He shook his head and forwarded her the quarterly report he’d intended to send the first time. Then he reached for the paperwork Sam brought in.
The papers were a little crinkled from the angry way she’d clutched them, but they would do. He’d been reading over the digital copy when Sam burst into his office. He’d been so engrossed in the material, he hadn’t noticed she had arrived for the morning. He would’ve stepped out to say hello. Ignoring her had probably dumped fuel on the fire.
But it didn’t take long to scan the pages and realize he had bigger problems than an angry, sexy secretary.
Finding out the real name of dwilder27 hadn’t been hard. An evening at home had traced the IP address and with a little digging, he had the name and address of the account owner. From there, he opted to have Mickey do the legwork. The guy was pretty trustworthy when it came to these things. He’d done a great job finding information on his brother Wade’s fiancée, Tori. He’d been very thorough on Sam. And judging by the papers in his hands, Mickey had done just as good a job on Deborah Wilder.
He knew it would be a relative of Tommy’s. Who else would look for him after all this time? Finding out it was his only sister was a bigger problem. Some curious, estranged relative might be prone to look up someone on the internet from time to time. But they would let it go if they didn’t find what they were looking for fairly easily. Not a sister. A sister would keep digging until she found her brother.
That was an issue. He hadn’t mentioned anything to his brothers yet. He didn’t want to alarm them if it was nothing. But this was something. They needed to know in case Deborah started sniffing around Cornwall looking for the trail Tommy had left for her to follow.
It should be a dead end. Everyone in town would tell her the story they knew as the truth—Tommy had run away from his foster home right before his eighteenth birthday and was never seen or heard from again. Good riddance, as far as most of them were concerned. He and his brothers were fortunate in that way. If they had to be involved in someone’s death, at least it was someone most people wouldn’t miss. Tommy had been arrested several times for assault and theft. His own parents couldn’t handle him and the state had taken him away. Tommy Wilder was trouble; a kid no one but the Edens would even take in. If anyone could get through to him, it was Molly and Ken. But even they couldn’t work their magic on him.
Once he came to the Garden of Eden, he immediately started problems. He’d stolen from Molly’s cash drawer at the gift shop. He refused to do his share of chores. He’d gotten in a fight with Wade over that and blackened his eye. And none of the boys liked the way he looked at Julianne, who was only thirteen at the time.
Tommy was a ticking time bomb. If he had made it to his eighteenth birthday and left the farm, he would’ve ended up in jail. Someone would’ve gotten hurt or worse.
That’s what Brody told himself when he thought about that night. Tommy’s death hadn’t been deliberate, but it had protected the future victims he hadn’t gotten around to yet.
Brody picked up the phone and dialed his brother Wade. Wade had lived in Manhattan for years but recently moved back to Cornwall when his fiancée, Tori, finished building their home. It had been a long process, but they’d moved into their massive dream house at the end of September.
If Deborah Wilder showed up in Cornwall, Wade would be the first in the family to know it.
“Hey, Brody,” Wade answered, sounding chipper as usual. After he proposed to Tori and their worries about the body being discovered were put to bed, his older brother had tried to forget about their past. He wanted to focus on his upcoming marriage and building their life together.
Brody hated to ruin the bliss, but Wade had to know what was going on. “Hi, Wade. Do you have a private minute? I need to talk to you about something important.”
“Sure,” Wade said, a serious tone creeping into his voice. “Tori’s working in her office upstairs. I’ll step out onto the deck in case she comes out.”
Brody could hear the doors open and the wind against the speaker as Wade moved to the patio with the panoramic view of the valley below. “I’ve gotten a hit on my search query for Tommy. I did some research and it turns out that it’s Tommy’s younger sister, Deborah. She’s looking for him, Wade.”
There was a moment of silence on the phone. Brody had a bad reputation for being the buzzkill of the family, but this couldn’t be dismissed as his paranoia.