Читать книгу Dead Giveaway - Brenda Novak - Страница 10

“There you are.” Allie twisted to see Officer Hendricks standing in the doorway of the storage closet, rubbing his giant belly as if he had indigestion. It wouldn’t have surprised Allie if he did. He ate more than anyone she’d ever known; he had a grease stain on his collar right now.

“What ya workin’ on?” he asked, hooking his thumbs into his belt and leaning against the doorjamb.

That was rather obvious since she was sitting on the floor with the Barker files spread out in front of her. But, contrary to what a police uniform generally signified, Hendricks wasn’t known for his deductive reasoning. “I’m searching for leads on the Barker case,” she replied.

“Leads?” He scowled. “Why? We already know the devil who did it.”

“We do?” She arched a sardonic eyebrow at him.

He reacted by scratching the top of his head, where his thinning blond hair had been reduced to a mere three or four strands. “Shoot, you’re the one who took Beth Ann’s statement.”

“And you can prove what she’s saying is true?”

“Just because we can’t prove Clay’s the one, doesn’t mean he ain’t,” he countered.

She’d heard that line from almost everyone in town. But she wouldn’t accept it from a fellow cop. “You can suspect all you want. But it doesn’t mean anything until you collect the proper evidence. Without it, we don’t have a case.”

“The evidence is there somewhere,” he said. “We just haven’t found the thread that’ll unravel it all.”

“That’s why I’m combing through the files, trying to figure out what’s been overlooked.”

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his forehead. It was cold outside—cool in the station, too—but he always sweated profusely. “Last I heard, your daddy didn’t want us messin’ with the Barker case no more.”

She retrieved another stack of files from the box in front of her. “He doesn’t want me wasting a lot of time on it, and I’m not.” When he left, her father had been too preoccupied to give her any new assignments. And it was a quiet night. She didn’t see any problem with pushing forward. She’d promised Madeline Barker some answers, and knew Clay’s stepsister would be calling any day to check on her progress. Madeline touched base with her once a week, sometimes more often.

Besides, Allie knew if she wasn’t intent on some goal, she’d nod off the way Hendricks usually did. She’d been up since Whitney woke her at two-thirty this afternoon, doing homework with her daughter, taking Whitney to her piano lesson, helping her mother with dinner, and then going through Whitney’s bedtime routine. She was exhausted, but felt she owed the taxpayers. She believed pursuing the Barker case was the highest and best use of her skills. Maybe it was nineteen years old, but it was still very present in the minds of so many—Reverend Barker’s daughter and extended family, the Montgomerys, Jed Fowler, who’d fixed the tractor at the farm the night it all happened, Reverend Portenski, who’d taken over for Barker at the church, and Reverend Barker’s whole congregation. Even the Archers had a stake in it now that their son had married Grace—and they were a very prominent family.

Allie couldn’t imagine why her father would make this case such a low priority, especially when he used to be so determined to solve it. He’d often berated his predecessor for bungling the original investigation and swore if it had been handled correctly they would’ve had the answers ages ago.

So why not handle it correctly now?

“What are you findin’ that we don’t already know?” Hendricks asked.

“Not much,” she said. But she was actually quite intrigued by the report she held in her hand. According to Officer Farlow, the officer whose position she took when he moved to Tennessee, Reverend Barker’s nephew had found the pocket Bible Reverend Barker had carried with him everywhere. This was last July, and it had since been released into Madeline’s care, but Joe claimed he’d discovered it at a campground on Pickwick Lake and insisted that Grace Montgomery had buried it there.

Records confirmed that Kennedy Archer had rented a spot at the campground during the month in question. Kennedy readily admitted Grace had been there with him, along with his two boys. But both he and Grace denied knowing anything about the Bible. Interestingly enough, Joe had camped with them one night, and although he and Kennedy had once been good friends, they were now pointing fingers at each other. Joe said it was Grace who’d stashed Barker’s Bible; Kennedy suggested Joe had buried it there in an attempt to frame Grace.

Allie could see how Kennedy might be tempted to lie in order to protect the woman he loved. But she could also understand why Joe might resort to providing the police with “proof” against the Montgomerys. He was positive they were responsible for the death of his uncle and wanted to see them punished. He figured he’d waited too long. But, prior to last July, the Bible hadn’t been seen since the reverend went missing. If Joe had planted it, where did he get it in the first place?

