Page 120 of Indigo Ridge (The Edens 1)

I growled at the voicemail greeting, checking the time again.

Seven forty-eight.

The summer nights were long in Montana and the daylight would last for almost another hour, but it was getting late. She’d missed dinner. She had agreed to dinner, right? I’d left her shellshocked this morning but Winn wasn’t one to ditch without a phone call first.

For the past hour, I’d assumed that something had happened at the station. Maybe an accident or an officer who’d called in sick. But as the minutes wore on and she still hadn’t returned my calls, the churning in my stomach was becoming unbearable.

I pulled up Covie’s number and called it for the third time. Four rings and it dropped to his voicemail.

“Shit.”

Bad news traveled at the speed of light around Quincy. If there’d been an accident or something else significant, someone in my family might have heard about it. So I started with the most likely source of news. Dad.

“ ’Lo,” he answered.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, how’d the creek look today?”

“Dry. Moved the horses down. All good. Listen, have you heard about anything happening in town today?”

“Uh, no. Why? What happened?”

“Nothing.” I sighed. “Winn isn’t home and she’s not answering. I wasn’t sure if something came up and I hadn’t heard about it yet.”

“No news here. Want me to make some calls?”

“No. Not yet.” If Dad started calling his buddies, there’d be rumor of an emergency before there was an actual emergency.

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“Call Eloise,” he said. “If there’s something going on, she’ll know before the rest of us.”

“Good idea. Bye, Dad.” The moment the line went quiet, I called my sister and asked her the same question.

“I’

ve been at the front desk all evening,” she said. “There hasn’t been anything going on that I’ve seen.”

And if there’d been a streak of cruisers blazing down Main with their lights flashing, she’d have noticed. “Okay. Thanks.”

“You’re worried.”

“Yeah. I am.”

“I’m going to make some calls.”

“No, not—”

Before I could finish, she’d hung up on me. “Damn it.”

There was no stopping Eloise, and if I knew my father, he was on the horn at the moment too. If Winn was just out and about, she wasn’t going to like being hunted down.

“Then she needs to answer her fucking phone,” I muttered, hitting the number to her personal phone again. It rang and rang.

Winn had been good about keeping it close and charged since Covie’s heart attack. But when it transferred to voicemail for the tenth time since I’d called, I hung up and paced the kitchen.