Chapter 8
The mayor came into the office Thursday morning looking like a man who had been arguing with God and lost.
Bonnie had worked for Lucas long enough to read his moods the way a rancher reads weather.
There was regular grumpy, which was most days.
There was post-doctor grumpy, which involved slamming his office door and ignoring her for two hours.
And then there was this—a barely contained rage that radiated off him like heat waves rising from a hot highway.
It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle nervously.
He didn’t say good morning. He stalked past her desk without looking at her, went into his office, and slammed the door so hard she was surprised the hinges held. She flinched, shocked by his fury.
What had happened to make him so livid?
She heard the scrape of his desk chair and the clicking of his safe opening. But then she heard a metallic sound she’d never heard before, the clang of something metal and heavy being set none too gently on his desk.
Her jaw dropped. The locked box inside his safe.
She’d seen it the few times she’d glimpsed Lucas’s safe open.
Gray metal, maybe ten by twelve inches in diameter and several inches tall.
It sat in the bottom of his safe, stuffed way in the back.
She’d always guessed it was a gun box that held a handgun and bullets.
Lucas wasn’t about to shoot somebody, was he?
Fear coursed through her. Should she call Sheriff Wheeler? Ask him to come over here? Talk Lucas down off whatever bridge he was teetering on the edge of?
As she picked up the phone to make the call, something smacked onto Lucas’s desk. It sounded like a stack of papers. Metal clanged again as if he had shut the metal box lid. The safe’s door closed with a bang.
She sagged in her chair and put the phone receiver back in its cradle. Turning back to her computer, she stared at the screen sightlessly. What on earth was that all about?
Lucas’s office door opened. He stood there with a manila envelope in his hand. It was thick and beat up around the edges. The flap was closed with a metal clasp, and a strip of yellowed masking tape ran all the way across the edge of the flap, further sealing it.
Lucas stopped at her desk, staring down at her with a look on his face that she couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t the anger she expected. That might have been a flash of guilt she spotted, or maybe something close to apology. Except Lucas Shoemacher never apologized for anything.
“I need you to shred these papers,” he said. “Do it now.”
“Of course.”
He set the envelope on her desk. Looked up at her. And smiled.
He went back into his office.
She studied the envelope. No label. No markings. Just a plain manila envelope sealed shut with tape that had been there long enough to yellow and crack at the edges.
In four years, Lucas had asked her to shred things exactly twice.
Both times they were routine administrative documents past their retention dates, which she’d confirmed against the state’s records schedule before destroying them.
And she’d had to twist his arm to get him to go through his old records in the first place to pull out useless paperwork and outdated material at all.
What had been important enough to hold in a locked box inside a safe? And why destroy it now? Why the specific instruction to shred it now? What was the hurry? Something was off about this.
Lucas is hiding something.
And now he was destroying evidence of whatever he was hiding.
Should she do what the boss asked of her without question? She’d always been a good employee, loyal, unquestioning, a hard worker who did her best to make Lucas look good.
But this . . . This didn’t feel right.
This felt like the day she’d realized Brent was having an affair.
She’d seen little things for a while that weren’t quite right.
Brent saying he’d been places she later found out he hadn’t been.
Money disappearing from their checking account without explanation.
Brent acting distracted and distant, not all there when he interacted with her and the kids.
She ignored all of it. Assumed there was a good explanation for everything. An explanation she wasn’t going to ask for because she trusted her husband and didn’t want to hurt him because she hadn’t trusted him.
She ignored the seed of suspicion stubbornly growing in her belly. Ignored the little voice whispering in her ear that something was wrong. Before she finally gave in and listened to her instincts, they had to shout warnings at the top of their lungs.
It turned out Brent hadn’t even tried to hide the evidence. It was all right there, in their house, the whole time. All she had to do was open her eyes and she would’ve seen it.
The moment she opened Brent’s top dresser drawer, she saw the motel receipts, sales slips from restaurants paying for two meals, even a couple of little love notes whose I’s were dotted with hearts, signed with a row of X’s and O’s above and below the name, Chelsey.
