Torn Loyalties Read online

  “Exactly.”

  Truth dawned in Grant’s eyes. “She’s done this before.”

  “Over the years, several times.” Madison leaned close. “Miss Addie doesn’t much care for competition on her street, either, which is probably why Pauline chose it. She can’t cook but she knows Miss Addie.”

  Grant sat back. “Why not just come ask Miss Addie to help her?”

  “Same reason Miss Addie didn’t just offer to help her.” Madison stiffened. “Pauline’s got nothing left but a little dignity. Miss Addie doesn’t want to take that away from her, too.”

  “Why is offering to help the woman taking her dignity?”

  “Because it implies she can’t do it on her own.” Madison patted his hand on the table. “Don’t worry. Miss Addie and Pauline know how it works here. They’ll handle it, and Pauline will be working here by the end of the week.”

  “What about her lease on the other property, where she’s opened her own place? It’s not that easy to just shut the door.”

  “It is when Miss Addie owns the property.”

  Grant’s jaw dropped.

  Madison laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Miss Addie returned with the pie and blueberry crunch.

  “Nothing really. Grant was just getting a dose of insight on how Southern women think.”

  “We are a maze-minded bunch, I suppose.” She set their dishes down.

  “I need to talk with Gracie, Miss Addie. About the rose at the Christmas service.”

  “What for?”

  “Just finishing off some paperwork.” Madison lifted her fork.

  Miss Addie’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t buying that paperwork claim for a second. “I’ll send her over after you enjoy your dessert.” She filled their coffee cups.

  “Talking about it won’t upset her, will it?” Grant asked. “That was a pretty traumatic night.”

  “Shoot, all she ever talks about is getting to play Mary in the Christmas program and it being the only one ever held in the parking lot. She never mentions the scares that took place that night.”

  “Kids are resilient.” Madison sank her fork into the hot blueberry crunch.

  When the last bites had been eaten, Madison watched Gracie walk over to their table wearing jeans, a red sweater and a cherry-red nose. She’d been outside playing. Madison smiled. “I like your hair in a ponytail.”

  Gracie beamed. “It’s brown. I wish it was silver-blond like your hair.”

  “Oh, brown hair is much prettier,” Madison said, hoping Gracie never suffered a trauma that changed her hair color so dramatically. “You can wear any color you want.” She leaned closer. “I have to be careful about that. Some colors just don’t go well with silver-blond.”

  “Huh.” Gracie looked at Grant. “You need a haircut.”

  He smiled. “I guess it is getting pretty shaggy. I just haven’t had time to take care of it.”

  “Gran says we have to make time to take care of ourselves.” She cocked her head. “She knows, ’cause she’s old and everything.”

  “Ah.” Grant kept a straight face. “Wise, too, I’d say.”

  “Very.” Gracie nodded emphatically.

  “Can I ask you to look at a picture or two for me, Gracie?” Madison reached into her purse.

  “I like to look at pictures.”

  “Do you remember the man who gave you the black rose for Maggie the night of the Christmas program?”

  She nodded, then told Grant, “I was Mary.”

  “The best Mary ever is what I heard.”

  “Thank you.” Gracie beamed. “I practiced real hard.”

  “So you’ll look at the pictures, then?” Madison asked.

  Gracie nodded.

  Madison put photos of Talbot and Dayton on the table.

  “It wasn’t them.” She looked at Madison. “I know them. It was the man with the lawn mower.”

  Miss Addie joined them.

  “What lawn mower?” Grant asked.

  “The one across the street from our house.”

  Miss Addie clarified. “He was cutting the grass at one of my cottages across the street from Della’s right before her garage blew up.”

  Madison and Grant exchanged a heavy look, and Madison’s heart beat hard deep in her chest. She held out a third photo. “Gracie, do you recog—”

  Gracie’s face lit up. “That’s him.” She grabbed Miss Addie’s arm. “Gran, that’s the rose man with the lawn mower. He looks different without his hat, but that’s him.”

  “Blake,” Madison said.

  “Blake?” Miss Addie looked from Madison to Grant and back to Madison. “Who is he?”

  Obviously Blake didn’t come into Miss Addie’s. Madison gave the wise woman a warning look. “No one important. Just someone we ran into on another case.”

  That response had been given for Gracie’s benefit. Miss Addie, indeed wise, sent Madison a worried look. “Gracie, go help in the kitchen for a bit, sweetie.”

  “Bye, Mr. Deaver. Madison.” Gracie skipped from the dining room behind the door to the kitchen.

  “Now I want to know the truth about this bit of business.”

  Madison knew determined when she saw it. “Make sure Gracie doesn’t mention this to anyone, and don’t you mention it, either. For now, that’s all I’m free to tell you.”

  “Is he running loose?”

  Madison didn’t answer.

  “Enough said.” Miss Addie grabbed their plates. “You get him and keep him, Madison McKay. I ain’t having that lowlife coming after my Gracie. I’ll shoot him myself.” She took the dishes to the kitchen.

  Grant watched her go. “I think she’d do it.”

  “Bet on it.”

