Chapter 43
The welcome home sign was strung across the back of the house between two posts, the letters painted in Mia's handwriting, slightly uneven, the M in HOME larger than the rest. The smell of charcoal and hickory hung in the warm evening air as Ed stood at the grill with a pair of tongs in one hand and a beer in the other.
The yard was full. Savannah sat in one of the deck chairs with Cora beside her, wrapped in a blanket.
Cora was thinner than the last time Noah had seen her but smiling.
Callie leaned against the porch railing talking to McKenzie, who was gesturing with a bottle and telling a story that was almost certainly exaggerated.
Ray stood near the fence with Hugh, the two of them side by side, not saying much.
Gretchen was helping Mia carry plates from the kitchen.
Ethan sat on the steps scrolling his phone.
Even a few from BCI had made the drive. Felix. Declan Porter, who brought a case of beer and shook Noah's hand twice. Pete Moss and Evelyn Cross, who arrived together and stayed close to each other the way people do when they don't know many faces at the party.
The night had gone as well as any night as they entered the first of the summer months. The light held late and the mountains turned blue in the distance and the fireflies were just beginning to show in the treeline at the edge of the yard.
"Thanks again for coming," Noah said, waving off Savannah and Cora as they headed down the front steps to their car. Savannah waved back. Cora turned and gave a small wave of her own, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders. Then the headlights came on and they pulled away.
Noah closed the door. The house was quieter now. Most of the guests had filtered out over the past hour. Mia had headed off to Gretchen's for the night. Ethan said he was visiting a friend. That left just Noah and Callie.
"Cora looked surprisingly well," Callie said from the kitchen doorway.
"Yeah, she does." He picked up a few of the plates and carried them to the sink. "She's been getting some alternative treatment for the cancer. Certainly put a smile back on Savannah's face."
He ran the water and stacked the plates.
The house smelled like smoke and summer, and with the window above the sink open, the night’s warm air came through.
"Hey, I appreciate you coming by."
"I wouldn't have missed it." She leaned against the counter. "So when Mia heads off for college this fall, the place is going to be quiet."
“Uh, huh.” He grinned. “But Ethan will still be here.
Though I'm lucky if I can get a word out of him.
Since the news of Fiona." He took a deep breath and turned off the water.
"You know, I really felt I was reconnecting with him before all this happened.
And now it feels like I've taken ten steps back. "
"He's young, Noah. Trying to figure out his place in the world. We were all there."
"Yeah, but this is a lot for him to process at that age. His mother gone, his first girlfriend. He really adored that girl."
Callie placed a hand on Noah's arm. "He'll come around."
"Yeah. I just hope it's with the right people."
"It will be. He's a Sutherland."
"Not sure that means as much as it used to."
Callie nodded, unsure of what to say to that. She let the silence hold for a moment, then picked up her purse from the counter. "Well, I should head out. I'm back in bright and early tomorrow. I have to cram."
"For the detective exam."
"Right," she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
She headed for the door and he followed.
He opened it for her and she stepped out onto the porch and lingered there for a second.
His gaze roamed the night. Fireflies pulsed in the yard and the mountains were dark shapes against a sky that still held a thin line of blue at the western edge.
"You know, if I pass, we could be working together more often," she said.
"Well, that would beat dealing with that stubborn old haggis."
She laughed. "Oh, I'm sure he's a long way off from retiring."
"Don't remind me." He smiled. "Thanks again for coming and... for what you did."
"Noah, you don't have to keep saying it. I got it the first time."
He stepped in a little closer. Just slightly. As if checking to see whether she would let him. She didn't pull away. He leaned in and kissed her. Not on the lips. On the cheek.
"Playing it safe this time?” she asked.
"Were you expecting more?”
“Maybe.”
He smiled as she turned and walked down the steps to her Jeep. She got in and the headlights flashed and she reversed and pulled away and the taillights disappeared around the curve and into the trees.
Noah stood on the porch for a moment. He felt a lightness come over him that he hadn't felt in a while. He watched the empty road for another moment, then he headed back in and shut off the light.
Natalie Ashford had seen it all through the trees.
It was a habit she'd gotten into over the past year, a way to see Noah without her father knowing. She'd park in a turnoff far out from the property and walk in through the woods on foot. Close enough to watch. Far enough to disappear.
There were two things wrong about that evening.
One was the lack of an invite. She hadn't been invited to his welcome home.
