Page 87 of The Moments You Were Mine
“You know I do, Sheriff. You examined all the ranch’s guns after the incident with Dad and Sadie a decade ago. Do you think I scared the hell out of my guests by shooting at myself today?” I kept my tone factual. Stiff. I wouldn’t react to his insinuation, even if I wanted to punch him in the face for even thinking it.
For a second, he looked chagrinned. Then, he sat on the chair next to me, confusion between his brows. “What we’ve found doesn’t make any damn sense, Fallon.”
“And what exactly is it that you’ve found?” Parker demanded.
“Fallon’s prints on the shell casings along with her prints on the inside of the detonation device from the cabin.”
Maybe it was because I’d experienced one too many shocks in the same day, or one too many in the last few weeks, but I couldn’t stop the bubble of incredulous laughter that escaped me.
Parker planted himself next to me. “This is bullshit.”
Wylee looked from him to me. “I’m not saying it makes sense, Parker. I’m saying these are the facts.”
A fresh wave of sadness flashed through me as the truth hit. The same truth that had hit me in the security hut the day before. “This is someone I know. Someone with access to me and the estate. Someone who would have the keycode to the gun cabinet in the security hut.”
“We haven’t uncovered a single red flag that would implicate any of the employees,” Parker said. “We have a few more to go through, but nothing stood out.”
Wylee didn’t respond, and that chill that had settled in, that dread, grew to a whole new level.
“There’s more,” Wylee said.
“More than me trying to burn down my goddamn ranch? And what, go in cahoots with someone trying to kill me and my guests?”
“You didn’t get hurt though, did you?” Wylee said softly.
“Fuck you, Wylee. Fallon isn’t behind this.” Parker stood, and I grabbed his hand, holding him back before he could do something stupid.
“We found the car that drove your mom off the cliff. It was buried in the back brush off the highway. An anonymous caller called it in.”
It should have been a relief. It should have been a step in the right direction after the hit and run had gone unsolved for over three months, but instead, the heavy lump in my chest enlarged.
“It was a stolen Toyota Land Cruiser taken from the SanDiego airport a week before the accident,” Wylee said. “No prints, but it did have a receipt inside from a coffee shop near the stables where you kept Daisy, along with a USD sweatshirt that had a long blond hair on it.”
It wasn’t just dread now but fear that crawled through me. It felt like I was sitting in the interrogation room of the San Diego police station all over again, faced with people thinking I was the worst kind of human. A thief. A drug dealer. And now an attempted murderer.
My brain whirled, trying to pull the pieces together, trying to figure out who would do this. Who would try to frame me while taking the ranch down at the same time? It couldn’t be JJ. It didn’t make sense. Wylee had said the car had been stolen a whole week before Mom’s accident, and that was just after JJ had proposed. He’d wanted to marry me. So what would he have gained in running Mom off a cliff?
A memory tugged at the back of my brain—something I wasn’t sure I would have ever recalled if I wasn’t faced with all these quiet accusations. “The alarm at the stable in San Diego went off one night. The owner called everyone out to check on our horses and the equipment we had stored there. The only thing I was missing was a sweatshirt.”
Wylee frowned. “That’s pretty damn convenient.”
“Convenient!” Parker exploded. “What the hell would her motive be to do any of this?”
Wylee ran a hand over his jaw. “That’s the piece I can’t quite put together, and it bothers me. You were already set to inherit the ranch, not your mom, so you’d have no reason to get rid of her.”
Anger broke through the panic and fear. “Go to hell.”
I stood, and the world spun. I had to grab on to Parker’s arm so I wouldn’t fall into the glass coffee table.
Wylee stood as well. Again, he looked momentarily ashamed, but then his face went blank again. “I’m glad to see that reaction out of you, Fallon. I want to believe the fierce kid I knew is still the woman before me, but the facts are piling up in ways that don’t match. And the truth is, we haven’t seen much of you in the last six years. I don’t know who you are anymore.”
It tore at my insides that I wasn’t sure I knew myself either.But I’d be damned if I let him see that.
“If you think, for even one second, I could do any of this to my family, my staff, and my guests, then you never knew me at all,” I spat. “Get the hell out, and don’t come back until you can apologize and give me the name of the person who did this to me and mine.”
Wylee headed for the door, snapped his hat on his head, and said, “I’ll validate the break-in with the stable owner in San Diego, and I’ll give you a list of the components of the timing device with your prints on them. Maybe you can figure out how you came in contact with them. But we have the video showing you at the cabin the night before it blew, so if you have a lawyer, you might want to think about contacting them.”
He closed the door quietly behind him, and I just stared at it with a vision gone blurry with tears. More damn tears.
