Accidental Roots The Series Volume 1: an mm romantic suspense box set Read online

  This time of year was always difficult for him. It always would be. He’d never been able to decide which was worse, the fog he drifted into at the beginning of November or the mix of guilt and relief he felt when the holidays were finally over. He’d feel relief for two or three months before the creep of time would begin reminding him that the holidays would roll around again, sooner rather than later. His anxiety rose as more and more shops and public spaces began to decorate, each Thanksgiving cornucopia or Christmas wreath a reminder of what he had lost.

  The Booking Room was his favorite place in Skagit other than the Tudor-style house he had inherited from his parents. Today, however, he regretted coming the instant he pushed through the entryway. The café was packed, his favorite table (the one he thought of as his own) was taken, and there was a new employee behind the counter. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people; it was meeting them that was hard. The dreaded introduction, the hesitation coming when Micah knew something unspoken was communicated: This is the guy I was telling you about.

  Micah turned to leave. Today wasn’t going to be a day of work at the coffee shop after all. As he turned, the woman in front of him moved and Micah’s messenger bag collided with her elbow. Due to a curse laid upon him when he was born, the new barista had just handed the woman her coffee. Without a lid. The hot drink slid out of her hand and hit the counter with a thunk and, like any well-planned disaster, it didn’t stop there. A chain reaction sparked. The full cup hit the counter perfectly, the hot liquid inside it exploding upward much like Mount Vesuvius had almost two thousand years ago when it destroyed Pompeii, dousing both the woman in front of him and the new barista.

  Silence. Dead silence.

  Micah stood there like a statue, wondering if he was having some kind of seizure or fever dream. Except he knew he wasn’t; this kind of thing happened to him with some regularity. He tried not to zone out so much. He was working on it. His therapist used to tell him it would get better. Since he’d stopped seeing the therapist about four years ago, he hadn’t had a chance to tell her it hadn’t.

  If anything, he felt worse this year than he had in previous years.

  Incredibly, both the woman who was now wearing her coffee and the newly baptized barista were good-natured about what had happened. Most of the mess was easily cleaned with damp towels. Micah shook himself far enough out of his daze to buy the woman’s drink and pastry.

  “Oh, it’s okay, nothing that won’t come out in the wash. I backed up into you or something. Too busy thinking about my to-do list for the month. Thanks for my coffee.” She patted him on the shoulder before leaving.

  He wanted to flee but forced himself to stay. If he went home now, he would probably crawl into bed for the rest of the day. And he’d promised Brandon he wouldn’t do that anymore.

  There was a new customer in the café, too. Not that Micah was paranoid or anything, he just noticed new faces. Skagit wasn’t a big city, but it wasn’t quite a small town anymore, either. A lot of people had moved north in the past few years, trying to escape Seattle’s high prices. The population growth accounted for the cleanup of the old downtown and the new boutique shop fronts in the area locals affectionately called NOT: North of Old Town.

  Micah figured the new guy was a cop. After all, SkPD headquarters was right across the street. And he had that look: hard, grim, displaying no emotion. His fingers flew over the keyboard of a laptop while he scowled at the screen. His phone must have buzzed, because he left his table to stand outside and talk to someone. Micah appreciated someone who chose to take his conversation somewhere besides the middle of a crowded coffee shop.

  The guy paced back and forth under the red-striped awning, managing to gracefully avoid incoming and exiting customers. A skill Micah had not mastered. He was shorter than Micah and stocky where Micah was lean. Broad-shouldered, he filled out his navy-blue Henley quite nicely. Micah shook his head at himself. He knew better than to scope out random strangers, but his attention kept flickering out the window where the brown-haired guy was apparently done with his call, hands on his hips, his expression not just grim now, but frustrated, too.

  Three

  THREE

  The small town of Skagit, Washington, sucked. The drive north from L.A. had sucked. Generally, everything sucked. As he’d expected, nothing had changed about the town he’d spent his first eighteen years in. The only thing that hadn’t sucked was finding a new and nice local coffee shop around the corner from his motel.

