Chapter 30
DAISY
Marcus starts toward the door.
The gun in Stan’s hand is six feet from my face. Dave is two hundred yards away with his head under an engine and Johnny Cash in his only good ear. Wyatt is on the other side of Blackstone Creek.
Marcus is walking out to give himself an alibi.
Unless I act, all chance at a confession goes clean out the window.
And for a moment, I swear I can hear my dad’s voice in my ear.
Keep him here. Keep him talkin’. Wyatt is comin’, angel.
I inhale through my nose as I close my eyes for one moment.
Okay, Daddy.
“Marcus.” It comes out rough, forced past the ball of emotion lodged in my throat.
He turns at the doorway, already halfway gone.
I open my eyes and force my voice to stay gentle and even. “Please, I need to know… What happened to my dad?”
Marcus stares at me for a beat before relief flashes across his weathered face, clear as day, and I immediately know I’ve chosen the right topic.
Because this is a man who has been waiting three years to explain his reasoning to someone who also loved Tom Monroe.
“Sweetheart—”
“No endearments, Marcus. Just tell me the truth.” I clench my jaw and tilt my chin without breaking eye contact. “I deserve that much at least.”
Marcus glances at Stan, who’s watching our conversation with a frown, the gun still resting against his thigh.
Beneath the table, my phone is doing the work. Every word he gives me is going on record.
When he looks back at me, he removes his hat, and after a minute, lowers his gaze.
“I got in over my head.” His eyes are on the brim of his hat, not on me.
“Caroline wanted the house on the hill, and then she wanted the one past it. The kids needed schooling, and then they needed more schooling. More, it was always more. And, you need to understand, I was making a small-town accountant’s wage while living a life that cost three times what I earned, and every month I’d sit at my desk, look at those books, and tell myself I’d stop next quarter. ”
His thumb rubs the brim of his hat, over and over again, as he continues.
“It started small. A few hundred here and there. Bill never checked. He trusted me.”
His voice wavers at that, and, sickeningly, I can tell the emotion is real. “By the time I’d been at it a year, I owed the ranch twelve thousand dollars. Two years in, it was thirty thousand. I told myself every night I’d come clean tomorrow. And then, it was too late.”
Too late.
Not to stop stealing. Too late because he’d already chosen a side.
“Silas Blackwood.” It’s a statement, not a question, and he knows it, too.
He nods without looking up.
“He came to me about seven years ago. By then, I had eyes on half the county’s books, and he said he’d pay me for tips on ranches in trouble. Just information and the like. Nothing illegal. Only telling him what I already knew.”
His laugh is short and ugly to the core.
“And the first check he sent me covered the kids’ entire quarterly tuition bills without me needing to move a dollar out of the ranch to do it.
After that, the arrangement just… grew. He needed places for the money to land that didn’t have his name on them. ” He shrugs. “I gave him places.”
I swallow heavily, trying my hardest to digest what he’s saying, while my phone sits on my thigh, capturing every word. “The Millers. The Hendersons. Larkspur River, every ranch that’s gone under in this valley. That was you.”
“I only told Silas when they were almost ready to fall. The offers came in through Mountain West, so Silas’s name stayed off the chain of title until the flip.” Marcus’s hands spread helplessly. “I was never the one buying. I was never the one pushing anyone out. I was just—”
“Don’t.”
My voice is that of a woman who is sick of the damn lies and half-truths.
“Don’t finish that sentence. This whole valley looks after its own.
Everyone on this side of the county showed up when the Hendersons lost their ranch two weeks ago.
Same when the Millers were floundering, and again when the Taylors needed a new barn roof.
Half the town has emptied their pockets time and again, and all of it for nothing, because you were sitting in your office, selling their weak moments to a goddamn Blackwood. ”
He tips his head to one side as he runs his thumb over his hat slowly for a moment, then continues as though I never said a word.
“Then Bill started asking questions.” Marcus’s shoulders draw in on themselves. “He caught a number that didn’t match. So he came to me about it, and I told him I’d look into it. I was able to bury it, but only a week later, he came back with three more, and it escalated again and again. And Tom—”
His throat works, and he tugs at his shirt collar.
“Tom was working it from every angle. The ranch books. The Miller sale. The shell companies. He was pullin’ threads I thought I’d buried, and he was pullin’ them from places I couldn’t see.
