Isabel unlocked the door and gave me the same nod she had before when I’d told her everything was fine. “Be sure, okay? They call them red flags for a reason.”
Instead of calling Mark, I drove straight to Elise and Erik’s house, where Mark was staying until the police released his home. We needed to find out if what I heard about Chief McTavish was true. And if it was, I didn’t want him to be alone when he heard the news.
I turned onto Elise’s street at almost the same time as another car turned into the driveway. A woman wearing a Fair Haven police uniform, her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, stepped out of the car. Elise.
In the middle of the day. Driving her personal vehicle rather than a police cruiser when she should be on duty.
There was no scenario in which this was a good thing.
I sped up and swerved into a spot in front of the house before Elise could reach the door. My tire scraped along the curb, and Elise spun around. She came down one step and waited.
I stopped in front of her without climbing the steps.
She smoothed both her hands over her already-smooth hair. “What are you doing here?”
Elise had always struggled to hide her tells. The fact that she asked me what I was doing here was a dead giveaway that she didn’t want me to ask what she was doing home in the middle of the day. She’d have been less obvious if she’d simply assumed I was here to see how Mark was doing.
I’d been right to assume that her coming home now wasn’t good. “I heard Chief McTavish was missing.”
Elise’s shoulders slumped, but it looked more like relief than shame to me.
“I don’t know how much time we have,” she said, “but I’m glad you’re here.”
The tendril of hope that Mandy’s information had been wrong withered and died. Elise hadn’t denied that Chief McTavish was missing.
I’d at least been partly prepared for it. Her response, though, suggested she wanted support for whatever had brought her home.
I braced a hand against the railing. “How much time we have until what?”
“Until they come to arrest Mark.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if she somehow hoped I wouldn’t hear her. Or maybe she didn’t want Mark to overhear.
Either way, she had to be overreacting to Chief McTavish’s disappearance. Unless they’d found some irrefutable evidence that Mark was involved with his disappearance—and they couldn’t have that—they shouldn’t be arresting him for anything else yet. Yesterday, Quincey seemed certain that someone was trying to frame Mark, and he’d expected that to be the direction the investigation took.
“What makes you think they’re coming to arrest Mark? Quincey—”
“Quincey isn’t running the investigation. Neither is Erik. I’ll explain inside.”
Elise retreated up the stairs and opened the door for me. It wasn’t until she offered to take the cupcake tray from me that I remembered I was holding them. I didn’t have an appetite for them now.
Mark came around the corner and stopped. His gaze jumped back and forth between us, landed on the cupcake tray, then came back up to our faces. “I’m guessing this is about something more serious than a problem deciding between the cake flavors.”
Elise laid the cupcake tray on the bench by the door where they hung their coats. “Chief McTavish is missing, and I’ve been temporarily relieved of duty. Erik, too. Erik’s still at the station, making calls and trying to reach whoever made the decision, to reason with them, but he doesn’t think it’ll help. Things have gone too far. We’re all under suspicion.”
She waved us farther into the house. Once in the living room, she actually drew the curtains closed. Under any other circumstance, her old-movie cloak-and-dagger air would have struck me as funny, but it felt like I’d forgotten my sense of humor in the car. Or, more accurately, back in Isabel’s food truck when Mandy told me Chief McTavish had gone missing.
“They’ve sent in outside investigators,” Elise said. “All Fair Haven officers are banned from accessing anything to do with this case. Quincey’s still working, but they’ve sent him on traffic duty. They didn’t directly say so, but it seems like they think we either helped Mark commit the murder or we’d tamper with evidence to let him get away with it.”
Crap. No, double crap. And even that wasn’t strong enough to express what this meant. The courts might operate under innocent until proven guilty, but the police didn’t. Quincey and the other Fair Haven police might have made an exception with Mark. Outside officers wouldn’t, which was likely why they’d been brought in.
Mark stood in the middle of the room, rubbing the stubble on his chin with one hand. The fact that he hadn’t shaved today spoke volumes about his emotional state.
I slid my hand into his and squeezed until he looked down at me. I waited for him to focus on me. “We’ll fix this. Other than Troy being in your house, they don’t have any evidence against you. My parents have won cases with ten times more concrete evidence than that against their client.”
Elise was smoothing her hair again, like even one strand out of place would cause the rest of her to go to pieces. “They have more evidence.”
I knew my head was shaking, but it felt like I watched it happen from the outside.
“They can’t have evidence.” It was Mark’s voice speaking, but he said what I’d been thinking. “I didn’t do this.”
“I know that.” Elise’s words came out sharp and loud. “But they do.”
The snap in Elise’s voice reminded me too much of what often happened between clients and their families when dealing with a criminal charge and having to mount a defense. Tempers grew short, doubt crept in, and isolating the ones who cared about you most became much too easy to do. Many relationships didn’t survive a criminal trial, even when the defendant was declared not guilty.
I’d found the kind of family I’d always longed for in the Cavanaughs. I wanted to marry Mark, but I wanted to marry into his family as well. I refused to allow this to destroy them.
Besides, Elise had made it sound like they could be coming to arrest Mark soon. We didn’t have time to waste bickering amongst each other. We needed to know what we were up against. Then we needed to prepare an explanation for whatever they thought they had against him. It couldn’t be conclusive evidence. There’d be holes.
I held Mark’s hand tight and reached my free hand toward Elise in a placating gesture. “We’re all in agreement that Mark didn’t do this. What evidence are they claiming they have?”
I picked the word claiming intentionally. It didn’t accuse any individual officer of lying, but it also made it clear that I believed they couldn’t possibly have any real evidence against Mark.
Elise drew the curtains tighter and flicked on a lamp so forcefully it wobbled. “They found a burner phone in the back of Mark’s bedroom closet. It had a text to Troy’s phone the night Troy died, saying Meet me at my place.”
My legs suddenly felt as stable as melting wax, and my vision went blurry at the edges.
