Chapter Eight
Anyone else and Alice would have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for the response.
No, she would have been poised to spring to her feet and bolt for the door, perhaps wishing she’d brought keys or a gun for self-defense.
But that wasn’t the case. She knew deep down, as surely as she knew her name was Alice Sweet, that the answer would be no.
Clint shook his head. “I did not. But the police and the jury seemed to think I did.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
His fingers glazed over the clipping in front of him with a gentleness that seemed more appropriate for petting the family cat than for a piece of paper.
After a long silence, she thought he was going to say no.
Instead he kept his gaze on the paper and proceeded to tell her how he’d met his wife, and the troubles they’d had.
“I read over these clippings, hoping I will notice something, anything, that will prove I did not set my house on fire to kill my wife.”
As he spoke, her gaze dropped to the clippings; House fire claims life of local woman.
Husband arrested for murder of wife. Man convicted of arson and manslaughter in the death of his wife.
When he brought up his son Jason, her attention darted over to the framed photo. “Would that be you and Jason?”
For the first time since he started talking, he pulled his gaze away from the page and looked to where she pointed. His head bobbed. “He was only six in that photo. He was ten when… when Carol died. He went to live with Carol’s Aunt Agnes.”
She listened as he seemed to relive that night, explaining about going out for a drink to get away from the fighting.
To coming home and falling asleep on the sofa.
Waking up to the smell of smoke and the flickering flames.
How he managed to save Jason but despite every effort, couldn’t get back upstairs to Carol.
Every few moments Alice nodded her head, her heart breaking for this good man who was clearly in so much pain merely recounting the history.
She couldn’t fathom what he’d gone through at the time, and fought to keep her hands on the table and not reach out to pat his arm or hold his hand. Instead, she merely sat and listened.
“Finding work back in Wyoming would have been hard enough as an ex-con, but there wasn’t a soul on the planet who hadn’t heard about the case and no one wanted to hire a wife killer.
” His gaze remained on the paper in front of him as he momentarily closed his eyes before going on.
“I had to come all the way to Texas to find work and even then, it was never anything long term, or well paying. I slept a lot in my truck. Until Ray. He didn’t seem to care.
Said everyone deserved second chances. I believed him. Was thankful. More than thankful.”
Once upon a time, she would have expected Ray to do the noble thing. The Ray they all thought they knew.
He gave a short-deprecating snort. “My guess is he hired me because he thought I’d be as crooked as the rest of the hands and willing to go along with his plans.”
“You. Knew?” She could barely get the words out.
His head shook from side to side. His head back, he closed his eyes again.
“No. But I must have done enough right for him to know that I was honest. It probably didn’t hurt that once when we were talking over a fence post, he asked me questions about what I’d done.
I doubt telling him I was innocent was what he’d wanted to hear. ”
If she could have, she would have kicked herself for even considering that he might have known what Ray was doing and not said a word. That went against everything she’d learned about him. She only hoped he didn’t hold her momentary lapse against her.
“Jason’s grown up thinking his father murdered his mother. I’ve tried to reach out to him, but, he’s refused any contact with me. I can’t give up, though. I have to prove to my son that no matter how it looks, what anyone says, I would never have done that to Carol, no matter how bad it got.”
Listening to the many times he’d tried to speak to his son, tried to find a way to prove his innocence, she wanted to jump up and pull him into a tight embrace the way she would any wounded child and reassure him everything would be okay, but he wasn’t a child, and she doubted that even vindication could make all these lost years right again.
“And now, you know as much as I do.” For the first time since he’d looked at the photo, lifting his head, he turned his eyes to hers. “Am I fired?”
She actually rolled her eyes at him. “Not only won’t I fire you, but if you actually kill someone, I’d be willing to bet that not only did they deserve it, I’d help you bury the body.” Letting a smile tease at her lips, she added, “We have an awful lot of land out here.”
Though he didn’t fully crack a smile, his cheek twitched and the darkness in his eyes seemed to give way to a teeny sparkle. “Thank you.”
“So.” Blowing out a deep breath, she straightened in her seat. “What are we going to do about this?”
“We?”
She nodded. “You’re my best hand, a much respected foreman, and, I hope, friend. How can I help?”
If Clint had thought Alice Sweet just short of an angel, he was pretty sure at this moment she was indeed a saint.
“I don’t know that you can.” His gaze dropped to the clipping he’d been fingering like a lifeline to his sanity.