  They rose to go. Madison grabbed her umbrella. “I think we’d better do some deep background on Blake. He’s showing up in all the wrong places.”

  “Talbot already has. You can be sure he put Blake through the mill before he got hired to work in the commander’s office.”

  “Then we’d better rerun it and check out the background of whoever ran the check, because they evidently missed a few key things.”

  NINE

  Wednesday was a bust. Thursday wasn’t much better, and so far, Friday was proving to be just as fruitless. Grant and Madison had spent no less than fourteen hours per day digging into Lieutenant Blake’s background and they had discovered nothing more than Blake was efficient and ambitious—neither of which were liabilities in the military realm unless he crossed the proverbial line, and from all accounts, he hadn’t.

  Blake’s performance, gauged by his annual Officer Effectiveness Reports, was positive. The last three OERs all carried endorsements from two-star generals, including the last one from Commander Talbot. Blake was single, a homeowner with good credit. Bad credit could get him busted out of the military, which was true for every military officer because it made him or her vulnerable to corruption and being recruited by foreign entities for nefarious purposes. In short, Grant grunted, they had nothing on Blake...except for Gracie’s identifying him as the man who’d given her the black rose at the Christmas program and as the man mowing a lawn he shouldn’t have been mowing near Della’s cottage when her garage exploded.

  While Grant didn’t dismiss Gracie’s certainty that Blake had been that man, he didn’t want to rely solely on a kid’s memory for evidence of it. “We need more,” he told Madison.

  She nodded, walked into the kitchen and called back, “I didn’t find anything even suggesting he’s crazy enough to do the things Blue Shoes did.” She walked back into the dining room with a plate of cheese and crackers. “The worst thing about him is he’s incredibly ambitious.” She bit a cracker and slowly chewed, then set the plate down on the table b
etween her and Grant. “Whether Blake is ambitious enough to get caught in the middle is the question.”

  Grant reached for a cracker and sliced a piece of Gouda from the disc. “Between Dayton and Talbot?”

  Madison took her seat. “Yes—not necessarily in realizing all that was going on, but he could have been covering his bases on whether or not Talbot and Dayton got their promotions.”

  “I’m not sure I’m tracking.” Grant popped the cracker into his mouth. The crunching sound of his biting down followed.

  Madison leaned back. “I think Blake is ambitious enough to make sure he’s in line for his next promotion whichever way Talbot’s and Dayton’s promotions went. If Talbot snagged the congressional appointment and Dayton took over the Nest, Blake wanted to be on his good side and positioned to move up. If Talbot wasn’t promoted and kept the Nest command, then Blake wanted to be on his good side and positioned to move up the chain with him.” Madison leaned forward. “From the calls coming in and the correspondence going out, Blake had to know that Talbot was keeping Dayton in the dark about things.”

  “No way around that, unless Talbot handled all his own correspondence and calls.”

  “How likely is that?” Madison asked.

  “Not impossible but highly improbable.” Grant took a drink of his iced tea. “Especially when he’s commanding the facility everyone knows about and one few know about. That’s double duty.”

  Madison stared at the boards on the walls, at the green Blake timeline. “It might be helpful to call a few of his prior commanders and get their impressions.”

  “They’ll want to know the reason.”

  Madison looked from the photo of Blake back to Grant. “Tell them the reason is classified.”

  “They’re generals, Madison.”

  “Yes, they are.” She smiled. “Who knows better that classified means classified and, when the military’s involved, violations create security breaches that endanger lives?”

  “Good point.” Grant wiggled his fingers. “Pass me that file.”

  Madison handed it to him, but didn’t let go. “We make a good team, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Are you liking me any better than when we first left the Nest?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She hadn’t brought this up because frankly she feared his response. But her feelings for him were deepening by the day—at times, by the hour—and in their beach run today, she’d reached the tipping point. For days now, they’d prayed and worked together, ate and went to church together. They exercised and grocery shopped and did everything else together she could dredge up in her mind that couples not yet committed do. And she’d loved it all. He seemed to love it all, but she wasn’t falling for the appearance trap twice. He’d proven he was a master at it.

  So she’d let things go unspoken and kept her questions to herself, but now, standing on the other side of the tipping point, she wanted answers. She had feared the developing bonds between them and the deeper feelings were one-sided and hadn’t wanted to know the truth. Now she feared not knowing was worse. He could break her heart either way, but if that’s the path they were on, better to break it now while she was neck-deep in this investigation than after it when her life returned to normal without him. She’d have way too much time on her hands then to mourn losing him.

  “You were kind of eager to get away from me then,” she reminded him.

  “I tried to explain myself but you wouldn’t listen.”

  True. “Do you know why?”

  “Not really.” He looked worried. “I talked to Mrs. Renault about it, not that it helped.”

  She hadn’t mentioned it. “What did she tell you?”

  “To give you some time to come to grips with everything.”

  “With you infiltrating my agency and my life. That’s what you mean?”

  He looked away. “Yes.”

  “You’re worried about us.” Madison saw and sensed it clearly.

  “Aren’t you?”

  She pulled his pink stone out of her pocket. “Here.” She passed it to him. “At the moment, you need this more than I do.”

