Author’s Note: As Mackenna says, the answers aren’t always the ones we want.

I hate my job.

Mackenna looked down at her phone with a smile. She hadn’t expected to hear from Carson again, at least not until after he was off of work and complaining about her choice of text message. She was happier about the message than she should be, than she wanted to be. Even though she wanted to share the restoration project with him, she didn’t like her enthusiasm for talking to him. She shouldn’t care so much, and she didn’t want to care this much.

I love mine.

You wouldn’t want to trade, then.

She laughed. No, she wouldn’t. Even if she and Mac were only scraping by, she was not interested in giving up doing what she loved. No. I thought you were working.

Something wrong? Besides the usual?

He didn’t respond for a while, and she frowned. She wasn’t much of a texter, and she wasn’t sure if he was, but she didn’t like it when he got quiet on her. It worried her. She grimaced, trying to talk herself out of calling him.

Mac would just shake his head at her. What was it about Carson that got this reaction out of her? She shouldn’t care. She’d never gotten along with the car owners in the past. They didn’t give their cars proper maintenance or even just the attention they deserved. These cars were treasures, rare and wonderful and deserving respect. So many people took them and all that history for granted. She hated watching it happen. Carson had the same attitude toward his inheritance, toward Phantom, so why did she give him a free pass?

The phone rang, and she jerked, shaking her head as she answered it. “Had to call, did you?”
“It would have taken too long to type. I’m not that good at it.”

“Neither am I.” She climbed onto the back of the pickup, wanting to sit for a moment while she talked. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with his car, and she wanted to discuss it with him even though he seemed to want nothing to do with it. “What’s up?”

He let out a breath. “I hate this place. One of these days, the farm they want to destroy will be my family’s. Or yours.”

“How can you work for someone like that?”

“I thought, when I got my degree, that I’d end up helping people like Grandpa. Turns out there’s never any profit in it. It’s so… disgusting, the greed and the manipulation. Just because there’s stuff in or on the land that they want, they want to take away a family’s legacy.”

“And your job is to help them do it?”

“Technically, no, but that’s what always seems to happen.” He muttered a low curse, and she wondered if he’d dropped something. “I should just quit, but the job’s all I have. What am I supposed to do if I quit? I’ve got nothing else, nowhere to go…. Besides, I might need the medical benefits if nothing else.”

“You’re not crazy.”

“No, just a killer.”

“You don’t know that. It’s not like you actually remember pulling the trigger, do you?” He didn’t answer, but she already knew the answer. “You also don’t know how it happened. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was self-defense. If you pulled that trigger, you had a reason. You could have thought he was going to kill you or kidnap you or…”

“Or?”

She grimaced. She didn’t want to bring it up, but there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it, either. “Or he… was molesting you.”

“I don’t know that I want to know anymore.”

She sighed. He couldn’t give up that easily, not with something like this. “Carson, I’m just throwing out possibilities here. If you don’t want to obsess over labeling yourself a killer, then you want a valid reason why you would have felt it was necessary, and then maybe it would torment you so much.”

“Yeah, because I really want to think about my father doing that to me.”

“Of course not, but it might be possible, might be another reason why your grandfather didn’t just tell you what happened.”

Carson’s voice was quiet, troubled. “That’s what worries me.”

She put a hand in her hair, trying to find a way to salvage what she’d done. She didn’t need to push him over the edge, even if she had a valid point. “The answers aren’t necessarily going to be ones you want. In fact, they’re more likely not to be ones you want. Still, it’s the truth, and that’s what you need.”

“Yeah, it is. Um… Look, I need to let you go. I… I think I’m done with work for now, but I… All of a sudden, I need another shower. Or ten.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know, but you’re all upset now, and that wasn’t what I meant to do—”

“I’m fine.”

He wasn’t, but he hung up on her before she could argue about it.

Author’s Note: Oh, the joys of working…

I’m sending you pictures of our baby.

Carson blinked, swallowing as he stared at his phone. That was unexpected, to say the least. He knew better than to check his phone when the boss was hovering nearby, intent on some kind of conversation, when he was as close to a promotion as he was and risking it all by checking his phone when he should have been working, but he’d missed the call saying his grandfather was having a heart attack because he’d thought work was more important, and it wasn’t. It might be all he had at the moment, considering his strained relations with his family and lack of friends.

