Time to go.
She plodded through the sand toward the house and finally set Nutmeg down in the grassy area near the garden. Thankfully, he didn't appear interested in running off. He wagged his tail and sniffed around the manicured lawn like those blades of grass were the most interesting things in the world. She envied how oblivious he was to the chaos all around him.
"Lena!" Delphine's voice carried from the house.
"Yes, I'm right here." Lena waved to Delphine and tried to get Nutmeg to hurry along.
He wasn't interested in hurrying.
"Okay, buddy, we'll come back out soon. We need to see what Delphine wants." She scooped him up and headed toward the waiting house manager, who looked a little more frazzled than she did when Lena arrived. Was that less than an hour ago?
Delphine motioned her inside. "Miss Van Horn is on the phone. You can use the phone in the kitchen. She's on line two."
"Oh, thank you."
Lena hurried inside, carefully deposited Nutmeg next to a water bowl she saw in the kitchen, and picked up the phone.Time to meet my new boss—if only for the next twenty-four hours.
Chapter 3
Nash watched the dog-sitter maneuver the soft sand while holding squirmy Nutmeg in her arms until they made it to the pathway leading back to the house. His interest was piqued. Her arrival wasn't surprising today, but the woman who jumped into action fighting the fire on the pier, and who showed genuine compassion for young Kai, wasn't what he expected when Delphine told him Victoria Van Horn had hired a dog-sitter.
Miss Van Horn had hired someone from the States to fly out to the Caribbean just to watch her dog while she was in Europe for two weeks.Of course she did. Nutmeg was a cute dog, and he loved dogs, but why Delphine couldn't feed Nutmeg and take him for a walk every now and then was beyond him. Apparently, Nutmeg required his own staff assigned to him for the two weeks his adoring Victoria would be away.
Lena perplexed him. She exhibited so much warmth and kindness—and fear.
It could have been the fire. It could have been the danger Kai was in. But he had a strong feeling something else was going on. Her interest in Emil Van Horn was concerning. He needed to look into Lena. Hopefully, she was innocent of any crimes Emil may be involved in. He'd keep his eye on her.
He returned his attention to what was left of the burned shed. He wanted to make sure the fire was one hundred percent out and that nothing was still smoldering. He was also very curious about how that fire got started.
It didn't take two minutes of poking around the charred wood to find what he was looking for.
The remnants of a lighter sat in the middle of the debris. Odd. He was no arson investigator, but he had plenty of cameras set up in the vicinity for his own purposes. Fortunately, two cameras focused on the beach around that pier. He'd be able to figure out if the kids were playing with the lighter or if something more nefarious was going on.
Nash returned to his living quarters over the garage, turned on his laptop, and sent a message to hisfriend—and for this mission, his team leader—Jason Bridger.
While he waited for a reply, he accessed the camera feed for both of the cameras near the pier. He ran them back about thirty minutes and watched the feed while he made himself a turkey sandwich with an optimal mayonnaise-to-mustard ratio.
He was about to enjoy the first bite of his sandwich when he saw a man approach the pier on the camera feed. The timestamp showed him walking up to the pier about two minutes before Nash noticed the flames. The man stood on the pier under the awning for a few moments, then left. Almost immediately after he was out of sight, the kids came into view, running on the beach from the opposite direction.
Then Kai walked onto the pier. He walked casually for a minute before flames started shooting up from the awning attached to the end of the pier. Even in the camera footage, Nash could see the terror in Kai's eyes. The footage left no doubt that the man started the fire, and the kids were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and answered the call. "Hey, Jason."
"Hey. Got your message. Wanted to run something by you."
"Okay, what's up? Do we know who this Lena Erickson is?"
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. We can dig deeper, but we can't find anyone named Lena Erickson anywhere. At all. However, there is a LenaAshworthtied to this situation. I'm sending you her picture."
Nash glanced at his screen.
"Yeah, that's her. Why is she going by a different last name?"
Jason sighed before he answered. "Lena is Cassidy's cousin. My guess is she's here on her own, looking for Cassidy."
Nash rubbed a hand down his face. "Very dangerous move, but honestly, I admire her initiative. We know no one else is concerned about Cassidy."
"Yeah, I know." Worried tension nipped at his tone. "But she doesn't know what she's stepping into. Emil's dangerous. Of course, she probably suspected that, or she wouldn't be here searching for her cousin and using a false name."
