Page 25 of Riptide
Tom turned back to his computer without a word, fingers already moving. "This Blaire Mitchell—she's a professional investigator?"
"I guess. You can look her up. She’s all over social media. She finds people." Cara looked down at her coffee. "And she found me."
"How?" Wade pushed off the wall. "What tipped her off?"
"No idea. She's good at what she does. She must have seen something that didn't add up."
"Tell them what she wants," Reagan ordered.
Cara looked down at her hands. "Fifty thousand dollars. In two weeks. Or she posts what she found on Instagram where her thousands of followers will help dig into my background—" Cara stared at the floor. "I've been lying to you since I got here. About everything. The bakery, the inheritance, who I am?—"
"Not everything," Piper said quietly. "You weren't lying about helping David. That was real. Or about being nice to me when I started working here. That was real too."
"And honestly," Reagan said, "we don't exactly have the moral high ground here. We all have things we don't talk about."
"But this is different?—"
"That’s not how I see it." Wade crossed his arms. "We don’t do explanations. We don't dig. We don't push for details."
"Because we all ended up in Haven Cove for reasons we'd rather not discuss," Tom added, still not turning from his screen. "And that's fine. What matters is who we are now, not who we were."
"But what if who I was is really bad?" Cara's voice cracked. "What if?—"
"Then that's your past," Reagan said firmly.
"But if Blaire exposes me, if people start investigating, you'll all be connected to me. They'll look at everyone who helped me?—"
"Got it." Tom clapped his hands together. "Blaire Mitchell. Professional skip tracer and influencer. I'm pulling everything."He whistled. “Yowza. That’s a lot of followers. How many victims are we talking?"
"No idea." Cara wrapped her arms around herself. "And I have eleven days to come up with fifty thousand dollars that I don't have."
"Or we go with my idea." Wade moved to the table. "Make her back off. Find her pressure points. Turn the tables."
"How?" Cara asked. "She's got documentation. Evidence. She could post it anytime."
"Then we need to make her not want to," Reagan said. "Find leverage. Everyone has something they're afraid of losing."
"What about her other victims?" Piper asked. "Could we find them? Get them to testify against her?"
"They won't." Cara's voice was hollow. "They're all hiding from something, just like me. Going public means exposing whatever Blaire found. That's why they paid in the first place."
"Then we don't go legal." Wade's expression was grim. "We handle it ourselves."
"Wade—" Reagan started.
"I'm not saying we hurt her. I'm saying we scare her. Make her understand that messing with Cara means messing with all of us."
"That could backfire," Tom pointed out. "Make her escalate instead of backing down."
"So we're smart about it." Reagan pulled out her notebook. "We investigate her first. Find her patterns, her methods, her vulnerabilities. Then we figure out the best way to apply pressure."
"I can track her movements," Wade offered. "See who she talks to, where she goes."
"I'll dig into her digital presence," Tom said. "Email, cloud storage, financial records. If she's blackmailing multiple people, she's keeping records somewhere."
"And I'll analyze her social media," Piper added. "Engagement patterns, follower demographics, who she interacts with most. There's always stuff people miss if you know where to look."
"I'll reach out to some old contacts," Reagan said carefully. "See if anyone's heard of her. If she's been doing this long enough, she might have crossed paths with people I know."