Always so focused on the mentions of his case, he’d never even noticed the other articles.
Not only was the man dead, but the man was his next-door neighbor.
What didn’t make sense to him was that the guy next door had just replaced his gas furnace the year before. How odd was that?
“What is it?”
He glanced up at her. “What is what?”
“You have a look in your eye that I see when something is bothering you. Not that being falsely convicted isn’t reason enough to be bothered, but there’s something else.”
Did this woman really know him so well? Staring at her for a moment, it struck him that at this point, she knew so much, how could it hurt to tell her what he was thinking? After all, how much worse could he look to her? “I never noticed that my neighbor died shortly after my house burned down.”
Her gaze darted to the clipping before she edged it out from under his finger and read it to herself. “The carbon monoxide death was your next-door neighbor?”
He nodded.
“And this happened right after your house burned down?”
“Except his was considered an accident and mine was determined to be arson.”
Eyes narrowed, she read the article again, then eyes wide open, leveled her gaze with his. “I’m not a detective, and maybe I’ve watched too many crime shows on television that have no basis in reality, but this says he was found on the floor of his garage with the engine running.”
Clint pulled the article back. He had assumed when he saw carbon monoxide that it was a furnace.
Scanning as quickly as he could, he said, “The only reason it wasn’t deemed a suicide was because the spring on the door was broken so the investigators determined that it was an accident.
That he was most likely trying to manually open the door before he gave up and the fumes overtook him before he could turn off the engine and get some fresh air. ”
“What do you know about your neighbor?” she asked.
“Apparently, not enough.” Could there be a connection? Had the clue to his innocence been in the manila folder all this time? Or was he grasping at straws again?
Alice pulled out her phone and began tapping at the screen. Her chin lifted and she glanced at the article before turning back and tapping some more.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking up the guy’s name. Seeing what I can find.” She scrolled through the screen, her finger moving, then pausing as she read, then swiping at it again.
“Find anything relevant?”
“Hard to say.” She squinted and he wished he could read her mind. “Was he divorced?”
Clint shrugged. “I know we would occasionally hear him and his wife arguing if we were both in our kitchens at the same time. I remember thinking maybe married people aren’t supposed to get along. That maybe my parents were the exception to the rule, and not the norm.”
“That’s right. You mentioned your parents balanced each other.”
He nodded, and even smiled. “They were like two peas in a pod.”
“That’s nice.” Alice smiled. “So he was married.”
It wasn’t a question, but he responded anyhow. “Except we hadn’t seen his wife for a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“At least a few weeks, maybe a month or more. We figured she was visiting a relative or something.”
“Hmm.” She returned to scrolling. “Well, well.”
“What?” He inched closer. Close enough to smell the vanilla in her hair. Crazy. He shouldn’t be noticing her shampoo.
“When I type in the address, it comes up that it was bought in foreclosure.”
He shrugged. “Makes sense if the guy died unexpectedly.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It was sold on the courthouse steps only a couple of weeks after he died. That had to be in the works long before he died. Trust me, if anyone knows about the threat of foreclosure, it’s me.”
“Do you think all of this could be connected?”
Her mouth clamped shut, she tapped some more at her phone and nodded. “And I know just the person to help us figure this out.”
Could it be after all this time, something had finally gone right for him?
“Declan, hello. It’s Alice Sweet.” She put the call on speaker.
“Ms. Alice, what a nice surprise.”
“I’m not calling too late, am I?”
“Nope. Only ranchers go to bed with the chickens.”
She laughed. “True. Listen, you’ve got people working on finding Ray, right?”
“The police are doing all they can—”
“No.” She cut him off. “I mean someone else outside of law enforcement.”
“That would be Brooklyn. The best of the best and even he’s having trouble tracking this character down, but I promise you, if anyone can find him, it’s Brooklyn. As a matter of fact, I think one of your sons is talking to him about some security set up at the ranch. Since finding that money.”
“Yes, of course. But I’d like his number, if you don’t mind.” Her gaze shifted from the phone screen to Clint. “I have something else I’d like him to look into.”
Clint’s hands fisted at his side. Not from anger, but from the restraint it took not to spring up in his seat and shout hallelujah.
Not only did someone—Alice—believe in him, but maybe somewhere out there, someone who actually knew what they were doing, and not just sulking over old clippings, would dig into the truth.
Because the truth was, someone set his house on fire, and that someone was not him.