“Wait...you said in the ambulance on the way over that Grayson wasn’t there when Boyd killed your parents...”

  He’d untied the gown, come around to the front of her. She stared up at him, mouth open, but didn’t seem to be focused.

  “What?” he asked, not wanting her to leave him yet, not even for seconds.

  “Grayson. He was there. I didn’t run. He grabbed me up. Ran outside with me and hid us under the house. He just kept saying, It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. I did it.”

  Frowning...she looked up at him. “But he didn’t do it. So why would he say that?”

  Jackson didn’t know, didn’t know if they’d ever find out, but he knew that he’d die happy if he could go with Aimee looking at him just as she was doing right then.

  * * *

  Kelly spent most of that afternoon with them at Jackson’s place, sitting in the kitchen, talking. Debriefing. Interspersed with casual conversation. The crime scene had taken less than an hour to process, and then another hour to clean—a feat made more expedient by the fact that Jackson ordered all furniture to be disposed of. By the time they’d left the hospital, he’d been cleared to be back inside and his house was the only place Aimee wanted to be at the moment—even if she just stayed upstairs in her room. His personal effects were along the far wall, by the staircase, and the rest of the room was bare and pristine. If there’d been any blood on the hardwood floor, it had been cleaned. The wool throw rug that had covered most of the room had caught most all of it.

  And Jackson didn’t want her out in public until they found whoever had been working for Boyd Evergreen. There was no guarantee the person or persons didn’t know Boyd was dead, and was, then, still “on the job” so to speak.

  Jackson had been on the phone on and off, not part of the investigation, but being kept apprised by his people, who were still looking to him for his thoughts and suggestions.

  And a couple of county deputies were stationed in the front and two more in the back of his property. Protecting them, not keeping them in.

  Aimee was free to go. Jackson just didn’t deem it safe for her to do so.

  Other than him not being able to participate in the investigation, he was under no restrictions at all. He didn’t have his police-issued gun on him, though. That had been taken in as evidence. He’d strapped his own nine millimeter to his waist before they’d ever left home after the shooting.

  Shortly before Kelly left, Aimee announced that she wanted to call Alonzo Gillum, her father’s old friend. “I’d just like him to know the truth about how my dad died,” she told them.

  And maybe she wanted to connect with the man who’d been a good friend to a man she was only just beginning to remember.

  More and more memories had been coming back to her all afternoon. Nothing big, or specific. Little snippets. Ice cream on her nose and her dad licking it off. Her licking ice cream off from his nose. Holding her mom’s hand walking into a grocery store.

  Innocuous things—and priceless to her.

  Alonzo answered on the first ring. “I was hoping I’d hear from you,” the man said. “My wife and I have been talking nonstop about all of this since I met you. She wants to meet you.”

  While she wanted to connect, Aimee didn’t feel at all ready to socialize and, instead, gave Alonzo a brief rundown of what had happened that morning and the things she’d remembered.

  A long pause followed her words. Dead silence, more like. To the point that she glanced at her phone to see if the call was still connected.

  Alonzo’s cough alerted her to the fact that, while yes, the lines were connected, he was still there as well.

  “My wife is sitting here with me, Aimee,” he finally said. “Is the sheriff there with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you put me on Speaker phone, please?”

  Frowning, she glanced at Jackson, who’d been watching her, eavesdropping unabashedly at her end of the conversation. Kelly had gone in to use the restroom and put a call in to her friend. The two of them were going to be staying around for a few more days and had been talking about heading downtown for dinner that night.

  Such normal everyday activity seemed so far-fetched to Aimee. So out of reach...

  She touched an icon on her phone. “You’re on speaker,” she said.

  Jackson, sitting directly across from her at the island counter, nodded.

  “Sheriff?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “I told my wife something when I got back from there, something I haven’t told anyone since the day it was told to me. She’s been after me ever since to tell you...”

  “Tell me what?” Jackson didn’t sound at all congenial then. “You realize that withholding evidence in a crime is obstructing an investigation...”

  Eyebrows raised, Aimee stared at him. Definitely not what she’d come to recognize as normal Jackson behavior.

  The man wasn’t as calm and contained as he’d seemed all day. And that tidbit made her feel better. Odd, but it did.

  “I know, sir. I told you what I felt safe saying. I led you to the poker game.”

  “You knew about the deed.”

  “No, sir. I wish I had known. I honestly didn’t see Mason after that night, and we rarely spoke. There weren’t cell phones in those days and Mase didn’t have a phone at the trailer.”

  Mase. A regular guy. With regular friends. And her parents didn’t have a phone at their trailer. Which would explain why her mom hadn’t called Aunt Bonnie more often than once a month—something that had hurt her aunt. Pay phone long distance would have been expensive.

  As far as Aimee knew, her mother hadn’t written, either.

  Just those monthly calls. And no more visits. For two years...

  “But he called me once, not long before he died. Said he was going to come clean about something we’d both witnessed, and then figured out...”

  “Lonzo, just tell him.” The female voice coming over the line had to belong to Mary Elise, Alonzo’s wife.

