Chapter 77
Hope didn’t know if what she was doing was the right thing here. She had kept all she had found secret for fourteen months now. Since the week after Steve Wilson had raped her sister and tried to do the same to Hope.
She looked at the people sitting at her kitchen table.
They had a dining room, of course, with a family of two dozen people they used the dining room every night.
But just like in Oklahoma, important stuff happened at the kitchen table.
It wasn’t big enough for everybody—they had two kids tables, too—but the kitchen table was where the important stuff was talked about.
Now, Daniel, Jake, Miguel, Gunnar, Jarrod, Haldyn, and Madison were there. Waiting on her.
“I don’t know…everything that Heather knows.
” Hope was trying to keep it together. But this was not what she did.
She did biological samples or computer forensics.
She didn’t put it all together and look at the damage people did to the innocent.
She just…couldn’t. Hope knew her own weaknesses.
She couldn’t deal with the people who were hurt.
She needed a computer screen between her and the evil.
“She kept some things secret. I don’t know if she thought she was protecting me or…
well, that was probably a part of it. She’s overprotective. ”
“Heather doesn’t share things openly, either,” Miguel said.
“She never did. She’ll just randomly come up with some theory and run with it.
Then come out with something that works or fits.
No one thinks the way that woman does. They just don’t.
Nick and I used to take bets to see what she’d come up with next. We rarely ever figured her out first.”
“She’s like…the smartest person I have ever known,” Hope said. “Everybody in our family knows that.”
“Which is saying something,” Miguel said. “Heather’s family…”
“Yeah, we get it. They are super-geniuses. Even the little bitty ones,” Murdoch said. “I live that reality. The littlest girl one is very diabolical. Hand that baby over to her favorite cousin Murdoch. I need the practice. There is a high likelihood my own spawn will look like this, you know.”
He was reaching for Ember. Hope handed him her niece. Murdoch was great with kids. She’d seen it before. Kids just gravitated to him, too. Her niece’s baby was going to be very lucky to have him for a father. He was raising one of Hope’s nieces and her nephew now, already.
“So where can we go to get what Heather was working on?” Jake asked. “We need something to go on here.”
Now that could be a problem. “I can give you mine. What I found. But anything that Heather was working on—guys, it’s in her head. Heather doesn’t write things down.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Miguel said. “She told me once that stopping to write things out just slowed her down and made her lose her train of thought.”
“I can confirm that. Heather talks things through—to herself. At warp speed. I started recording her after week one, just to keep up,” Jarrod said. “I have her current case files now. But I’m not seeing anything that we don’t already have.”
“That’s because you have to see this part of it.”