She hadn't even received a thank-you text for the flowers she'd sent.
And then there was the exchange between him and Callie.
She had always had a feeling the two of them were close.
But that kiss, the way they looked at each other like giddy high schoolers on a porch in the firefly light, made the rest clear.
Natalie made her way back through the woods.
The path was dark and the branches caught at her jacket as she picked at a piece of bark on a small stick, peeling it away strip by strip, thinking of all the decisions that had led her here.
The conversations with her father. The secrets she'd kept from Noah.
The lies she'd told her father. She'd felt stuck between two families, trying to live in both worlds but failing on all fronts.
She couldn't fault Noah for pushing her away.
But then she understood her father's position too.
She had handed over the bag of evidence hoping it would change things between them, that it would earn Noah's trust. It hadn't.
She reached her car and got in. The interior was dark. She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
Her father had said getting too close would hurt. That eventually the Sutherlands would betray her. That they would leave her out in the cold. That it would weaken her.
It had.
She picked up her phone and called him. It rang twice.
"Natalie."
"You were right."
"About?"
"Everything." She wiped the tears from her cheek with the back of her hand. "I'm ready to do what is required."
She hung up and started the engine and tore out of there, the gravel spraying behind her and the dark swallowing the road ahead.
Back at the house, Noah finished cleaning up and collected some of the laundry to put a load on before he settled for the evening.
He gathered Ethan's shirts and jeans from the hamper in the hallway and carried them toward the machine.
As he sorted through the pile, a card fell out of one of the pockets and landed face up on the floor.
Noah reached down and picked it up.
Luther Ashford. The name in raised print. A phone number. An address in High Peaks.
What was Ethan doing with this?
Noah stood there for a moment turning the card over in his fingers. He set the laundry down and headed to the kitchen. Picked up his phone and tried Ethan's number. It rang and rang and went to voicemail.
He considered calling Luther directly. Telling him to stay the hell away from his son. But he knew that would only drive Ethan further in the wrong direction. You couldn't pull a seventeen-year-old back by grabbing. You could only leave the door open and hope he walked through it.
Instead Noah poured himself a drink and sat down at the kitchen table where the case files were still spread out.
The Hale investigation. The pages he and Thomas O'Connell had been poring over for weeks.
The cold case that sat beneath the bog case like a foundation beneath a house, invisible until you looked.
His phone rang.
He glanced at the screen expecting Ethan.
It wasn't. It was a Virginia area code. Parabon NanoLabs.
"Joe."
"Noah. We've finished the expedited processing on the sample extracted from the interior of that blue latex glove you sent over."
Noah sat forward. "What did you find?"
"We created a raw DNA file and ran it against the public databases. GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. We also compared it against the reference profile we have on file from the Hale investigation."
"And?"
"The results are definitive. We found a first-degree relationship.
Specifically, a parent-child match. The sample contains approximately 3,400 centimorgans of shared DNA, equivalent to half the autosomal genome, with the other profile.
This isn't a cousin or a distant relative. This is a biological father."
"Are you sure?"
"Scientifically, yes. We used genetic genealogy to move forward through the records to confirm the identity. Based on census, birth, and marriage records in Adirondack County, the only person who fits that genetic profile is Hugh Sutherland."
Noah went quiet. The kitchen was still. The case files lay open on the table and the night pressed against the windows and the drink sat untouched in his hand.
"Thank you," he said.
"We'll send the glove back to you."
He hung up and sat there. The card with Luther Ashford's name on it lay on the table beside Hugh Sutherland's name in the case file. The two were together like two halves of something that had always been one thing.
Noah picked up his phone and called Thomas O'Connell.
"Hello?"
"O'Connell. I think I know what Luther Ashford has over my father."
He stood and walked to the window. The Adirondacks stretched out beyond the glass, dark and vast, the peaks barely visible against the sky.
The valley below was quiet. The town was asleep.
Somewhere out there, Luther Ashford was having a conversation with his daughter.
Somewhere out there, Ethan was with people Noah couldn't reach.
Somewhere out there, Hugh Sutherland was sitting in his house with a secret that had held for decades, a secret that had shaped two families and corrupted a department and buried itself so deep in the bedrock of the High Peaks that no one had thought to dig.
Until now.
THANK YOU FOR READING
If you enjoyed that, please take a second to leave a rating and review, both help, it’s really appreciated. Book ten will be out in the spring of 2026.
Thanks kindly, Jack.