Chapter 25
The Scott Farm
As Burke turned onto Scott Valley Road, the familiar curve of split-rail fence and open pasture came into view.
The first spread on the road was Bridlepath Farm. Grant’s place.
Grant Scott looked enough like Burke that strangers always knew they were brothers—same blue eyes, same broad shoulders, same easy confidence.
But Grant was a couple of years younger, with sun-streaked blond hair, a more rugged edge, and the kind of face women noticed twice.
Years spent outside had left him leaner, rougher around the edges, and permanently tanned.
Where Burke looked like a sheriff, Grant looked exactly like what he was.
A cowboy.
Burke spotted him halfway down the blackboard fence line, riding a restless palomino that was dancing sideways and tossing its head.
Burke slowed the truck and dropped the window.
Grant glanced over, one hand easy on the reins despite the horse acting up beneath him.
“What’s up?” Burke called.
“Horse has decided he’s personally offended by that mailbox,” Grant said dryly as the palomino sidestepped again.
Burke snorted.
“Looks like he’s winning.”
“Only temporarily.”
Grant settled the horse with the kind of effortless confidence that came from a lifetime in the saddle. Then he nodded toward the house farther down the hill.
“Dad home?”
“Yeah. Truck’s down there.”
Grant nodded once.
“Naomi’s threatening to quit if he doesn’t stop feeding peppermints to the horses.”
Burke smiled despite himself.
“She’s been threatening that for five years.”
“Yeah.” Grant’s mouth twitched. “And somehow she’s still here.”
Burke tapped the steering wheel.
“See you later.”
Grant lifted a hand and turned the palomino back toward the fence line as Burke drove on toward the house.
The Scott farmhouse sat at the bottom of the rise, white paint softened by years of mountain weather.
Burke pulled into the gravel drive beside an old Ford pickup he’d seen his entire life. The blue paint had faded close to gray, but it still ran, and Burton Scott wasn’t about to give it up.
Burton sat in a wooden chair near the railing, a glass of iced tea in his hand. He didn’t bother getting up when Burke stepped onto the porch.
“Evenin’, Sheriff,” he said, the title dry and affectionate at once.
Burke smiled.
“Evenin’, Dad.”
Burton nodded toward the empty chair beside him.
“Sit.”
Burke dropped into the chair and stretched his legs out, boots settling against the boards he’d helped replace one summer in high school.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The quiet here was different than in town. It worked some of the day’s static out of his shoulders, but it didn’t loosen the knot that had formed when he’d listened to that first episode.
“You hear about the podcasts?” Burke finally asked.
Burton gave a quiet grunt.
“Hard not to. Naomi’s been playing them in the barn. Grant claims he doesn’t listen, but he’s been asking questions.”
Burke shook his head once.
“Naomi still sounds like trouble.”
Burton’s mouth twitched.
“The good kind,” he said. “You didn’t drive out here to ask me about your brother’s barn manager.”
Burke leaned forward, forearms on his knees.
“They’re digging up the Caroline Simms case.”
Burton nodded once.
“Figured they might. Sooner or later, they always go looking for the ones that never sat right.”
“You remember it,” Burke said, though he already knew.
Burton took a slow sip, ice clinking.
“’ Course I do.”
Burke watched him.
“What did you think back then?”
The old sheriff stared out toward the fields, that same thoughtful look Burke remembered from childhood.
“Never liked it,” Burton said at last.
Burke’s hand went to his belt, his fingers brushing the cold leather of his holster—a nervous habit he’d picked up from the man sitting two feet away.
“What do you mean?”
“You remember her folks?” Burton asked.
“Simms family. Good people.”
“Hard-working. Kept to themselves,” Burton agreed. “That father of hers didn’t quit looking.”
He was quiet a beat longer, thumb running once along the sweating glass.
“There are some calls you second-guess for years,” he added. “That one was mine.”
“I heard they put up flyers everywhere,” Burke said.
Burton nodded.
“Everywhere. Sylva. Waynesville. Cherokee. Asheville. Up toward the Smokies.”
“And somebody kept taking them down.”
Burke’s frown deepened.
“Taking them down?”
“They wouldn't just take 'em. They’d peel 'em back until only the staples and a few white shreds of paper were left on the telephone poles. Like someone was trying to skin the memory of her right off the wood.”
“You ever figure out who was doing it?”
Burton shook his head.
“We even tried a camera once. Whoever it was never showed while it was running. Smart enough to know when they were being watched.”
Burke’s jaw tightened.
“So somebody wanted that case to go away.”
“That’s the way it looked,” Burton said.
He leaned back, the chair creaking.
“What about the kid?” Burke asked.
Burton’s voice softened.
“That boy was the center of it all. David Mercer Jr. Davie. Caroline’s little boy.”
“He was what, a year old when she disappeared?”
“’Bout twelve months,” Burton said. “Could barely walk. Her parents wanted him. Mercer and his folks wanted him. Courts trying to decide where to put a baby with a missing mother and no answers.”
Burke rubbed the back of his neck.
“Messy.”
“Very,” Burton said. “And now that boy’s eight or nine, growing up with half the county’s old secrets tied to his name, whether he knows it or not.”
Burke let that hang.
“You think it was Mercer?” he asked finally.
Burton was quiet for a long moment.
“I looked hard at him,” he said.
“He had opportunity. He had access. And he had a reason to keep things… quiet.”
“You couldn’t prove it.”
“No,” Burton said. “And I don’t hang a man on what I can’t prove.”
“David Mercer didn’t just build houses, Burke. He built the town. Hard to arrest a man when half the jury is living under a roof he framed.”
“But I never cleared him in my mind either.”
He looked toward the tree line, shadows stretching long.
“Mercer had money. Connections. Crews all over the county,” Burton said. “And plenty of enemies.”
Burke felt that familiar split open in his chest—son on one side, sheriff on the other. Reopening his father’s work wasn’t about proving Burton wrong, but the line still felt thin some days.
“Enemies don’t usually take down flyers and flowers,” Burke said. “They add more.”
Burton’s mouth twitched in something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“True enough.”
Burke’s mind shifted back to the podcasts—the tight narration, old clips of Burton’s voice, strangers already spinning theories about his town.
“What do you think about them doing this?” he asked. “The media wannabes.”
Burton was silent for a beat.
“People forget cases like that,” he said. “They move on. Tell themselves they couldn’t have done anything more.”
“Then something like this comes along and reminds ’em. Pulls all the old ghosts out. Makes ’em nervous.”
“Nervous how?” Burke asked.
“Some folks are afraid of the truth finally coming out,” Burton said. “Others are afraid they’ll find out it never will.”
Burke stood slowly, his knees popping in the quiet.
“So the flyers, the flowers… somebody kept cleaning up anything that reminded people she was missing.”
Burton nodded, staring into his tea as if the answers were at the bottom of the glass.
“Exactly. And you tell me, son—who benefits more from a clean slate? A man who’s innocent, or a man who’s patient?”
Burke didn’t answer. He looked out over the darkening fields toward where Mercer’s new development was carving scars into the hillside.
The podcasts had stirred the water. But it was the silt at the bottom—eight years of silence and shredded paper—that was finally starting to rise.
He started toward his truck.
“Burke,” his father called out.
He stopped, hand on the door.
“Watch your back with that Harper woman,” Burton said, his voice barely carrying over the crickets. “She knows how to win. But in this county, winning isn’t the same thing as surviving.”
Burke looked back toward town, toward the lights of Sylva beginning to glow below the ridge.
For the first time, the case didn’t feel old.
It felt awake.