Owen
“What do you mean the police are there?” I clenched my steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white.
“Break-ins, thefts, suspicious activities in the woods. And four ATVs were stolen from the equipment shed up at North Camp last week,” Gus grumbled.
“We’re so behind. March was a wash, and now that things are thawing, everything takes twice as long.
Don’t even get me started on the truck that almost rolled on Monday or the creditors breathing down our necks. ”
“And now the fucking police.”
Gus grunted. “The chief has it out for us now. After decades of friendship, he didn’t take too kindly to the international drug trafficking operation Dad ran right under his nose.
Plus all the assault, kidnapping, and murder that went on in the quiet little town of Lovewell made Chief Souza look bad. ”
My stomach sank like it had been at least once a day for months. Gus had a point. As the sons of criminal mastermind Mitch Hebert, we should get used to the fuzz crawling all over our business.
Not that any of us deserved it. We hadn’t been involved in Dad’s nefarious activities. And the next few weeks would be hard enough without the authorities interrupting and causing problems. We had enough of those on our own, hence the reason I was headed home, despite how badly I didn’t want to be.
For months, I’d been helping behind the scenes, but I’d adamantly remained in Boston, preferring the comfortable quiet of my condo.
I looked over financials and advised Gus and hired lawyers when necessary.
But the writing was on the wall. I couldn’t do everything that needed to be done from there.
We still had too many open questions, and we still had too many disasters to clean up.
So I was Lovewell-bound against my better judgment.
“Just get here,” he said. “I can’t keep things running on my own. We need investors.”
“We need to sell,” I corrected. For six months, we’d been hemorrhaging money trying to attract investors to our family timber business. At this point, our only hope of getting out of this without losing our shirts was to sell.
Gus didn’t respond. He’d been vocal in his opposition to selling, and we’d come to figurative blows over it several times. If I’d been in Lovewell, I had no doubt they would have escalated to the physical kind.
I understood his desire to keep the company our great-grandfather had built.
But we were sitting on thousands of acres of timber rights, one-quarter ownership of the Golden Road—the largest logging road on the Eastern Seaboard, connecting Maine to Canada—and various pieces of real estate, trucks, and machinery.
It was all worth a lot of money if we found the right buyer.
And by ourselves, there was no way we could keep it from sinking.
Even before I’d become an accountant, numbers had always made sense to me.
I saw things in dollars and cents. When it came to Hebert Timber, I saw debts and the federal forfeiture of most of my father’s assets.
I saw an opportunity to make sure my mother and brothers were taken care of after the family business fell apart.
But Gus was the lumberjack. He was emotionally connected to the trees and the land and my great-grandfather’s legacy.
A legacy my own father shat all over when he used it as a front to traffic drugs, and even more so when he started murdering people to protect his opioid shipments.
“Two weeks,” I warned as I exited the highway and headed toward the mountains. “That’s all I’ve got.”
The heavy sigh Gus let out crackled down the line, making my gut twist. It ate at me that so much of our troubles had fallen on his shoulders for so long.
But Hebert Timber was his life, his passion.
He knew the ins and outs of the industry and how to keep the doors open in the short term.
I was the one who had run away and never come back.
He was the oldest brother, the protector, and the problem solver.
The solid, strong, dependable Hebert. He’d grown up in the woods, and he’d always wanted nothing more than to run the company with Dad someday.
Instead, Dad had blocked him. He’d held him back rather than letting him into his inner circle.
With his qualifications and experience, he’d be a valuable asset to any timber company in the United States, but he’d remained loyal.
When Dad went to jail and the entire operation blew up, Gus stepped in and tried to right the ship.
He’d been working seven days a week for over a year and was running on fumes.
Not that he’d admit that. Nope, he was way too stoic and proud.
He’d work himself into an early grave before he asked for help.
And that was why I was finally coming home. To do my part. Even though crossing the border into Maine had me reaching for the Tums I kept in my glove compartment.
I tightened my grip on the wheel and focused on the road as he ran through the outstanding, constantly growing list of crises we were dealing with.
Unfulfilled orders, angry customers, employees who were overworked after more than half the team quit, mysterious criminal shit, and the ongoing federal investigation into my father.
I took a deep breath.
Two weeks.
That’s all I was giving this shit show.
Two weeks in hell. Two weeks to close things out.
Two weeks until I could make a clean break from my father and all the shit he’d put us through over the years.
I repeated it like a silent mantra. Two weeks. Two weeks.
The four-hour drive had felt endless. The straight shot up I-95 should have been easy. One where I could field work calls, talk to my staff at DiLuca Construction, and listen to a few podcasts.
Instead, my racing thoughts had taken over and consumed me for every single mile.
My stomach rolled as I crossed the border into the state of Maine. I’d been mainlining Tums for the last hour, watching as the exits grew farther and farther apart and the trees and mountains got taller.
