Gabe stood in the doorway. Something—maybe all the crashing and cussing—made her reluctant to go into the room.
“Heath? What are you doing?”
“I need to get this done. I’m almost out of time.”
“It’s three in the morning. We can work on it next weekend.”
He shook his head wildly. “I’m almost out of time. She’s gonna need her bed.”
He was trying to screw in a screw, but his hands shook, and the screw kept bobbling and falling away.
“Fuck! Fuck!” He shoved the side rail away, but it got tangled up in the fluffy pink area rug and didn’t go far. That set him completely off. He picked up the side rail in both hands and slammed it down again and again, roaring incoherently. When it cracked, he threw it away and stood up. He charged to the wall and picked up another piece of the crib.
Gabe saw that he was bent on destroying the room. Still too afraid to go in, she stood at the doorway and screamed his name. “Heath! Heath! HEATH!”
Finally, he heard her, and he stopped. For a few seconds, he stood panting in the middle of the room, holding the other side rail, looking like he’d phased into a world he didn’t know.
Then he came back to himself, and he realized what he’d done. The bottle had been upended, and booze glugged onto the rug. His tools were scattered. One rail of the crib was broken, and there was a deep divot in the pink wall where the rail had hit when he’d thrown it aside.
He’d broken his children’s crib. Gabe could see him understand that, and his immense sorrow pulsed from him and slammed over her. She began to cry.
“God, oh God. Oh God.” He dropped the other rail and fell to his knees. “Oh God. Gabe!” Dragging his hands through his hair, he began to sob. “Gabe…please.”
“I’m here.” She went to him and knelt at his side. “It’s gonna be okay.”
His head flew back and forth. “No, no, no, no. I tore everything apart.”
She knew he wasn’t talking only about the crib. “No, you didn’t. We’re together. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
“I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to miss our life.”
Gabe couldn’t do it; she couldn’t be strong. She didn’t want him to leave her. She didn’t want him to miss a minute of their life.
Unable to stop her own tears, she crawled onto his lap and held him close. His arms came around her, and they sat in the chaos of a dead little girl’s room and allowed each other to be weak.
PART SIX
Chapter Twenty-One
Heath sat in the corner of the tufted leather sofa in his father’s study and stared down into the dark amber liquid in his glass. Gabe was upstairs resting; ever since she’d given testimony early in the week, she’d been pale and tentative, and he hadn’t wanted her to sit through another of these cursed postmortems.
Around him sat his family, as usual. Every night, they all came back to the ranch and picked apart what had happened in court. Almost every night, Honor joined them. Often, her minions joined them, too. Tonight, the whole expensive fucking team was present.
They sat around and combed through every word, every nuance, and it was all meaningless. He’d stopped participating in these discussions days ago. None of it mattered. He was going to prison, and all this scrambling around trying to save him was doing nothing except weakening a family heritage older than the state of Idaho.
His father had just sold a big chunk of Cahill forest to the government to keep Honor and her minions paid. Four people—Honor; Melina, her investigator; Art, her science consultant; and Debbie, her paralegal—were on the case full-time, working overtime, at an average combined rate of close to two thousand dollars an hour. Plus expenses.
For all the years since the claim was first staked, the ranch had only grown. The Twisted C had survived the Great Depression and the Great Recession without losing a single tree or a blade of fucking grass. But it might not survive him. He was tearing his family down.
“I need to sell the shop,” he said, and everyone in the room gaped at him like a piece of furniture had spoken.
“No, son. We’ve had this out already. I want that there for you to reopen if you can, and if you can’t…well, we’ll put it up for sale then. But what comes of it, that’ll be Gabe’s money. That’ll be for your wife and child. You take care of your child, and I’ll take care of mine.”
His father had always hated that he’d worked away from the ranch. That he was trying to save the smithy as long as he could told Heath that he’d lost hope, too.
Wes came to the door. “Em, they want you to do stories tonight. Why don’t you take a break from all this and put the kids to bed. It’s been a long time.”
Emma stared at her husband like she was trying to figure out who he was. Heath was tearing that down, too, consuming his family’s attention to such a degree that his sister had almost forgotten that she had a family of her own.
“Go on, Emma. Take care of your kids,” their dad said.
“Um…okay. Okay. I’ll be back.” She stood and came over to Heath. With a squeeze of his shoulder, she repeated, “I’ll be back.”
It didn’t matter whether she came back or not.
When Emma left, Wes lingered but didn’t sit down. Honor picked up as if she’d been in the middle of a comment, but Heath couldn’t remember what she’d been saying or even that she’d been talking.
“Anyway, friend testimony went well overall. Almost as well as family. I don’t think Victor’s cross will hurt us, since we’re not arguing that Heath isn’t violent, and he didn’t fumble too badly. I saved it on redirect, I think. We needed a picture of a good man, and we made one. Now we call our own experts and chip away at the circumstantial evidence.”
“Can I—” Wes started and then stopped.
Honor looked over her shoulder but didn’t say anything. Her expression must have been expectant, though, because Wes stepped closer to their circle. “I think I found something. I don’t know if it’ll help, but…”
“I’d say we’re desperate, Wes, so throw it out there.” Logan stood and took Heath’s empty glass from him. He went to the bar and refilled both of their glasses.
