by Alice Sharpe
Echo gasped. “Oh, no.”
“She didn’t even make it to the hospital,” he added. “They’re doing an autopsy. There’s some question whether the fire killed her or something else. Lonnie is a mess, hardly coherent. Del seems to be the only one who can handle him.”
Things were spiraling out of control but Adam still couldn’t see how it all connected. He needed to confront his father with what he’d just learned from his uncle, but now seemed like a terrible time to do it. Nevertheless, now was all they had. “I want to know why you never told anyone you went after Mom with a gun the night she ran out,” Adam said.
The shocked hurt in his father’s eyes almost knocked Adam off his feet. “Who told you—”
“Pete saw you,” Echo said softly. “He was in the house and he saw you. He even followed you but he lost you and he thinks he heard a shot—”
“Now wait just a minute,” Birch interrupted, the initial shock shifting into anger. “Okay, I did go after her and I did take a rifle out of the gun case because the case wasn’t locked and it was right there—we’d been having trouble with coyotes. I thought if Melissa wandered too far away she could be in trouble. Then I realized she wasn’t that stupid so I came back into the house. I never fired the rifle.”
“Was it a .22?”
“Hell, I don’t remember.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“How would it have looked? Who sent that blasted postcard?”
“Uncle Pete,” Adam said. “Trying to save you and the ranch.”
His father swore.
Pauline appeared in the large open doorway, her face distraught. “You have to come help. Hurry. Lonnie stumbled.”
Adam sprinted up the stairs, his father climbing more slowly behind him. They found Lonnie slumped against a chair in the hallway, Del holding on to one arm. They got him to his feet and onto the bed, but he’d gone all boneless and felt as heavy as a bag of wet sand. His face and hands were streaked with soot. Adam hated himself for thinking it but the thought crossed his mind that it was all an act, and overkill to boot. He told Del where he could find J.D., then left the others to help Lonnie.
When he returned to the living room he saw Echo had picked up the business card she’d found in the cigar box earlier that evening. A glance at the clock showed it was almost two o’clock in the morning. They should both sleep.
“Do you believe Dad?” Adam asked as he sat down next to her.
She nodded. “I believe both of them. Adam, remember you told me that your father said Edwin Day’s cousin’s name had the word rock in it. What if he remembered it wrong? What if it was really stone?”
Adam mentally kicked himself. What else had he missed? “What are the chances the phone is still connected?” he said as he punched in the number on the card.
It rang once, then switched to an answering machine, “You’ve reached the office of Mariket and Clarke. Please call back during regular business hours or leave a number and your call will be returned.”
He hung up, and using the search engine in his phone, punched in Mariket and Clarke, Montana. “They’re in Hamlin,” he told Echo a moment later when the results filled the small display.
“Hamlin is where Edwin Day was from.” She’d listened in on the recording and now studied the screen. “Look. Mariket and Clarke are attorneys.”
“Yeah.” He checked his watch. “Hamlin is four hours from here. If I leave now, I’ll be there early tomorrow. I’ll go tell Jamie. This is really going to leave him shorthanded, but I don’t see an option. There has to be something we’re missing.”
“I’ll go grab a few things,” Echo said.
“I wish you’d—”
She held up a warning hand. “Of course you do. I know you can go alone. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
“You’re the most stubborn—”
But she was already gone.
Chapter Nineteen
It was Echo’s intention to keep Adam company during the drive, but he didn’t want to talk and she didn’t blame him. She fell into an uneasy slumber, her head propped against her window. She awoke at sunrise, cramped, stiff and wooly mouthed.
Adam flashed her a glance. “Morning.” He had one elbow outside his window, one hand on the steering wheel and he sounded wide awake. His hat was behind the seat, his short hair caught the breeze. She studied his profile for a moment. He looked incredibly handsome, sexy, exciting, different somehow than he had a few days earlier, as though the stress of the past few days had altered something in his face.
As though experience had carved away some of his youth.
“I was having a dream Lonnie was standing outside your house tossing flaming matches through a window,” she told him when he caught her staring. She hugged herself against a sudden chill. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lonnie before tonight, let alone met him.”
“You need something hot in your stomach,” Adam said. “There’s a truck stop up ahead. Let’s get something to eat and wait until Mariket and Clarke opens.”
The truck stop appeared on the horizon and grew into a sprawling building surrounded by huge parking lots filled with long-distance trucks. An hour later, face and teeth scrubbed, stomach full of coffee and an omelet, Echo climbed back into Adam’s truck.
Hamlin was a bigger town than Woodwind, but not by much, and there was little traffic at this time of day. Thanks to the GPS, they found the office easily and parked on the street out in front. Adam’s truck, plastered with ranch dirt and grass debris, the equally disreputable ATV still anchored in the bed, looked out of place parked next to the stately old buildings.
The room they entered was barren except for a couple tall ladders pushed against bare walls and paint cans, rollers and brushes stacked in a corner. Paint-splattered tarps covered the floor. Swatches of different colors bisected walls as though a color palette was in the process of being worked out.
A little bell had tinkled over the door when they opened it. Within seconds, a middle-aged woman with short auburn hair walked through a connecting door. She stopped when she saw them. “I was expecting the painters.” She checked her watch. “They’re late as usual. May I help you?”
“We’re looking for a man named William Stonehill,” Adam said. “Does he work here?”
“No,” she said, taking off a pair of reading glasses and letting them dangle from a beaded cord around her neck. “I’m the only one who works here now.” She put out a hand. “My name is Amanda Clarke.”
Echo swallowed her disappointment. Of course it couldn’t be that easy. “What happened to Mariket?” she asked, shaking Amanda’s hand.
“Divorce, hence the remodeling. Even his name will be gone as soon as the glass guy gets around to scratching it off the window. Hallelujah. Now what can I do for you?”