She made a note to ask Madeline if she could take a look at it.

Hendricks gathered phlegm in his mouth and spat into the wastebasket behind her, jerking her out of her concentration.

“Do you mind?” she asked, disgusted by the crude noise.

“Mind what?” he replied and pointed at her notepad. “What’s that you’re writing?”

If she ignored him, would he leave? she wondered hopefully. But she wasn’t that lucky. Her silence only encouraged him to hunch down and peer over her shoulder. “If…Joe…found…the…Bible…at…the…campsite…as…he…claims…how…did…he…know…where…to…look?” He read slowly, trying to decipher her handwriting. “Where…else…could…he…have…gotten…it? Who…has…it…now?”

“Hendricks, don’t you have—” Allie started, but he interrupted her.

“Heck, I can answer those questions for you.” He used the door frame to straighten because his knees struggled beneath his weight. “Grace took the Bible off Reverend Barker when Clay killed him, just like Joe says.”

“Then why would she keep it for so long before trying to dispose of it? She was an assistant district attorney, for crying out loud, and very successful at her job. Don’t you think she’d know better than to hang on to something that would raise so much suspicion if she was caught with it?”

“Maybe she was moving it to another hiding place,” he said. “Like she tried moving Reverend Barker’s body.”

“There’s no proof that she was moving anyone’s body,” Allie reminded him.

“What do you suppose she was doing at the farm in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a shovel?”

“According to her—” Allie thumbed through some sheets of paper, came up with the statement she’d read only a few minutes earlier and quoted Grace. “‘After hearing so many people accuse my mother and brother of killing my stepfather, I was finally ready to see for myself if he was buried out behind the barn.’”

“Yeah, right,” Hendricks said.

“She wouldn’t want to do it in the middle of the day—let anyone else know she’d begun to doubt her family. Besides, if they knew what she had planned, they might’ve tried to stop her. Makes sense.”

“I don’t care. I don’t believe her.”

Allie wasn’t sure she believed Grace, either. But she wasn’t going to jump to the same conclusions as everyone else. When she operated from a preconceived notion, she often missed the most salient clues in a case. She’d learned that the hard way. While tracking down a serial rapist in Chicago, she’d been so sure it was one man when it was really another that she’d misled the whole task force and the real culprit had slipped away. It had taken them an additional two years to find him. “We can’t prove she’s lying,” she said. “As a matter of fact, right now we can’t prove anything. Joe marked the spot where Grace was digging, then we took a backhoe to Clay’s farm. And what did we get for our trouble? The remains of the family dog, which died of old age before Barker ever went missing. That’s it.”

“We?” he challenged.

“The police,” she clarified.

“I was there, and I’m telling you, as soon as we struck bone Grace was sure we’d found Barker. You should’ve seen her. She nearly fainted when we pulled that skull from the ground.”

“She might’ve thought it proved someone in her family had killed her stepfather. She actually says that’s what she thought in here.” Allie slapped the report on the concrete floor. “Finding out that you’re so closely related to a murderer would be shocking for most people.”

“I think she already knew her brother had done the evil deed and she was scared he’d get caught.”

Allie stretched her legs in front of her because they were getting cramped from being crossed for so long. “Then why didn’t we find any human remains?”

“Because Clay moved the body before we could get there, that’s why.”

“Was Clay watching you dig?” she asked.

“Yes sirree. No one steps onto his property without him knowing it. And it’s best to get permission—with or without a search warrant. It could be dangerous to startle him.”

She set aside the report she’d been reading, interested at last. “Did he seem nervous? Frightened? Like Grace?”

“How could you ever tell? That man’s made of stone.”

Allie remembered the subtle evidence of vulnerability she’d witnessed in Clay last night, the embarrassment and humiliation, the anger and simmering resentment. He’d tried to flirt with her to ease the discomfort they were both feeling, so he wasn’t without sensitivity.

“He’s as human as the rest of us,” she said.

“No, he’s not. I could put a gun right between his eyes and cock the damn trigger—and he’d dare me to fire. I’ve never seen a tougher sumbitch.”