“I’ve been goin’ through the files last couple of weeks. Started out just curious, all these boxes of papers sittin’ around, then I started seein’ shit and tryin’ to make sense of it. I think I saw somethin’.”
“Get to it, Weston,” Heath’s father growled.
Wes threw him a sharp look and then went to a box that sat before Art, the science consultant. “May I?”
“Sure,” Art said. “I’ve been through everything in here with a comb, but if you saw something, then show me.” There was a territorial bite in his words, and Heath got a little bit interested.
Logan brought Heath’s refreshed drink to him and sat down. Everybody watched while Wes flipped through the files in the box. He finally pulled out a blue folder and opened it. “Here. This water test report.”
Art leaned back. “The body was found in water. Crime scene team always takes a sample of the water. Standard procedure.”
“Yeah, but look at this.” Wes pointed to something on the paper, showing Art. Everybody else, even Heath, leaned forward.
Increasingly on the defensive, Art glanced at the page. “Yeah. ‘Au.’ That’s the chemical symbol for gold.”
“Everybody here knows what ‘Au’ means.”
“There’s trace gold in all the water around here. But the veins were depleted a long time ago.”
“You sure about that? Look at the concentration.”
Art looked and went pale. “Oh shit. Shit.”
Honor snatched the folder from Wes’s hands and studied the paper in it, frowning. “What should I be seeing here?”
Wes answered. “The concentration is hundreds of times higher than normal for this area. There’s a live lode somewhere out by the creek. A big one. Somethin’ must’ve shifted underground, and the lode’s started leechin�
�� into the water”
Logan snatched the folder from Honor. “Holy fuck. Dad—check this out.”
Their father put his reading glasses on before he took the folder from Logan. “I’ll be.” He looked up at Wes and smiled. “I’ll be.”
“Goddammit, Art, this is your job.” Honor snapped.
“I wasn’t looking for naturally occurring mineral deposits,” Art rejoined, his hands up as if he were anticipating a blow. “That might mean big money for y’all, but I don’t know what it has to do with the case.”
“It’s motive for Whitt,” Honor said. “What we’ve been missing.”
Wes nodded and sat down among them. “I might’ve worked it out. If Whitt found out about the gold, then the land buys make sense. Small parcels, the only flat land on Granville’s creek access. I think he bought them to do core samples.”
“Gold mine would tear hell out of the land,” their father said. “Ruin it for ranching.”
“That’s why he went after Heath. He knows you’d never mine on this land, and you’d never sell to him or anybody else who would. Unless you had to sell to save your family.”
Honor finished her wine and poured another full glass. “That’s a big heap of forward thinking. Too big for a jury unless we have concrete proof.”
Wes, flourishing in the sun of the family’s full attention, shook his head. “I don’t think he planned any of it so far in advance. I think he found the gold, bought the parcels, and then shit went haywire in town, and he took advantage. That’s how he made his big money, you know—he bet against the housin’ market and made a killin’ when it blew up. He knows how to take advantage of an opportunity.”
“Tell me the story, Wes,” Honor said.
For the first time in a week, Heath was fully invested in a discussion about his case and even felt a little twitch of life in his heart. It scared him. The full glass of bourbon sat on his knee; he set it on the table before him.
Their dad turned to Logan. “Get Wes a drink, son.”
Officially the nicest thing their father had ever said about or to Weston Taylor.
With a smile and a nod, Logan got up again and did as he was bid.
Wes took a deep breath. “Whitt finds out there’s gold here—he’s got government connections all over the West. Maybe he saw it in one of the regular test reports from the Feds. He figures we either don’t know about it or are keepin’ it quiet because we don’t want it mined. He buys up some land so he can take his own samples without permission. At about the same time, Gabe”—Wes scanned the room furtively, like he wanted to make extra sure she wasn’t in the room—“comes into town, and Heath goes all lovesick crazy and protective, starts goin’ after Black again. While Whitt is tryin’ to plan how to make his move, the feud with Catherine blows up, and she goes to him for a loan. He sees her as his wedge with us. He hires Black for the same reason: because he’s a trigger for Heath, and he might be useful. He makes sure Black’s around town a lot, tryin’ to get him in Heath’s way. He puts Devlin up at the Moondancer because he wants muscle on call. Maybe he tells Catherine she needs protection. I don’t think she’s in on it any deeper than that. What’s goin’ on with her and Heath, that’s family shit. She’s a town girl. Bitch she might be, but she’s got jasper in her veins like the rest of us.”
He stopped and took a swallow of his drink, grimacing as it went down his throat. “Then Heath beats Black up on the Fourth, leaves his hat behind, and Whitt sees his play.”
“He gets the vic patched up and sends him out with Devlin on the pretense of some kind of job,” Honor mused, taking over the story. “Devlin kills him and leaves Heath’s hat at the scene. Why doesn’t he leave his own DNA? And why would he kill for Whitt? What does he get?”
