Page 47 of Tangled Past
All the while Margaret Cormier’s voice kept replaying in his head.He said he’d do anything to protect them.
Asa drew in a breath through his nose and exhaled it slowly. The cuff of his shirt brushed the band of his Apple watch.Time. So much of it lost. So much of it looping back now to a single night in a barn.
The door clicked.
He glanced up.
Maya hovered in the doorway as if she wasn’t sure if she should come in.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to knock.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her voice a little rough. “I thought about it. Does that count?”
“Not in this building. In this building, you get honorary family status.”
She stepped inside, closing the door halfway behind her. The room felt smaller immediately, but not in a bad way.
The overhead lights picked up the faint smudges under her eyes, the way her cheeks were still pink from earlier tears. She’d tied her hair back, but a few strands had escaped, curling near her jaw.
“How’s your head?” he asked.
“Loud,” she said honestly. “Yours?”
“Same. Different noise.”
She came around the table and slid into the chair beside him instead of across. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of her shoulder, even though they weren’t touching.
“Will send everyone scurrying?” she asked.
He nodded. “He’s trying to locate anything about your mother, now that we have her name. Rachel and Declan are setting up surveillance on the docks. JT’s digging through old incident reports that might involve Troy Malbern’s name, but if my father handled Malbern privately as a favor to the Hardesty family, there won’t be any. Hopefully, there’ll be something on that white SUV. Eli’s looking at financials. It’s a long shot.”
Her fingers twisted together in her lap. “And you?”
“Waiting for round two,” he said. “Will wants us along when he talks to Malbern, or at least when he starts watching him.”
She was quiet for a beat. “I don’t recognize his name. Do you think he did it?”
The question hung there, heavier than it had any right to be.
“I’m not sure,” he said eventually.
The tension in her shoulders eased a fraction.
“I think Troy Malbern is a man with too many connections to ignore. He owned the property before the Hardestys. He left a trail of complaints about losing it. He drove a white SUV. He’d been escorted off that land more than once by my father, according to the Hardesty family. That doesn’t make him guilty, but it does mean we’d be foolish not to take a hard look at him.”
“So he’s . . . a possibility.”
“A possibility,” Asa confirmed. “A loud, angry, uncooperative possibility.”
“But not the only one,” she said, her voice soft.
“No. Not the only one.”
She stared at the tabletop for a long moment.
“Margaret’s voice . . .” she began, then swallowed. “The way she remembered him. Your father. Like he wasn’t just another chief. Like he mattered to her.”
“He did. He mattered to a lot of people.”