Sitting at her desk now, staring at Lucas’s envelope, a thought exploded across her brain with the force of a bomb.
Had Brent thought she was so gullible and so loyal to him that she would never look through any of his personal things and discover the affair? Or had he just not cared if she caught him?
What if she had listened to her intuition sooner? Could she have saved her marriage? Nipped Brent’s affair in the bud before he fancied himself in love with a college co-ed in town for the summer? Would Brent have been at home and off duty the day of the Shoemacher fire and be alive today?
She would never know the answers to any of those questions. And she supposed the answers didn’t matter at this point. Brent was long dead and her marriage had ended the day before the fire killed her husband.
But the same instinct for self-preservation that had shouted at her four years ago, warning her frantically that she was being played for a fool, was shouting the exact same warning at her now.
Except today it was her boss taking advantage of her and assuming she would blindly take him at his word, do as she was told, and not ask any questions.
The shredder sat right behind her desk beside the trash can. All she had to do was turn around and feed the documents into it. No fuss. No muss. No risk. No messy questions. Her life would sail on smoothly, just the way it was now. All she had to do was not rock the boat.
But something—instinct, or that odd look on Lucas’s face, or the voice in her head telling her everything was about to change, the voice she’d desperately been trying to ignore for weeks—told her in no uncertain terms not to shred whatever was in this envelope.
With a glance at Lucas’s closed office door, she slipped the envelope into her big purse and buried it at the bottom of the bag.
She turned on the shredder and picked up a stack of unused printer paper about the same thickness as the envelope. She fed it into the shredder. Its loud whirring and the crunching noise of paper being chopped into tiny slivers filled the office.
The shredder fell silent.
She worked the rest of the day on autopilot.
Filed the planning commission minutes. Returned three phone calls.
Updated the community calendar. Answered an email from the county about road maintenance funding.
Normal things. Ordinary things. The envelope sat in her bag under her desk like a smoldering coal, radiating heat through the leather.
Lucas left before three, which was early even for him. He’d been leaving earlier and earlier since his last doctor’s appointment. He paused at her desk on his way out.
“You took care of the shredding?” he asked gruffly.
“Of course.”
If she’d had any doubt about her decision not to shred the documents before, the flash of abject relief that crossed Lucas’s face followed by a look of smug satisfaction convinced her she’d made the right decision.
“You’re a good girl, Bonnie,” he said with enough condescension to set her teeth on edge. He might as well have said, “Good doggie. Way to obey your master, you stupid mutt.”
She didn’t open the envelope at the office.
She drove home, made dinner for the kids, supervised homework, broke up an argument between Cassidy and Noah about whose turn it was to clear the table, read Noah a chapter of his book about combustion chemistry—she could not believe she was doing this with a seven-year-old—and put them both to bed.
Then she sat down at the kitchen table and opened the envelope.
Inside was a stack of printed documents—maybe thirty pages. Some were typed letters on the mayor’s personal stationery. Some were printouts of emails. Some were what appeared to be copies of bank statements or financial records.
She sorted them into piles by type, the way she sorted everything. Her hands were steady. Her heart was not.
Most of it was unremarkable. Old correspondence about ranch operations, vendor disputes, a property line disagreement with a neighbor that had been settled years ago.
Routine stuff that should have been shredded as a matter of course, and she could see why Lucas had let it pile up. He wasn’t an organized man.
Then she read the emails.
There were two sets of them, printed out and stapled separately.
Each set was a chain of conversation between Lucas’s personal email address and an address she didn’t recognize.
Both email addresses were generic—anonymous accounts with no names or personal information—just strings of letters and numbers.
The first set of emails was short. Four messages in all. The language was careful. Oblique. The kind of phrasing people used when they knew what they were discussing but didn’t want to say it plainly.
But Bonnie had spent four years reading Lucas Shoemacher’s correspondence, and she could read between these lines just fine.