Clay was tough, all right. Allie suspected that life had made him that way. How else would he have survived the constant doubt, the suspicion, anger and animosity he’d battled for so many years? Allie could only wonder why he hadn’t moved as far away from Stillwater as possible. What kept him around? The farm? As Barker’s wife, Irene had inherited it when he disappeared. Then once Clay had graduated from college, she’d passed it on to him. Allie wasn’t sure what kind of an agreement he had with his mother and sisters as far as the property was concerned, but surely he could sell out, pay them off if he owed them money, and buy another piece of land where no one had ever heard of the missing reverend.

“Why do you think he stays put?” she asked. If he’d killed Barker and buried him at the farm, that would explain it. But if he was innocent…

“Where else would he go?” Hendricks asked.

“There must be towns where he’d be welcomed. He’s young, strong, handsome. Without Reverend Barker’s disappearance hanging over his head, he’d be like anyone else.”

Hendricks wiped the perspiration beading on his forehead. “Guess he stays ’cause he’s got family in the area.”

Why didn’t they all find a new home? Allie wondered. Molly, the youngest of Irene’s children at thirty, had left as soon as she graduated from high school. According to Madeline, she was currently designing clothes in New York. Grace had left, too, but she’d come back, and now that she was married to Kennedy Archer, Allie didn’t think she’d leave again. Kennedy, along with his father, owned the bank. He wouldn’t want to uproot his boys, abandon the family business and leave his parents. His father had just survived a bout with cancer. But Clay and Irene had never even attempted to get away. When he returned from college, she’d moved into town and let him take over at the farm. And that was that.

“Do you know much about Clay’s background?” she asked, adjusting her position so she could see Hendricks without putting a crick in her neck.

“Aren’t the details all there, in the files?” he asked.

Some of them were. But the Stillwater police force hadn’t investigated many missing persons—or murders, for that matter—and the files weren’t as detailed as they should be. She was looking for the word-of-mouth snippets her father and his predecessors had deemed unrelated or unimportant. If Hendricks was going to impose his presence on her, she figured she might as well learn what he knew. He loved gossip and generally picked up on whatever was being said around town. “There’re a few bare facts. Where he was born, that sort of thing.”

“He was born in Booneville, wasn’t he?”

She nodded.

“My little sister was in his class when he moved here. Said he made good marks in school. Until he was older.”

“Did his grades start to fall before or after Reverend Barker went missing?”

“Mary Lee told me it happened about the same time, but I’ve never checked his transcripts.”

“What about his natural father?” she asked.

“Ran off is all I heard.”

Clay’s file indicated that much, but no more. “Has anyone ever tried to locate Mr. Montgomery?”

“Not that I recall. Why?”

She shrugged, but to her surprise, Hendricks caught on, anyway.

“You don’t think Clay might’ve killed him, too?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m no genius, but my guess is Clay would’ve been too young.”

He didn’t respond to the sarcasm in her voice. “So you were thinking of Irene? Of course!” He clapped his hands as if they’d just solved the case. “Now I know why they paid you the big bucks in Chicago. I doubt anyone else has even thought of that.”

Probably because Allie was the only person in Stillwater jaded enough to consider it. The cops on her father’s force had never come up against the kind of heinous criminals she’d dealt with. “It’s worth checking,” she said slowly.

“Sure. Makes sense.” Hendricks’s head bobbed like the bobble-headed puppy Allie’s grandmother used to display in the rear window of her giant Oldsmobile. “If Clay’s father was alive, he would’ve come around at some point. The Montgomerys have lived in Stillwater for…what, twenty-three years? But no one’s seen hide nor hair of him. Curious, ain’t it?”

If Clay’s father was dead, and the circumstances surrounding his death were at all suspicious, Allie needed to examine that coincidence. But Hendricks was getting more excited than such a slim possibility warranted. “Not necessarily. There could be lots of reasons we’ve never seen him. So don’t get carried away,” she cautioned. “Chances are, Mr. Montgomery’s alive and well and living in some other state.”

“Right,” he said, but she could tell he wasn’t really listening. He was too busy jumping ahead. “If we got Irene for one murder, we’d get her for the other. It’s brilliant.”

“Hendricks.” She stood and grabbed hold of his arm to make sure he understood that she was serious. “It’s a real long shot, so don’t go spreading it around.”

“Who me?” He waved a dismissive hand. “I won’t breathe a word,” he said. But it wasn’t a day later that someone approached her at the Piggly Wiggly to ask if Irene Montgomery was a serial killer.

