Streak of Lightning Read online

  Contents

  Author Bio

  Also by Clare O’Donohue

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  STREAK OF LIGHTNING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Excerpt from The Double Wedding Ring

  A PLUME BOOK

  STREAK OF LIGHTNING

  CLARE O’DONOHUE is the author of the Someday Quilts series as well as the Kate Conway Mysteries. She is also a freelance television writer and producer.

  Visit www.clareodonohue.com

  Also by

  Clare O’Donohue

  SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERIES

  The Lover’s Knot

  A Drunkard’s Path

  The Double Cross

  The Devil’s Puzzle

  Cathedral Windows (A Penguin Special e-Book)

  The Double Wedding Ring

  KATE CONWAY MYSTERIES

  Missing Persons

  Life Without Parole

  Streak of Lightning

  A SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERY

  A Penguin Special from Plume

  Clare O’Donohue

  A PLUME BOOK

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Copyright © Clare O’Donohue, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  eISBN 978-1-101-61585-0

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  “You think you can hurt me? You can’t. I will end your life.” The voice was loud and the threat convincing.

  I was outside of Everything Pizza, and safe from the tirade going on inside the restaurant, but even I was a bit intimidated. There was nothing I could do except wait for the situation to calm down. Jesse Dewalt, the chief of police in Archers Rest, was inside, and if anyone could handle the town bully, it was Jesse. Through the screaming, I could hear him quietly mediating the situation.

  I did feel bad for him, though. He’d gone in to get us a couple of slices for lunch and found yet another crisis, courtesy of the restaurant’s owner, Joe Proctor. Who Joe was screaming at or why I didn’t know. But it didn’t really matter. Joe had had a problem with nearly everybody in Archers Rest at one time or another. Including me.

  A few weeks before, I’d parked my car in front of his store. It was legal street parking, but he still yelled. That was Joe’s reaction to every slight, real or imagined—the mailman delivering late in the day, kids playing on the sidewalk, or customers who took too long to finish their meal—no one was immune. And for better or worse, the town was so used to him that we barely even noticed anymore.

  “Are you doing anything special for New Year’s?” Lori Proctor asked me as we heard a loud crash coming from inside the restaurant she owned with her husband. She had met me on the sidewalk and stopped me from going in, so now we were just standing in the cold, acting as if there were nothing odd about it.

  “Jesse and I are going to New York City later today, so we’ll be there to ring in the New Year,” I said. “What about you?”

  From inside the restaurant, I could hear Joe yell, “You are a punk, you hear me? I can take you down anytime I want.”

  Lori blushed, but otherwise her face remained calm. Like me, she was doing her best to ignore Joe’s latest outburst. Though, unlike me, she had decades of practice. “No, nothing special,” she said through a thin, tired smile. “Joe and I are always so exhausted that we just fall into bed when we get home. I don’t think we’ve been up late since we took over this place.”

  Lori was, I guessed, in her mid-fifties. She was quite pretty; her light brown hair had a few streaks of gray and her skin a few lines, but she was a woman who, with a good night’s sleep and some peace and quiet, would make heads turn.

  “I know where you live, where you work, where you buy your groceries. I know everything about you, and if you mess with me again, you’ll regret it.” Joe was sounding a bit tired. His threat had lost its edge. That was a good sign.

  After a few minutes, Rich came out of the shop looking shell-shocked. “Hey, Nell,” he said, his eyes downcast. He nodded in Lori’s direction without ever looking at her. “Hey, Mrs. Proctor.” He walked forward quickly, heading in the direction of Jitters, the coffee shop where he worked. Rich was just eighteen, slight and sweet, and although he’d had a few minor brushes with the law, he was a good kid. He was also, I assumed, the latest victim of Joe’s one-man terror spree.

  Jesse walked out of the restaurant holding a small pizza box. “It might have gotten cold,” he said. “It took a little longer than I thought.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jesse,” Lori jumped in. “It’s just . . . he’s worried about the bills, that’s all. It’s hard to make a living with so few tables, and Joe just gets frustrated. . . .”

  “It’s fine. It’s all over now.”

  She nodded and seemed relieved. She smiled at me and started to go inside, but Jesse stopped her. “Lori, I know I sound like a broken record, but you don’t have to put up with this. I can help.”

  “He’s a sweet man. Really, he is,” she said. “He just gets upset too easily. I keep telling him one of these days it’s going to kill him, all that anger and stress, but . . .” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s not him I’m worried about. If you need me, if you need help for any reason . . .”

  She patted Jesse’s arm and then went inside without another word. I wondered how many times Jesse and Lori had had that conversation.