  “Not long before Mase quit coming to the bar, him and I were out in the parking lot one night, having a smoke. Two guys came out. An older guy and a kid. We’d seen them inside. From behind. They were sitting a few booths up from us, and all we could see was their backs. No way the kid was old enough to drink, but the older guy was buying him shots. Outside, we were in the shadows. They were, too. No idea who they were, but we could hear them arguing plain as day. The older guy had met a woman and thought he was going to get lucky. He wanted the kid to get lost. Take their vehicle and go home. Kid said, no way. He wasn’t driving drunk. Didn’t even have a license. The older guy tells him if he didn’t get in the truck and get his ass home, he was going to tell their old man the kid had been drinking. Kid gets in the truck and bounces it out of the parking lot.”

  A pause came over the line and Jackson’s tone was urgent as he said, “And?”

  If the day didn’t hurry up and end, she might forget what good felt like.

  Might never be able to call it up again.

  “Neither of us thought much of it,” Alonzo said. “Stuff like that happens all the time.”

  “Yeah, go on.” Jackson wasn’t sparing the guy any compassion.

  “When Mase called, he said he’d figured out who that kid was. That there’d been an accident that night. And that he was going to tell what we’d seen. He was just giving me a heads-up in case someone came asking me about it. He wanted me to have a chance to have my story ready—whether I was going to back him or not. Didn’t seem to matter to him much whether I did or not. He just didn’t want me blindsided. Because that’s the kind of guy he was.”

  “He never told you who the kid was?”

  “No, but after you all came asking about everything, I started asking around about accidents that could have happened in surrounding towns that fall and found only one involving a teenaged boy. In Evergreen, not Halston where we were both staying at the time. Mase used to bunk with me on weeks when we were working the north portion of the mine. The drive was shorter than going all the way back to Evergreen...”

  Another tidbit...another piece of a life that meant the world to her. Her father, as a bachelor, bunking with a friend during the week...

  That’s what she wanted to think about. Friends. Good things involving her parents.

  Not the thing that got them killed.

  Please don’t let her dad doing the right thing be what got him killed.

  Jackson’s hand came across the counter. Covered hers.

  “It was Grayson Evergreen.”

  Gay Gay’s accident had been Boyd’s fault. And her dad had confronted him about it. That’s what Grayson had been talking about when he said he did it. That it was his fault.

  She remembered the argument. Something she hadn’t understood at the time. There’d been yelling about an accident. Grayson’s car accident. Her father had figured it out. Confronted Boyd. Told him either he told his father, or Mason was going to. Grayson deserved to know it wasn’t his fault.

  Aimee hadn’t thought she had any tears left.

  She’d been wrong.

  Chapter 23

  Jackson’s department had a lead on a guy who they believed was responsible for both trying to run Aimee off the road and the sheriff’s office bombing. Leon called him just after Kelly left.

  “Boyd had a charter jet gassed and ready to go at a private airstrip five miles from here,” Jackson told Aimee as he got off the phone.

  How could he so have misjudged the man? All his life he’d served the Evergreen family. Holding them in high esteem. Kissing Boyd’s ass a time or two because of the funding the family provided to the city, even more than sixty decades after her founding. Evergreen money helped fund the sheriff’s department.

  And Boyd Evergreen’s support hadn’t hurt when Shephard Redmond had retired and Jackson’s name had been put to the city council as his replacement.

  “I look like I was bought,” he said, laying his guts right on the counter where he and Aimee still sat, across from each other, with beers in front of them. He’d ordered pizza. It would be delivered to the station and Leon was going to drop it off himself on his way home to get some sleep.

  “Who sees you that way?” Aimee’s question flew at him with little sympathy. “Life is too short to take on things that don’t exist,” she continued. “Believe me, I know.”

  She did know. The woman had lived the majority of her life without her full reality and when it had started to come back to her, risked her life to find it. To live it. Even with the probability that it was going to be painful.

  Looking over at her he grinned. Not a happy expression, but an honest one. “I’m suffering from a bit of disillusionment here,” he told her. “Give a guy a second or two of slack.”

  Her gaze changed immediately. Softened. Those brown eyes filled an emotion that drew him. Made him want to drown in it. “You’re the one not cutting yourself any slack, Jackson. You stayed down deep in this all the way through, even when the rules started to change on you. You never faltered. Never lost course.”

  “I took a wrong road or two.”

  “Because the evidence led you there, and even then, every road you were on led to the intersection that brought out the truth.”

  Was she trying to kill him with kindness?

  Not a bad way to go.

  And yet, strangely, he was feeling better.

  But had more to tell her. Things that should have come before self-doubt. Way before.

  “They’ve got a BOLO out statewide, city police, state and county, for the guy Boyd hired to pilot his plane. They’d been heading to Mexico. Would have been in the air within minutes of him killing you. Been in Mexico before we figured out where he’d gone, and who knows what country before we got to him. But you can bet it would have been one that doesn’t extradite. The pilot has no record, but he owns a beat-up blue pickup truck and recently purchased the exact explosive that blew up outside the back door of the station.”