Reverend Portenski’s hand shook as he removed the floorboard in the far corner of the old church and reached into the dark hole beneath. He had stumbled upon this small recess quite by accident a decade ago, when he was moving furniture and doing some repairs to the building—and had rued the day ever since.

If only God would let him know what he should do with what he’d found. While trying to decide, he’d replaced the heavy table that had hidden the loose floorboard and tried to forget its existence, to forget what was beneath. But during the dark quiet hours of the night, when the pressures of the day began to dissipate, he remembered the contents of this hiding place, which conjured up images he wished he’d never seen.

After ten years, he was tired of the guilt, the nagging worry, the indecision. It was time to put the matter to rest. He pulled the paper sack from the hole and walked as quickly as his arthritic joints would allow to the small study at the back of the church.

A fire burned in the sparsely furnished room. He wasn’t as poverty-stricken as such a study might indicate. He could’ve afforded more elegant appointments. But he had no wife or children to make comfortable and eschewed all but the most necessary physical possessions. He craved knowledge and enlightenment, and believed that intelligence was the true glory of God. So he spent every dime he possessed, above what he devoted to the church and his flock, on books. They lined the room on three sides, residing on makeshift shelves he’d built himself, using unfinished wooden planks and cinder blocks.

It was a sacrilege to bring what he carried into this room. The words of some of the greatest men who’d ever lived—renowned philosophers and theologians—resided here. But the devouring heat and glimmering flames of the fire beckoned.

Portenski pressed closer. He felt as if the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels as he drew his hand back to toss the sack into the fire.

Do it! Throw it! his mind screamed. And never think of it again.

But he couldn’t. As much as he wanted to protect the church and the faith of his parishioners, he couldn’t in all conscience destroy what he’d found. Neither could he take it to the police. He’d waited too long. Besides, doing that wouldn’t change anything; it was too late.

Which brought him right back where he’d been for the past ten years: he was the guardian of a secret he could neither tell nor keep.

Slumping into his seat, he slowly opened the sack and spread several Polaroid pictures on the desk.

As penance, he forced himself to focus on each one—and then he threw up.

His mother was calling him.

Clay shaded his face with his arm and gazed toward the driveway that circled around to the chicken coop, barn and outbuildings. Sure enough, there she was, hurrying toward him in a red dress, a flamboyant hat and high heels.

“Stay there, I’m coming,” he called and dropped his shovel before she could break an ankle in the loose gravel. He’d been cleaning out irrigation ditches all morning. The exertion made his long-sleeved T-shirt stick to him, but it was actually a mild, overcast day.

“Have you heard?” his mother cried before he could reach her.

He didn’t know what she was talking about. If the shrillness of her voice was any indication, he didn’t want to know. But she wouldn’t have left the boutique where she worked unless it was important.

He braced himself for the worst. “What’s wrong?”

“Allie McCormick is searching for Lucas.”

He’d expected to hear Barker’s name. “Lucas?”

“Your father, Clay! Don’t you remember the name of your own father?”

With one sleeve, he wiped the perspiration rolling from his temple. Of course he remembered his father’s name. It was just that he didn’t think about Lucas anymore. He had more pressing concerns. But there’d been a time when he’d longed for his father on a daily basis—to the point of nearly making himself ill.

“Why is she looking for him?” he asked.

“Folks are saying I killed him! Can you believe it? He’s probably as alive as you and me, and a darn sight richer.”

He raised a hand. “Whoa, slow down. Why would Allie be interested in Lucas? He’s got nothing to do with Reverend Barker or Stillwater or anything else. He’s never even been here.”

“She thinks I’m some sort of black widow. Mrs. Little just told me.”

Mrs. Little owned the dress store where Irene worked five days a week. Although the Littles had been grudging with their friendship at first, and still kept the relationship mostly on a professional level, they were kinder to Irene than anyone else in town.

“So she’s searching for him,” Clay said with a shrug. “Let her. The more time she spends on Lucas, the less she can spend on Barker.”

“But what if she finds him?”

“Maybe she can collect the back child support he owes you.”

She made a face. “Stop being facetious. I’ll never see a dime from him, and you know it. Not at this late date. I don’t even want his money.”

Clay didn’t understand why she was so worked up. “What exactly are you worried about?”

“If she contacts him, it might bring him here. I don’t want that.”

“He won’t bother us, not after so many years.”

