Chapter 17 #2
Bonnie’s hand tightened on the box of spaghetti she was opening. “Cassidy . . .” She stopped herself from chiding Cassidy for saying something like that to an outsider. But Gray wasn’t an outsider to her family any more, now, was he? Instead, she merely asked, “What did he have to say about that?”
“He said he’s trying to help you with something hard. He said it wasn’t about us.” She paused. “He didn’t lie. I checked. I read a book on ways to know if people are lying, and he didn’t have any tells.”
Well okay, then. She supposed she was glad to know Gray had passed her daughter’s honesty vetting.
Bonnie looked at Cassidy and felt a pang of grief.
She wished there was some way to protect her children from seeing her pain, but her kids were too smart and too observant, not to mention they were now of an age where they would notice her feelings no matter how carefully she tried to pretend everything was okay.
“I’m okay, Baby,” she said softly.
Cassidy’s expression said she knew that wasn’t entirely true but was willing to accept it as a working hypothesis. She sat down at the table across from Noah and opened her own book.
The three of them occupied the kitchen in a silence that felt, to Bonnie, like the safest place in the world. Her children were warm and fed and doing homework in a house with a lock on the door and a porch light she would always leave on for them.
Whatever was happening with the mayor and the investigation and the slow unraveling of everything she’d believed about her life, none of it touched this kitchen. This place, this safe place called home, was real. These two small people were real. And she loved them with all her heart.
She made dinner and didn’t think about Lucas Shoemacher for almost a full hour. It was the longest stretch she’d managed in weeks.
Gray’s phone rang at nine-fifteen, after he’d finally read three pages of his fire dynamics textbook without his mind wandering to Bonnie or Cassidy or his father or any of the other humans who had recently and inconveniently complicated his life.
In moments like this he almost missed his life before, organized completely around spreadsheets, textbooks, and cattle genetics. Almost.
His caller ID read, Coop.
“I’ve got names,” Cooper said without preamble.
Gray closed the textbook. “Go.”
“One set of emails went to an email address registered to Lex Jansick.”
Gray’s hand tightened on the phone. Jansick. The man who had written the state’s official report concluding the fire was accidental. The man whose report had closed the case and sent eight widows home with nothing but grief and death certificates.
“The other set?”
“County building inspector. A guy named Dale Fenton. He signed off the final inspection of the barn.”
“The barn without sprinklers.”
“The barn without sprinklers,” Cooper confirmed. “The payments to Fenton date to the year the barn was built. Shoemacher paid him to sign off on a structure that didn’t meet the fire suppression requirements of its own blueprints.”
Gray stared at his timeline. The payoff emails slotted into it like the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now that it was complete, the picture revealed was devastating.
“What happens now?” Gray asked.
“I’ll putting the full package together. All your evidence and mine. Once it’s compiled, it’ll go to Montana’s justice department.”
“How long till the package is ready?”
“A week. Maybe less.”
Gray nodded, though Cooper couldn’t see it. “Can I tell Bonnie the names of the email recipients?”
A pause. “Your call. She’s your partner on this.”
His partner. He liked the sound of that. A lot.
“She’s the one who found the emails. She deserves to know,” Gray said.
“Fair.” A pause. “Gray, the work you’ve done on this is exceptional. You’ve built a case any prosecutor would be proud to present.”
He didn’t know what to do with a compliment from Cooper, who did not dispense them casually or often. “I just followed the evidence.”
“That’s all any good investigator does.”
They hung up, and Gray texted Bonnie right away. Cooper got the names. I figured you wouldn’t want to be ambushed by this, either. May I see you tomorrow?
Her response came quickly. Lunch at Rose’s. Noon.
Rose’s Diner at noon on a Tuesday was the worst possible place to share sensitive information, but it was the only place in Cobbler Cove where two single adults could have lunch together without the entire town assuming they were romantically involved.
Everyone ate at Rose’s. It was the great equalizer.
Gray arrived first and took the booth in the corner. The pinochle group occupied their regular territory near the front window. Ruth Sanger was holding court, as always, her voice carrying over the lunch crowd like a public address system with opinions.
The topic of the day, it seemed, was the fire station.
“. . . a real civic gesture,” Ruth was saying. “Lucas may have his faults but reopening the station was the right thing to do. Not every mayor would have done it.”
