Page 80 of Forever Dead

"I'll keep you in the loop," he said. "And I'll bounce what I find off you when I need your insight."

Selena felt something inside her lift.

"Thank you."

"There's a condition."

"Of course there is."

"You've got to promise me you won't go wandering around in the dark like this again while you've got a bad leg."

"I promise."

Connor stared at her for another moment.

"What?"

"I'm deciding whether I believe you."

"You should."

"I'll try."

Selena opened the driver's door and lowered herself carefully into the seat.

Connor remained beside the car.

She put the cane across the passenger side and reached for the ignition.

Then she stopped.

“Connor?”

“Yeah?”

Selena looked past him toward Eleanor’s farmhouse. “For a second in there, I thought I saw someone.”

Connor followed her attention toward the dark windows.

“There was nobody in the house when I cleared it.”

“I know.”

Neither of them said anything else about it.

She turned the key.

The engine started.

Connor stepped back from the car as her headlights came on.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Harold Greer passed the old Tully place every morning. The route from his house to the lower pasture had not changed in thirty years. Out of his drive, left at Miller’s Creek Road, over the narrow bridge where the guardrail had been bent since spring, then another mile through fields before the Tully farmhouse appeared behind a stand of sycamore and oak.

He knew the place the way a man knew the face of a neighbor he had seen every day for half his life. The sag in the porch roof above the eastern post. The white paint thinning on the clapboards. The stone chimney with the darker patch near the top where Jack Tully had repaired it after a lightning strike. The barn beyond the house leaned a little more each winter, though not enough for Harold to convince Jack’s son to spend money on it.

Jack had been dead seven years.