“Something wrong, Koslow?”

Carson didn’t want to explain that to his boss. He tried for words, failed, and started to put the phone away instead. Sanders leaned over, able to glance at the phone, though Carson had to wonder if the man might have picked it up anyway. “A baby, huh? I didn’t know things had gotten that serious.”

Sanders was fishing. He wasn’t one of those men who encouraged families and stability—he hated the idea of his employees having other connections outside the office, unless it meant more business—but he kept a polite face on that, always politically correct.

“They’re not. I’m not… Um…” Carson opened the next message and let out a breath of relief. He’d kill Mackenna for this later, but he should have known that was what she meant. He hadn’t figured on her calling the car a “baby,” but then she’d already named it, and that was kind of weird to begin with. “Oh. It’s the car. The one I inherited from my grandfather. I should have known. The mechanic I took it to has a real sense of humor.”

Sanders raised a disdainful eyebrow as he studied the picture. “That’s your inheritance?”

No, my inheritance is some obscure clue about a murder. Maybe. Carson shook his head, not wanting to get into that at all. “Um… Yes. It and some other scrap metal. Grandpa was kind of odd, and he had plenty of grandkids to worry about. I figure I got kind of lucky there. I could have gotten the china, like my brother Nick did. I’ll just ask her to stop sending stuff until I get off work and can look at it properly.”

Sanders nodded, folding his arms over his chest as he waited. Carson frowned, not sure why his boss felt the need to watch him do it. He started typing, not much of a texter. Why are you sending pics of the car?

Her reply was instant, as though she’d been expecting it. Either that, or she had a much better carrier than he did. He never got service at the farm. Every restoration project needs before and after pictures.

Right.

You first.

He shook his head, putting the phone aside. He gave his boss an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I thought it was something else. Could have been something more to do with Grandpa and the estate, maybe. You said earlier that you wanted to talk to me about the Myers claim? I thought that was John’s project.”

Sanders leaned against the cubicle, shaking his head. “Pulling him off. He can’t handle it. You have the right background for this. You were raised on a farm.”

“Meaning I side with the farmers nine times out of ten,” Carson reminded him. “Don’t ask me to do this, please. I don’t like the ethical dilemma I’ll put myself in. I won’t want to uphold the company’s interests. I’ll want to take care of the landowners.”

“Those don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

Carson nodded, but his boss was being—well, the nicest way of putting it was overly optimistic. Truth was, he was being a dick. The two sides rarely got along, and Carson hated being in the middle since his company was almost always in the wrong. That was why John was supposed to deal with that crap. He toed the company line. “Is this because I’m up for promotion?”

Saunders smiled. “Now, Koslow, you know we don’t work that way.”

Sure they didn’t. Carson forced another smile. “I’ll get the file.”

Author’s Note: I did my best to research the bullet hole and what that meant as far as the gun that fired it, but I fully admit that I’m not an expert. Only guns I’ve ever fired were water guns, and even then, I didn’t get to play with them much.

Wide, sightless eyes, almost the same as his own, staring up at the sky—was it the sky or the ceiling?—he didn’t know. He could see the body, that face, the eyes, but he never got close to it. He thought he could move, but he didn’t try. Fear, maybe. The man was a stranger, so fearing him made sense, and staying back from the dead man was smart, so he should be right where he was.

“Carson.”

He jerked, sitting up in his bed, wrapping his arms around his legs, trying to calm himself down again. He didn’t understand. What was that? He didn’t know the voice, had never heard one before, and he had never seen blood on himself. He couldn’t remember there being any blood near the body, either. If his father had been shot, then why wasn’t there blood? Why was the blood on him?

Because he was terrified of ending up like his father, of course. He knew that. He couldn’t help thinking that he was going to die the same way, but he didn’t even know that his father was dead. Sure, he’d walked out on them, and no one had heard from him, but did that plus Carson’s dreams mean that he was dead? It was no guarantee, even with the bullet hole in the car.

No one said the car had anything to do with his father’s death, either. That could be a weird coincidence, something that happened before his grandfather got the car.

Damn it, why hadn’t they just told him? If his grandfather knew who killed his father, then why didn’t he just say so? If his grandfather did it, if his uncle did… Hell, if Carson had somehow done it, then why didn’t he know? Why did they leave him with so many questions, tormented by partial truths and nightmares and memories that didn’t make sense? Why make him feel like he was losing his mind? Was it really so terrible, the truth?

