Chapter 24 Lennon
TWENTY-FOUR
LENNON
There’s a Carson-sized hole in the room that he just left. I’m mad at myself, furious really, that I didn’t say those words back to him. I should’ve told him how I feel, but I hadn’t been able to make my mouth form the words.
The word love hurts for me. It doesn’t make a warm space in my chest like it does for so many other people. It gives me anxiety, and it all but means the person who said it is going to leave. I so wish it were different, but that’s the reality I’ve faced my entire life.
Which is why when he said it, I panicked. Thank God he recognized it, but I’m still angry with myself. This morning could have been totally different if I would’ve just decided to tell him how I feel.
Sighing, I get up, heaving my sore body out of the bed, and decide to head downstairs. At least there, I can be with friends, and that’s better than being alone.
“About time your slow ass got up.” Atlee grins, coming over with a cup of coffee in her hand. “I was about to bring this up to you, just to make sure you were alive.”
“Oh, she was alive all right.” Nora whistles, looking at me with a shit-eating grin. “I think we all heard that she was alive.”
“Oh my god,” I shriek, my face on fire. “You heard? I’m so embarrassed.”
“Never be embarrassed about getting dicked down.” She comes over and checks me with her hip. “Just know that I’m jealous.”
“Surely you and Truett?”
She sighs. “It’s on and off with us, the same way it always is. Who knows if we’ll ever learn to make it stick.”
Aubree clears her throat. “At some point, the two of you are going to have to stop running from each other.”
“Sure, we will.”
“You’ll end up married,” she says with conviction. “Just watch.”
This is exactly what I’ve been missing most of my life. Friends like this and a community like this. One where I can have people to talk to, and who like picking on each other in a way that isn’t mean.
Nora doesn’t say anything. She just shakes her head, and that’s when I realize there’s breakfast on the table. We all sit down and start passing around the plates of food. Looking around, I realize how lucky I am to be in this moment, and I vow I’ll never take it for granted.
The food is good, the coffee is better, and the conversation fills up all the empty spaces inside me that I didn’t even realize were hollow. By the time I push back from the table and carry my plate to the sink, I feel more like myself than I have since Carson left this morning.
But that pull is still there. That nagging, insistent tug that tells me I’m not done yet. That there’s something sitting in that back office waiting for me, something that isn’t going to leave me alone until I see it through.
“I’m gonna go use the computer again, if that’s all right,” I say, rinsing my plate and setting it in the drying rack.
Atlee waves me off. “You don’t have to ask. You know that.”
I do know that. That’s the thing about being here—nobody makes me feel like a guest who’s overstayed. I squeeze her shoulder on my way past, and she reaches up and pats my hand without looking away from Nora, who is telling some story about a horse that got loose at the feed store last spring.
The office is quiet when I push the door open. Morning light is coming through the single window, landing in a long rectangle across the desk. I pull out the chair, settle into it, and open the laptop.
I’ve been turning the pieces over in my mind since last night—the name, the badge, the way Reagan had looked at me outside that gas station like he was cataloging me. Like he was deciding something.
I start the same way I would for any case back at the firm. Public records first. Name, state, occupation.
Thomas Reagan. Sheriff. South Dakota.
The results that come back are clean. Almost too clean. There’s his department page, a few local news articles, a mention in a county commissioner’s meeting minutes from two years ago. Nothing personal. No trail. No history that goes back further than about fifteen years.
I frown at the screen.
Everybody has a trail. That’s the first thing David ever taught me when I started doing background research for the firm.
Everybody leaves breadcrumbs, even if they don’t mean to.
A parking ticket. A marriage license. A voter registration that follows them from one state to the next.
You can trace a person’s whole life in public records if you know where to look.
Thomas Reagan doesn’t have any of that. It’s like he materialized out of thin air sometime in the late 2000s and just started being a person.
I drum my fingers on the edge of the desk.
Okay. Fine. Let’s try something different.
I open a new tab and pull up a genealogy records database we have a firm subscription to—one of the perks of working for a practice that does a fair amount of estate work. I log in with my paralegal credentials and start over.
This time, I vary the date of birth, pulling a range of ten years in either direction. I try different spellings. I try adjacent counties in surrounding states. I try Montana. I try Wyoming. I try Nebraska.
Nothing that matches.
I lean back in the chair and look up at the ceiling for a minute.
Then I try something I probably should’ve thought of sooner. I search the obituary databases. Sometimes when you can’t find a living person, it’s because they borrowed a name from someone who didn’t survive long enough to build a record.
Thomas Reagan. Obituary.
The results load slowly, and I scroll through them, skimming dates and locations. Most of them are men who lived long lives—Thomas Reagans in their seventies and eighties in Ohio, Virginia, and upstate New York.
And then I see it.
I sit up so fast that the chair rolls back an inch.
Thomas Alan Reagan, age 4. Beloved son. Gone too soon.
The obituary is small. The kind that runs in a local paper and gets digitized years later by some historical archive project that nobody pays much attention to. But it’s there. A little boy named Thomas Reagan, who died in rural Montana more than forty years ago now.
My chest tightens as I click through.
The dates make sense. The geography makes sense. Then I notice the timing—this child died within a week of another article that appears in the same newspaper’s archive. I click that one too, and my stomach drops straight to the floor.