  “They think the guy is still in the area.”

  Trust her to hit on the worst piece of what he had to tell her.

  “Yeah.”

  “But he has no reason to want me dead, now. Even if he doesn’t know yet that Boyd’s dead, he knows he didn’t show for the flight. He won’t get paid with Boyd in the wind.”

  “Unless he thinks you can ID him from the road incident.” He had to be honest with her. “And...so far we’ve managed to keep Boyd’s death under wraps while we try to lure this guy out. Sometimes it helps to live in a really small town. Only the mortician and sheriff department know who the dead man was who was pulled from my house. Identities being held contingent upon notification of next of kin.”

  She sat back, her eyes widening. “Grayson. Who’s going to tell him?”

  Jackson shook his head. “That’s yet to be determined. I suggested that we wait until tomorrow, get with the Evergreens’ lawyer—he’s a good guy, I know him—and see what provisions were made for Grayson’s care on the event of Boyd’s death. Seems probable that whoever is named as executor and or guardian of Evergreen funds on Grayson’s behalf should be the one to tell him. Or maybe Dr. Harris. He’s retired, but Grayson knows and trusts him. I’d think there’s a good chance he’d be willing to step in given the circumstances.”

  Aimee looked sad as she nodded. And then, she reached for his hand. “So, I’m still under protective custody for the night?” she asked. The sadness didn’t leave her gaze, but something else entered. A light that made him feel things he most definitely had no business feeling in that moment. Under the circumstances he’d just referred to.

  “Yes.” He had to tell her the truth. He was who he was. He had to take accountability to stay right with himself, and that’s what mattered.

  Same as his old man, he supposed. Jackson didn’t agree with some of Shephard’s ways, but his father had had a brand of internal integrity that had never wavered.

  Apparently, he’d passed it on to his son.

  If Jackson could be that lucky.

  “My dad...he died saving a woman and two kids from a drunk abuser,” he said, the words totally killing the moment. But there they were, for some reason. Out in the open for the first time in his life. One of the many things he never spoke about.

  “Oh my God, Jackson! I knew he earned a commendation, but...why didn’t you say something?”

  “When?” It wasn’t like they were dating. Or even friends. They’d known each other five days.

  “What happened?” She didn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of his question. The facts it was meant to bring out.

  “We got a call...guy beating up his wife...had a gun...protocol says we go out in bulk, surround the place...someone gets the kids out first and foremost, then go for the woman...but my dad, he knows the guy, perp was the son of a friend of dad’s who’d died in the mine. Dad had helped him out a time or two. Had been certain that if we surrounded the place, we’d lose him, send him over the edge. Maybe killing his whole family. But if Shephard Redmond went in alone, he was equally certain that he could talk him down. Get him to give up the gun and no one would be hurt. We all disagreed, as a department, en masse, but old Shep was the sheriff. He made the call. He went alone.

  “Perp didn’t give him a chance to get a word out. Soon as my dad exited his personal vehicle, in jeans, but with his gun up, guy shot him. Dad shot, too, taking the guy with him. No one else got hurt—other than the beating the wife had already taken.”

  “Sounds like your dad knew someone was going to die. Why else would he have gotten out with his gun up? Or been able to get a shot off so quickly? Sounds like he knew whoever he sent in was going to get shot.”

  Her words stunned him. As in sitting there, open-mouthed, staring and seeing nothing.

  It was so obvious? Why hadn’t seen it? Why hadn’t anyone else figured that out? They were cops. And...they all knew.

  They all knew.

  Probably assumed Jackson had figured it out, too. Maybe that’s why no one asked him to talk about it. Because the Redmond way was to do the job, serve the town, with no glory.

  Glory blinded a guy.

  Allowed him to be open to being bought.

  And Redmonds weren’t that.

  Jackson wasn’t that.

  He’d trusted Boyd Evergreen because he’d taken him at face value. Because he’d grown up being taught to respect him. Because all he’d ever seen, in all his life of knowing him, were Boyd Evergreen’s good actions. The bad had been hidden—even from his own flesh and blood.

  Turned out he really was his father’s son.

  And he was damned thankful for that.

  And thankful to Aimee Barker for giving him pieces of himself he’d been missing.

  * * *

  She went to bed with him. There was no conversation about it. Or during it, either. They made love as passionately, and for as long, as they had the night before. Her on top. Him on top. Side by side. Upside, downside, with their hands, their mouths, their bodies. And other than talking about the pleasure in the moment, there were no words spoken between them.

  No breaching the wall between real life and making the darkness bearable.

  And morning came far too soon. Before dawn.

  Jackson’s phone rang just after five. Leon, back on the job, telling him that the perp had been caught. A guy who’d worked at Grayson’s long time mental facility had been on Boyd’s payroll for years. Mostly keeping a close eye in case Grayson started to regain any facilities and start talking. After the place burned, the perp was out of work, and willing to do what Boyd needed. His fingerprints matched that found on the explosives, and his phone’s GPS showed that he’d been by the nursery on the day Aimee had been run off the road.