Page 3 of Search for the Truth
“M.C.,” he read out loud.
Missy Clearwater?
Liam turned the drive over again, then scanned the area once more.
His phone started to vibrate in his hand. Doc Ernest’s name was on the screen.
“Hey, Sheriff, are you still at the scene?” she asked instead of a greeting.
There was a rush to her words. An urgency.
Liam’s gut started grumbling.
“I am. We’re finishing up with the pictures. What’s up?”
There was movement on her side of the phone. When she spoke again, she was nearly whispering.
“I’m going to need you to take a lot more pictures. And do a dang good job of it.”
Liam wanted to say he always gave the job his best, but something in her tone pulled a question out of him instead.
“What’s up?”
There was hesitation.
But then there was certainty.
“Because I think Missy Clearwater might have already been dead before she hit the ground.”
Chapter One
Blake Bennet had been to many crime scenes over the last ten years or so. It had come with the territory of being law enforcement, never mind the fact that she’d been a sheriff for many of those years. But her reign with a badge had ended and, she thought, with it any sense of being amid the chaotic aftermath of someone’s life again.
Boy had she been wrong.
Currently her living room would have given the crime scene unit a run for their money.
“Blake! We’re going to be late.” A woman, brightly dressed but frowning severely, hurried into the room with bangles clanking and a baby on her hip squirming. In the last six months of sharing a home with her stepmother, Blake was still getting used to her jack-in-the-box sudden appearances around their house.
That went double for the toddler and baby who had managed to turn the room into a disaster movie within the blink of an eye.
“I can’t find the keys,” Blake yelled right back. “And unless you’ve learned how to fly in the last ten minutes, we need those to get going.”
Lola had not in fact learned how to fly in the last ten minutes.
She balanced Bruce on her hip and started throwing couch cushions and blankets around while Blake went back to her grid patterned search. Once she had been searching for a man buried alive and yet, somehow, the pressure she felt now was really grating. It didn’t help that she already knew what would happen when they got to the school gym.
Everyone in Seven Roads would look at her.
The absent aunt come back home to take on the job title of inexperienced mother. Add in the fact that she was single, technically unemployed and living under the same roof with the stepmother she had barely known before coming back, and Blake was a walking, talking tabloid story for the town.
The gutsy Seven Roads locals would talk to her—the rest would talk in whispers.
It was, at best, annoying. At worst, it just plain hurt.
“Blake!” Lola exclaimed, pulling her attention with a start. She was pointing across the room to the one calm thing among the chaos. “Clem has them in her hand!”
Clementine Bennet was a quiet four. While her baby brother and her stepgrandma were expressive creatures, Clem was an observer first, a toddler second. Blake was reminded of the demeanor of the detectives she had worked with during her tenure in law enforcement. Watch people, take in the details and then communicate when necessary, if at all.