He winced. He’d forgotten to call his brothers, and he didn’t want to do it now, even though he hated feeling so alone and confused. He put his head down on his knees.

His hand was much smaller in the dream, not teenage, but not so small as to be a toddler, he didn’t think, and if he’d been that young, there was no way he’d remember any of it, right? Still, having his hand show up in the dream—bloody or not—might help him pin down when he saw what he did.

Only he had no idea if he could trust that, either.

“Damn it.”

He lifted his head, looking toward the window. He didn’t know how to sort out the rest of it, but he knew that he wasn’t going back to sleep tonight. This morning. Whatever. He stood, walking over to the window and looking out at the dawn, frowning.

He heard the phone and jumped, hating himself for his overreaction to everything. He shook it off, going to pick it up. Larry or Nick, calling to lecture him about calling, had to be. He hit the button to take the call without looking at the caller ID. “Koslow.”

“I see I didn’t wake you.”

He lowered the phone, checking the screen. “Mackenna?”

“You can call me Mac if you want,” she said, and he blinked, still trying to figure out why she was calling him. “I had a couple of things to run by you.”

“Um…”

“Let me start by saying I’m not an expert and I don’t know how much of an expert these people are, but from a quick internet search, I stumbled on a forum question about bullet holes in a metal sign, and since they look roughly similar to the one in Phantom’s fender, I thought I’d go ahead and pass on what I did learn. If I knew a cop or someone with forensics training, I’d ask them, but anyway, the point is, the bullet probably came from a large caliber handgun. I’m going to measure it again to be sure, but if you know who in your family owns handguns, then you might be able to narrow down the weapon.”

“Um… I thought the only guns we owned were rifles. Hunting rifles. Pheasants. Grandpa liked to do that. I can’t stand the taste of them. Or of venison.”

“Me, either.” She laughed, then sobered up again. “Well, a rifle shot should have a different look to it, with a deeper punch, but that’s not a guarantee as there are rifles that fire pistol rounds. Still, from what I could tell and what everyone said, it’s most likely a handgun.”

“I… I don’t know that I have any—What was that about Phantom?”

“Oh. That. I named the car. I always do that. This one said Phantom to me, since it’s dark and like a skeleton in the closet type deal… It fit.”

He put a hand to his head. “Okay…”

“I shouldn’t have called. I can let you go—”

“No, don’t. I…” He let out a breath. He didn’t want to let her off the phone, as much as he was ashamed to admit it. Hearing her voice made him feel a lot less alone, and he shouldn’t be reaching out to a stranger, but he had no one else right now. “I was awake, and I’m not… I was just… Don’t you sleep?”

“Not much. Why?”

“No particular reason.”

“You had a nightmare, didn’t you?” She shouldn’t know that. He didn’t want her knowing that. He almost hung up on her, but she went on. “Look, if you need to talk, you can call. I’m an insomniac myself.”

He sat down on the bed. “I’m not sure I should. I already put you in a bad position by giving you the car, and I don’t even know… What if it was me? What if that’s why I can’t get anything more out of the nightmares than I have before? I can’t handle that I killed someone.”

The silence he got said plenty. He hung up, putting the phone back where it was. He might as well shower, start getting ready for work, go back to the routine that had sustained him for the past few years. He’d always done this on his own before, and he could do it now.

Author’s Note: It’s a sad day when being crazy is the easier path, isn’t it?

“Bullet hole. Right. Bullets… That makes sense… Only it doesn’t and…” Koslow put a hand to his head, the rest of his words deteriorating into incoherent babble as he faltered, crumpling as he went down to the ground. Maybe he was more of a psycho than she’d thought at first, but that wasn’t fair. She knew better. He looked way too much like her uncle had before his PTSD made him put a gun to his own head.

She refused to be that helpless again, even if she’d only been a child when her uncle died and couldn’t have changed anything—medication and therapy hadn’t worked—so she knelt beside Koslow and put a hand on his arm. Keeping her voice gentle, she tried to coax him out of it, using the same thing she used to do with animals when this place was more of a farm and less of a relic. She didn’t know that she was doing anything right, but after a while, his breathing seemed to level out, and the babble was gone.

