From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,113
well as those poor young women’s families. She felt Finn’s blue gaze on her.
“You haven’t mentioned the hotel.”
She shrugged as she looked down the highway toward the spot where her grandmother’s Old Girl had stood. Casey had wanted it gone. Well, it was now. “I came home to sell the Crenshaw. I just hadn’t planned to stay around to see it be razed. By the way, I can’t take your money now.”
“The deal was done before it was destroyed,” Finn said and smiled. “I actually come out better with the loss on my taxes this way.”
Casey studied him. “What will you do with the land?”
“I’m donating it to the town. I guess there is talk that it could be a park. Unless there’s something you’d like me to do with it.”
She shook her head. “I promised my grandmother I would get the things that meant so much to her. I did that. I also promised her I would release Megan’s ghost and get closure for myself and her. I never planned to keep that promise, but as it turned out, I got everything and more.” Her gaze met his. “Ready?”
* * *
FINN LEANED OVER to kiss her softly on the lips. “Ready. It was nice of you to offer me a ride to San Francisco, but you do realize you’re not going to get rid of me that easily?”
She grinned. “You have something in mind?” she asked as she started the engine.
His dark gaze held hers. “As a matter of fact, I do. Maybe I’ll tell you about it on the drive.” He’d come here looking for redemption for not saving Megan. The truth was he’d been hiding out here, looking for something he couldn’t name until he’d started reading Anna’s journals and had met Casey. He saw her look again in the direction where the hotel had stood.
“Emery believed there was an evil in it that made him do what he did. I wonder if Jen believes that, too?”
He shook his head. “Megan brought her lies and her unhappiness with her. So did the others. I spent months in that old monstrosity. I fell in love with the Crenshaw and its new owner. Maybe we find what we’re seeking, even when we don’t know what we are really looking for.” She turned to smile at him. “Your grandmother believed that we get what we put into life. I think she was right.”
Casey shook her head. “My grandmother sent out those reunion invitations. Her attorney told me. She couldn’t have been in her right mind.”
He laughed. “I don’t know about that. She invited me. I assume Megan’s parents must have told her about me when they asked her to take Megan for the summer. They weren’t just getting her away from the fallout from the car wreck. They were getting her away from me. Your grandmother was making sure you and I crossed paths. We both had to put the past behind us, make things right and give her peace of mind. Anna was always worried that one of her guests might have been responsible for those missing girls. She’d never dreamed it was Emery.”
“Like he said, Anna was always kind to him,” Casey said as she hit the gas and pulled out of the Sleepy Pine Motel parking lot and onto the two-lane blacktop that would eventually take them to San Francisco.
“I’m just thankful that she got us together,” Finn said.
“What are you saying? That Anna planned it this way?”
He grinned and tilted his face back to take in Montana’s big sky overhead. Sunlight lit his dark hair whipping in the wind and made his eyes shine when he glanced over at her as she gunned the engine. “I like to think she did.”
Casey laughed. “I have to admit, it would be just like her.” She looked at the road ahead as she sped past where the Crenshaw Hotel had once stood, its scars still visible. But she was no longer dwelling on the past.
She was looking to the future from now on. Not that she had any idea where she and Finn were headed. West, until they hit the Pacific Ocean, was all she knew.
“We can’t see the future, and there’s no reason to be looking over our shoulders all the time at the past,” her grandmother used to say with a wink. “We have to look ahead and have faith that everything will turn out just as it’s supposed to.”