Love Inspired Suspense April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 by Laura Scott (free e reader .TXT) 📕

the Walkers, knew that they saw trash whenever they looked at me. Your ma always looked like she’d been crying, like it was my fault somehow. I don’t know anything. Anything at all. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be sharing with the likes of you.”

Liam shook his head when Paige would have protested and cupped her elbow. “Let’s go. There’s nothing to learn here.”

To their surprise, Cal Jr. followed them out to the enclosed porch. “Don’t pay no mind to Ma. She says a lot of things, but that’s all it is. Just talk. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“Are you sure about that?” Liam challenged. “She sounded pretty certain in what she was saying, blaming us and the rest of the survivors for what’s happened to her, to you.”

The man’s face hardened. “Sure as I am that she can’t drive. I take her everywhere. Ma wasn’t lying about being disabled. She can barely make it from the bedroom to the kitchen without falling. I’ve picked her up off the floor enough times to know she’s not faking it.

“If she were out trying to kill people, I’d know about it. I do my best to take care of her, but she’s gone sour inside. Real sour. For your own good, don’t come back.” He held the porch door open and waited pointedly until they stepped through it. “I don’t expect to see you again.”

Outside, the wind snapped with a mighty energy, the keening edge of it sharp against the skin, but Liam scarcely noticed. He was still ensnared in the hatred he’d seen in Mrs. Hawkins’s eyes, a hatred so intense that it bored a hole into him.

What had he and Paige done to merit such loathing? He had saved the woman’s husband’s life, and all she wanted to do was to blame him for ruining her own. Hawkins’s son was right: she had gone sour inside. Could that turn her into a killer? Could she and her son be in on it together?

Neither one of them appeared to have the cunning to carry off murders designed to look like accidents, but looks could be deceiving.

Liam held her car door open for Paige. When they pulled away from the house with its grim atmosphere and inhospitable occupants, it was with relief. Mrs. Hawkins’s accusations pierced his soul. Though he knew he didn’t deserve the condemnation the woman had leveled at him, Liam couldn’t deny the dark feelings that swept through him.

He chewed on the idea that mother and son were behind the killings. Could it be? The son hadn’t seemed hostile except toward the end, but he might just be more adept at hiding his feelings than his mother.

He shared his thoughts with Paige.

“Mother-son killing teams aren’t common, but they’re not unheard of,” she said, her tone pensive.

The dilapidated house was filled with bitter grudges and black moods. Did it also hold a pair of murderers?

SIX

“We opened a can of worms back there,” Liam said.

“And then some,” Paige said as they lingered over coffee after a home-style meal of meat loaf and mashed potatoes at a corner diner. “My grandmother used to say that about people who’d made themselves particularly unwelcome.”

They sat side by side in a booth, both with their backs to the wall. Paige never sat any other way and figured it was the same with Liam.

The diner was one of those places where red vinyl stools were pushed up to gray Formica counters and the same red vinyl covered the booths. The Formica was chipped and the vinyl cracked, which added to the vintage feel of the place. The food wasn’t fancy and suited Paige just fine.

The homey meal had settled some of the hard feelings that the visit to the bus driver’s wife had stirred up. Equally disturbing was Mrs. Hawkins’s referring to Liam as her man. Granted, Paige liked Liam, admired him even, but she certainly didn’t claim any relationship beyond client and operator with him. She sneaked a glance at him and hoped he had ignored the woman’s words.

“I’d say unwelcome was putting a positive spin on it,” Liam said. “Mrs. Pope—or Hawkins as she goes by now—made it clear she couldn’t get rid of us fast enough.”

“Except when she wanted an audience for her complaints,” Paige added.

“Yeah. She’s got that down to an art, doesn’t she?”

“She’s so bitter over the accident, yet she didn’t lose anyone. Seems the only thing she lost that she really cared about was her husband’s paycheck.” Paige acknowledged that she’d taken some hits from the woman’s comments and was perhaps judging her overly harshly. Liam, though, had taken the brunt of it. He didn’t deserve the charges she’d leveled at him.

As she pondered the question if Hawkins could be behind the murders, she couldn’t make the pieces fit. The woman had been openly hostile. Would she have shown her hand that way if she were responsible for the killings?

Sharing her thoughts with Liam, she said, “Could she be cunning enough to let us see how much she hated the survivors in the hope that we’d dismiss her?” She shook her head to her own question. “I don’t see her as that devious, as disagreeable as she is. Honestly, I don’t think she has the brains to pull off killing three people and make it look like accidents.”

“What about Cal Jr.?” Liam asked. “Could he have planned it? He was quiet until the end, but there was plenty of anger in him when he told us not to come back.”

“He looked like he has his hands full just taking care of his mother. I have to give him props for putting up with her. It can’t be easy living with someone so knotted up in anger and self-pity.”

“She got to me,” Liam admitted, his frustration evident in the crumpling and uncrumpling of his paper napkin until it was nothing but shreds. “I knew the families who lost kids blamed me, but I didn’t expect it from her. I