Walter Meeks grunted. “The man approved a building permit. Let’s not throw him a parade.”
“After what happened? After that fire took eight of boys? Reopening the station—that takes courage. That takes a man willing to face the past.”
Gray stared fixedly at his coffee, his jaw tight.
Bonnie walked in.
Ruth fell silent. Gray couldn’t tell if she shut up because one of the widows of the fire walked in or if she got distracted from her gossip by the pinochle game she was supposedly playing. Either way, he was grateful for an end to the singing of Lucas Shoemacher’s praises.
Bonnie wore her work clothes—a cream-colored blouse and dark slacks, her hair swept back from her face and twirled into a twist thing that ran vertically along the back of her head. It was nice. Sophisticated looking.
He watched her smile at Rose, exchange a greeting with Irma, and cross the diner with the polished ease of a woman who had been performing normalcy in public spaces for years. She slid into the booth across from him.
“Ruth’s singing Lucas’s praises again,” she said, her voice low and even.
He grimaced as he muttered back, “I heard. She was talking about the fire when you walked in but shut up when she spotted you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Rose is right over there. She lost her husband, too. Does Ruth think that just because Rose has Cooper now it doesn’t hurt her to be reminded of JB’s death?”
He sent her a sympathetic look and started to reach out with his hand to lay it over hers. He stopped abruptly as he realized what he was about to do and where they were.
Her gaze dropped to his hand as it lurched toward her and then pulled back as abruptly. She sent him a crooked smile.
It took a moment, but Bonnie said conversationally, “She cornered me in the post office last week to tell me what a fine man I work for.” The smile on her face didn’t reach her eyes. “And I said, ‘He certainly is.’ I swear. I deserve an Academy Award.”
Rose appeared with menus and two glasses of water. “The usual, Bonnie? And turkey club or the soup and sandwich for you, Gray?”
They ordered and Rose vanished. From the pinochle tables, Ruth’s voice floated over. “. . . and he let that handsome, young Lawton boy, clean up the station with his own two hands. That’s Lucas looking out for the town, is what that is.”
Bonnie picked up her water glass. Her hand was steady. She drank. But for an instant, a flash so fast he nearly missed it, her eyes flashed gold and green fire. Her expression settled back into bland indifference as fast as the flash had come and gone.
Gray wrote down the names in his notebook along with a brief note beside each.
Making no big deal of it, he casually turned the notebook around to face Bonnie and pushed it forward so she could read what he’d written.
Glassware clinked around them, and the hum of the lunch crowd buzzed on, undisturbed.
Lex Jansick, the state arson investigator whose report called it an accident.
Dale Fenton, county building inspector who signed off on the barn.
She looked down at the page without expression.
She’d gotten good at that. She was receiving devastating information, and her face was perfectly composed, her hands still.
Of course he supposed the alternative was falling apart in a public place filled with dozens of people.
And in Cobbler Cove, people were always watching everyone else.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Before and after? Like you thought?”
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly. Her eyes were dry. Her jaw was set.
From the front of the diner, Ruth declared, “Mark my words, Lucas Shoemacher will be remembered as the mayor who rebuilt this town after tragedy.”
Bonnie looked at Gray. Her hazel eyes glinted with fierce, quiet resolve that burned hotter than mere anger. She picked up her water glass again and took a long drink.
“Cooper’s putting the package together,” Gray said. “A week at most.”
“Good,” Bonnie said. “The sooner it’s out of our hands and into the proper ones, the sooner I can stop pretending I don’t want to overturn his desk and scratch his eyes out.”
“You may have to wait a little while longer. Until someone from the state makes it known to the person in question that the investigation’s open and that person is a subject of interest.”
She huffed, the said in resignation, “I’ve waited this long. I suppose I can wait a little longer.”
Rose brought their food. As they ate, they talked about the calves, Noah’s new quicksand obsession, and the fire science exam Gray had coming up. Normal things. The surface of a life that still rolled along even though the road beneath it had shifted and cracked.
When they left, they walked to the parking lot together. The March air was cool and sharp, carrying the smell of snowmelt and the faint dry rustle of last year’s grass on the hills above town.
Gray stopped at her car. “Yesterday Cassidy wanted to talk to me about you.”