Chapter Thirteen
The town was in an uproar and, for the first time it had nothing to do with the danger or mystery that had taken place within its limits.
No one really cared about the still-unknown woman shooter who had carjacked Mr. Gleason while he was pumping premium or that, while his car had reappeared in the next county over, she hadn’t.
No one seemed to care about the shooter who had died at the steel mill being identified as a Rafe Bailey—a do-anything for hire with a long jacket of various criminal activities and time spent in several county jails and one state prison—or the fact that still no one knew who had hired him.
And when it came to the steel mill itself—the largest employer of the entire town, and the one stretch of space in all of Seven Roads that most residents had been to at least once—almost no one spoke about the boarded-up, blocked-off and hidden network of old rooms beneath that had been partially discovered after the shooting.
Some did speak to the fact that the shooting in question had resulted in the injuries of the only McCoy County detective and the Keyses’ almost-bride, but most of those people chattering were working at the sheriff’s department.
One of their own had been hurt, and they had no one in custody to answer for it.
A gnawing problem that kept their focus on the things that mattered most.
Talk of Gary Whittaker’s homicide case, still without a lead, hadn’t completely died down, but the shock value’s stock had never risen too high to begin with, since he had been an outsider.
Instead, the gossip that blew every other piece of news out of the water for the town locals kept to one bit of information that had leaked in the aftermath of all the hubbub.
The rumored breakup of Evelyn Myers and Mitchell Keys.
It was one thing for the wedding to be postponed because of a homicide.
But for the bride-to-be to be caught out with another man the day after with no public explanation, not to mention the extra layer of rumor that Scott Keys had made such a stink at the sheriff’s department, demanding that same man be fired… Who cared about Gary Whittaker?
Who cared about the missing shooter?
Who cared why there had been a shooting at all?
Darius, a week later, believed he could have left the town in ruins if they could only see who met him in his living room after finally being released from the hospital.
Eve, sitting cross-legged in front of a laptop on his couch, nearly fell over as she tried to undo herself to stand. Mitchell, sitting next to her, managed to catch the water bottle she’d had sitting next to her before it fell to the floor.
“I didn’t think you were getting released until this afternoon,” Eve exclaimed, righting herself.
Mitchell gave her a little push for extra stability.
She didn’t address it. Her gaze went over his shoulder to the hallway leading to the front door.
“How did you get here? Did you drive? Is that allowed? I mean, I know it’s mainly the one side of you that’s all hurt, but surely that’s still not allowed.
You know, I got a flu shot in the backside once, and it hurt like all heck just driving back a few blocks, so I bet a bullet wound would—”
Darius held up one hand in a stop gesture and interrupted the raging flow of thoughts.
“Theo’s outside with my bag,” he said. “He’ll be in after he finishes telling Liam I’m out and home. My phone’s juice is low, or else I’d do it.”
He added in the last part because he had a feeling Eve was about to grill him on why he hadn’t called her.
Which would have been another awkward exchange in front of her fiancé if it weren’t for the fact that both had already set the story straight for him back at the hospital.
“The fight that Eve helped rescue me from when we first met was with my ex-boyfriend’s new boyfriend and his friends,” Mitchell had explained, sitting on the couch next to Darius’s hospital bed.
“They were under the impression that I was trying to get back with him after we ran into each other earlier that day by accident. They accused me of using my money and influence to try and win him back. I…got a little heated at that, and that’s when they remembered it was three against one. ”
Mitchell had shared a look with Eve that was clear in its gratitude. She’d accepted it from her spot on the edge of Darius’s bed with a little nod.
Then Mitchell’s attention had fastened on Darius again. There it had stayed for the remainder of his explanation.
“If that isn’t an indication of the important part—I’m gay,” he’d clarified. “But I’ve never come out to most of my family or the public, and so far I’ve managed to keep it a secret, despite people like those guys trying to make me pay for whatever imagined slights they think I’ve committed.”
“So Scott doesn’t know,” Darius had had to make sure.
Mitchell had nodded.
“Our father was a very traditional man, who made it very clear that to inherit the family money and business an heir had to be just as traditional. While I’ve never been in the running for being the CEO or taking a seat on any board since Scott is older, my mother’s deathbed wish was to make sure I at least inherited my share of the money when my father did pass.
Which meant the easiest thing I could do was leave the idea of traditional on the table, at least for a few years.
” He’d sighed out long at that. “Those few years turned into over a decade, and then Dad got sick, and I realized the idea of not admitting who I am just to get money…felt too wrong to keep going. So I decided to finally come out, and I was so nervous that I invited one of the few friends I had over to help me practice what I was going to say.”
Mitchell had been tensing slowly Darius had noticed. At that part, his shoulders had become a hard line of obvious stress.
“In hindsight I shouldn’t have picked a hotel as a meeting place but we were working out of town so it seemed practical,” he continued. “Scott saw me go into a room, with a man, and assumed we were there for other things. And when my friend left, Scott came in to—I thought—talk too.”
Eve had balled her hand into a fist. Her jaw had tightened.
She’d been mad.
Darius had understood why after Mitchell stood, turned around, and lifted his shirt.
Scars—so many different lengths and depths and severity—had been spread across the skin of his back, a horrifying series of stamps of the past. Even Darius had felt his own anger rise at the sight.
“The mere idea that I had kept a secret from him, sent Scott into a rage,” Mitchell had started again after a moment.
He’d turned around, face fallen. “He didn’t care if I was gay—he didn’t even ask—but the thought that I might have been trying to ‘scam him out’ of what would have been all rightfully his?
He was so angry that he didn’t even give me a chance to confirm or deny if I dated men or not.
