Chapter Twenty-One
The Bennet Ranch
Aly woke with a start at the sound of a loud bang. Her hand flew to her heart, where it galloped in shock and fear, as she looked around.
She didn’t remember falling asleep, but apparently she had. She looked down at the broomstick in her hand. Right, she’d been sweeping and then had just thought to sit down and enjoy the sun streaming in the windows and…
Hurricane Sam apparently had landed. And slammed the door for good measure.
Sam looked down at Aly in the chair. “Sorry,” she said.
She didn’t exactly look apologetic though. She looked furious.
Not unusual for what had been going on, but still. “Is everything all ri—”
“Where’s Landon? Skinny said he was up here.”
“Oh. I…” Aly looked around, fuzzy and out of it.
Landon was in the house? Had he caught her napping? She had told him after lunch she was more than fine, so that would be a little embarrassing, but why would Landon be at the house at … Aly looked over at the clock on the wall.
It was dinner time. Good Lord, how much energy was growing this baby going to sap out of her?
Aly got to her feet, worked to breathe through the wave of nausea, just about the same time Landon rushed in. “Is everything okay? I heard a bang. I was just making dinner.”
“Landon.” It was chastisement, but he didn’t even spare her a glance.
He was clearly concerned Sam’s loud arrival was bad news.
“Remember last year when you made a list of everyone who would have had that Bennet pocketknife?” Sam demanded.
Landon shook his head as if to change gears. “Um, yeah, I guess.”
“Do you still have it?”
Landon blew out a breath, clearly trying to remember. “Probably on that old piece of junk computer in the office.”
“Will you get it?”
“Yeah, just … give me a second.” He started to move back toward the kitchen, but when Aly took a step toward him, he stopped, held up a hand.
“Nope. Have a seat. I’ve got dinner.”
“Landon, I can handle—”
“You’ll handle sitting.”
She was about to argue again, but Landon nodded toward Sam.
A silent kind of watch her. Aly wasn’t sure he believed he was doing that out of any concern for Sam, but she supposed he was right that dealing with Sam’s strange request and angry demeanor was more important than rushing to deal with the dinner she’d slept through preparing.
Sam paced. Energy pumped off her. Not unusual, but it left Aly feeling uneasy.
Aly set the broom aside and lowered herself back into the chair. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“I went by the house to pick up a few more things,” Sam said, still pacing, though she stopped at the window for a moment and looked out, before resuming the harsh strides from one side of the room to another. “Jake appeared at the door, all ready to convince me I’m wrong about Nate.”
Aly nearly shrieked. She’d kind of liked Jake Hayes, sometimes. Even if he was a little abrasive. She thought he was a bit like Cal and Nate. Troubled. Maybe some old trauma haunted him.
But this? This was beyond any kind of troubled behavior. “What? Like he’s stalking you?”
Sam paused for a second, and Aly could see Sam hadn’t considered that part of it.
Her eyebrows drew together. “Stalking,” she echoed. “I just stopped by for ten, fifteen minutes tops. How would he know to come to the door? Why was he on my street in the first place?”
“That isn’t right. You should lodge a complaint against him. It’s harassment.”
Sam nodded. “Maybe. Maybe I will. But first I want to figure out what he let slip.”
Landon returned with the old laptop. “Pasta is done, just have to mix it with the sauce or whatever. Here.” He handed the laptop to Sam. “It’s still thinking, but the document should pop up once it’s done. Now, what is this about?”
Sam took the laptop, plopped on the couch. “Jake came to my house when I was picking up some things. Talking about how there was evidence and I needed to face it and blah, blah, blah. Then he tells me that one piece of evidence they recovered at the scene is a Bennet pocketknife.”
Landon frowned. “And Nate is missing his?”
Sam glared up at Landon. “No. It wasn’t Nate’s. Nate’s was at home on the hook where it always is. He keeps an extra set of keys on it. He doesn’t carry it around, so this piece of evidence is wrong. And I want to know how this random knife got there and whose it is.”
“I have mine in a box with my dad’s, Landon’s, and some of Benjamin’s things,” Aly said, wringing her hands together. “I put them all there after last year. I’m pretty sure Cal has his.”
“It’s no one in the family,” Sam said. “I’m just about sure of that.
” The document must have popped up because she leaned in, nose practically pressed to the screen.
“I don’t think this is a real connection to anyone we know, but we need to figure out how it got there.
How. All of these people had them when they were questioning Benjamin last year, right? ”
“Yes. Dad claimed he had his. We’ve never found it though, so I always assumed the one the police recovered from the creek was his.”
Sam’s head whipped up. “The one Nate found in the creek that they took for evidence? The one that never connected to anyone?”
“Yeah, that one,” Landon agreed.
“And what happened to that knife? Where did it end up?” Sam demanded.
They all looked at each other, thinking back to last spring when Sam had first brought Nate back to Marietta. When they’d all begun to uncover the truth about Benjamin Bennet.
“No one ever claimed it,” Aly said. “At least no one around here. And if it was Benjamin’s, he was in jail, so he wouldn’t have been able to claim it. So as far as we know … the police would still have it.”
“Which means it should still be at that police station,” Landon said.
Sam’s hands clenched into fists. “And someone from that police station planted it at the murder scene.”
Landon looked at her uneasily. “Look, Sam—”
“No, I’m not flying off the handle.” She had her hands in fists, lifted a little like she was physically fighting the urge to do just that.
“I’m going to call Cal.” She blew out a breath.
“We’re going to work through this in the best way for Nate.
So we’ll call Cal, and tell him, and go from there.
” She blew out a slow breath, clearly still fighting the urge to fly off the handle.
Aly exchanged a glance with Landon, but Aly saw that same flicker of fury she’d noted there the other day. He did a better job of leashing it than Sam, but eventually…
All this leashed fury from everyone was going to fray.