“He could see it as an opportunity to make amends,” she said. “Especially with you. You were the oldest. He knew you best.”

Clay brushed some of the dirt from his pants. His father had never come back. Not even for him. It was a wound that would likely never heal. But he refused to indulge in self-pity.

Anyway, something else was going on. He could feel it. “You think I’d welcome him back?”

“You used to worship the ground he walked on,” she said.

She was right. Lucas Montgomery had once been Clay’s hero. He was the man who showed up on payday and took them to town for an ice-cream cone. The man who waltzed Irene around the kitchen, or pretended her spatula was a microphone, making them all laugh. The man who held Molly on his lap until she fell asleep, then tucked her safely in bed. Clay’s life—and he assumed it was the same for the rest of his family—had been better, more complete whenever Lucas was around. He couldn’t lie about that.

But even when Clay was only five or six, Lucas had stopped coming home on a regular basis. And when he began staying away two and three days at a time, the fighting started. Clay could still hear his mother pleading with his father. “Lucas, you’ve gotta stop drinkin’ and carousin’, do ya hear? The water bill’s due. What we gonna do if we can’t pay the water?” and “You’ve got children to take care of now, Lucas. How’s Clay gonna learn to be a man if you don’t stick around and teach him?” His father always said, “It has nothin’ to do with drinkin’, Irene. I’m still a young man. I’ve got a lot of life to live, a lot of places to see.And I can’t do that strapped down to a wife and three kids.”

Clay had initially sympathized with his father. It was his mother who was wrong, who tried to tell his daddy that he couldn’t have any fun. She was the reason he didn’t stick around like he used to. Then Lucas abandoned them altogether, and Clay was forced to grow up almost overnight. As he worked for the local feed store, making less than half of what he would’ve been paid as an adult, Clay had realized which parent really loved him.

Occasionally, he still felt guilty for the way he’d blamed his mother during those years. But, as a child, he’d found it was difficult to fault the parent who was always smiling and saying, “I’m just funnin’, Irene, don’t get yourself in a state.”

“There’s no reason to worry,” he told his mother. “I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“It’s his fault, you know. We’d still be living in Booneville if it wasn’t for him.”

“I know,” Clay said. When his father walked out, he’d left Irene so destitute she’d almost lost her children. Without an education, she couldn’t make enough to feed them. Clay remembered eating nothing but oatmeal for one entire summer. So when Reverend Barker had asked Irene to marry him, she’d agreed mostly out of desperation. They all knew that. Clay suspected even Barker understood. How else could he have gotten a woman so much younger and so much more attractive than he was?

At least Irene had gone into the relationship determined to be a good wife, to make the best of what she considered a second chance. Clay remembered her treating Reverend Barker’s daughter, Madeline, the same as Grace and Molly, remembered her pulling him aside to say that the reverend might not be a handsome scoundrel, or make them laugh, but he had his priorities straight. He was a man of God, and they were finally going to be a complete and happy family.

Little did she know life would only get worse from then on…

“Talk to Allie, convince her to stop what she’s doing,” Irene said.

Clay blew out a long breath. “Why? Let her do what she wants and ignore it. If you react, she’ll know she’s struck a nerve and she’ll keep after it.”

“But she has struck a nerve! You need to explain how it was for us after Lucas left. Tell her not to bother with him.”

“Mom, you’re not making any sense. If Dad hasn’t looked back before now, what makes you think he’s going to? And even if he does, I’ve just told you it won’t make any difference to me. I’m sure Grace and Molly feel the same. You have nothing to lose.”

She clasped her hands tightly. “That’s not true,” she said, her gaze intense.

Clay narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“He called me once,” she admitted.

“When?”

“Not long after Lee died.”

“How’d he find you?”

“Everyone in Booneville, including his own cousin, knows I married a reverend and moved to Stillwater. I’m sure it wasn’t hard.”

Clay jammed a hand through his hair. “Okay, he called once. Why is that so significant?”

“I was at my lowest, Clay. I—I was inches away from a nervous breakdown. Grace was…you know what Grace was like after what that bastard did to her. She’d walled herself off from both of us. And Molly was just a little girl, confused but mostly oblivious.You were all I had, and you were only sixteen.”

Adrenaline began to pound through Clay’s veins. “Tell me you didn’t,” he said.

“Clay, I needed him. I—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was so desperate that I pleaded with him to come back.”

