Page 77 of The Moment They Can Never Forgive
“It didn’t move after I’d started it. I checked underneath, and while the wheels did have blocks behind them, the truck was also attached by a chain to a handle in the floor.”
“Your father loved that thing, so it’s possible he chained it up to protect it.”
“I know, but since there was no point leaving the pickup there, I got the bolt cutters to break it like I had all the barn locks.”
He remembered that about her too. How she never asked for help with anything, just got on with it. Raised on this farm, she’d learned to do most things for herself because her father was always useless. The Reynolds women had done anything from fixing cars to changing a faucet.
“I drove it forward, and then when I got out, I found the shape of a door in the floor.”
“Tell me you didn’t go down into it,” Dan said. When she nodded, he felt his back stiffen at what she could have found down there. Because chances were, it was something illegal if someone had gone to that much trouble to hide it.
“Of course I went down.” She looked pissed that he’d think otherwise. “This is my property now. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know, maybe because someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to hide that room down there? That perhaps whatever is in it was illegal or dangerous.” He never raised his voice in the line of duty, and aware that Hudson was close, he kept it down, but he was angry, and she knew it.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that, asshole,” she hissed back.
He blinked. “I beg your pardon. Did you just abuse an officer of the law?”
“Whatever.” She batted his words away like she would a gnat. “I looked around in there, but there seemed to be nothing weird going on?—”
“Like people snorting lines of coke or a chop shop, you mean?” Dan inquired with deceptive calm. “Because you did know that was going on right under your nose, after all.”
“Fuck you, Dan Duke,” she spat at him.
“No thanks, not while you’re in this mood. I’ll take the Leah I had the other day.”
Her mouth opened and closed twice before any sound came out.
He beat her to it. “This is getting us nowhere. Show me what you saw, Leah. Please.”
She exhaled slowly. “You’re right, and I’m sorry…it’s just that finding the room?—”
“It’s got to be unsettling knowing what your father was doing?” Dan added.
She nodded.
“Show me what you found, Leah.”
“Got them,” Hudson said, returning to the kitchen. “I went upstairs to get the chicken book that I got out of the school library too, in case I need to check I’m doing everything right.”
“Great,” Leah said. “Let’s go feed our egg suppliers, then, bud,” she said. “Get your boots on.”
He watched them put on their boots, his head running through what she’d told him. Then he walked with them back down the drive to where the outbuildings were.
“You check for eggs and feed those chickens, Hudson. Then I’ll meet you in the first barn,” Leah said. “I just want to show the deputy something in another one, okay?”
The boy ran off to do as he was told, Benny on his heels.
“He really does look like Cassie,” Dan said instead of the ten other things he’d managed to hold back.
“He does.”
She walked away from him, and he kept his eyes on her rigid shoulders and not that lovely ass.
“This is the last one,” she said. “I found it in here.”
“Anything good in the other barns?” Dan asked, trying to play nice. “We didn’t go through them when we came to clean up.”