His eyes cleared, and he stared at her, horrified. “Oh, no, please tell me I didn’t. Damn, I haven’t had one of those in more than a decade. I’m sorry. This is… embarrassing, to say the least.”

She shrugged. “I’m not one to judge. Never have been. Might have learned that the hard way, but you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Sure I don’t,” he said, dragging himself up with the help of his truck. “I… I can’t believe I did that. I swear that hasn’t happened since I was—I don’t even know why it happened. Shouldn’t have freaked out over something like that. I don’t even know that there’s any reason to think that it’s a bullet hole or that it has anything to do with… anything.”

Mackenna studied him. “You ever manage to convince yourself with that kind of talk? It doesn’t sound like it would work for me.”

He lowered his head. “Doesn’t work for me, either, or I’d have put this all behind me years ago.”

She leaned against the truck next to him. “What’s this, anyway? Oh, don’t look at me like that. You come here with a rare car and bullet hole and have a panic attack and think I won’t be even the slightest bit curious?”

“I don’t—I know you probably are. I owe you an explanation. I just… I’m trying to find a way to do it. I don’t know how to explain it without it sounding crazy. It is. I—My father took off when I was born, and none of us have heard from him since. Then… for no reason that anyone can explain, when I was in high school, I stared having nightmares about him. Dead. I don’t know how or why. I thought it happened at my grandfather’s farm, but they never found a body. I went into therapy, they gave me medicine, and I went to college and put it all behind me. Then Grandpa dies, I inherit what’s in the barn, and it’s all back like it was…”

She shook her head. “Not like it was.”

“Um, no offense, but you don’t know me, and you didn’t know me then and so you—”

“Now you have a car with a bullet hole. I’d say that you have proof this time around—or at least a whole lot more to go on, now don’t you?”

He looked back at the car, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, though. If my grandfather knew about the bullet hole, if he knew that my father was dead, that someone shot him, doesn’t that mean that he did it? Why the hell wouldn’t he just tell me that instead of putting me through all this? He’s dead; it can’t hurt him anymore. Even if it wasn’t him… Why not tell me? He can’t have been threatened by the person who did it. They have no hold over him. He’s dead. If it’s someone in my family… shouldn’t I know that instead of having some kind of… wild goose chase?”

“Well, yeah, I’d think so. I mean, you’d have to figure that whatever you might remember would put you in danger from them, so I don’t know why he wouldn’t just come out and say it, especially if he knew he was dying. Did he?”

“Heart attack. It was sudden, but he did leave a will, so… he had some kind of plan even if he didn’t know the day or hour.”

She nodded. “How many people know you have the car?”

He winced. “Five, counting the two of us. My two brothers and my sister-in-law. I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with my brothers, though. He was their father, too, and they’re not that much older than me. Nick is three years older, Larry five. It’s not… I think I’d rather be crazy.”

Mackenna let out a breath. “Yeah, comparing that to mistrusting your whole family, that’s got to be the easier path.”

“Would you help me get rid of the car? Just find someone who wants the parts or something. You’d know better than I would how to find the right kind of person.”

She frowned, taking hold of his arm. “Why would you do that? The car’s all you’ve got. Your one shot at finding whoever it was that killed your father and ending your nightmares. You need it.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t. I don’t know who to trust, and if I pursue this, if I tell anyone in my family what I’m doing… I’m as good as dead.”

“I’d say you’re more in a position of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Ignorance can’t save you forever.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t suppose I said anything in my panic attack that might have… helped or made any kind of… sense, did I?”

“No. At first you had real words, but it went to gibberish fast.”

“That’s what always happens.” He closed his eyes. “Um… The truck belongs to my brother now, so I need to get it back to him, and I have to be in the city in the morning. I…”

“We can unload the Maxwell if you want. My grandfather and I can take a look at it and see what it needs and what it’s worth. He’ll love having his hands on another one of these. He’s got two, and they’re his favorites.”

“Thank you. Not just for that, but… for all of it.” He looked at her hand and then shook his head again. “No. I can’t ask you to do that. If anyone in my family knows about the car and the bullet hole, then it’ll put you and your grandfather at risk. Even if they don’t know now, they will. Everyone will know that I found the car, that I brought it here. I’ll just drive back and tell them you couldn’t help me with it. That’s for the best.”

He was jumpy and paranoid as hell, but she couldn’t blame him for that. “Don’t you have anyone who can… help with this?”

