Page 174 of Paranoid

With that she had stepped away from the rescue vehicle and watched as it rolled down the cannery’s lane to the highway. Then, she’d decided to drive back to Seaside. When Cade was clearheaded enough, she wanted to fill him in.

And then, she swore, she’d forget she’d ever been in love with him.

CHAPTER 40

Cade opened a bleary eye. He was medicated, still groggy from the surgery. But hours had passed and it was late morning in the hospital, where he could hear soft voices and the pad of soft-soled shoes as people passed in the hallway.

A lot had happened since he’d been admitted.

Kayleigh, all business, had been by earlier and spied the splint on his nose and what was the beginning of what would be nasty black eyes from his broken nose. He didn’t feel too bad, compliments of the hospital’s pain medication, though his ribs would take a while to heal. Despite the pain, he remembered most of what she’d said, starting with, “Boy, you look like hell.”

He’d laughed, his ribs reminding him that that was a bad idea, and he’d thanked her, hearing from Voss that Kayleigh had dove into the river and saved his ex-wife from drowning. She’d told him about Lucas and he’d felt numb inside, having known the kid since the day he’d been born. Never had he once considered his kids’ cousin capable of such hatred and vengeance and violence.

He still had trouble believing it. But there had been more. Much more.

Sitting on the one chair in the room, looking like she could sleep for a week, Kayleigh had told him everything that had gone down: Bruce Hollander was still alive, in this very hospital in ICU under guard as he clung to life. In his few lucid moments he’d admitted to terrorizing Rachel for all the reasons they’d expected, but said that Lucas had been the killer who had taken the lives of Violet Sperry, Annessa Cooper, and, as it turned out, Nate Moretti. Xander Vale, whom Lucas had wounded, was in a hospital in Astoria and expected to make a full recovery, the bullet having barely missed his femoral artery, though shattering his left femur.

It seemed fair that Lucas, for all the pain and anguish he’d caused, would suffer at the hands of both Harper and Rachel, who had attacked him with an umbrella and bolt cutters, of all things. He’d smiled upon learning about it and then had heard later that Lucas hadn’t s

urvived, that he’d been DOA at a hospital in Astoria.

Kayleigh had played down her part in rescuing his ex-wife but had explained that they’d located Nate Moretti’s vehicle behind one of the outbuildings at the cannery, and Nate himself, dead and rotting, had been pulled from the Columbia, a bullet lodged in his heart—or what was left of it. Cade had been spared that grisly detail.

Another shocker and hard to grasp was that early this morning Ned Gaston’s closest neighbor, a single woman by the name of Kathy Ortega, had heard a cat crying at his place. Upon inspection, she’d found his back door open and discovered his body, dead by an apparent gunshot wound to the head; possible suicide, though she’d reported seeing a Jeep pull up to Gaston’s house earlier that evening, a Jeep that looked a lot like the one registered to Xander Vale, right down to the Oregon Duck license plate frame holding the plate to the Jeep’s bumper.

Cade wasn’t completely buying the suicide angle. Ned Gaston, despite his involvement in concealing what had really happened twenty years ago, despite his guilt, had been a fighter. The way Cade saw it, Ned, too, could very well be a victim of Lucas’s wrath. Or had he realized that the truth was about to come out? That Cade had been digging into Luke’s death?

Luke Hollander.

It was all about him.

Who knew the kid would go so far off the rails?

He started to slip back into slumber when the door to his room swept open. Rachel, a little worse for wear, poked her head through the doorway, deep circles showing beneath her eyes, her skin a little paler than he remembered, her expression one of concern.

She’d never looked more beautiful.

His stupid heart soared.

“Hey,” she said. “You awake?”

“Does it look like it?”

She eyed his face. “What it looks like is bad.”

“And here I was thinking you looked gorgeous.”

“Sorry, can’t say the same about you.” She smiled then, some of her color returning. “But I’m glad you’re still with us.” She stepped into the room and his two kids joined her, Dylan in camo shorts and a T-shirt for some band he’d never heard of, and Harper, appearing sober, looking so much like her mother at that age it was scary.

The important thing was, they were safe. They were all safe.

“So . . . how are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been run over by a Mack truck, and then they give me something and it’s tolerable. But I’m afraid my dreams of becoming an NFL quarterback are over.”

“Tom Brady will be so relieved,” she said and Dylan laughed while Harper rolled her eyes. Again, like Rachel.

She smiled, that little grin that always touched his heart, and showed off her bandaged hand. “Didn’t escape unscathed.”