Chapter 11 #2
She would wait for Cooper to trace the email addresses. She would wait for confirmation of who’d been paid and for what. She would be methodical and certain and wait to curse Lucas to the seventh circle of Hell until she knew for sure he was the one who’d set the fire and covered it up.
Not because she owed Lucas anything. But because she owed Brent that much. She owed the seven other men who died in that barn that much.
She owed herself that much.
At ten-fifteen, Lucas opened his door and leaned against the frame. “Bonnie. Call my daughter Ellie and see if she picks up.”
She kept her face neutral. “Of course. What should I say if she answers?”
“Tell her I’m calling. She won’t pick up if she sees my cell phone number.”
He retreated into his office before she could respond.
She dialed the number from the contact list she kept in the municipal files. It rang five times and went to voicemail. A young woman’s voice, clipped and professional: You’ve reached Ellie Shoemacher. Leave a message.
Bonnie hung up without leaving one and buzzed the mayor. “No answer. Voicemail.”
A long silence from the speaker. Then, “All right.”
The intercom clicked off.
She sat very still for a moment.
His own daughter wouldn’t take his calls. His health was failing. He was settling affairs, destroying evidence, trying to reach estranged children who wanted nothing to do with him.
He was becoming more human to her at the exact moment she began to suspect what he’d done, and that made it harder, not easier.
A cartoon villain would have been simple.
A dying old man who approved the fire station reopening and couldn’t get his daughter on the phone.
That was complicated in a way that made her want to scream.
She didn’t scream. She opened the paperwork to schedule a county repair crew to fix the latest pothole and started typing.
At eleven thirty she walked to Rose’s for lunch because she couldn’t bear to eat another granola bar at her desk.
The pinochle group was in full swing. Ruth Sanger was holding court, cards fanned in her hand, her voice cutting through the diner’s ambient noise like a circular saw.
“I’m telling you, Walter, the council should give that Lawton boy a medal. Have you seen the fire station? He’s got it looking like a showroom. And he’s out at Foster Ranch helping with those calves, and he’s driving the ambulance for Tucker, and he’s taking a double course load . . .”
“He’s a busy young man,” Walter allowed.
“Busy? He’s a marvel. And so polite. He called me Miss the other day. When’s the last time a man under eighty called me Miss?”
Walter retorted, “You threatened to end me three days ago for trumping your ace. Why would anyone call you anything other than, ‘That harridan’?”
“That was cards. I’m talking about civilized manners.”
Bonnie slid onto a stool at the counter. Rose appeared with coffee.
“You look like you could use this,” Rose murmured.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Honey, you look like you haven’t slept since January.” Rose studied her with gentle attention. “Everything okay?”
“There’s a lot going on at work. Lucas is . . . having a hard time.”
Rose nodded sympathetically. “I heard he’s been ornery as a bear with a toothache.”
“To put it mildly.”
From the pinochle table, Ruth’s voice carried across the diner: “. . . and the mayor approved the fire station reopening, don’t forget that. Say what you will about Lucas Shoemacher, but he did a good thing for this town.”
Bonnie stared at her coffee and said nothing. She ate half a turkey club, wrapped the other half for later, and headed back to work. On the walk back to the municipal building, her phone buzzed.
It was a text from Gray. No words. Just a photograph of a cream-colored calf standing in a stall, looking directly at the camera with an expression of placid bewilderment, as if the calf couldn’t quite figure out how it had gotten so large, either.
Underneath the photo: Blizzard says hello. 134 lbs today.
She stopped walking. Stood on the sidewalk in the thin March sunlight and looked at the picture of a calf that had no idea the world was cruel.
A second text arrived: Whenever you feel like talking. Or not talking. No pressure. I’m here.
She put the phone back in her pocket and walked the rest of the way to work.
That evening, after the kids were in bed, she sat at the kitchen table again. Not in the dark this time. She turned on every light in the kitchen because she was done sitting in the dark with this.
She laid out the summary Gray had given her along with the copies of the evidence he’d made for her. As she looked at all of it, something shifted inside her. It felt as if the tumblers of a lock were clicking into a new position.
She’d been loyal to Lucas because loyalty was penance. For kicking Brent out of the house and sending him to that fire. She’d been disloyal, and someone she loved had died because of it.
In her grief she’d decided she would never be disloyal again. She would be the perfect secretary, the perfect widow, the perfect mother. She would hold everything together and never act on her feelings again because the last time she did, her children lost their father, and it was her fault.
But Lucas had used that against her. He’d weaponized her grief and her guilt and her desperate need to be dependable until he was so sure of his control of her that he’d handed her evidence of murder and trusted her to destroy it without looking.
He’d almost been right.
But he wasn’t.
She gathered the papers into a neat stack and slid them back into the white envelope Gray had carefully put them in for her. She placed the envelope in the bottom drawer of the hutch in the dining room beneath a tablecloth that hadn’t been used since Brent was alive.
Then she washed her coffee cup, turned off the lights, and went upstairs.
She checked on Noah. He was sprawled across his bed at an angle that defied the laws of physics, his question notebook open on the pillow beside him. She eased it away and set it on his nightstand. The open page read: Can fire burn memories? Ask Gray.
She closed her eyes against the quick sting of tears.
She checked on Cassidy. Her daughter was curled on her side, facing the wall, her observation notebook tucked under her arm the way other children kept stuffed animals. The protective posture of a girl who’d learned far too young that the adults around her sometimes needed watching.
Bonnie pulled the blanket up over Cassidy and stood there for a long time, looking down at the fierce, confident, brave daughter she’d raised.
Tomorrow she would be worthy of Cassidy. She would go to work. Sit by the mayor’s closed door and do her job because that was what she did. But the woman who walked into that office tomorrow would not be the same woman who had walked in yesterday.
Yesterday’s Bonnie had been loyal to a fault. Faithful for all the wrong reasons.
Tomorrow’s Bonnie was going to be brave.