Page 46 of Capturing You
Was it really so easy to wipe away a family like chess pieces swiped from a board?
As if they’d never mattered at all.
Except they had mattered to someone. Suddenly, she had a better understanding of Ford and what made him tick. Even the locals rarely talked about what’d happened at the Ballentine Mansion twenty-five years before. But Ford hadn’t forgotten. The secretive, curious man was determined to uncover the truth.
If only he’d let her help.
From the loft, she got a sense of the size of this garage—large enough to hold far more than the two cars below.
Two cars… How odd when only one person was here.
A beat-up blue pickup truck sat beside a red Cadillac sedan. The two vehicles were worlds different from one another. Did they both belong to Ford? If so, why had he brought both of them? And, logically thinking, how?
She climbed down the stairs, thinking that Ford didn’t seem like the pickup-type. Maybe the truck went with the tool belt—a prop to back up his claim as a handyman.
But the man inside the house didn’t seem the red-Cadillac type, either.
Weird.
She reached to peek beneath a tarp in the truck bed and found boxes of flooring. Why would he have that, if he wasn’t really a handyman? Was that part of his prop?
The truck’s cab was clean, though it showed the vehicle’s age. In the glove box, she found the registration and proof of insurance, both in Ford’s name.
The Cadillac was just as tidy but much newer. She found the proof of insurance in the glove box. This car was registered in Massachusetts to…
She stared, blinking. Confused.
Marie R. Ballentine.
Ballentine?
As in, the Ballentine Mansion? As in, the family that used to own the property?
She’d assumed they’d sold it. Apparently not. Even so, why was the car here?
The Cadillac might not be brand new, but it hadn’t been here since the murders. That much was obvious, considering the fancy screen on the dashboard. It was clean and shiny and smelled fresh, meaning it hadn’t been parked very long at all.
It didn’t make sense.
Brooklynn climbed out and closed the door, suddenly certain that if Ford found her, he’d be furious. She hurried back inside, down the long hallway, and to the main staircase. She climbed to the second floor, her heart pounding all the way.
She’d discovered something Ford didn’t want her to know.
Not that she was afraid he might hurt her. He’d proved that much, anyway. But she needed Ford, she needed this sanctuary. She’d gotten comfortable here. She wanted to stay until this whole crazy thing blew over.
If Ford discovered her nosing into things, he might just order her off the property. But the more she knew about this place—and the man who lived here—the less she wanted to leave.
CHAPTERTEN
Forbes leaned back in the creaky leather chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
His father's old files had revealed nothing. He'd left a lot of handwritten notes, but Forbes couldn't make heads or tails of them.
Three weeks of reading until his eyes crossed had garnered exactly zero helpful information.
The police had perused all of Dad’s paperwork after the murders, then shoved the files back into the cabinet haphazardly. Forbes had spent his first hours in this office putting them in chronological order.
Not that he hadn’t reveled in reading his father’s notes, seeing the real estate empire through Dad's eyes. After he’d finished college, he’d had nothing but a lot of education and a huge dream.