Local Man Fails to Appear for Domestic Violence Hearing. Apartment Found in Disarray.
The man’s name is Ethan Fury.
I actually say it out loud. “Ethan Fury.” I pause. “Well, that name had to be some kind of warning sign.”
I keep reading.
According to the article, Ethan Fury had been arrested several months prior on charges of domestic violence.
He’d been booked, released on bond, and was scheduled to appear in court.
He didn’t show. When authorities went to his last known address, they found the apartment ransacked. There was blood.
The article is careful about what it says next. It doesn’t call him dead. It says he is presumed dead. It says the investigation is ongoing. It notes that there is no known next of kin.
Then there’s nothing else. I search his name six different ways. That one article and a brief follow-up that says essentially the same thing are all that exist.
I sit back again, this time slowly, and let what I’m looking at settle over me.
A dead child’s name. A violent man who disappeared. A sheriff who materialized out of nowhere fifteen years ago with no history.
I’m still staring at the screen, turning it all over, when the door opens behind me.
“Hey.” Atlee leans against the door frame, mug in hand. “You’ve got that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’re about three seconds away from either solving something or completely unraveling.” She comes into the room and looks over my shoulder at the screen. Her brow furrows. “What is all this?”
“Reagan.” I point at the obituary. “This is a four-year-old boy who died in Montana forty-some years ago. Same name as our sheriff.” I move my finger to the second article.
“And this is a man named Ethan Fury—who, yes, I know—who was supposed to appear on domestic violence charges and never did. They found blood in his apartment. Presumed dead.”
Atlee reads in silence for a moment. Then she straightens up. “Okay, but wait. Wouldn’t the cops have figured this out when Reagan had to give his fingerprints? Like, when he got hired? Doesn’t law enforcement get printed?”
“They do,” I say. “But it only works if there’s something to match against.” I pull up a third tab. “If Ethan Fury’s prints were never properly entered into the system, or if they were lost somehow before they could be uploaded, there’s nothing to flag.”
I already have the hunch before I even finish the sentence. I pick up my phone and do a quick search for the county jail that would have booked Ethan Fury based on the address in the article. It’s a small operation, the kind that barely has a website.
I find a number and dial.
It rings four times before a woman picks up with a flat, distracted hello.
“Hi, I’m calling from the law offices of Henley and Associates,” I say, sliding into the professional voice I’ve been using for years without even thinking about it.
“I’m a paralegal working on a civil matter, and I’m trying to pull historical booking records for an individual who was processed through your facility.
The name is Ethan Fury. I believe it would have been in the mid-to-late eighties. ”
There’s a long pause. I can hear her typing.
“Ma’am, records from that period—we had a significant loss of physical files during a flood. A lot of what wasn’t already digitized before that point just…” She trails off. “It’s gone.”
My pulse kicks up. “Were fingerprint records included in what was lost?”
“Fingerprints, photos, intake paperwork. If it wasn’t in the system before the flood, it didn’t make it.”
I close my eyes for exactly one second. “Is there any chance you’d still have a physical mugshot or booking card that might have survived? Even partial records?”
Another pause, longer this time. “I’d have to check with records. That’s going to take some time.”
“I completely understand, and I appreciate it so much.” I give her my name, my firm’s name, and my email address. “If there’s anything at all—even a partial file—could you scan it and send it over? I can provide written authorization from the firm if you need it.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” she says, and she sounds like she means it, which is more than I expected.
We hang up, and I set the phone down on the desk and look at Atlee.
“Now we wait,” I say.
Atlee pulls up the spare chair from the corner and drops into it. She doesn’t ask me if I’m sure about any of this. She doesn’t tell me I might be reaching. She just sits with me, and I’m grateful for it in a way I don’t quite have words for.
We talk about other things while the minutes pass. She tells me something funny that Devlin said at breakfast that she forgot to mention earlier, and I laugh at the right parts, but most of my attention is sitting right on top of my inbox like a weight.
Twenty minutes. Thirty.
My email chimes.
I click on it so fast I nearly knock the laptop sideways.
The subject line just says, Fury, Ethan – Partial Records.
There’s a PDF attached. The file is old, clearly scanned from something physical that had seen better days. There’s water damage along one edge, and the resolution isn’t great. But it’s there.
I open it.
The booking form is mostly legible. Name. Date. Charges. And there, in the upper right corner of the page, is the mugshot box.
The image is grainy. The damage from age and whatever that flood did to the physical file has softened some of the detail. But it’s not so damaged that I can’t see the face.
I know that face.
The hair is different. The jaw is younger by decades. But the eyes—those flat, watchful, assessing eyes—are exactly the same as the ones that looked at me outside that gas station.
My hand comes up and covers my mouth before I even know I’m going to do it.
“Lennon.” Atlee is leaning forward, her voice low and sharp. “What? What is it?”
I turn the laptop so she can see.
The silence that follows lasts exactly three seconds.
“Oh my god,” she breathes.
“Yeah.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere far away and slightly underwater. I look back at the screen, at that younger face that belongs to a man who was supposed to be dead, at a name that was never his to use in the first place.
“That’s him,” I say, even though I don’t need to. Even though we both already know. “That’s Sheriff Reagan.”