Chapter Seventeen
The cold won out eventually. With the quilt they’d rolled as a pillow open over his shoulders, Mick hopped around the room to give his feet minimal contact with the freezing cement while trying not to trip over the blanket.
Rachel was on her own hazardous journey with a quilt wrapped around her like a tortilla.
He couldn’t help grinning at her hair, poking out in all directions from her ponytail, but she was clearly avoiding looking at him.
Mick knew morning-after regret when he saw it.
Only it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. He let his shoulders drop as he looked away and had to grasp the corners of the quilt to avoid streaking across the garage.
She might no longer appreciate seeing him that way, even if he couldn’t close his eyes without picturing all of her perfection.
Or inhale without breathing in the touch of her perfume that lingered on his skin.
He’d messed up, all right. And he was in over his head.
His chest squeezing, he moved to the truck, its door still hanging open. He grabbed his shirt and boxers that he’d left near the right front tire. A gray sock lay beneath them.
“This is yours.” He held it out to her.
“Do you see the other one?” Rachel asked but didn’t approach.
“Not yet, but here’s one of mine.” His heavy black sock dangled from the top of his boot, but the other one wasn’t anywhere near it. Under the tread of his other boot, he located a second gray sock. “Here’s your other one.”
She must have worked fast, he discovered, as he turned back to find her wearing her zipped coat over the quilt. Her jeans were draped over her arm, and though she’d tightly fisted her hand, satiny black panties that he knew intimately peeked out from the circle of her pinkie.
“I’ll turn away so you can get dressed.”
He did as he said he would until she cleared her throat. Slowly, he looked back to her. She hadn’t moved.
“Um, I still don’t have everything.”
“Right.” Leaning inside the truck door, he found her sweater rolled into a ball on the passenger-side floor mat. He shook it out and added it to the socks he was holding.
“Still not everything.”
She didn’t have to tell him which item she’d lost. He’d never be able to see a red bra again without picturing how amazing she’d looked in hers. But it wasn’t with her sweater.
Her expression pinched, she rounded the truck to the driver’s side and dressed behind that screen. The door they hadn’t opened earlier squeaked when she pulled it wide. She climbed inside, still wearing her coat for a shirt.
“I’ll look under the truck,” he said. “I’m still missing a sock.”
He bent to move outside her line of vision and put on his boxers and jeans.
Then folding a blanket for extra padding for his sore knees, he lowered to the floor and peered under the truck.
His second sock appeared behind the front tire.
Without his phone to use as a flashlight, he smoothed his hand around on the cement, hoping to catch on something lacy.
“Not under here. Found my sock, though. Hey, think there’s any food in the house? Maybe before we start digging through boxes, we could grab a bite—”
He backed out and stood but cut off his words as he found Rachel on her knees on the bench seat, her head bent as she looked behind it. After a few seconds, she reached down and pulled her lacy garment out by a strap.
“Oh, good. You found it.”
Rachel didn’t turn back to him or respond. Instead, she continued examining something behind the seat.
“What else did you find? Tell me it’s not a mouse’s nest.”
He appreciated that she didn’t glance over to see him openly shiver at the thought of that.
Without responding, she reached down again and pulled out a messenger bag with a thick shoulder strap.
The bag didn’t look particularly special, its light brown leather scarred, but Rachel cradled it as though it were precious.
“Was that your dad’s? Your mom’s?”
Still not answering, she set it on the seat next to her, turned the clasp and threw back the flap. Three file folders had been placed inside.
“What is it? Why would your dad keep papers in the cab of his old pickup truck?”
She pulled the first file out of the bag, opened it and stared down at the paper.
“He didn’t,” she said finally. “The bag wasn’t his. It’s Riley’s. A prize possession.”
“So what’s it doing out here? What’s in it?”
Once again, she didn’t answer, but she turned the paper so that Mick could see it, too. The letterhead at the top said “Bilton Holdings.”
“Well, you were looking for answers, so—”
She lifted her hand, signaling for him to stop, then pointed to words just below that letterhead and a date from nearly twenty years in the past.