  “Couldn’t we do something?” I asked him as we walked back to Someday Quilts. “Couldn’t you arrest him?”

  “I’d love to, but he hasn’t broken the law. When I walked in, he looked like he might lunge at Rich, so I had to hold him back, but I don’t know if he would have done anything. As far as I know, Joe’s never laid a hand on anyone, including Lori. He screams, he makes threats, but I have no evidence he’s ever gone farther than that. He’s just a jerk, and unfortunately there’s no law against that.”

  “Well, there should be. He’s a WOMBAT.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a quilting term,” I explained. “Waste of money, batting, and time. Sometimes when you’re making a quilt, something doesn’t work. Maybe it’s the design, or the fabrics, or you’ve made some big mistake in the sewing. You c
an change it—add things, take things away—but the truth is sometimes nothing will help. Rather than put any more time into it, you have to just accept that it’s a loss and move on.”

  “That’s a pretty good description of Joe. Trouble is, I don’t think Lori agrees. At least not yet,” Jesse said as we reached the quilt shop where I worked. “So what do quilters do with WOMBATs, anyway?”

  I thought about it for a second. There were lots of things quilters did with the quilts we’d given up on. We traded them with friends who saw in them what we no longer did; we turned them into dog beds, donated them, cut them up and repurposed the fabric; or we just threw them in the trash and chalked it up to experience.

  “Does it really matter,” I said, “as long as they’re gone?”

  Chapter 2

  Jesse and I settled into the classroom at Someday Quilts. I pushed aside the latest shipment of books that had arrived, including a pattern that offered an easier method for making a double wedding ring quilt, a classic and time-consuming pattern of interlocking rings that was on my quilting bucket list.

  Our pizza slices were getting cold by the time we sat down to eat, but they were still delicious. It was the dilemma everyone in town faced. No one liked dealing with the man, but the lure of his cooking was hard to resist.

  As Jesse and I ate, we talked about my new favorite subject: the upcoming trip to New York City. In just three hours, our train would be leaving, and just three hours after that, we’d be pulling into Grand Central Terminal. I’d lived in New York for several years, but I hadn’t been back since I’d moved to Archers Rest over a year ago. As much as I loved our small village perched on the Hudson River, Someday Quilts, and the people who had come into my life since I’d moved to town, I was looking forward to forty-eight hours of big city excitement again. And I was especially looking forward to two whole days alone with Jesse.

  We’d been dating for eleven months, but between his duties as the local police chief and life as the widowed father of a seven-year-old girl, a free evening was hard for him to come by, let alone a whole weekend.

  And I had my share of responsibilities in town, too. I was a part-time art student, with a project due in my pottery class when winter break was over. I’d gone into the studio over the holiday to finish it, and I’d wrapped up everything that needed to be taken care of at the store. My grandmother Eleanor Cassidy owned Someday and would normally not have cared if I took a few days to be with Jesse, but she was having a post-Christmas sale, and it was all hands on deck. It took me several hours to convince her that I wouldn’t be needed on Saturday and even more time to prep all the sale fabric bolts, patterns, and notions so that Eleanor wouldn’t have to do it.

  But it would all be worth it, I reminded myself. Jesse and I were going to spend two blissful days in one of my favorite cities in the world, celebrating our first New Year’s Eve as a couple.

  “Police station, three-thirty,” Jesse said as he headed back to work. “And bring some snacks for the train if you remember it.”

  “I will. I’m counting the minutes.”

  “It would be more helpful if you counted the cash in the drawer.” My grandmother walked up from behind me. Her voice was stern, but there was a smile in her eyes. “It will pass the time until you go on your trip.”

  She was right. Counting the drawer, waiting on the customers who were piling in to take advantage of the sale, restocking the fabric bolts, and cleaning the shop did pass the time. It was three-twenty-three when I looked up and realized I was about to be late.

  “Are you going?” Eleanor looked at the clock and yawned. At seventy-four she had more energy than most people, including me, but today’s sale was enough to exhaust anybody. Her golden retriever, Barney, clung to her side. Being petted and adored by customers had worn him out, I guessed, since he seemed as anxious to get home as Eleanor.

  “I’m going.”

  “Another successful day,” she said.

  “And year,” I added. Someday Quilts might have been a small shop in a small town in Upstate New York, but it was everything to Eleanor and me. And thanks to good word of mouth about our expanded inventory and a few glowing magazines articles, it was becoming a destination shop for quilters from as far away as Boston.

  The growing business was a reason to be thankful for the year we were ending, and one of many things to be excited about for the year ahead. One of which was my grandmother’s upcoming wedding in just a few weeks.

