Page 135 of Timid (Lark Cove 2)

With a deep breath and an apologetic look at Willa, I dove in. “Mom called me about three weeks ago. That was the phone call I got the night I left the house.”

“I kind of figured that one out today,” she muttered.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“You should have told all of us.” Thea crossed her arms over her chest. “Was she calling you this entire time?”

I shook my head. “Just that once.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t want to talk about her.” She’d been theoretically dead to me. Now, she actually was.

“What did she want?” Willa asked.

“Money.” I took a drink of my water, then sat back in my chair to explain the entire night. “She asked me to meet her somewhere. She said if I didn’t talk to her, she’d go to the authorities to take Ryder back. I didn’t want to even take the chance that she’d put him through it, so I met with her.”

I had just been trying to do right by Ryder. Even though I was working to get legal custody of him, my claim hadn’t been approved yet. Mom was still his legal guardian. I’d figured the fastest way to get her the hell out of Lark Cove again was a quick meeting to hear her out.

“I told her to meet me here in the parking lot. It was snowing pretty hard and I offered to talk inside, but she didn’t want to come in. She just told me that if I wanted to keep Ryder, I needed to give her three thousand dollars.”

“Did you?” Logan asked.

“No. I told her to go to hell, then got in my truck and drove off.”

Willa put her hand on my knee. “Then what?”

“Then nothing. I got back in my truck and drove around for a while. I was pissed and needed to think. After about an hour, I came back here and drank with Dakota for a couple hours.”

“That’s why Sheriff Magee called him down.” Thea snapped her fingers. “He?

?s your alibi for part of the night.”

I nodded. “He poured me tequila shots for two hours and kept me company, then drove me home.” Poor guy had walked from my house to his in the snow, but thankfully, Lark Cove was small and he didn’t live more than five minutes away.

Logan leaned forward in his chair. “So we just have to prove that during the hour you were driving around, you didn’t kill your mother.”

“That’s right,” I told him.

“How did she die?” Thea asked.

I shuddered as the photographs Magee had shown me earlier flashed through my mind. I think he’d shown me pictures of Mom’s lifeless body in order to gauge my reaction as well as to confirm she was in fact my mom.

I don’t know if it was what he’d been going for, but I’d almost puked up breakfast in the interrogation room’s trash can. The images of her gray skin and dead eyes were burned into my brain forever.

“She was strangled,” I said quietly. “In her car, they think. That’s where they found her. She’d turned off the highway onto Old Logger’s Road. I have no idea why she’d take that turn. Maybe she was lost or something, but that’s where they found her. Her car had been run off the road into some trees.”

“She died three weeks ago. Why are they just now finding her body?” Logan asked.

“It snowed,” Hazel explained. This was Logan’s first year in Montana, so it wasn’t a wonder he didn’t understand. Once upon a time, she’d taught me about those old roads too. “That road gets closed every winter because it sits at the base of two mountains. It drifts in so badly during the winter they can’t keep up with the plowing, so they just close it off until spring.”

“Someone must have followed her up there and killed her, then driven her car off the road,” Thea guessed.

I nodded. “And somehow we have to prove that someone wasn’t me.”

“But why?” Willa asked. “Why would they even think it was you? They just assumed that since you’re her son, you’d kill her? That makes no sense.”

I took another drink of my water, buying myself a minute. This was the part of my story I didn’t want to confess.