If it wasn’t for Eve, I’m not sure what would have happened had I actually told him the truth. ”
Eve’s jaw had unclenched then.
“I had already been working for Scott for a while and saw him break from schedule,” she’d jumped in.
“I followed him, worried I’d somehow made a scheduling mistake, and when I realized what was happening, I said what I thought would be the most helpful in the moment—that Mitchell wasn’t secretly dating men but secretly dating me instead. ”
“And, even though I had been planning on telling the truth up until then, I saw something in my brother that scared me to lie along with her.” Mitchell had lowered his voice.
It had made his next confession all the more sinister-sounding.
“A man who would do anything and everything for power, for money, for status, even kill his own brother for even the chance of getting slightly more of it all.”
Eve’s expression had softened but her words were still as harsh as they had been before.
“I had just found out that the foundation had money coming out of and going into accounts I couldn’t identify or trace when they should have been going into various originations, specifically the drug trial that during which my father’s friend had died.
I had been planning on asking, assuming it was some kind of clerical issue, but then I saw what he did to Mitchell.
And how, even after I caught him in the act, he buttoned up like it was nothing after he accepted our lie. He even smiled.”
Eve had shaken her head.
“So I opened up to Mitchell instead, and for the last six months, we’ve been doing our own investigation into the missing money, and two months ago we finally had a breakthrough.”
“But before we could do anything with it, Scott told me I needed to marry Eve,” Mitchell had added. “Not that I should or might want to, that I had to.”
“Right when you two found something that might expose him,” Darius had underlined.
They’d nodded in tandem.
“We’re worried that he found something out but can’t figure out what that might be,” Eve had said.
“And we were worried Scott was setting us up somehow. Why else would he want me to marry all of a sudden?”
This was when Darius finally understood the lie Eve had told him the day of the wedding.
“Which is why I met with Gary Whittaker once before we came to Seven Roads,” Mitchell had said, sheepish in his confession.
“I wanted to know the full extent of what it meant for Eve and me to be married and what she would legally be able to do, wondering if there was a reason in there that we could find for the sudden rush down the aisle.”
“It was like I lit a fire beneath him and asked him to sit on it,” Mitchell had continued after a bewildered expression had crossed over his face.
“He became angry and said he wouldn’t answer any family questions without the family there—without Scott there.
Which only made me panic, and I reeled everything back in and wrote it off as prewedding nerves.
It seemed to calm him down, but then when I tried to talk to him last week, he looked like he was seeing a ghost.”
“When you saw him last week,” Darius had repeated.
The conspiratorial partners had glanced away from him at that.
Mitchell took his blame well despite it.
“I met Gary for lunch the day he was killed, just after noon.”
Darius had looked at Eve for that. She’d met his gaze too, less enthused to admit her part in what had happened next.
“Which I didn’t know about because I was too busy trying to stop the wedding, so when I was asked about where Mitchell was later… I lied and said I was with him.”
The rest of the conversation had been short, but Darius couldn’t deny he had felt something in him shift at finally knowing the why behind Eve’s lie.
It wasn’t that she was in love with Mitchell or held him on some pedestal because of his fortune, status and connection to his older, much more popular brother.
She had been trying to help a friend.
A friend who swore up and down that Gary had been alive when he’d left his hotel room around twelve twenty.
There was no evidence or way to confirm Mitchell’s story, but despite himself Darius believed him. Maybe, he realized, because Eve did.
After that, Darius might have stayed in the hospital, but Gary Whittaker’s homicide case had done something he hadn’t expected it to do.
It had gone backward.
Back before the day of the wedding, or the arrival of the wedding party in Seven Roads, or the engagement, or the lie told to Scott about Eve and Mitchell’s secret relationship.
Because, they might not have had proof yet, but Darius had had a hard time believing it had been a coincidence that Gary had been killed after talking with Mitchell.
And, for the first time since the murder, Darius had a lead he knew would go somewhere.
It just was a matter of how to approach it.
Now standing in his living room and staring at the fake couple who had spent the last half of a year trying to topple a man steeped in money and power, Darius had a plan.
One it was time to share.
“You think Scott is using his money from the foundation to fund more sinister activities. I think you’re right. And I’ve come up with a plan that I think will prove it.”
Darius had spent the last several days in the hospital pouring over all the notes Eve and Mitchell had made on their investigation. Their breakthrough had been less of a breakthrough and more of a hunch that someone in the wedding party had helped with Scott’s less-than-legal intentions.
As of that morning, Darius believed he’d finally bridged that hunch to what would be a tangible piece of evidence.
If they played their cards right.
Eve’s eyes had widened as she waited for his explanation.
Instead, he knew he was about to get her anger next.
“But I’ll only help on one condition.” Darius pointed to the woman standing in front of him. “You don’t leave my side. Not once and not for anything.”
“What? Why?” Darius noted her reddening cheeks, but he didn’t wait to see if it was from annoyance or something else.
Instead, he narrowed his eyes at her and made sure the aim of his finger stayed true.
“Because you, Evelyn Myers, have a talent for getting into trouble. Whether you’re making it or falling into it. So until we get this entire thing settled, you aren’t leaving my sights. Agree now, or else you two can leave and I’ll let you figure it all out on your own.”
That, of course, was a lie.
And like the fake alibi she’d given Darius before, he knew that Eve knew it was a lie too.
Still, she’d never been one with the personality to accept an ultimatum easily. Her nostrils flared a little as she took a moment to let his nonthreat linger.
Mitchell was smart enough to also stay quiet behind her.
Darius was finding that he was liking the man more and more.
After a moment, Eve let out a quick breath of defeat.
“Fine,” she gave in. “Until we can prove the White Knight of Small-town Living is the villain in disguise, I’m all yours, Detective Williams.”