It's Never too Late

* * *

MARK WAITED FOR Addy outside the science building again. Waited so long he was almost late for his second class. Between his second and third class, he remembered that he hadn’t mentioned Thursday night with Abe to her and gave her a call.

She didn’t answer.

And when he stopped in at home between school and work, Nonnie told him that Addy hadn’t been back for her soup, either.

* * *

ADDY DROVE BY the sheriff’s office on her way out of town. She hadn’t been on the road ten minutes when he passed her. She followed him, and he led them past the cactus jelly plant where Mark worked to a turnoff on state park land. Pulling in, he stopped his car and came back to her.

Rolling down her window, Addy frowned up at him—partially because the sun was in her eyes and partially because she was just plain not in a good mood.

“Sorry for the all the clandestine hoops we’re jumping through here, but until I know for sure what’s going on I don’t want to take any chances.”

“It’s okay,” Addy said, understanding Greg’s concern.

“You want to get in, Sheriff?” she asked, motioning to her passenger seat.

Maintaining his stance leaning over her car door, he shook his head. “I apologize for my para

noia, but I want this to look like an ordinary stop. I’m guessing Will didn’t tell you about my dad.”

The question came seemingly from nowhere.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, needing to hand off the folder in her bag and deliver the rest of her message. She needed to leave town as soon as they thought they could be done with her services. Sooner if possible. She’d been in class over a month, had poked all over campus and had found nothing untoward. Not in class, extra-curricular programs, campus housing, campus work studies, or even in eavesdropping at the student center.

Almost unanimously, students at Montford appeared to love Montford.

She wasn’t surprised.

And she felt confident that she could do the remaining research from her home in Colorado.

Greg had been speaking about his father having been on his way someplace.

“He was carjacked,” she heard him say.

Her heart lurched and the sheriff had her full focus as he should have had all along. “Where?”

“Not five miles from here,” he said. “He’d been on the freeway...” The sheriff broke off then.

“Was he hurt?”

Sheriff Richards nodded. “He lived another nine years, but only with assisted care. He never resumed any kind of a life. It took me that long to find out who’d killed him. Turns out it was kids—part of a gang initiation. It involved the little brother of a member of the sheriff’s department in Shelter Valley. He covered for him. This was a man I trusted with my life.”

“So you don’t put anything past anyone.” Which made her feel better about what she had to tell the sheriff about Will Parsons.

“People do what they have to do given the situations handed to them,” he said. “I have no idea who is behind the threats to Will, but I don’t count anyone out, either.”

“I understand.”

She could turn over the file and be done here. Get back to Nonnie and her soup and packing. Back to avoiding the man who could very well have been the love of her life until she could get safely out of town.

People do what they have to do given the situations handed to them, Greg had said. “That sheriff or deputy who was responsible for covering up the crime that eventually took your father’s life...did you hate him when you finally discovered what he had done?”

“Hard to hate a guy who was looking out for a kid brother who’d been sucked into a gang against his will,” Richards said.

“But wrong is wrong.”