His chest constricted. “How much did you tell him?”

“All of it,” she said. “I had to talk to someone, let the pain out. My head was going to explode if I didn’t. And I thought if he knew what we were facing and how unfair it all was, he’d stand by me and be the man I’d always wanted him to be. How could any man hear how his daughter had been abused, defiled by her own stepfather, and not support her?”

Anxiety made it difficult to speak. “What did he say?”

“He promised to come. He was living in Alaska, said it was beautiful and that he’d move us up there with him.”

Clay dropped his head in his hands. “Even if he’d kept that promise, we couldn’t have left,” he said. “You knew that. We still can’t. The moment we sell the farm, the police will get the new owner’s permission to search, and they’ll go over every inch.”

“Maybe he realized that,” she said softly.

“Because…”

Her gaze fell to the ground. “I never heard from him again.”

“God.” Clay squinted into the distance, out across the cotton fields. What was he going to do? If Allie tracked down his father and started questioning him, there was no telling what Lucas might say. And once the details of Barker’s death were revealed, they wouldn’t be hard to prove. The police would find Barker’s car in the quarry, where Clay had driven it. They’d get another warrant to search for Barker’s remains, and this time they wouldn’t walk away empty-handed. Clay had poured cement over the earthen floor of the cellar, but that wouldn’t stop them. “What if he’s told someone? What if he tells Allie?”

“He swore he wouldn’t.”

As if that counted for anything. “Can’t you get Chief McCormick to call off his daughter?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? He won’t even mention my name in front of her.”

“What the hell does he think happened to Barker? Has he ever asked you about it?”

“No. We’ve never discussed it. I don’t think he wants to know.”

Clay clenched his jaw. “You’ve heard from Dale recently, then?”

“He called me yesterday.”

“What did he say?”

“He misses me.”

Clay knew from the way she’d spoken that she missed him, too. “Did you tell him it was over?”

She cringed visibly.

“Mom!”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “It was the first time we’ve been able to talk in over a week. But I will. I promise,” she added quickly. “Just get Allie to quit searching for Lucas, okay? You have to stop her before she contacts him.”

Clay rubbed the whiskers on his chin. He had no leverage with Officer McCormick. She wouldn’t back off because he asked her to. Especially after the other night. “What can I do?” he asked.

“She’s lonely,” his mother volunteered.

He rocked back. “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

She straightened her hat, as if she needed to keep her hands busy. “Women like you, Clay. You can make Allie like you, too. You could even make her fall in love, if you wanted. A woman will do anything for love.”

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. I won’t play with her heart.”

“But she’s attractive and—”

“No!”

“Okay, don’t go that far. Just…be nice to her, take her out a few times. Maybe you’ll enjoy her company. You never know. You could do worse than end up with a woman like Allie.”

Clay couldn’t believe it. “Are you insane?” he asked. “How long do you think it would be before she figured out the whole scenario?”

“It’s better to make her your friend than your enemy,” she replied. “You’re not opposed to having another female friend, are you?”

He said nothing.

“Come on,” she continued. “Madeline says she’s very nice.”

His mother didn’t need to convince him of that. He could already tellAllie was a good person. She’d certainly been fair with him the other night, despite the prejudice he faced from the rest of the community.

“I don’t know,” he said. He couldn’t imagine befriending a cop under any circumstances. He’d spent too many years avoiding them. But there was wisdom in the old adage “Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.” The more information he gleaned about her investigation—what she was finding and which direction she was going—the more he’d be able to protect himself and his family.

“I don’t like it,” he said. Her suggestion made some sense, but he’d be using Allie, and he didn’t feel right about that. He preferred to keep his distance.

“Can we really afford to hunker down and just hope for the best?”

No. He knew they couldn’t.

“Clay.” His mother touched his arm.

“What?”

“We have to do whatever we can.”

She was right. He couldn’t pretend Allie didn’t have the skills and determination to reveal what—so far—he’d managed to hide. Maybe he should spend some time with her, try to neutralize the threat. What better choice did he have? He could be careful, maintain just enough distance.

He wondered if he’d ever be able to throw off the yoke of the past. “Fine,” he said with a sigh.

His mother smiled in apparent relief, as if she thought he’d crook his finger and Allie would forget all about Lucas and Barker. Problem solved.

If only it was that simple.