In the civilized world, April meant spring. But up here, winter still reigned, as evidenced by the snow piled up on the side of the road and the forty-degree midday temperatures.
“You need to get here,” Gus repeated. “Chief is threatening to come back with a search warrant.”
Aw, fuck. The feds had already thoroughly trashed the place, and we’d been searching for all kinds of key documents since. The local police playing Sherlock Holmes would only set us back further.
“I left at five,” I spat, wishing I’d stopped for a third coffee before I’d left more populated areas. I’d forgotten just how long these country roads felt. “Canceled all my meetings, rescheduled important events, and jumped in the car. I’m doing the best I can.”
I made my way through town, down Main Street, headed toward route 106 and the forest. Lovewell, Maine, was just as I remembered. It had been frozen in time.
Same thick forest, same neighborhoods of modest homes, same streets riddled with potholes big enough to sink the Titanic. This place had always maintained the small-town atmosphere, which felt like such a strange contrast against the wild majesty of the mountains and the forest backdrop.
As I put downtown in my rearview, my anxiety worsened. The narrow, winding road was bordered by thick pine forest and led up to the mountains, and with every minute that passed, I was coming closer to the place I’d spent so many years avoiding.
My heart was lodged in my throat, and I’d broken out into a sweat, but I forced myself to continue on.
A looming shape appeared suddenly in the middle of the road, and I all but jumped out of my skin.
“What the fuck?” I slammed on the brakes so violently I was thrown forward, and my chest hit the steering wheel as my car skidded to a halt.
“Owen?” Gus yelled through my car’s Bluetooth as I fought to take in air. “Are you okay?”
My hands shook, and all the energy drained from my body. I put the car in park and dropped my head, continuing to focus on breathing without responding to my brother. I didn’t think I could form the words even if I tried.
When I finally forced my head up, I startled again. Because standing at the bumper of my Audi, practically staring into my soul, was a moose. A massive moose, literally longer than my damn car.
“Owen,” Gus urged, sounding frantic.
“I’m okay,” I said, resting my head on the wheel. “I almost hit a moose. It’s just standing here in the middle of the road.”
“Fuck.” He huffed a breath. “A moose will kill you.”
I sat up again, and I swore the motherfucker was making direct eye contact with me, sensing all my darkest thoughts.
Breathe. I just had to breathe. It would move eventually, and then I could continue on my way to deal with the endless shit show at Hebert Timber.
“It’s not moving,” I said with a honk of my horn.
The damn moose was standing sideways in the middle of the road. The forest was dense here, the trees growing right up next to the road, which meant there was no way to drive around the beast.
And the creature didn’t even flinch when I honked. That didn’t stop me from trying to scare it away, though.
“Don’t antagonize the moose!” Gus yelled through the Bluetooth. “Do you want it to charge you?”
“It’s blocking the damn road.” I honked again, yet it continued to stare. Though its nostrils were flaring. Had they been doing that before? Was it going to attack me? “How do you move a moose?”
“You don’t, you moron. It’s a fucking moose.”
Gus was so absurd. It was just an animal. “Yeah, but I need it to move. So what do I do?”
“You wait until it moves on. You were born here, right? It’s not a fucking dog. You can’t distract it with a treat.”
I unbuckled my seat belt. Okay, so I couldn’t tempt it away, but maybe I could run it off.
“Go around it.”
“I can’t. The woods are too thick and close to the road here.”
“And you drive that ridiculous Audi.”
“It has all-wheel drive.”
My brothers were always riding me about how impractical my car was.
He scoffed. “I’m sure that finely tuned German suspension is great for off-roading through forests and around moose.”
“Moose aren’t sacred around here or anything, right?” I didn’t remember that being the case, but it had been a long time since I’d been back. I’d traveled to India a few years ago and had been baffled by the way the world stopped for the cows that lingered in the middle of the road.
“God, city boy. You’re worse off than I thought. No, they’re not sacred, you dumbass. It’s a fucking moose. Fifteen hundred pounds of unpredictable wildlife. Is it a bull or a cow?”
Its gender was irrelevant. All that mattered was that it was in my way. I’d been in the car for almost four hours and was sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated. In this state, I’d do pretty much anything to get this show on the road.
“Fuck if I know. It’s giant. Think it’ll take off if I yell at it?”
Gus barked out a deep, full laugh.
Damn. If I’d gotten this much of a rise out of him, then he really thought I was an idiot. Gus was usually pretty deadpan.
“Fuck, I thought you were the smart brother. Just sit and wait.”
“But the police are there. And there’s so much to do.”
The next laugh was even louder, the sound of it sending a shock of irritation down my spine. “Brother. You’re in Maine now. Best learn to slow down a bit or you won’t survive.”