  It had been madness to drive, really, but he was tired of airports and airplanes. After flying from Ringling to Helena to Seattle to Bellingham, then driving to Skagit for the funeral, then two flights to get to L.A., Adam couldn’t face another airplane for a while. He also had no idea how long it was going to take him to wrap up everything in Skagit. From what the lawyers had said, the house wasn’t going to be easy to clean up. If he wanted to sell, he had his work cut out for him. The county had already sent a certified letter giving him ninety days before they would begin the process of condemning the property. Bastards.

  In a moment of irrational sentimentality, Adam had booked himself a room at the Wagon Wheel, a relic from the heyday of old Highway 99. The contents of the room were relics, too. The furniture had lots of history, evidenced by nicks and dents and by the fact he was reasonably certain this exact bedroom set had been featured on The Brady Bunch. The paint on the walls was beige. As were the carpet and bedspread. Beige being a rule adopted by landlords and cheap hoteliers everywhere. The lobby was, possibly, even worse, but Adam didn’t care. He’d sleep there and spend the next few days at the cleverly named Booking Room Café, directly across from the Skagit police headquarters.

  Was he task avoiding? Absolutely. His intention had been to come to Skagit, rent a bulldozer and a Dumpster, maybe salvage what he deemed worthy. Unfortunately, driving down the pitted driveway toward the wreckage of his dad’s life had thrown Adam into a state of panic.

  So he was going to wallow in self-pity for a few days before getting back to his depressing chore.

  The Booking Room was cute and, in addition to an impressive selection of espresso drinks, also offered sandwiches and soups. He thought maybe the guy he’d seen behind the counter was a manager. Since he wasn’t staying, he didn’t need to find out. He was certain the colorful thirtyish woman was the owner; she ran the place with a sassy no-nonsense attitude. Adam liked her.

  Adam claimed one of the tables toward the back and next to the windows as his own. He’d been there since they opened at five thirty. He was attempting to keep up with his cases while he took care of Gerald’s business. Mohammad had told him not to worry, but he couldn’t help it. Reputation notwithstanding, he felt personally responsible for each victim and wanted to help their families find closure. He also didn’t want some other yahoo messing up all his hard work.

  Adam was also avoiding talking to the lawyers and going back out to Flagstaff Lane. He’d managed to talk Weir into sending him the findings from Ringling. Adam had been trying to put some kind of timeline together. There was so much time between Rochelle’s disappearance and the discovery of her body, though. He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end—he needed a haircut.

  A crash startled him from his brooding. The perpetrator was a hot mess who, in the space of three minutes, knocked over a chair with the grocery bags hanging from his wrist and then backed into a woman on her way to the restroom. The poor guy almost expired on the spot.

  Adam was immediately and inexplicably fascinated by him. At first it was pure rubbernecking. The guy seemed to have no idea where his arms and legs were in relation to his body or the space around him.

  Three days later, when Adam realized he was waiting for the poor guy to come in for his afternoon coffee, he knew he needed to quit going there. There was no reason to waste time going over paperwork and files if Mohammad wasn’t going to let him actively participate. There was absolutely no reason to keep his eye out for a lean m
an with dark curly hair and green eyes (he thought) who couldn’t walk a straight line sober.

  The next afternoon he found himself disappointed when Cute Hopeless Guy didn’t come in for his standard triple Americano, with room. Adam was so disconcerted by the unfamiliar emotion he stayed away a full day.

  Instead, he drove out to his dad’s property. It kind of reminded him of Rochelle’s meadow. He wasn’t wearing his third-best suit or his dress shoes, but he felt just as useless. Just as unsure of the timeline of his father’s life and death. The house was shabby and unkempt, more so than when he had left eighteen years ago. It hadn’t changed since the other night when he had pulled off I-5 and driven straight there: dark, empty, brooding.

  “Why?” The two huge Douglas firs had heard it all before. Their long limbs scraped across each other, whispering their secrets into the damp. Still not answering him.

  November in the Pacific Northwest meant the sun never fully rose. Despite the murky light, Adam could kind of see into the windows of the log house. He could see muted shapes that might be canvases or, just as likely, stacks of garbage. He had no clear idea how much his father had painted since Adam had left.

