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Chapter One

The explosion caught Charlie by surprise. People didn’t usually blow things up in Middlesex, Connecticut, especially at four in the afternoon. But as Charlie rode his Harley down Elm Street, something exploded behind the metal door of an ordinary two-car garage.

The door was still rattling as he made a U-turn and swerved his bike into the drive, skidding on layers of snow and ice. He damned near hit the Civic Hybrid parked there.

Leaping from his bike, he ran toward the garage. “Don’t panic! I’m here!” He banged on the door. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

“Yes!” The voice was muffled and female. And she was coughing.

“I’m calling 911!” He reached for the cell phone clipped to his jeans pocket.

“No! Don’t do that!” More coughing.

He paused, his finger over the send button. “Why not?”

“Because I’m fine!”

Charlie needed more information. There had been an explosion, for God’s sake. And there was this funny smell seeping out of the cracks around the garage door molding. “Can you open the door? You could be in shock or something.”

“Honestly.” She coughed again. “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?” Charlie tried to picture himself climbing back on his bike and riding away without knowing what had caused the explosion and whether the woman in the garage was as fine as she claimed. Nope, couldn’t do it. “Open the door. I need to know you’re okay.”

After a moment of silence, the door started up. Then it quickly stopped, leaving a gap of six inches. The funny smell grew stronger.

“See there?” Charlie breathed in the fumes and the back of his throat tickled. He cleared his throat. “Now your door’s jammed.”

“No, it’s . . . uh, yeah! It must be jammed! But I’m fine, really.” She coughed twice. “Here’s my hand, in one piece.”

Charlie stared at the hand she stuck through the six-inch opening. He thought of Thing from The Addams Family, except her hand was a lot prettier than Thing. She was wearing a pink sweater with the cuff turned back over a very delicate wrist.

She wiggled her fingers. “See? Everything works.” Her nails looked manicured, although she wasn’t wearing polish. No rings, either. She’d have to be lying on her back on the garage floor in order to stick her hand out like that. Maybe she’d landed on the floor after the explosion.

But that made no sense, because she’d just activated the garage door opener. Sure, she could have been holding the opener at the time of the blast, but that was highly improbable, which meant she was lying there specifically to stick her hand out and convince him she wasn’t maimed. She was hiding something in that garage.

Just his luck, that kind of behavior intrigued him. Not too many women he knew caused explosions and then tried to pretend nothing had happened. None, in fact. He dropped to one knee and took off his helmet so he could peek under the door, but the warm air coming out made his glasses fog so he couldn’t see much of anything. “What’s that smell?” Now he’d started coughing, too.

She pulled her hand back inside. “I’m . . . um . . . making something.”

“Moonshine?” Charlie had never smelled moonshine, but he’d tasted his share of cheap whiskey in his undergrad days. This garage had distillery written all over it, not that he cared, philosophically speaking. He was just damned curious.

Her laughter was interspersed with more coughing. “Are you a revenuer?”

“No, I’m an engineer.” His knee was getting cold where it rested on the icy cement. His leather chaps helped, but he decided to shift to the other knee to balance out the chill factor.

“An engineer? The choo-choo kind or the brainy kind?”

“The electrical kind.” He tried not to breathe the fumes. “I work at Middlesex Light and Power.” At least for now. Before the end of the month he’d have his new position nailed down at Hoover Dam. At that point the ML and P would have to survive without him.

“Interesting.” Her coughing fit seemed to have ended. “Are you out reading meters?”

“No. I have a desk job.” He shifted knees again.

“Then why aren’t you there? At your desk?”

“In winter I come in an hour early so I can knock off at four. Look, we’re straying from the topic here. Are you sure you’re okay? Some injuries have a delayed reaction. You can bleed to death without really knowing you’re hurt.”

“I’m not bleeding.”

“It could be internal. I’ve heard of people who had no idea they were wounded and then bam! They keel over dead.”

“That would be bad.” She didn’t sound as if she were taking this seriously at all. “Are you qualified to assess internal bleeding?”

“Well, no. But I’ll bet I could tell if you were mortally wounded or not.” Besides, he wanted to know what she was hiding in there. “If this door’s jammed, you could come to the front door.” And after he’d made sure she was fine, he’d talk her into letting him into the garage.

“What happens at four that you take off from work early?”

“I like to shoot pool at the Rack and Balls before dinner. I was on my way there when I heard the explosion. Naturally I stopped.” He could still smell the noxious odor, but it was much fainter.

“I appreciate your concern. I really do.”

“Anyone would have done the same. And speaking as an engineer, I’m not sure you should be breathing those fumes.”

“The Rack and Balls has a pool table?”

“Yeah.” It was common knowledge. “You must be new here.”

“I bought the house in October. I guess that’s new.”

With that, Charlie’s brain processed the data and came up with an ID. She was the New York model who’d moved to Middlesex last fall. Both his mother and his aunt Myrtle had mentioned that a model had bought a house on Elm Street and she sometimes came into the bakery. But she’d only allow herself one cinnamon roll and then she’d make it last several days.

And what was her name, anyway? Erin? Elise? He couldn’t remember. But now he was really confused about the explosion. Fashion models and explosions only coexisted in James Bond movies.

Curiosity made him ignore the cold cement. Leaning down, he balanced on his forearm and took off his glasses so they wouldn’t fog up while he tried to get another look inside the garage. He ended up with a fuzzy view of denim overalls and lots of brown wavy hair. He couldn’t see her face and he definitely couldn’t see what was going on in the garage.

Obviously she wasn’t planning to open the door all the way. He might never find out what had caused the explosion, but at the very least he needed to make sure that she wasn’t in shock and therefore numbed to the pain of something like a piece of metal sticking in the back of her skull.

“About the pool table,” she said. “Is it full-sized or bar-sized?”

“It’s an Olhausen eight-footer.”

“Really?” She sounded more than a little interested.

He knew she could be faking that interest to distract him, but somehow h