, surely they ought to reach the top by now.”

She didn’t have to say any more. Gideon leaped up the metal-bar ladder that was welded to the side of the roll-away. His groan told her he’d seen the same thing she had.

He looked down at his hands and groaned again. “I suppose I just wiped out any fingerprints they might have left.”

“I’m sure they were all gone after I touched it.” She tried not to think about what she’d seen inside the Dumpster—the bags carefully untied, the contents sorted out, as though someone had been going through everything they’d thrown out. They may have even been inside the roll-away as she’d thrown in more bags, but she hadn’t seen them because of the high metal sides.

But what made her want to scream in fear were the words scrawled along the back inside wall of the Dumpster.

GIVE IT BACK

The jagged block letters made Maggie feel threatened.

“What do they want?” she asked.

“Something from the basement?” Gideon suggested. “It looks like they were searching through the things we threw out.”

“But don’t you think—” Maggie tried to suppress a shudder, but failed “—don’t you think it looks like some things are missing?”

To her relief, Gideon took her question seriously and looked back into the roll-away. “You’re right. That bag was full of all those broken vacuum attachments and that old wrapping paper that was falling apart, but I don’t see half the vacuum attachments anymore. And I think some bottles are missing from that bag over there.”

Maggie could picture the bag he was talking about. It had been dragged to the far end of the Dumpster and all its contents had been emptied out. She knew some of it was either missing or hidden among the other bags. Her gut instinct told her it had been taken. But why?

With a wordless prayer, she looked up to the clear-blue Iowa sky as though God might send her answers straight out of heaven. Instead she saw a broken gutter hanging down from the eaves, and felt that much more disheartened by the project she’d undertaken—which she’d never asked for in the first place. Pushing away her discouragement, she asked Gideon the question that was foremost in her mind.

“Do you think we missed it—the suspicious thing my dad told you about? Do you think his murderer took it with them?” Her voice dropped off as she returned her gaze to the roll-away Dumpster and then back to Gideon.

For a moment she thought the suspended lawman was about to agree with her. But then his features hardened and he shook his head.

“No. It has to still be inside. This only makes me all the more certain.”

“Why?”

“Because if your father’s killer had what they were looking for, they wouldn’t be asking for it back, would they?”