Lucas was paying someone for something. The amount was specific—the amount jaw-droppingly large—and the timing was tied to a particular event happening, though the event was never named.
The tone was transactional. Money for silence or money for a specific action that was about to happen.
The final email in the chain was a confirmation of receipt of payment to the owner of that anonymous email address.
The second set was similar. A different anonymous email address, different amount of money on the table. This payout was for less but still a substantial sum. Same careful language. Same transactional rhythm. Pay, confirm, done.
Two people. Two payoffs. For something Lucas didn’t want anyone to know about. The last email in this set was also a confirmation of receipt of payment.
She set the emails down and stared at them.
Outside, a car passed on the street, its headlights sweeping across the kitchen ceiling and vanishing. The house was quiet around her.
The loyal thing to do—the thing she would have done a few months ago without hesitation—was to shred every page, put the remains in the garbage, and never think about it again. That was her job.
She did what Lucas asked because she was loyal to him.
He’d given her a job when she most needed one.
Not only had he given her a steady paycheck for the past four years that fed and housed her family, but he’d also given her a place to go every day, responsibility that kept her from retreating in a shell and never coming out again.
After Brent died, being loyal was the one thing she’d vowed never to fail at again.
The last time you were disloyal, Brent died.
The thought punched her in the gut like a fist. There it was. The real reason she’d never questioned Lucas. She’d learned her lesson from Brent’s death. Never, ever waiver in loyalty or very, very bad things happened.
And so, she’d been slavishly loyal to Lucas. Loyal to the job. Loyal to the idea that if she just did what she was told and never made waves, nobody else would die because of a choice she made.
She stared at the emails.
She thought about Gray’s voice on the phone last night, asking if she could think of anyone who knew the barn well, and about what he’d said in the calving barn. I need you to see what I’ve found. All of it. Together.
Whatever Gray had found, it was damning. She knew it from the way he’d avoided her eyes over the blueprints. From the way he’d carefully turned the pages back, covering something he didn’t want her to see.
And now she was holding evidence of her own that she didn’t understand. Two sets of payoffs to unidentified recipients. For something Lucas wanted buried permanently.
She wasn’t ready to hear what Gray had to tell her because she knew deep down it was a truth with enough explosive energy to burn her life down.
No, she couldn’t destroy these emails. She didn’t know why they were important, but she was sure they were. Or maybe she did have some idea of what they were about, but she wasn’t ready to admit that to herself, either.
She separated the two sets of email printouts from the rest of the stack and placed them in a plain white envelope from the kitchen drawer. She sealed it and wrote nothing on it. She slid the envelope into the zippered interior pocket of her purse and pulled the zipper shut.
She fed the rest of the documents into the small shredder she kept in the hall closet. The machine whirred. The paper disappeared in thin, curling strips. The routine letters, the vendor disputes, the property line correspondence. All of it turned to confetti in the plastic bin.
The shredder fell silent.
Down the hall, Noah’s nightlight cast a thin line under his door. Cassidy’s room was dark.
She had just done the most disloyal thing she’d done since kicking Brent out of this house four years ago.
She waited for the guilt to arrive. For the sick empty feeling that had followed her through the days after Brent’s funeral, the accusing voice in her head whispering, You did this. You caused this. You killed him.
It didn’t come.
What came instead was the cold, clear alertness she’d felt as she’d stared down at the evidence of Brent’s affair and her mind finally assembled all the pieces she hadn’t wanted to see before.
She didn’t know who Lucas had paid off, or why, or what they’d been paid to do or not to do. But she knew a bribe when she saw one.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. She glanced at it.
Gray had texted her. Ellie answered my question. When you’re ready, I’m ready. No rush.
She picked up the phone and typed: Not yet.
She stared at the words. Deleted them. Typed: Soon. I’ll let you know.
She hit send before she could change her mind, set the phone face-down on the counter, and turned off the kitchen light.
In her bag, the emails sat, patient and incriminating and impossible to unsee.