And if either one of them finished what they were doing, I was done for. My wife. The kids—”
“You don’t get to bring your children into this.” The words land between us like a whip, and he stops, closing his eyes.
“No,” he says quietly. “No, you’re right.”
“Keep going.”
Marcus opens his eyes and looks at me for the first time since he sat down.
“Stan came to me.” He tips his head toward the doorway, eyes still on mine. “Said his mama had a glass of wine too many and let it slip that it would all be over soon. That I’d be paying for what I’d done by the end of the month.”
He shrugs a shoulder.
“Stan didn’t know what she meant. But I did.
I knew the minute he opened his mouth. Alma saw every one of the shell company transfers cross her desk.
She had the bank side of the whole operation in her files, and Tom already had the ranch side.
If they put their pieces together, I’d be in a cell inside a week.
And if Bill found out on top of it, I’d never see the outside of one. ”
There’s a weighted silence for a long moment, but I don’t fill it. I simply wait for it to do its job.
“So it had to be both of them. Tom had the records, Bill had the questions, and if either one walked off that road, my whole life would’ve fallen apart.”
My whole life.
As though my dad’s and Bill’s lives were line items in his ledger, and the math only worked one way.
Despite the rage rippling through me, I hold his gaze. Breathe in. Breathe out.
There’s still more to the story.
“Wyatt was supposed to drive them that morning, but a call came that kept him back.”
Marcus drops his gaze to the hat still pinched between his fingers. Surprise crosses his face, there and gone just as fast, but I note it with pride. He had no idea I was looking at the bank call angle until right now.
“He was the one card I had left to play. Bill had been pulling him deeper into the ranch for a year. Taking a step back and letting him take the reins on the operation. And Wyatt trusted me the way Bill did, so if Bill and Tom were gone and Wyatt took over, I’d have kept running the books clean for another twenty years and nobody would have ever thought to look again. ”
He breathes out.
“And if he’d been in that truck—” He stops, and starts afresh. “Wyatt’s not Bill. He’d have fought. He’s the kind of man who walks out of a crash pulling his gun. So Alma arranged a call, and that kept Wyatt on the phone about a flag on the operating loan long enough to get the job done.”
The kitchen is quiet enough to hear the clock on the microwave tick over, while the rage I’ve been swallowing this whole conversation finally surfaces.
If he’s going to say it in his voice, I’m going to make him say it in mine.
“So you had my father killed.”
Marcus flinches as though he’d never considered his actions as anything other than necessary. “I told Stan to—”
“Just say the damn words, Marcus, and stop being such a fucking coward.”
He looks at me as though the cuss personally offends him. His mouth opens and immediately closes while his fingers tighten on the brim of the hat in his lap until the felt crumples.
“I had your father killed.”
I knew he was murdered. I’ve known for months. But knowing and hearing those words said out loud by a man my father trusted is entirely different.
My lungs forget what they’re for, and my hand on the table is the only thing keeping me in the chair.
Daddy, oh God.
The breakfast Wyatt made me an hour ago surges up my throat, and I clamp my teeth together, keeping it down by a thread.
“And Bill.”
“And Bill.”
The silence after it is the silence of a man laying down a weight he has been carrying for three years. Marcus sags into the counter behind him. His eyes go glassy, then he drags a hand down his weary face.
“I tried so hard to keep this from you, sweetheart.”
My entire body revolts at the absolute audacity of this man, and I know my face says exactly what I think when he doubles down.
“I really did. I filed that insurance claim. I gave you the ledgers. I sat with you at the inn and told you every good memory of your daddy I could dig up. I was trying to give you a story you could go home with. A story you could live with.”
His voice is soft and wounded in a way that tells me he fully believes every word he’s saying.
“I prayed every night you’d finish that article and settle back in Denver with that city kid. Prayed on it, Daisy.”
I say nothing. The journalist in me is a recording light, steady red, like the phone on my lap.
“I thought the break-in would send you running back to your city life and your safe, paved streets. Give me back the peace I’d spent three years building. But you just dug in deeper.”
His hands spread helplessly as his eyes widen, the epitome of innocence.
“You have to understand. I didn’t want this. I never wanted this. But you wouldn’t just let it be.”
“You don’t get to put this on me, Marcus.”
“I’m not putting it on you, sweetheart. I’m saying if you’d only stopped digging—”
“Don’t.”
Marcus stops, his hand still half-raised.