“Money,” Melina answered. “It has to be money. One of his convictions was for contract work. He pled it down, but the arrest was aggravated assault. Vic was in ICU for three weeks. If he took cash, there wouldn’t be a trail. And DNA—he could have guarded against it. He’s got the experience.” She lunged for another box and grabbed a file. After perusing it for a few minutes while everybody stared, she nodded. “He left no DNA in that case. He was collared on a flip.”
“We’ve been on him since right after the arraignment. Have we seen him do anything that looked like he was moving a large sum of cash?”
“No,” Melina answered. She and Honor were talking like they were the only people in the room. “I’d’ve made a note of it. Maybe he’s got it with him. In his room at the Moondancer?”
Honor sat back in the leather wingchair and steepled her fingers as she thought. Heath focused hard on her, fighting the urge to feel hope again.
“We need to get in that room,” she finally said.
Logan finished his drink. “If Catherine’s not in on this, can we bring her to our side?”
Honor shook her head. “She’s a witness for the state. We can’t interact with her outside the trial.”
“Can I?” Wes asked. “I’m not a witness or involved with the trial. I haven’t even been in the courtroom.”
“But you’re family.”
Honor nodded. “Morgan’s right. This is too good to lose, and it’s delicate. We don’t want to do anything to break it.”
“Ellen.” Everybody turned to Logan, and he continued, “She’s the desk manager or something up there, but nobody called her as a witness. She’s got to have a master key. She’s been around a bit the past few weeks. Helped out with the wedding and all. Gabe thinks she’s a friend.”
“And if she’s not?” Heath figured her for a spy.
Again, everybody reacted as if they’d forgotten he possessed the power of speech.
“That is a risk we should take. If she’s willing to enter the room under some plausible pretense, and she finds the money or something else suspicious, then we’ve got our story. If not, we’re no worse off than we already are.”
“Is that admissible?” Wes asked.
Honor smiled. “We’ll get some latitude, especially if Ellen has a reason for entering the room. We’re not bringing charges against anyone. It’s not up to us to do the state’s job for them. We only have to tell a story that the jury will believe. All we need is to create doubt. I think we’re going to tell them the truth, but that doesn’t even matter.”
Heath chuckled, but not because he found anything funny. Ironic, maybe. He thought it was interesting how little the truth ever really mattered.
Honor met Heath’s eyes. He’d never seen her smile so broadly before. “This is good, Heath. This is the best news we’ve had, by far, since your arrest. This is a story I can tell.”
Heath sighed. It was good news. It was a chance, and there had been damn little of that. But hope was too dangerous anymore. He was better off where he was, waiting for the end.
He picked up the glass of bourbon, lifted it at Honor in a parody of a toast, and drank it down.
*****
Gabe was under the covers in one of the second-floor guest rooms. This room had been his, once upon a time, but his mother had made it over into something like a hotel room when he’d moved into the bunkhouse with Sybil.
It was late, and he was drunk and exhausted. Heath didn’t want to sleep in this room. He’d pushed aside the possibility that they had found the story of his innocence; he was more comfortable staying in the bleak place he’d been, expecting to be convicted. So he wanted to sleep with his wife in their own bed. There were probably only a few more nights in his life that he could.
But Gabe was sleeping deeply and quietly, and he didn’t want to disturb her, so he stripped to his skin and slid in beside her.
As he pulled her into his arms, tucking her body against his like nested spoons, she woke with a little moan.
“Hey.”
“Hey, little one. Sorry I woke you.”
“I missed you.” Her voice was only half awake. She took his hand and set it on the new curve of her belly. Their child.
Clo
sing his eyes against the anguish that clenched around his heart whenever he was near her now, and had tightened near to crushing at the thought of missing her for the remainder of his life, Heath rested his forehead on her shoulder.
“I’m here now. Go back to sleep.”
*****
The next day, while Honor called her expert witnesses to spin other explanations for the mountain of evidence against Heath, Melina and Art were off seeking help from Ellen Emerson.
Heath didn’t trust her. He’d liked her fine. She’d never been someone much in his notice, actually, but he knew her well enough. She was a town girl, a few years younger than he. They’d never had cause to be true friend or true foe. But she was on staff at the Moondancer, and she hadn’t gotten fired for befriending Gabe, so Heath couldn’t see how she was anything but a spy.
Today was the first time she’d been in a position to do more damage than the usual gossip, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t much more damage that could be done. Heath put her out of his mind and focused on the legal pad in front of him. He’d been doodling all week. Honor had shouted at him about it at lunch the day before, saying that the ‘optics’ for the jury were bad, made it look like he didn’t care. He’d just shouted right back. It did not matter.
Gabe sat behind him, looking beautiful as always but fragile. She hated sitting in the courtroom. It brought back old, horrible memories for her, and it was making new, horrible memories every day.
When she’d given her testimony, the fucking prosecutor had made her talk about her family. She’d done it, she’d answered every awful question, but Heath had heard the pain in her shaking voice, and he’d wanted to kill that bastard.
Honor had stabbed her silver pen into Heath’s thigh to keep him in his chair. She’d drawn blood and ruined his suit.
He really was capable of murder. It was little more than an accident that he was innocent of the crime he was about to be convicted of.
Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1) Page 28