14. Alex #3
Something in his voice makes me sit forward. “Talk.”
“I tracked down someone who used to know Mark Mitchell. Old associate, and I’m using that word loosely. Guy’s elderly, wasn’t all there when my people found him. Memory comes and goes. I wouldn’t swear to anything he said without corroboration.”
“Then why call me before you have it?”
“Because one of his stories checks out enough that I don’t want to sit on it.”
I stand. “What story?”
Frank exhales, long enough that I know he’s already braced for whatever this is. “He says Mark murdered an entire family upstate. Father owed money to the Irish mob, and according to this guy, Mark was the one sent to deal with it.”
I sink back into the chair.
First a gambler. Now, maybe a murderer. What the hell had Belle been trapped in behind the walls of that Victorian?
“Are you serious?”
“Again, boss, he wasn’t all there, and half of what he said barely made sense. That’s part of the problem. But the way he described Mark made him sound less like a gambler who got tangled up with the wrong people and more like someone they called when there was a problem that needed solving.”
“A fixer.”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
I stare through the windows at a skyline that looks very far away now. “An entire family?”
“Father, mother, kids. I looked into it, thinking the old man might be mixing Mark up with somebody else.”
“And?”
“There were deaths that match what he described.”
The muscles across my shoulders locks tight. “Murders?”
“No,” Frank pauses. “Officially, it was a boating accident. Parents died. The children’s bodies were never recovered.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
“How many kids?”
“Two.”
“Can you tie Mark to it?”
“Not yet.”
“Then how do we know any of it’s true?”
“We don’t. Not yet.” At least he says it plainly instead of dressing it up for me.
“I’ve got people digging into the case now.
The problem is, it was closed as an accident, both lead detectives who worked it are dead, and records are thin because nobody had a reason to preserve evidence for a murder that officially never happened. ”
“Where was Mark?”
“This was before he moved to Riverside Falls.”
My fingers tighten around the phone hard enough that I feel it in the joints. “So nothing direct yet.”
“Not yet. But enough to keep digging.”
“Then keep digging.”
I hear papers shifting on his end, then nothing. Frank goes quiet, which is unusual enough to make me sit up.
“What?”
“Boss, I’ve got to tell you something, and I don’t love saying it.”
“Go ahead.”
“The more I dig into this, the worse it gets. At first, I figured Ms. Clarke was hiding from debts, that maybe Mark owed somebody money and she got stuck cleaning up his mess after he was gone.” He hesitates long enough that I hear him deciding whether to finish the thought.
“Now I’m wondering what she and her brother were actually living inside before they ever ran. ”
My jaw locks.
Frank rarely editorializes. That’s one reason I trust him with things I wouldn’t hand to anyone else.
“I’m feeling pretty damn sorry for both of them, boss.”
Mark Mitchell. The man I spent ten years casting as Belle’s victim, the debt he supposedly ran from, the crime I built an entire empire trying to punish her for. Gambler. Debtor. Maybe worse. Far worse, if Frank’s old witness is telling anything close to the truth.
And Belle was twenty. Liam was eight. Two kids inside a house with a man whose past might include dead families and people powerful enough to turn murder into an accident report nobody ever reopened.
My stomach turns over.
“Keep digging,” I say again, because it’s the only order I have left that makes any sense. “Anyone who worked with Mark before he moved. I want to know whether that boating accident was the only one.”
“Understood.”
“Call me the second you have something solid. I don’t care what time it is.”
“I will.”
The line goes dead.
The office feels different now. Or maybe I do.
I think about Belle telling me she thinks about the night she left every single day.
If you could go back, would you do it differently?
I couldn’t change a thing.
Couldn’t not wouldn’t.
She’s already been punished enough for a crime she didn’t commit. Ten years in isolation raising Liam alone while carrying a truth she still can’t bring herself to say out loud.
Then me. Dragging her back through every accusation I could construct. Making her apologize for wounds she may have been bleeding from just as badly as I was.
I close my eyes.
Enough.
Whatever happened ten years ago, I’m done letting it decide everything that comes next. I need to talk to Belle, hear what she can give me, tell her what I know, and find out if there is still enough left between us to build something that exists outside dark rooms and old grief.
Maybe she made a terrible choice at twenty. I’ve made several since. Maybe forgiveness is simply admitting we both caused damage and deciding we’ve done enough.
And after that, if she still chooses me, maybe we finally put the old baggage down and see what we can build without it.