To the Mount Isabel Police Department:
I wish to confess to a long list of crimes associated with Bilton Holdings Corporation and the Bilton Foundation…
Her hand moved too quickly for him to see what else the letter said as she traced two fingers down the page to a signature at the bottom and a name printed below it.
That part, he read aloud. “Stanley F. Hoffman, Chairman of the Board.”
* * *
Rachel backed out of the truck and reached for the zipper pull on her coat, her hand trembling so much that she missed twice before clasping it between her thumb and forefinger.
Once she’d unzipped it, she couldn’t shake out of her jacket fast enough.
She dumped it on the floor. What did she care if Mick saw her topless again?
Nothing else mattered since she’d learned that everything she believed about her father—and her whole family—had been a lie.
There was no honor. No decency. Only lies.
How could she wrap her head around the idea that her father was…
a criminal? She didn’t want to believe it, but the words were right there in black and white.
Shaking her head, she tried to brush aside the questions as she slid her arms into the straps of her bra and fixed the clasp.
“Riley told me not to look,” she said, not caring if Mick could hear her. “Why didn’t I listen? Why couldn’t I just forget about it?”
A shiver overtook her from so much more than the cold just as Mick rounded the truck to the driver’s side.
Like her, he’d pulled his jeans on, but he was still shirtless and barefoot.
While rocking from his heels to his toes, he held out her sweater and socks. He’d draped his own shirt over his arm.
With a nod of thanks, she accepted her clothes. She yanked the top over her head.
Mick pulled on his shirt and then coughed into his sleeve. “I know what you’ve found is upsetting, but—”
“Upsetting? You think that’s all it is?”
He held up his hands. “No, I realize it’s bad, but we haven’t even read it.”
“Isn’t it enough already? The man just confessed to God-knows-what involving Bilton. We didn’t even know he was part of that company, and he was chairman of the board?”
“You still don’t know everything. You still have to read the rest of the file.”
As gooseflesh skimmed up her arms over what she still might find, she lunged for the file folder. Then she dropped it back on the seat. “I can’t read that here.”
She jerked her hand to indicate their surroundings, which still included a pile of blankets on the floor. “I should never have come. What was I even doing here?”
The look they exchanged made her cheeks burn at the memory of Mick’s touch. What they’d both been doing in the garage seemed like an even bigger mistake now. Rather than looking for information that could have helped Riley, they’d been christening her father’s truck and her mother’s quilts.
“You weren’t the only one in that…bed.” He gave her another look and stepped to the pallet to clear away the blankets.
“Let’s not talk about that now. I can’t—” She shook her head, trying to clear her muddled thoughts. “It was a blip in judgment. That’s all.”
But she couldn’t look at him as she said it. Otherwise, those kind, gentle eyes would see the uncertainty in hers.
Desperate for something to do with her hands, she crossed back to the blankets on the floor. She picked one up, folded it and stowed it in one of the open tubs.
“I wasn’t talking about the garage.” Mick tucked a quilt in a different container. “I meant we could read it in the house. We’ll turn up the heat and make some coffee and—”
“I’ve got to pick up the girls from Stacy’s. It’s getting late.” Rachel let her shoulders drop as she recognized that there was probably still time to peek…if she wanted to do that. “Don’t you get it? I can’t be here. Anywhere.”
In a place that she’d already suspected would be filled with ghosts, those records had turned the spirits sinister.
“Clearly, I didn’t know the man at all,” she said to fill the silence as she reached for another quilt.
Her breath caught as she recognized the double-wedding-ring design that once had been stretched over her parents’ bed.
Before she could stop herself, she buried her face in the cloth.
When she lifted her head, she caught Mick watching her, his gaze so compassionate that her chest squeezed.
She wasn’t sure how to explain to him that on a day when her father had become a stranger to her, she still clung to that little-girl memory of her mother.
“How about we take the whole bag back to your house and go through them after you pick up the twins?” he asked.
“Maybe we should just—”
Mick crossed his arms and lifted both brows. He could be as stubborn as she could, and he would never agree to leave her to deal with this discovery alone. Since she was too tired to argue about it, she nodded.