  When Adam was much younger, his father always had a canvas going. Sometimes more than one. Peering closer, Adam could also see stacks of what might be books and papers. Mounds of what looked like clothing—towels, maybe? The front area seemed mostly clear; cars had to park somewhere. The medical examiner had to have come down the same gravel road to pick up his father’s body.

  The backyard was a testimony to decades of hoarding. When Adam was a teen it wasn’t called hoarding. It was “collecting” or “preparing” or “just in case.” Calling it hoarding didn’t make it any more understandable.

  A vehicle grumbled down the pitted driveway. He was going to have to have fresh gravel brought in if he kept the place. A nosy neighbor had probably seen him arrive. Seen, meaning watched him through a grimy pair of binoculars and decided to call the citizen patrol on him.

  Eighteen years and he still recognized the beat-up truck pulling up next to him. He was incredulous the thing was still running. It was a relic from the late 1970s. It had rust on its rust. Ed Schultz, weatherbeaten and grayer than Adam remembered, but still tall and strong-looking, slid off the driver’s seat and out the truck door as it creaked open. The truck’s windshield had a huge horizontal crack running along the bottom that the sheriff’s department had probably ticketed Ed for twenty times. Adam figured that because it had been there the last time he had seen Ed.

  “Adam.” Ed held out his hand, grimy and stained from years of hard work. Adam shook it and managed not to wipe his hand on his pants afterward.

  “Hello, Ed.

  “Marty Lang called and said there was someone up here. I figured it was you. But I told her I’d check.” Ed’s voice was wicked from decades of cigarettes, pot smoking, and heavy drinking. He was kind of a miracle of science. Skagit’s very own Keith Richards.

  “How’d you know I was in town?” Stupid question, really, what with the Marty Langs of the community.

  The older man rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. “Adam, this town may have grown since you were here, and now some folks seem to think Skagit is actually on the map. But a lot of us old folks are still around, and we have a network kinda thing.”

  That didn’t sound sinister at all. But it did sound eerily similar to the conspiracy theories his father and his cronies used to throw around when they were high or drunk. So, pretty much all the time.

  “Okay.” Adam didn’t know what to say. He was in Skagit solely to remove the evidence of his father’s existence, not to linger with the locals and reminisce. He’d looked up a couple of junk-removal companies. They were booked out a week or so; he had time to go through the house and sort out the trash.

  The house he hadn’t been able to enter yet.

  “Also,” Ed interrupted his train of thought, “my Sara owns that coffee place you’ve been going to.”

  Adam took a good look at Ed. The Ed he remembered was well on his way to a frequent-flyer pass with the county jail. He had been a heavy everything user and an almost vagrant, living in his truck between jobs when he couldn’t couch surf or stay in someone’s cabin. This Ed looked like he showered regularly and didn’t use fingernail clippers to cut his hair. This Ed looked healthy.

  “Your Sara?” Because, what?

  “My daughter Sara. We found each other a few years back. Well, she found me.” He seemed embarrassed. “It’s a long story. Look.” Ed glanced at Adam, then back at the house. “Why don’t you and me go get a cup of coffee; I can fill you in on the past couple of years.” As if Adam hadn’t been gone for almost half his life. “And you can meet Sara.” Ed looked determined. “I know you need to clean out Gerald’s place.” They both turned, looking at it for a minute. Ed shook his grizzled head. “But it doesn’t need to be right now. Maybe we can figure out something.”

  Adam so didn’t want to go into Gerald’s house that any excuse not to was a sign from something. Not God, but something. Even if he was a little suspicious of Ed’s motivation: he knew as well as any of the old-timers that the house was a potential gold mine. Regardless of how it looked or the amount of trash outside and probably inside, Gerald Klay’s legacy was buried in there somewhere.

  They ended up at the Booking Room, of course, and the thirtyish woman with hair more on the side of strawberry than blonde was Sara, Ed’s daughter. She was cute, if you were into that sort of thing, and she rocked the vintage-rockabilly look like no other.

