Chapter 12 Holt #2
12. Lucy’s real truck is being brought back to Sandpiper Shores this evening.
By the time Holt stepped back from the center board, every person in the room was staring at it.
He capped the marker, then looked at the faces in front of him.
June looked grave, her pen resting idle above her page.
Carmen’s folded arms had tightened higher across her chest. Zane was reading the board with the expression of a man trying to see whether the pattern on it was legal, logical, or both.
Willa looked pale. Harvey had stopped pretending he was only there as a helpful extra set of hands.
Margo sat motionless beside Rad, her eyes glued to the whiteboards.
Holt moved to the clean board on the left.
At the top, in black, he wrote:
10 YEARS AGO
Then he crossed to the clean board on the right and wrote in black:
SUSPECTS / TARGETS
He divided the right board into five columns.
At the top of the first, in red, he wrote:
SUSPECTS
At the top of the second, in brown:
MOTIVES
At the top of the third, in purple:
CURRENT EVIDENCE / LINKS
At the top of the fourth, in green:
POSSIBLE TARGETS
At the top of the fifth, in blue:
NOTES / QUESTIONS
Then, working down the red column, he wrote:
1. Victoria Morrison
2. Clive Morrison
3. Sienna Morrison
4. Dr. Judy Vernon
5. .Alfred Smythe
In the brown motive column beside them:
1. Jealousy. Control. Something to hide.
2. Unclear.
3. Unclear.
4. Revenge connected to Gilbert Fry. She is his older sister.
5. Unclear. Possibly acting under pressure from Victoria, Sienna, or Clive.
In the purple evidence column:
1. Victoria had Clive’s car towed and crushed immediately after Lacey was run off the road.
2. Clive owned blue sedan matching color of the car that hit Lacey. Front-end damage.
3. Sienna had possession of bracelet found in Teacups after fire.
4. Judy’s devices are with trusted forensic specialist. Still waiting on results.
5. Alfred has scratches on hands and close access to Morrison household and movements.
In the green targets column:
1. Lucy may have been targeted to stop renewed relationship with Tom.
2. June may have been targeted to stop Holt and June reconnecting.
3. Judy Vernon may be a target because of Gilbert Fry and possible evidence he was not behind the trouble and tragedy ten years ago.
4. Margo Tanner. Reason still unclear.
Finally, in the blue notes column:
1. Is Tom involved? If so, how deeply?
2. Need to get hold of Nigel Frost. He may be withholding information from ten years ago.
3. Is what happened ten years ago related to what is happening now?
4. Events around start of incidents, accidents, and fires:
a. Willa, Margo, and Rad begin looking into ten years ago.
b. June and Carmen arrive in Sandpiper Shores just before first fire.
c. Holt arrives in Sandpiper Shores on day of first fire.
He had become so focused on fitting the information neatly, legibly, and in the right order that he did not notice the room’s silence deepen until he turned around and found every face fixed not just on the boards, but on him.
For a second, no one said anything.
Then Harvey spoke first. “You need to add something.” He pointed at the board.
“Do you have some new information?” Holt looked at him, and Harvey nodded.
“Clive’s getting a new car soon. He messaged me to let me know his mother got the insurance to pay out for a brand-new one.” Harvey shifted in his chair and pointed toward the board with the suspects.
“What?” June was the first to react.
“According to him, the tow company that took the blue sedan to the junkyard also does auto repairs. Apparently, they backed Victoria up when she claimed the car was stolen in transit.” Harvey nodded.
“Why would she do that?” Carmen asked immediately. “Why not just get the bumper fixed?”
“She had the car crushed as soon as it got to the junkyard.” June glanced at her sister. “Now I know why. With it crushed, no one will be able to find it.”
“This makes Victoria and Clive look very guilty,” Zane said. “She has the car crushed almost immediately after Lacey is run off the road, and now she lies about it?”
“Is it true she was driving the car?” Carmen asked, glancing from June to Holt.
“Yes,” Holt and June answered in unison.
“So she gets the car crushed and then deemed stolen before anyone can find the damage and question what happened,” Zane clarified.
