Chapter Forty-Four
Isla and Bowen left the library, and she knew she owed him something now. He had behaved, kept quiet while she looked, asked very few questions for a cop. He was definitely very different from his partner back then.
He asked, “My turn now?” They stood between their parked cars, one cop, one civilian.
She clutched her bag, holding the printed copies of the article to her side, and nodded for him to continue. She braced herself for what she would tell and what she wouldn’t. He studied her.
“Why the rush to leave back then?”
When she and Bowen had crossed paths back then, she hadn’t known him and had said nothing. Today, she knew him a little more and still said little because she still didn’t know enough. “I had a bus to catch?”
He narrowed his eyes, not buying it. “Now you’re at the Corrigans’. Word like that goes around fast. Plus, you’ve been talking to people in town.”
She nodded, shifting and making it obvious their time was running out.
“Now you’re back,” he said. “And running up against an extremely powerful family with unlimited resources. You’re playing with real fire here, you know? Are you sure you need to continue down this path?”
She was too far on it to get off. The only way was to see it through to the end.
He straightened, his gray eyes concerned. He handed her a card with his contact information.
“I hear you, Detective Bowen.” He, like Myles, was warning her off. “I appreciate your concern.”
He waved her off, breaking their eye contact. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t able to help you back then, and the way you ran off has always bugged me. This is the least I can do. I can help if you need me, but you have to be careful.”
She planned to return to the estate and spread everything she had accumulated in her research across the bed in her room.
The timeline was falling into place, and the picture was clearer now but far from complete.
She went back to her talk with James—his cryptic words and profound guilt—and reread the note in Eden’s scrawl that had been tucked into Mommie Dearest, alluding to an incident that had happened before.
The old Abbott farm. Something had happened there on Eden’s last night.
But before that, something else had happened that had changed Eden, Sara had said.
Was it a stretch of the imagination to think someone had made sure to keep silent about the accident, worried about the fallout?
The fact was this: Something horrible had happened afterward that had changed both James and Eden, something that James could never forgive himself for and that had to do with Eden’s eventual departure.
Truth just beyond Isla’s reach pressed on her as she stared at the scattered evidence.
She wasn’t sure what was scarier—the secrets she was uncovering or the realization that she was now a part of them.
Isla was tugging on a loose thread of a tightly bound ball begging to be unraveled.