Page 34 of Wood Riddance
“Hmm. I can’t say that every experience I’ve had with men has gone like that.” She tilted her head and gave me a placating smile.
“Shit, please don’t bring up my brother right now. The cheese I bought for tonight was far too expensive to vomit up.”
Parker was the only close friend I’d had in years. My brothers and I were close, and I got along well with my employees, but I’d never been able to really connect with another woman until I met her.
She got me. She was a badass ex-cop who had somehow managed to domesticate my asshole brother Paz—which was no small feat in itself—while simultaneously solving my father’s murder. I was lucky to call a woman this fiery, this gutsy—who also had a heart bigger than most—my friend. However, she had the very annoying habit of calling me out on my self-pity bullshit.
“I’m only suggesting you pull your head out of your ass. It’s time to get out there. Loosen up. The business is thriving now, and you’re growing. You’re allowed to take a breath.”
Slinging a dish towel over my shoulder, I flinched. That was all I’d heard these days. That it was over. The bad guys had been caught. It was time to move forward.
The rest of my family was attempting to move on. To find closure and put the horrors of the last few years behind them. Me? I still couldn’t accept the violence my family had experienced. My brothers brushed it off, but their lives had been in danger. And our dad had been killed.
All for greed. Greed that was destroying communities with opioids.
I needed to understand how it could come to that. To make it make sense.
“I can’t take a breath,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Arrests are not convictions. You know that. And we still don’t have the full story. Not about Dad.”
What we did know was that one of Mitch’s henchmen, a dumbass fuckup named Stinger, had done some work for us in the past. He gained access to our trucks at camp and sabotaged the slack adjuster on the brake system of one of them.
My dad, who normally sat behind a desk, had jumped behind the wheel of said truck to deliver a late load of timber to the mill. It wasn’t uncommon for him, even though he was the CEO. But it was notable because he was being set up.
“And Henri,” I said.
She ground her teeth and ducked her head. This ate at her too. My bestie could pretend all was right in the world again now that Mitch Hebert and his cronies had been apprehended, but she was nearly as hung up on these details as I was.
“Trust me, I’ve pored through every document over and over. The FBI and state police have taken statements from dozens of people who know the suspects or could have come into contact with them. Paul is singing like a canary in lockup. Still, no one has been able to piece together what happened with Henri.”
More than a year after Dad’s death, my eldest brother, Henri, had been involved in a similar accident. When he lost control of the truck, he’d jumped out. He’d survived, but not without several significant injuries.
When I did my own investigation of his truck and my father’s, which still sat out in the yard behind the shop, I discovered similar scratches on the slack adjusters. The tampering was almost identical.
“Stinger and Grinder have alibis for that date. They weren’t anywhere near the camp.” This was nagging at Parker too, but like the good friend she was, she always did what she could to keep me from falling down the paranoid, obsessed rabbit hole.
Too late. “It was not a coincidence.”
“I know. I believe you.”
Her response made my skin itch.
“No. You need to understand. This isn’t some far-out conspiracy theory. I saw the damage to the brakes with my own highly trained, extremely experienced eyes. The same type of wrench was used in an almost identical manner to mess with the slack adjuster. That makes it very likely that the saboteur involved in each crime was the same person.” My chest tightened so painfully it was hard to breathe. It happened every time I ran through the evidence. It had been almost two years since I’d discovered the tampering done to the brakes on my father’s truck, and I’d obsessed over it every day since.
His death had been ruled an accident. Both by the state police and the department of transportation. But I’d known from the day it happened that my father was far too skilled a driver and far too familiar with the roads in the forest and the conditions that day to have lost control of his truck the way the authorities claimed. Henri, though, had forbidden me from hauling Dad’s truck into the shop to take it apart.
But a year after his death, crippled by grief, I did it. And that’s when I discovered the slack adjuster that had been damaged.
And every minute since, dread had lingered in my gut, warning me that we were all in danger. Sure, a couple of shitheads had been arrested, but that didn’t mean the threat had passed.
Parker knew this. She had enough experience and know-how to understand that there was always another layer, another set of bad guys up the chain. The men awaiting trial were not the only ones involved. The trafficking ring had been far too successful for far too long to not include dozens of players or more.
Regardless, she’d been pushing me to move on. To heal.
“The truth will come out eventually. Attempted murder is kind of a big deal. No one would willingly cop to that and get hit with more charges.”
I dropped onto a stool at the island and closed my eyes. She was right. Everyone else had been cleared. The police had interviewed all Gagnon employees, and they’d subpoenaed employment records and security camera footage and every other record imaginable.
She sidled up to me and bumped my shoulder. “Eventually, we will know.”