  He took it. “So you’re not going to trust me, after all.”

  “No, I absolutely do trust you.”

  Grant frowned, lifted the stone. “So why are you giving this back?”

  “Because you just look worried.”

  “Madison, if I know nothing else, I know that with you there is no ‘just’ in anything. You’re deliberate. So spare me the mental gymnastics and tell me what this really means.”

  “It means, rub it. It clears your thinking and you need a clear mind when talking to Blake’s former generals.” She folded her hands in her lap. “And about us,” she said, putting a bite in her tone. “We’re fine. Better than fine. I’m thinking you’re serious about me and I’m good with that. So if you’re not, now’s the time to say so. Am I just an assignment to you?” Laced in her lap, her hands shook. Her palms went clammy.

  He sobered, and looked her right in the eye. “You’ve never been just an assignment to me.”

  Joy burst inside her. She bit the smile from her lips. “Really?” Did she dare to believe him? To trust him with knowing he had her heart?

  He sighed. “I’m crazy about you, Madison, and I don’t want to go anywhere. I’d rather be here with you, working on a case that makes me sick inside, than anywhere else.”

  She did smile then, and reached for his hand. “Me, too.”

  “No more worrying for either of us. We’re fine.”

  She’d told him that earlier. “Yes, we’re fine.” And they were, at least for now. Considering she hadn’t let a man this far into her inner circle since Afghanistan, she was content with that. “It’s Friday and the generals could be skating out early. Better make those calls.”

  “Right.” Grant pecked a kiss to her palm, then released her hand and picked up the phone.

  Just before six, Grant joined her in the kitchen at the granite breakfast bar. “Well?” She dished up Chinese food from the cartons into bowls. “Hope this is okay?”

  “Smells great and I’m starving.”

  She smiled and passed him a spoon. “Grab a plate.”

  He reached, and said, “I talked to his last two bosses. Our take on Blake’s ambition is confirmed. Both of them said he had a reputation for making sure that however a situation resolved, he had skin in the game on the right side.”

  “So he habitually plays both sides.”

  Grant nodded, and dropped the spoon into a bowl of lemon chicken. “They’re emailing reports over, recapping what they said.”

  “That’s good.” Left nothing to get muddled up in translation when it was all down in black and white. It was raining again, so Madison took a seat at the kitchen table.

  Grant joined her, his plate heaping.

  That pleased her. She hadn’t asked what he wanted. They’d had Chinese multiple times in the past months and she knew his preferences. That surprised her. She hadn’t realized how many things about him she’d absorbed.

  “Any important news from the office?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Renault says everything’s under control.” They’d been so focused on what they were doing here that Madison had left the agency completely under Mrs. Renault’s watchful eye. “I have to admit, a part of me resents that they don’t need me more.”

  Grant bit into an egg roll. “They rely on you for everything. Think about it, Madison. Even if things were falling apart, Mrs. Renault would deal with them because she has a pretty good idea what you’re dealing with here.”

  “Talbot’s probably told her exactly what we’re doing. I’m not sure.” She frowned. “You know how closemouthed Mrs. Renault is unless she knows exactly what she�
�s talking about.”

  “I’ve noticed that about her.”

  Madison frowned. “Shifting focus. So they wouldn’t worry about their reports and what us asking for them really meant.”

  Grant nodded. “Not that Mrs. Renault would lie.”

  “No, but she’s a master at saying just enough to lead you to believe what she wants you to believe. You have to do the jumping to conclusions, though.”

  “After dinner, let’s look at what Blake might have found on Dayton that cued him Dayton could be Blue Shoes.”

  “If Blake did find something, how he used it could be significant to us.” A memory at the Nest flashed through her mind. Her in the duct, staring down into Janet Hardy’s cell. “He didn’t treat Janet well, when she was detained.”

  “Talbot claims he knew nothing about her detention.”

  “I believe him about that,” Madison said. “When I told him she was there, he was shocked.” Madison swept her hair back. “Blake did exactly what Dayton told him in there. I witnessed that myself.” Another memory flashed through her mind. “Grant, when you were in my cell pretending to be me, and Dayton was on his way down there, Blake tried to call him, right?”

  Grant nodded.

  “On his mobile?”

  “No, at the operations desk. I didn’t see it, but I heard Beecher take the call and tell Dayton who it was. Dayton blew Blake off.”

  Madison felt the hair on her neck lift. “He didn’t take the call?”

  “No.”

  What did that mean? She mulled it over.

  Grant paused, his fork midair. “Blake had to be on the inside with Dayton or he wouldn’t have given Gracie the flower and he wouldn’t have been on scene with a lawn mower to watch Della’s garage blow.” Pausing, Grant sobered. “I know what Blake wanted and what Dayton promised him.”

  “What?”

  “He was going to make Blake his vice.”

  Madison drew back. “He’s a lieutenant.”

  “Yes. And he’d be promoted below the zone and probably be youngest vice commander ever. Certainly the youngest at the Nest.”

  Madison sucked in a breath. “Blake would sell his soul for that.”