  Sara came out from behind the counter and gave her grizzled dad a huge hug.

  “Dad, I didn’t think I’d see you today! You missed me that much.” There was a tease behind those words.

  Ed actually blushed. Adam’s equilibrium was completely shot. The Ed from his youth had been a hard-talking drunk who spent his time spouting conspiracy theories with Adam’s father and working seasonally if at all.

  “Adam, this is my daughter, Sara, and she owns this place.” There was so much pride in those words. It looked good on Ed.

  Adam reached out to shake Sara’s hand, but she closed in and gave him a hug as well.

  “Sorry, I’m a hugger,” she said unapologetically.

  “Sara, Adam is Gerald Klay’s son. I ran into him up at the cabin.”

  “Oh, Adam, I’m sorry for your loss.” She did look remorseful then. Adam hated getting condolences for someone he hadn’t seen in eighteen years or spoken to in ten. He felt like a traitor in the end; his own accomplishments still paled in comparison to his father’s.

  “Were you at the funeral? I’m nosy, too. And I think I would have remembered you.” Sara asked, still smiling.

  “I was. I flew in and flew out the same day. I was still on a case.” Bald-faced lie. They had taken him off the Ringling case immediately, but Adam hadn’t been able to let it go. He’d flown to Skagit, stood in the back of the Elks Lodge where the memorial was held (and managed to avoid signing the guest book), and then headed to L.A. so he could bring Weir up to speed. Then he’d spent a week or so dragging his feet about what was coming next. When the lawyer called and gave him the details of the will—Adam inherited everything—that was when he had wanted to cry. What Gerald couldn’t do in life, he was doing in death: forcing his son to return home.

  They were all kinds of standing there staring at each other; Adam felt mildly uncomfortable. He and Ed had a history, but what would they talk about now? He was no good at making polite conversation. The door jingled quietly, and they all turned. Of course, it was Cute Hopeless Guy. He wore his standard deer-in-the-headlights look, and his cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink when he noticed them all staring at him.

  Sara dashed behind the counter. Adam had the feeling that was how she lived her life, lots of hugging and dashing and nosiness. A force to be reckoned with; no wonder Ed had straightened up when she came on the scene.

  “Hi, Micah! Your usual today?” Sa
ra asked. Even though her employee was standing right there, she hip-checked him out of her way so she could take care of Micah. Very hands-on.

  Micah. Adam wondered vaguely about the name. He and Ed stepped away from the front of the counter to allow him to pass, but he just stood staring blankly.

  “Hey, Micah, your usual?” Sara repeated.

  Micah shook his head, seeming to realize he was standing in front of the counter. He blushed again. Not mild, like Ed had, but a full-on blush, from neck to hairline. It was adorable. Adam’s inner voice mocked him: adorable, really?

  “A large triple with room, thanks.” Adam watched as Micah paid for his drink and went and sat down toward the back. The same table he had seen him at before.

  “What do you guys want while I’m back here?” Sara asked. Her employee shook his head and crossed his arms across his chest. He was a pretty good-looking guy, on the skinny side, older than Adam, with a slight East Coast accent.

  “Are you going to let me do my job?” he groused. “Don’t you have paperwork or something to do?”

  Ed chuckled. “Don’t worry, Ira, she has to sleep sometime.”

  Two large drips later they sat down close to the front so Sara could sit with them between customers. Customers Ira was perfectly able to help.

  “So,” Ed started. “Word about town is that Gerald left you everything.” Adam waited a beat for the recrimination. “That’s got to be hard for you. I never knew what happened or why you took off; it hurt Gerald something fierce, but he never would talk about it. Said he was to blame. Some folks were surprised when they found out about the will, but I wasn’t. I knew Gerald better than most, I guess.”

  Four

  FOUR

  It wasn’t getting better; it was getting significantly worse. Micah’s already-crappy concentration was completely shot. Gone. Out the window. He hadn’t been able to focus for days. He’d finally admitted defeat and emailed his clients explaining that he needed some personal time and would have to push back their website builds a little while.