And why did Connor sound like he wanted Janine to be guilty?
A thick silence filled the room. In the distance, the chainsaw whirred.
“What if,” Holly broke in, “we misunderstood? The letter said ‘only you know what to do.’ We took that as a warning to keep silent, but what if it’s the opposite, telling us to speak out?”
“But who?” Sarah asked. Holly couldn’t mean … “No. If Janine decided it was finally time to expose him, to derail his ambitions, why not just do it? Besides, he’s run for office before and she didn’t say a thing.”
“That we know of,” Leo said.
So they were checking. “Leo, she’s not a terrified girl anymore. She’s a grown woman. Not that I believe she’s guilty for one minute, but if she’d wanted to kill him, why not just kill him? Why go to all this trouble? And why drag the rest of us into it?”
But it made a certain kind of sense. They hadn’t been all-for-one, one-for-all for a long time. What if Janine hadn’t been sure she could count on their support, not without manipulating them to rally ’round her.
Leo was eyeing her closely, as if he could read her mind. She wouldn’t put it past him—he’d know
n her her whole life.
But he wasn’t necessarily on their side. He’d say he wasn’t on anyone’s side, that his goal was the truth. Justice. She wanted to believe him, believe that he was better than the sheriff who had subtly, but surely, pressured her and Janine to hold their tongues twenty-five years ago.
“Leo,” she said. “I know you have to investigate her. You have to investigate everyone who had a beef with Lucas—his ex-wife, his former partner.”
“Unhappy clients,” Holly said. “Unhappy not-clients.”
“Lucas left plenty of both,” Leo said.
As she’d heard that first day back, in the Spruce, when Deb the waitress had aired her grievances and the older couple had chimed in with their gossip. And her own brother was a client, though he’d said nothing to suggest he’d been unhappy with Lucas. Neither had Renee Harper.
She stepped between her brother and sister and looped her arms through theirs. “We trust you to do your job.”
“Thank you, Sally. Sarah,” Leo replied.
“Speaking of jobs.” Connor dropped her arm. “Better get back to mine.”
The two cousins shook hands. “I see your crews are working up on Lynx Mountain,” Leo said.
Sarah frowned. “Do we have land up there? I know it’s a checkerboard, but I thought that end of the ridge belonged to George Hoyt.”
“He sold,” Connor said curtly and turned to leave, gesturing to Leo to go first.
Now what was that about? She stared at the men’s muddy footprints and wondered.
20
Didn’t matter if it rained buckets. If she came back cold and drenched and shivered and got the flu and spent a week in bed. Sarah needed to get out of this house and clear her head.
The woods were quiet. Connor had left, leaving young Matt to limb the downfall and pile up the debris. A full crew would finish the job next week and haul the merchantable timber back to the yard. But the roads on the property were clear and the threats to the buildings removed. The debris, the slash, they’d burn before the summer heat dried out the woods. She’d tended slash piles with her father in the spring and fall, rakes and shovels in hand, the smell of dank, mossy smoke working its way into her hair, her clothes, her nostrils. She should have hated it, but she hadn’t. She’d loved the time with him, time in these woods, time tending the family legacy.
Seems the family had another legacy, too. One whose depth she’d never guessed.
Secrets. And silence.
They were talking now. Could they undo the damage the silence had caused?
The rain had subsided, but the air was still heavy, cool in the way that it always was after a rain, and she caught a whiff of wood smoke from somewhere along the shore. A bald eagle perched on a tall snag.
“Take care of the land,” her father had liked to say. “We’ve been good to it, and it’s been good to us.”
God, she missed him.