Chapter 15 #2
“Does that mean you’re going to arrest me?
” In his youth, Trent hadn’t ever been frightened of spending a night, or two, in the town lock-up.
But now? It was utterly terrifying. Not because he was afraid of closed spaces.
Or because he couldn’t hack a night in jail.
But because he knew deep down he was better than that.
And damn it, he didn’t want to disappoint his parents.
It didn’t matter that they were no longer among the living, but what they would’ve thought of him and his life choices mattered more now than ever.
“No,” Dawson said quickly and definitely.
“We have an eyewitness that someone was on your property this morning. You were shot at. Add in all the other strange happenings and some other matters we’ll get into once my office has looked into a few things, I don’t believe that’s necessary right now.
” Dawson raised his hand when Trent opened his mouth.
“I don’t want you saying one word about what went on here this morning.
” Dawson turned to Keaton. “You good with that?”
“I can delay filing anything for a day. Maybe two.” Keaton nodded. “But if someone called this in, we have to be prepared that someone also tipped off Stacey Wilkerson.”
Trent groaned. “That woman is a menace. And she never checks her sources. Thanks to her, I was a suspect in a murder case.”
"That didn't last very long," Dawson said.
“Not an easy thing to forget,” Trent said softly. “Everything that's happening has to be connected. Karl. The Hendersons. Slade’s death. The limestone mining. The fact that the government wants to dig up my dad's body. Maybe even this Dutton guy. I just don’t know how or why.”
Buddy moved up beside Trent. “I’ve put Cullen on the payroll until we figure this out.”
“I’ve got some old contacts looking into it,” Sterling said. “Background checks on everyone. I'm even going to dive deeper into Dutton to see if his interests in limestone mining are something outside of campaign promises.”
“Someone in law enforcement leaked my dad’s name.
Maybe it could've been this Dutton guy.” Trent looked at his boat.
The hole in the fiberglass. His father's dock, where strangers had tied off a brand-new skiff and calmly walked onto his property and killed two animals that had done nothing wrong except exist in a place someone wanted to use against him.
“Give us a little time to do our jobs,” Dawson said.
"What about the meeting?" he asked.
“We’ll meet this afternoon,” Keaton said. "After we get a chance to process this shed."
Which put it somewhere between the exhumation and the town meeting tonight, wedged into a day that was already running out of road. Trent nodded because there was nothing else to do.
Dawson gestured toward the yard. "I need everyone to step out and let us work."
They filed out into the bright, punishing morning. Buddy and Sterling said their goodbyes with the clipped efficiency of people who had things to do and would do them without being asked twice. Keaton and Dawson disappeared into the shed with their phones out.
Trent walked toward the house, and Dove fell into step beside him.
The screen door creaked the way it had since he was a kid.
Inside, the kitchen smelled like eggs and coffee and the ordinary morning they'd had about forty-five minutes ago, before the world had another go at him.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, his hands at his sides.
"I don't know how much more of this I've got," he said.
“They used a gator a I knew.” He stared at the floor.
"He's been coming here since I was a teenager.
He's never bothered anyone." His voice didn't crack.
He wouldn't let it. "He came here because I made it safe.
" He felt the failure of that in places words couldn't reach.
“Don’t do that to yourself. This isn't your fault.”
"Maybe not. But I seem to be the center of it, and it's not just gators that are being killed.
It's people." He held up his hand before she could say a word.
“I'm sorry about your uncle." He lifted his gaze. “I know he didn’t tell us everything. But whatever it was that he was trying to do, he didn’t deserve to be murdered.. He didn’t deserve to be gunned down in a parking lot, and over what?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, my uncle was willing to risk his life for it.
” She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms, her eyes steady on his.
“He came here to warn you, or help you, or maybe to stop something.” She paused.
"Which means there's a thread here somewhere.
And when we find it and pull it, the whole thing comes undone. "
He looked at her—this woman who hated gators and showed up anyway, who'd watched her team die and got back up, who was standing in his kitchen less than a day after identifying her uncle's body and talking about threads instead of falling apart.
He loved her. God, he loved her. He knew that the way he knew the moat—every depth, every current, every cold-blooded creature that called it home.
He knew it without needing to say it out loud and without being ready to, which was the quiet cruelty of being a man who'd spent most of his adult life keeping his mouth shut about the things that mattered most.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. He was a coward and she deserved better.
Pushing off the counter, she poured him a fresh cup of coffee and set it in front of him, then sat across the table in his father’s chair.
Outside, the gators moved in the moat. A tail slapped the water, sharp and authoritative—a way of announcing that one of them was watching.
He wrapped his hands around the mug.
Find the loose stone.
Okay. He could do that. He'd pulled twelve-foot snakes off struggling animals with his bare hands. He'd held this property together through his father's death and his mother's slow disappearance and every bad decision he'd made in between.
He could find a loose stone. And he’d find the threat and neutralize it.
And once it was all over, he had to find a way to tell Dove how much he loved her. How he couldn't see his future anymore without her in it.