Page 20 of Claiming the Grump

She wished Keith were here.

She’d thought it a handful of times already and had refused, each time, to call him. He was at the station for the handover—McGraw and two Texas Rangers and the particular bureaucracy of transferring a corrupt cop across state lines—and that was where he needed to be, and she was fine. She was at a fall market buying wine and shawls and a corkscrew she planned to present with ceremony. She was having a very good afternoon.

She was just also, quietly, keeping track of where the exits were.

Old habit. New habit. She was still deciding which.

The maze closed as the light changed—a teenager in an orange vest clipping the rope across the entrance, his colleague collecting the queue signs—and the crowd shifted around her, relaxed now, settling into the evening. Families drifted toward the car park, children draped half-asleep over shoulders. In their wake came a different crowd, easier and unhurried, couples and friend groups claiming the long tables between the food stalls and the maze.

Somewhere behind her a bluegrass band climbed a makeshift stage and started tuning. Then they started playing, and the sound of it carried, warm and particular, fiddle and guitar threading through the crowd.

She bought herself a loaded baked potato from a stall doing excellent business—butter running, sour cream, the kind of thing that required a table and both hands—and a hot apple cider in a paper cup and scanned the long tables for a free corner.

She spotted a gap near the end of one, a corner with enough room, and started toward it, bag over one shoulder, potato in one hand, cider hooked in her fingers on the other.

She would text him. Just to check in. Just to say the market was good, and she’d bought things and there was wine waiting, and he could come find her when he was done.

She was smiling at this thought when she looked up and saw the face in the crowd.

Her mind went blank first. The way it did sometimes before the body caught up—a flat second of no, that’s not—and then her stomach dropped out, and the cold moved through her in one clean wave.

Darius Cole.

He was twenty feet away, half-turned, scanning the crowd, methodical and unhurried, as if he knew exactly who he was looking for and was in no particular hurry because he was certain he’d find her.

She didn’t think. She moved.

She ducked under the rope that barred entrance to the corn maze, and she was through it before she’d decided to be, into the dark between the first rows, and the stalks closed behind her.

Stupid. The thought arrived immediately, cold and clear. You ran into a box.

She kept moving anyway, deeper, turning at the first junction without knowing where it led.

Her phone. She pulled it out with fingers that weren’t quite steady and hit Keith’s name.

He answered on the second ring.

“Hey. How’s the market—“

“Cole is here.” Her voice came out lower than she’d intended, pushed down by the instinct to not be heard. “McGraw’s partner. He’s in the crowd, he was looking for me, I went into the maze—“

A beat of silence. His voice, when it came, was reassuringly steady. “Where are you now?”

“Inside. I don’t know—left of the entrance. I’ve turned once.”

“Get into the corn. Find the densest part you can.” His voice had changed, a quality she recognized from the interrogation room—the particular flatness of a man setting everything else aside. “I’m already in the car.”

“Keith—“

“Keep the line open. But stay quiet.”

She moved. The corn was taller than she’d expected, the rows tight, the light between the stalks already going dim as the sun dropped. Her heels weren’t made for this—she was going to ruin them—and the leather bag kept catching, brushing loud against the stalks. She put the phone, the call still running, into the inner pocket of her vest so that she had her hands free to push corn stalks to the side.

“I can see you.”

She went still.

The voice came from somewhere to her left, unhurried, almost singing. Deep, and recognizable, and wrong in the way of a sound that was never supposed to be in this place.