  At the moment, though, she was going solo. Oliver, my grandmother’s fiancé, was visiting his daughter in Canada, so Eleanor would have only Barney with her for company while I was gone. “I’ll call you at midnight,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare. When I close up the shop, I’m going to put my feet up and listen to some nice, soothing music. And if I manage somehow to stay awake until midnight, maybe I’ll have a hot cup of tea to celebrate. But more likely than not I’ll be asleep by ten. You and Jesse will be having a bit more excitement, I imagine, with all that crowd in the city.”

  “We’re not doing Times Square, but we do have dinner reservations, and after that I think we’ll just walk around. It will be fun just being there. I’m going to show Jesse some of my old stomping grounds, and he’s going to show me the places he hung out during his days on the New York City police force.” I could hear the giddiness in my voice. “But we’ll be back Sunday afternoon. I can come into the shop from the train.”

  “Nonsense. Promise me nothing but fun for the next forty-eight hours.”

  “That’s not a hard promise to make.”

  I gave her a long hug, grabbed my overnight bag, and ran across the street to Jitters, the coffee shop owned by my friend and fellow quilter Carrie Brown. There was no time to stop at a grocery store, so the snacks I’d promised Jesse were going to have to be whatever Carrie had left in her pastry case in the late afternoon. Rich was waiting on customers, still looking a little shaken by his encounter with Joe. I noticed a small cut by his eye. Maybe Jesse was wrong about Joe never laying a hand on anyone. Or maybe Rich had gotten himself in some trouble elsewhere.

  I ordered quickly and headed toward the police station, trying to balance coffee, muffins, my purse, and my overnight bag. As I approached the intersection of Main and River streets, I noticed that the plate glass display window at Violet’s, the flower shop next to Everything Pizza, was shattered. I was tempted to stop in and ask Violet what had happened, but it was just another thing I didn’t have time to ask about if I wanted to make my train. I laughed to myself as I crossed the street—love was the only thing that trumped my natural nosiness. And only barely.

  Chapter 3

  “Three killers, two car thieves, a bank robber, and five assaults with a deadly weapon.” Jesse stood in the station’s main area, sorting through the latest batch of wanted posters that had arrived from the state police with the same glee I might have for a shoe catalog. “And that’s just this week. The state police make a lot of arrests, but they don’t seem to be able to hold them.”

  “Unless you want six assaults with a deadly weapon, you’ll put those away,” I told him.

  “Nell.”

  “Don’t ‘Nell’ me. We have a train to catch.” I put the coffee and muffins on the reception desk and my bags on the ground.

  “I’m almost ready to go, but I have to wait until Greg gets back. I can’t leave the police station deserted.”

  He had a point. The station was a collection of empty desks. A bad flu had been going around, and two of the full-time officers were out because of it. Another was on vacation, and the part-time guys, who made up the bulk of the Archers Rest police force, were either on rounds or unavailable. That left only two officers, Jesse and Greg, to man the station. And in a few minutes it would be only Greg.

  “I just saw that Violet’s shop has a broken window,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. I thought someo
ne else would be here to go check it out. . . .” I took a breath and said what had to be said. “If you want to go, I’ll wait. There are later trains.”

  “Not tonight there aren’t. It’s a holiday schedule, just the one train into New York. And I lent my mom my car while she has Allie,” he said. I tried not to seem disappointed. There was no way that Jesse could let the vandalism at Violet’s go unanswered. Jesse noticed my brave face and said, “Greg will be back, and we’ll get out of here.”

  “If we postpone,” I said, “I really will understand.”

  Jesse kissed me on the forehead. “No way, Nell. We’re not going to get another time when my mother can babysit all weekend and you’re not needed at the shop. Larry Connelly just finished his training as a police volunteer. He said he’d come in once he closed up the garage at six-thirty. I’ll call over to Violet’s and see if everything’s okay, and Greg can check it out when he gets back.”

  “Where is he anyway?”

  “He went to get a sandwich, but you know Greg. He probably got distracted, started talking about the latest in police procedure to whoever would listen, and forgot to come back.”

  “Then maybe you should call and remind him.”

  Just as I spoke, the front door to the police station opened, and Greg walked in pulling a handcuffed Joe Proctor behind him. Greg was one of the youngest and most dedicated officers in Archers Rest. Maybe he was a little too enthusiastic, caught up in what he imagined a police detective should do, but he was always good-natured and kind. Except at the moment.

  “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to shut you up,” Greg yelled as he yanked at Joe’s arm. Joe was about four inches shorter than Greg and, at nearly sixty, was more than twice Greg’s age, but he was putting up one heck of a fight.