“Remember you don’t know the whole story yet,” he said. “Even the stuff in the bag might not tell you all of it. Like why your father wrote a confession nearly twenty years ago and then never bothered to deliver it to police.”
“Maybe he had second thoughts?”
“Then why keep it where someone, like your brother or you, could find it?”
He stacked the first two tubs together and rested them against the wall. “It could be a fake. Or your dad could have been coerced into writing it. All we know for sure is your dad isn’t around to tell his side of the story.”
Her chest ached with the need to buy into Mick’s theories, to believe that her father was innocent and that this had all been some big mistake. But as her gaze shifted to Riley’s messenger bag, her throat tightened, her hope straining.
“The stuff in there will give me a good overview of my father’s side. If not that, his suicide made a pretty strong statement all by itself.”
Mick blinked as though he’d forgotten that part.
The irony that she’d once tried to convince herself, and anyone else who’d listen, that her father’s death had been an accident, niggled at her as well.
She couldn’t have been more wrong, but right now she was too angry and hurt to care if guilt had pushed him to that awful limit.
She returned to the truck to collect the messenger bag. Resisting the temptation to open the folder and read every word in this place that served as a reminder of her father’s betrayal, she tucked it inside and closed the flap. When Rachel returned, Mick pointed to the bag.
“You don’t have to look at it. You could just put it back behind the seat and pretend you never saw it. Just like your brother must have done. No one would have to know.”
She tilted her head and studied him. “You’d be able to forget what you saw?”
He nodded, then shrugged. “I’d try. If whatever your father didn’t involve the Mount Isabel FD, anyway. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Wouldn’t it bother you not to report crimes you’d become aware of?”
“Like I said, not my business.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute.” In her gut, she already knew Mick was an honorable man, just like Riley. And, like her brother, it would kill him to keep a secret that wasn’t even his.
But could she? For a second, she allowed herself to consider it, though nausea already rolled in waves inside her.
“Riley did ask me to forget about it. But we all know that’s not who I am. He only looked into our father’s suicide because I couldn’t let it lie. Then he was forced to hide our dad’s secrets. No wonder he—”
“You’re not going to blame his relapse on yourself again, are you?”
Lifting her chin, she crossed her arms. “Like you said about being cleared of responsibility in that fire last year, I can’t claim total innocence. I put him in that situation. He might have kept secrets to protect our family’s reputation, but he did it mostly to shield me.”
“He’s a good brother.”
“Wish he could say that I’m a good sister, too.”
“He can. And, no matter what stories you’ve told me, I bet he always could.”
Rachel shrugged, not ready to believe what he’d said but desperately wanting to.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Mick said. “If he didn’t want you to ask questions, then why did he mention the Bilton Foundation at all?”
She shook her head over the question that had been bugging her since Friday.
But the answer was suddenly clear. “Because he knew I would look, no matter what he said. So he gave me something I could research on the internet. He probably figured that was safer than going out and asking the wrong people questions.”
“And you did that, right?”
Rachel ticked off facts on her fingers. “I found a corporate address in South Carolina. And on the ChariGuide database, I found the foundation’s annual Internal Revenue Service Form 990 for nonprofits and the board of directors list. No names I recognized on that.”
“Riley never expected you to track down the information that he found.”
“But I did. So, if I’m going to help him now, I need to know all of it.” She patted the bag. “Want me to drop you off at your truck?”
“It would definitely shorten the walk.”
When she glanced over, he grinned. “Maybe I parked a little farther than I said earlier.”
Rachel rolled her eyes but then stepped to the controls for the propane heaters.
They moved about the room, closing boxes and stacking tubs the best they could.
Sure, it was a little awkward between them, but not as much as she would have expected.
It felt like they were on the same team.
One that just might be able to help Riley.
Maybe they could forget that they’d made love while working together to uncover the truth. Or at least pretend to.
She had no doubt that the situation was about to get darker once they studied all the information they’d found. But for just that moment, she let herself breathe and appreciate that she wasn’t alone.