Boots and Bullets

The door opened, a bell tinkled and he caught the scent of orange and cinnamon. He breathed in the sweet, rich smell, glad of the warmth inside the shop as the door closed behind him.

He’d expected piles of old furniture—not this decorated, attractive shop.

“Be right with you!” Kate called from somewhere above him. He noticed a beautiful, wide stairway that climbed to the second floor. There was a small sign that read Private.

As he walked around the lower floor, he saw that each room had its own setting, each unique and charming. It felt almost magical, the lighting, the tapestries, the overstuffed chairs, the colors and textures, trinkets and curios. He remembered what she’d said about refinishing the furniture she’d gotten from the old hospital and could see her handiwork throughout her shop.

He could well imagine the condition many of the old items had been in before she’d worked her magic. It surprised him what wonders she’d achieved with a collection of what most people would have discarded as worthless. He could feel Kate’s energy in every room. It was like walking into the woman’s home rather than a shop.

At a rustling sound, he turned to see Kate Landon come down the wide flight of stairs. She’d showered and changed since he’d seen her at the old hospital and now wore a colorful skirt and top with black ballet slippers.

Her hair was still damp and hung around her shoulders, a coppery wave that framed her face and set off her wide green eyes. She was so stunning he stared, completely enchanted with this woman who could turn trash into treasure. As he stared at her, he realized that before, all he’d seen was her resemblance to the dead woman, now …

“Hello,” she said in a lyrical tone. She seemed amused to see him again.

“After meeting you, I decided I’d better see your shop,” he admitted honestly.

She smiled, opening her arms to take in the expansive rooms. “It’s still a work in progress. I haven’t been open all that long. I bought the building at an auction four months ago.”

So she had been in town before his coma. Which meant he could have seen her, just as his brother would have suggested, and that was how she became part of his nightmare.

“Your shop is amazing. You’ve done wonders with it,” he said glancing around although all he really wanted to do was look at her.

“Halloween night the basement is being turned into a haunted house,” she said. “You should come. If you’re still in town.”

“I just might do that.” His gaze locked with hers. “Do you have plans for dinner tonight?” The invitation came out of nowhere, surprising them both.

Her eyebrows shot up.

“I realize we just met and you know nothing about me.”

She smiled. “In a town this size? Are you kidding? Everyone in town knows your life history by now.”

He returned her smile. “I hope what you heard wasn’t all bad.”

“Not all of it,” she teased. “I’d love to have dinner with you, but I’m afraid I have other plans tonight.”

Of course she would have a date, a woman like this.

“I have to help my friend Jasmine sew some props for the haunted house. She sews, I help by providing the food and moral support. But I am planning on stopping by the Fall Festival later this evening. Maybe I’ll see you there if you’re going. There’s going to be frybread. I never pass up frybread.”

“Great.” Cyrus wondered if this woman was why he was supposed to come back to Whitehorse. Maybe it hadn’t been about a murder at all. Maybe he’d been destined to return to meet this woman. He liked the idea much better than the alternative.

It made more sense than any other explanation he could come up with. Which would mean there was no murdered woman in the nursery. No switching of babies. No wandering down an empty hospital hallway. None of that had happened.

Instead Kate Landon had happened. He smiled to himself, desperately wanting to believe she was the reason he was in Whitehorse as he shoved off the doubts that had plagued him, the things that made no sense.

He told that nagging little voice demanding a logical explanation for everything to shut up. It didn’t matter why he’d walked right to the old hospital nursery earlier today, why he’d been able to find his room, why he knew how the tile felt on his bare feet, or the big one, why Kate Landon looked so much like the murdered woman that he’d thought she was the victim’s younger sister.

Couldn’t it be possible that he’d had the dream just to get him back here to meet Kate?

Cyrus felt as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He was freer than he’d felt since he’d awakened from his coma. He told himself that he could let it go.

Those months would always be lost, but he had come out of the coma with apparently no long-lasting side effects. He’d been lucky. He was alive. It was time he started enjoying that fact. Just as Roberta Warren, the hospital administrator, had told him.

But as he turned to leave, Cyrus saw something in a glass cabinet that changed everything.

Chapter Five

“Do you like the bracelet?” Kate asked as she joined him at the glass case.

For a moment, Cyrus couldn’t find his voice. He told himself there had to be hundreds, thousands of bracelets just like this one. But even as he thought it, he could see that this wasn’t costume jewelry.

“It looks old,” he said as he stared down at the delicate string of tiny silver sleigh bells and tried to still his thundering heart. He saw that it had been made by a jeweler with an eye for detail. “It’s incredible workmanship.”

Kate beamed. “My grandfather was a silversmith. He made the bracelet for my mother’s sixteenth birthday.”

“Your mother?” he asked, his voice sounding strained to his ears.

When she didn’t say anything, he said carefully, “There’s no price on it.”

She laughed softly. “Because it’s priceless,” she said as she unlocked the case and gingerly lifted out the bracelet. The bells tinkled softly, sending a chill through him. He’d heard that sound before. A memory, unfocused and distant, tried to surface.

“The items in this case aren’t for sale. I just like them where I can see them,” Kate said, pulling him out of the memory. “It makes me feel closer to my mother. I can’t bring myself to wear the bracelet. I like that she was the last person to wear it. Silly, I know.”

“No,” he said, looking over at her and thinking he couldn’t be more enchanted by this woman.

“It’s really quite heavy,” she said, surprising him as she laid the bracelet in his palm.

The silver felt cold against his flesh and sent a memory of another palm clutching this bracelet ripping through his mind. He quickly handed it back to her and started to ask more about her mother when the front door jangled open and three women came in with a gust of cold air. Wind whirled golden leaves around the steps before the door closed again.

“Good afternoon,” Kate said with a smile as she greeted the shoppers. Cyrus watched her quickly put the bracelet back in the case and lock it. “Maybe I’ll see you later at the Fall Festival,” she whispered as she passed him to go offer the women a cup of hot spiced cider.

He stood for a moment, staring at the bracelet, before he noticed the women glancing back at him with obvious curiosity.

As he left his mind was awhirl.

The bracelet he’d seen in his dream was real. That had to mean that the woman wearing it had also been real—and murdered in the hospital nursery just like he’d known from the moment he’d awakened from his coma.

If the bracelet had belonged to Kate’s mother, then she had to be the woman he’d seen in the nursery. The same woman who’d switched the babies.

WHEN THEY’D BEEN interrupted by the three local women entering the shop, Kate had felt as if Cyrus had wanted to ask her something more.

As she gave the women a tour, she was again struck with that uneasy feeling she’d had when she’d met Cyrus at the old hospital. He hadn’t just stopped by her shop out of curiosity. He wanted something from her and she suspected it was more than a date.

As more women entered the shop, Kate replayed the moment when Cyrus had seen her mother’s bracelet in the glass case by the door. At first she’d thought he was taken with it. But now that she thought about it, he’d seemed shocked to see it, almost as if he’d recognized it.

Her heart began to beat a little faster. Was it possible he knew something about her mother?