“She says she hit a tree,” Harvey told Zane and Carmen.
“Then why go to all the trouble to hide it like this?” Carman asked, looking at Harvey. “If she really did hit a tree, why was the car crushed and then deemed stolen. Just come clean and say I hit a tree?”
“Well,” said a voice from the doorway, “if Victoria were driving, that would be a problem.”
Every head turned.
Ace leaned against the doorframe, looking entirely too comfortable for a man who hadn’t been invited.
For one sharp second, Holt didn’t even understand where he had come from or what door he was standing in.
“Didn’t we close the door?” Carmen said exactly what Holt was thinking.
“You did,” Ace said. He lifted a thumb toward the back corner of the room. “The one that leads into the hall. You didn’t close the service door that goes into the kitchen.”
“Ace. What are you doing here?” Willa’s eyes widened as she asked the question.
“I was looking for you,” Ace told her. “Three of the day camp counselors can’t make the overnight camping trip tomorrow, and I don’t think it’s safe for just you and me with all those kids.”
“I can help,” Rad said immediately.
“Me too,” Margo offered.
“I would,” Harvey said, “but the shop’s drowning.”
“I’ll do it,” Carmen said. “I’ll be your third.”
“Great,” Ace replied easily, then pushed away from the doorframe and walked into the room as if this had all gone exactly as he had planned it. He pulled out a chair and sat beside Willa. “And while I’m here, I’m going to assume my invitation to this meeting got lost somewhere in the ether.”
“Actually,” Holt said, deciding he was too tired to dance around the truth, “I hadn’t decided whether to include you because of your relationship with Sienna.”
“I did vouch for you,” Harvey assured Ace. “But you and Sienna do date.”
“We’re friends. Well, friendly. I take her out when she needs to get away from her overdomineering mother.” Ace turned his head and looked at Harvey with narrowed eyes. “You, Harvey, have a much closer relationship with Sienna and Clive than I do, yet here you are.”
“Harvey has already proved he can be trusted,” Holt explained. “More than once.”
“And I haven’t.” Ace nodded once, leaned forward, and took a cookie from the tray in front of him.
“Fair enough. But let me save you some guessing. I’m not loyal to the Morrisons.
Not in any way that would matter here.” His gaze drifted to the right-hand board as he bit into the huge cookie, and his brow furrowed.
“Why is Margo a target?”
The room stilled again.
Margo looked at him.
“Because when Aunt Lacey was run off the road, I was supposed to be doing my delivery route in my mother’s truck at that time.” Her voice was soft as she updated Ace.
Ace turned more fully toward her.
“Margo was also in the vet office when it was attacked,” June said.
“And I was supposed to be going to Henderson Farm on the day of the fire there,” Margo added.
Rad’s head came around so fast his chair creaked. “What?”
“I asked Aunt Lacey to take the deliveries that day.” Margo’s fingers tightened in her lap, but she held his gaze.
The weight in the room changed.
Holt felt it at once.
Not because he hadn’t already been considering Margo as a possible target. He had. But hearing it from Margo herself, hearing the practical reality of where she had been meant to be and who had taken her place, gave it a different kind of force.
“Margo…” Willa said softly. “You think you were being targeted?”
Margo nodded. “There’s one more thing,” she continued.
Holt uncapped the black marker again and turned toward her. “Go on.”
Margo drew in a breath.
“I was leading a camp troop through the forest surrounding the campground near where the fire was that day,” she told him.
“I was teaching the kids about the plants. But we had started a lot earlier than we planned and were already finished by the time the fires had started.” She shifted nervously in her seat.
“But if we hadn’t started an hour earlier…
we’d still have been in the forest, like what was on the calendar for activities that day. ”
For a moment, the room went utterly silent.
Holt’s eyes widened before he could stop the reaction, and around him, he could feel everyone else arriving at the same terrible conclusion.
Margo had just shifted the center of the board.
Not Judy’s line. Not the Cedar Key piece. But nearly everything else.
The accidents. The fires. The substitutions. The routines. The near misses.
All at once, they looked different.
All eyes turned to Margo.
She had just completely changed the way they were looking at the investigation.