Chapter 6 Carrie #2
“What a jerk,” Alisha hissed.
“Wait,” Carrie said, gentling the cut. “What they told you wasn’t true.”
“Oh, really?” Cheryl’s mouth thinned. “Where was he then? He ran the minute his parents saved him from me.”
“No,” Carrie said softly. “His parents forced him to go. He told me. It was the only way they knew to keep him from finding you and trying again.”
“You’re lying,” Cheryl snapped, but the words didn’t strike as hard as they might have. Hope and hatred were fighting tooth and nail behind her eyes.
“They lied to both of you,” Carrie continued. “They told him you’d run off with another man. He was as gutted as you. He wrote. The letters came back.”
“Convenient,” Cheryl said, but the certainty had lost its crisp edge.
“Instead of tearing his life apart to punish him,” Alisha said bluntly, “try sitting across from him and telling the truth. And while you’re at it, fix the land mess you helped build.” She turned to Carrie. “Cheryl knows exactly what the lease-sale fraud is.”
“That wasn’t my idea,” Cheryl shot back quickly. “It was Dick’s parents’. They thought it poetic that Ian would think he was buying what he’d always wanted and discover he was only renting it. Dick told them Ian had approached my mother after my father died and made an offer.”
“How did Dick come back into your life?” Carrie asked. The timeline had a fishbone stuck in it.
“I’ve known Dick for years,” Cheryl answered.
“We all went to school together in Key West—me, Dick, Ian. I ran into Dick after college. He said he and Ian were going into business—Key Developers. It made me furious. Dick helped me. He helped me get off the floor I was mopping—literally—and start a wedding business. I sewed. I planned. I became very good at it.”
“You’re the celebrity planner,” Carrie said, and Cheryl inclined her head, the compliment a currency that still worked.
“That was thanks to Dick’s introductions,” Cheryl continued.
“Then his parents learned who I was. They embraced me. They took my son as a grandson. They were… very persuasive.” The word tasted bad in her mouth.
“I know who they are. I know what they did. I know what I did by letting them steer. I didn’t set out to hurt Ian or Trevor or your father,” she told Alisha.
“I wanted to hurt my mother. The rest was collateral I told myself I could ignore.”
“Convenient,” Alisha said again, scorn flattening the syllables.
“Katy was helping us clean up,” Cheryl said, pushing forward before the scorn could expand and choke the words.
“Dick had already begun to unwind bad deals—quietly. He didn’t want his parents to know; he was afraid of them.
He shielded his partners when he could. He got ready to split the business, bleed the old shell, and start up a legitimate company with Ian and Trevor in the clear.
Then the woman at Monroe County—the one before Katy—started cozying up to him.
She was supposed to be helping my side of the table.
She had access. She liked playing in the dark. He let her think there was… more.”
Cheryl’s nostrils flared. “She switched sides when she realized he didn’t love her. She went to the Feds. They closed his company. They started rounding up Stanstead men like it was a sporting match.”
Carrie heard the bitterness there, and beneath it, a tremor of relief that someone had finally caught the bigger wolves.
“And Trent got her to keep feeding,” Alisha said, connecting dots that were suddenly less scattered. “She disappeared. Is she going to wash up on a beach too?”
“We have never killed anyone,” Cheryl said, each word clipped and cold. “That’s not our way. That’s their way. And no—your boyfriend’s people put her into protective custody. After that, everything started to shut down around us.”
“When?” Carrie asked, thinking of the “Closed Indefinitely” sign and the hollowed-out office.
“About a year ago,” Cheryl replied. “But Dick kept working to right what he could. He even offered information on his parents to the FBI.” She slid a sharp look at Alisha. “Before you ask, no—Katy was never a liability to be removed. Dick loved her.”
“What happened to Dick?” Alisha asked, circling back to the only question that had any hope of forward momentum.
“You tell me,” Cheryl said, hunger and fear scraping the polish off the words.
“We went to his apartment to look for anything that might help before the official search swallowed it,” Alisha said. “He was there. Tied to the bed. The air conditioner was on high. He was barely alive.” Her gaze narrowed. “Are you disappointed to hear it?”
“Alisha,” Carrie warned, and turned to Cheryl. “I’m sorry about Katy. I’m sorry about Dick’s condition. But if you want me to help you—legally—you have to be honest. Do you believe Dick killed Katy?”
“No.” Cheryl didn’t hesitate. “He would never. He asked me for a divorce. He was going to run away with her. We were waiting for his silent partner to be removed.”
“What partner?” Alisha asked. “Katy’s diary says all he had to do was get rid of a partner.”
“His parents,” Cheryl said simply. “We were waiting for the arrests we knew were coming. We also needed Katy to secure the files Trevor and Ian had gathered on Dick and the company. We wanted to clean everything, hand over what belonged in a courtroom… and walk away.”
“Be excused,” Alisha translated.
“Call it what you like,” Cheryl retorted.
Then, as if the pressure inside her chest had found a seam, she let one last piece break loose.
“Someone leaked that Trevor and Ian were building a case. The leak ran to the Stanstead side. The plan shifted. They were going to dump everything on us. Even deals we had nothing to do with. Even my business. They would have said it was a front. They would have pointed and said ‘look at the money’ and people would have believed them because it was easy.”
“Why should we believe you now?” Alisha asked.
“Because I can prove it,” Cheryl said quietly. “I hid what matters. Dick has spent three years undoing what he could. We had almost untangled the last knot—Lost Love Cove. Then someone told his parents what we were doing. Before we could find the missing piece, Trevor sold my mother’s house.”
“The one ‘sold’ to my father,” Alisha said, drawing air quotes with acid in the gesture.
“We let it go through,” Cheryl admitted. “We had to. Dick’s assistant went on maternity leave in the middle of it. Dick was out with me chasing another line that would have let us fix the cove cleanly without tipping his parents that we were the ones cutting their strings.”
Carrie lifted a hand. “Pause. Why is the property still in probate if Delia died five years ago? Why were we told the county was searching for a missing heir?” Her brow knitted. “When clearly you had already been in touch with attorneys.”
A sound slipped from Cheryl that might have been a laugh if it weren’t so sharp.
“Because I’m not my mother’s heir.” She held both of their eyes in the silence that followed and took the smallest, most satisfied breath.
“She left everything to a daughter she had before me. A girl she gave up so she could marry my father.”
The room went very still. The only sound was the faint, relentless hush of the sea beyond the balcony as it pressed and pulled the shore, as if it had all the time in the world to hear what came next.
END OF BOOK FIVE