“No.”

Author’s Note: I had a bit of this in mind from the beginning, though the characters took it in a bit of a different direction from what I’d planned. That’s okay, though. It more than works.

“Excuse me. I think I’m lost.”

“Well, if you’re looking for the highway, it’s about thirty miles southwest of here, and the nearest gas station is another ten miles in either direction. If you wanted to get yourself lost, you picked a good place to do it.”

Carson nodded, trying to get a better look at the person under the truck. He hadn’t realized the overalls belonged to a woman until she spoke, and he didn’t know what to think now. That was what he got for trusting Carrie’s internet search. He should have looked the place up for himself because this could not be it. Another farm, rundown and ramshackle, holding on because of a family’s sheer stubbornness, not because this kind of work turned any kind of profit. Judging from the truck she was working on, this place had seen its last heyday when his grandfather’s had—more than forty years ago.

“I know where the highway is. I think I got bad directions. I came out here looking for Mac Gilreath. I guess he has some kind of… auto restoration place, but my sister-in-law must have been mistaken.”

“Why, because she’s a woman?”

“Um,” he said, hoping he wasn’t about to get involved in some kind of debate over sexism because he didn’t have the brain for it at the moment. “No, because I’m not entirely sure she likes me. I kind of—Well, to put it mildly, most of my family thinks I’m one step away from the looney bin.”

The woman slid out from under the truck, studying him. Her hair was covered by a scarf that was more grease black than the blue of the fabric, and she seemed smaller now that he could see more of her, a trick of the shadow under the truck and her overalls, a set he didn’t figure had always belonged to her. “You don’t look like some kind of psycho, but then looks can be deceiving.”

He forced a smile. “Yeah, that’s true. Is there anyone named Gilreath around here or am I on a wild goose chase?”

The woman dragged herself up from the ground, and now he knew why her bandana wasn’t the stereotypical red—it would have clashed with that hair of hers, a shade that crimson had to be dyed, right?

“I’m not sure if I should hit you or not.”

“Why would you hit me?”

She held out a hand. “Mac Gilreath. Should I call you a chauvinist now or later?”

He grimaced. “Sorry. I had no idea. Carrie gave me a name and an address, and I made a bad assumption. I didn’t look up the information myself, I should have, and I shouldn’t have—Okay, on that note, I’m going to leave. We’ll just… forget I was that stupid and call it a day.”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, the original Mac is, in fact, a man, and he would have been around if you’d come a few minutes earlier, but he’s of the old generation, you know. Church on Sunday, like clockwork.” She shrugged, wiping her hands on a rag. “I’m Mackenna, his granddaughter. So… you did come all the way out here, and most people don’t. What were you interested seeing Grandpa about?”

Carson gestured to the trailer. “That. Apparently, I got left that by my grandfather, and I have no idea what to do with it.”

She put a hand to her head, knocking the scarf off as she moved closer to the trailer. “Wow. Where was this?”

“In his barn.”

“Right. Should have known. You can see the effect of the animals on the paint. Here and there. Their sweat does things to a car after years in storage,” she said, running a hand along the fender. “This is almost all original, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. You’re guess is a hell of a lot better than mine.”

She shook her head. “A near complete Maxwell, probably… 1908, maybe 1909. This is incredible.”

“This is… complete? My brothers figured it was junk.”

“Your brothers are idiots.”

“I won’t argue that.”

She looked up from the car with a grin, but her attention went back to it a moment later. “It doesn’t look like much, not like this, but this is a find, Mister…?”

“Koslow. Carson Koslow.” He gave the car another frown. “I don’t have the money to restore it. I know that. I guess I was just hoping to find someone who could tell me about what it’s worth and help me get a fair price for it.”

“You’d sell it? Just like that?”

He let out a breath. “I… I don’t know. I’m not sure why my grandfather left me it. None of us even knew he had it, and I thought—Never mind. That’s a long story I won’t bore you with.”

“Okay, fine. Just tell me the story behind this.”

Carson stared at the hole that she’d pointed out, a strange gap in the frame. “I… You’re the mechanic. That’s… rust, right? Went through the fender there. I mean, that metal looks kind of flimsy compared to what we have, so it must be.”

She shook her head. “Flimsy metal’s got nothing to do with rust, and I would have said that was a bullet hole, but that’s me.”