Deadline (Sandra Brown)

why. You were married to her, you should know. Even after the law dusted their hands of ever finding them, she wouldn’t. She’s got the means to hire people to track us down. I don’t want to be worrying about that for the rest of my days. Better to simply—” He made a chopping motion.
    “I guess,” Jeremy mumbled and took a swallow of beer.
    “Needs to be soon, too.”
    “You’re right. If we’re going to do it, let’s get it over with. I want my boys. The longer we wait, the dimmer their memory of me becomes.”
    Carl murmured in agreement, but he was only half listening. Thinking out loud, he said, “Something’s not right.”
    “Not right with what?”
    “This situation.” He finished his beer, then got up and began to pace. “I feel like I’m missing something, and when you miss something, you get caught.”
    “Amelia doesn’t suspect that I’m still alive, does she?”
    “She’s given no indication of it. Even when I saw her today, she was definitely upset over the nanny, but she acted like herself and said her sweet good-bye to dear old Bernie. ‘Until next summer…’ Like that. She was sad to be closing up the house and leaving the beach. She loves that place. The kids, too. They play—” That sparked a thought. “Where are the pictures?”
    “Bottom drawer of the bureau.”
    “None of me, right?”
    “No. First thing I looked for. I know how you feel about pictures of us. Mom told me that the maddest you ever got at her was when you caught her taking pictures of me as a toddler.”
    That wasn’t the maddest he’d ever got at Flora, but Jeremy didn’t need to know that.
    He found the pictures—apparently taken by Dawson Scott—in the drawer, paper-clipped together. He took them over to the dining table so he could spread them out for better viewing.
    “Damn fool thing you did to get these,” he said to Jeremy as he joined him at the table.
    “Curiosity got the better of me. I saw y’all leave, saw him jog over to her house and put something under the doormat. He was dressed up, so I figured he was going to dinner, too, and wouldn’t be back for a while. I got back to the CandyCane with time to spare.”
    Carl still thought his son had been reckless to row a dingy to shore and then back to the boat. The margin for error had been huge. And for what? The photos seemed harmless enough, hardly worth the risk Jeremy had taken to obtain them.
    Jeremy picked up a picture of his sons playing in the surf. “As long as he was at it, I wish he’d taken more shots of them and fewer of Amelia.”
    “Why’d he take them at all?” Carl asked. “You checked him out on your computer?”
    “Didn’t even have to dig. He’s exactly what he claims to be. He’s won prizes. He covered Afghanistan for his magazine. Just back from there, actually.”
    “So what’s he doing down here?”
    “Besides lusting for Amelia, you mean,” Jeremy said as he held up a photo of her.
    “Feeling’s mutual, I think,” Carl said.
    “Really?”
    “Something’s there. She looked kinda sick when I told her I’d seen him with Stef.”
    “Is she sleeping with him?”
    “Do you care?”
    “Not really. I’d be surprised, is all. Pregnancy killed her libido.”
    Carl wasn’t convinced of Jeremy’s indifference when it came to Dawson Scott and Amelia, but his concerns about the man were much more serious. “What gets me,” he said, “is that this writer showed up out of nowhere, moved into the house next door to your ex-wife’s, and edged in on her and the boys.”
    “You said yourself that he was running down the story of me, Darlene, and Willard.”
    “That’s what I said, but…”
    “What else could it be?”
    “I don’t know,” Carl muttered. “That’s what worries me.”
    “It makes perfect sense that he’d want to interview Amelia to get background stuff about our life together.”
    “True. But it seems to me that he went to an awful lot of trouble to cover a murder trial in out-of-the-way Savannah.”
    Jeremy blurted a laugh. “The man went to freakin’ Afghanistan for stories.”
    Carl turned to Jeremy and must have telegraphed his rising anger, because his son’s amused grin collapsed. “Are you humoring your old man?”
    “No, Daddy.”
    “You think I’m getting soft in the head?”
    “Of course not.”
    “You think you’re smarter than me?”
    “No! Jesus!”
    “Others have thought they were. They didn’t listen to what I told them, and you know