Page 3 of Her Last Refuge

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t see the big puzzle, then.”

"I don’t see it, either. I just feel that it’s there."

"I just don't want you building a case around a guy who's been dead for twenty years off the back of a letter that doesn't even name him."

"I'm not building a case." The words came out sharper than she meant them, and she caught it, softened her voice on the next line. "I'm trying to understand what Eleanor believed. That's different."

Jack didn't push it further. He sat with her another few minutes, asking once about the clippings, and once about whether she'd found anything on the original police report that didn't match. Both times her answers came back clipped and half-finished, her eyes on the page instead of on him. She heard herself doing it and couldn't quite pull herself out of it.

At some point he stood, said something about heading up, and pressed a hand briefly against her shoulder on his way past. Rachel nodded without fully hearing the words, already back inside the timeline, already turning over the note that read D.F. lied to Mama and wondering what exactly had been said in that room.

She didn't notice him leave. She didn't notice the sound of the stairs, or the creak of their bedroom door, or any of the small noises that usually marked the house settling for the night.

When she finally looked up again, the stove clock read 12:31.

She sat there a moment longer, letting the number resolve into something real. The house was fully quiet now, the ambient and almost breathing quiet that only came once everyone else had been asleep for a while. Quietly, she gathered the clippings and slid them back into the yellow envelope Eleanor had kept them in. The timeline went in next, then the police report, then finally the letter, which she held for a second longer than everything else before folding it along its old crease and setting it on top.

She carried the envelope to the counter and placed it in the waiting lockbox Eve, Eleanor’s sister, had let her take. She then crossed to the switch by the hall and killed the lights. The kitchen went dark behind her, and she stood there a moment in the doorway, the way Jack had stood not long before, before she made herself turn and head for the stairs.

Briefly, she let herself understand how obsessed she was becoming with this mystery. With a smile that had absolutely no humor in it, she then thought of how Paige had become so obsessed with her podcasts and couldn’t help but think she’d gotten it honestly.

Of course, as her mother, Rachel was still undecided as to whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.

CHAPTER TWO

The parking garage beneath the field office was half full when Rachel pulled in a little after 7:30 the following morning. It was early enough that she beat most of the other field agents, but not early enough to have her pick of spots near the elevator. She parked on the third level and took the stairs down, her badge already in hand before she reached the security desk.

Her office was on the fourth floor, a windowless room she shared with a filing cabinet that had been there longer than she had. The corkboard on the wall hadn’t been updated in a bit, showing scraps and notes from previous cases. A framed photo of Jack and Paige sat on the corner of her desk, slightly crooked. Another one of Peter with Paige as a baby sat beside it, slightly smaller. She found herself still missing Peter sometimes, mainly because she knew he and Paige would have gotten along incredibly well during this stage in Paige’s development.

She set her bag down, opened up her laptop, and headed to the breakroom for the morning’s first cup of coffee. When she got back to her desk with coffee in hand, she told herself she'd give it half an hour...just enough to see if there was anything on Douglas Farrell that hadn't turned up in her searches at the kitchen table over the course of a few nights. Maybe there was something she’d missed, something that being in her actual working environment might help her pry lose. Then she'd close the tab and get to the actual workday.

The Bureau's databases turned up nothing on him at all, which in itself told her something. No file, no flags, nothing beyond a basic identity match pulling from old public records. She once again found the article identifying him as the attorney for the Lewis estate, but that was all.

She switched to open searches instead, working through what little digitized history existed for a small-town Virginia attorney who'd died in 2006. A local bar association newsletter from the eighties listed him as a longtime member in good standing, noting his decades of service to families in the county. A short piece in the local paper, scanned and uploaded years after the fact by some historical society, covered his retirement from active practice in 1998. In it, he was described as a fixture of the community; the article quoted a colleague who called him a man of real integrity. There was a photo accompanying the piece, grainy from the scan, showing a lean man in his sixties standing in front of what looked like a courthouse. He was smiling sheepishly and his hand was raised in an easy wave.

Rachel pulled up the timeline she'd built the night before and worked backward from the date of Victor Lewis’s death, trying to place Farrell's age at the time. If he'd retired in 1998 after what the article implied was a long career, and if he was seventy-eight when he died in 2006, that put him in his late thirties when Eleanor's father was killed. He would have been young enough to still be building a name for himself in the county, but maybe old enough to already be trusted with a family's business.

That fit with what Eleanor had written. A man in his thirties, already the family's attorney, present at the house the night before her father died.

She kept digging, and eventually the archived county paper produced something more specific: a short article on the inquest into Victor’s death. It was the kind of brief procedural piece papers used to run when there was nothing dramatic to report. Farrell was named in it, listed as the family's legal representative present at the proceedings. The article gave almost nothing else—no detail on testimony, no mention of controversy, just a paragraph confirming the county's finding of accidental death and Farrell's presence on behalf of the family.

Rachel read it twice, looking for anything beneath the surface of it, and found nothing. It was a formality, recorded as blandly as a weather report.

What struck her more was what came after. She searched for any later mention of Farrell in connection with the Lewis family and found almost nothing beyond that inquest. No further estate work. No later filings tied to the farm. If he'd handled the family's affairs for years before the death, as Eleanor's timeline suggested, that connection appeared to end almost immediately afterward, cleanly and without explanation.

She sat back and looked at the screen for a while. The cursor blinked at the end of an empty search bar. She knew there was a good chance it meant nothing. Families changed attorneys all the time. Maybe the mother hadn't liked how the inquest had gone, or maybe Farrell had simply scaled back his practice as he got older, the way the retirement piece implied. There were a dozen boring explanations for an attorney quietly stepping back from one family's business, and exactly zero of them would ever show up in a database search.

But it also fit. It actually fit very neatly with the version of events Eleanor seemed to believe. Those events included a trusted attorney present the night before her father’s death, followed by quick, clean inquest. And then there had been nothing.

She thought about the note in Eleanor's shorthand. D.F. lied to Mama. She had no way of knowing what that lie had been, or whether it had anything to do with the inquest at all. Eleanor might have meant something small, some private disagreement about money or land that had nothing to do with murder. People held onto grudges over all sorts of things, and grief had a way of making even ordinary betrayals feel enormous.

Or it might have meant exactly what it sounded like it meant.

Rachel rubbed at her eyes and looked at the clock in the corner of her screen. Half an hour had turned into fifty minutes, and she still had nothing that amounted to more than a suspicion. Farrell had no criminal history, no complaints on record, nothing but a life that read, on paper, exactly the way the retirement piece had described it. A man of real integrity.

The dead didn't answer questions, and Farrell had been dead for two decades. Whatever he knew about that night, whatever Eleanor had believed he'd told her mother, none of it was sitting in a database waiting to be found. It was buried with him, or it existed only in the mind of a woman who'd carried her suspicions in a locked box for fifty years.