“And you don’t know anyone name William Stonehill?” Adam said.
“Now, I didn’t say that.” She looked them both over and added, “Why do you want him?”
“We’re trying to track down anything we can about another man by the name of Edwin Day,” Echo said.
Amanda gestured at the room she’d just left. “Come have a seat.” They followed her into a slightly larger office with warm yellow walls and high windows. A vase of sunflowers sat on a shelf. She pointed out a pair of matching chairs for them and seated herself behind the desk, folding her hands in front of her. “I haven’t heard Ed’s name in a long time. May I ask how you know him?”
“We don’t,” Adam admitted. “His bones turned up in a cave on my family’s property. He’s been dead a long time. How is his name familiar to you?”
A fleeting smile curved her lips. “William Stonehill is my father. My name is Clarke thanks to my first marriage. Anyway, Dad is in a memory care place now. Most days, he doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t talk at all anymore, but once in awhile, the expression in his eyes makes me think he still recognizes me. I treasure those times.”
“And Ed
win Day?”
“An enigma. I’m sorry, I can see that I’m confusing you. Edwin Day was a friend of my father’s. They were really different. Dad was an attorney. In fact, this was his office back then. He was the salt-of-the-earth type, you know, dependable and honest as the day is long. Ed was about as opposite from that as a man could get. He’d been raised by his grandparents and when they died and he was free to cut loose, he really cut loose. I think he was married like four times. Always running around with someone new. But he and dad both liked to go fly fishing and sometimes friendships just kind of defy logic.
“Anyway, when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, Dad hired Ed, who had just gotten another divorce, to do some undercover work for a family back east who had contacted Dad for help. Strictly under-the-table and hush-hush.”
Adam held up a hand. “Undercover work. Wait, are you saying Ed Day did undercover work in Wyoming, out near Woodwind?”
“I’m not sure exactly where. The Rocky Mountains somewhere.”
“Which explains his other identity,” Echo said. She leaned forward and explained. “He was found with two driver’s licenses.”
“Who or what was he investigating?” Adam asked.
“A guy by the name of Buzzby Crush, I kid you not. Crush was a hit man in Jersey way back when. The story went that he took a boatload of money for a multiple hit and then disappeared without fulfilling his contract. The mob was hell-bent on finding him but so was the family of an innocent girl who got caught in the cross fire of an earlier assassination. The investigation dead-ended in the Midwest. That’s when the girl’s family hired Dad. Eventually Dad uncovered rumors that suggested Crush had settled near a small town in western Wyoming so he hired Ed to go hang out and chat people up and see if he found anything.”
“Good grief,” Echo said.
“What did Buzzby Crush look like?” Adam asked.
Amanda Clarke sat back in her chair. “No one knows. He was very careful not to have his picture taken. Plus Dad said it was his M.O. to change his appearance for each client and each hit.”
“Did Ed Day find any proof that this man was in Woodwind?”
“I gather he called a few times and talked to Dad. Nothing definitive as I understand, but I also got the feeling he felt he was closing in. And then the calls stopped coming.”
“Do you know how old Crush was?”
“When he disappeared? I don’t remember. Not too old. As I recall, he came out of nowhere, built a reputation very quickly and then faded away with all that money. I think he was only in ‘the business’ for a couple years or so.” She steepled her fingers. “Now it’s my turn to ask a question. How did you run across my father’s name?”
Adam took the card from his pocket and handed it to the older woman. “I think my father wrote it down after talking to your father about what happened to Edwin Day. He probably scribbled it on the first scrap of paper he found.”
Amanda ran a finger over her father’s name, a wistful smile curving her lips. “And you live in Woodwind, is that right?”
“Nearby, on a ranch.”
“A ranch,” she mused. “I’m remembering now. Dad took a fishing trip to Yellowstone several months after Ed disappeared. He stopped by the ranch where Ed was last known to be. He must have talked to your father. I gathered from my dad over the years that the local consensus had Ed running away with the rancher’s wife. Oh dear, would that be your mother?”
Adam nodded.
“Dad told me years later that he hadn’t found the story surprising given Ed’s reputation with women, but he did wonder why any woman who had a family and a good life like she must have had would trade it for a life with Ed. He was highly undependable and it just struck Dad as odd that an educated woman like your mother would find that attractive. But you never know about people, do you?”
“As far as we know, they were friends and nothing more,” Adam said. “You mentioned that Ed was getting closer to Crush. Why did your dad just let the investigation drop?”
“There was absolutely no proof of anything. After Ed took off, Dad decided Ed had been leading him on. See, Dad was sending Ed money after the calls. He figured Ed just wanted to keep the cash coming, so he reported progress, saying he was sure Crush was one of the ranchers he’d worked for and then moving on and claiming it was another one. Dad doubted any of the reports were true.”
“Do you still have those reports?” Echo asked.
“Heavens no. That all happened a lifetime ago. It wasn’t until years passed and Ed never showed up again that Dad began to wonder what had really happened to him and then his own problems with memory started. Now you say Ed was buried in a cave? What kind of accident—”
“He was murdered,” Adam said. “Probably back before your father ever asked about him.”
Her eyes widened. “Murdered? How?”
“A bullet through the forehead,” he said quietly. “Execution style.”
Echo clutched her stomach at the sound of the words, execution style. Could there really be any truth in this story? It seemed absurd and yet…
“My mother’s skeleton was found in the cave with his,” Adam added. “It appears she was shot, too, though not in the head. And now there’s been another killing with the same weapon.”
“Was the new victim killed execution style?”
“No, his murder was made to look like a drug deal gone wrong. But the man was digging around in the cave where the other two bodies were thrown.”
“So he was a threat.”
“Yes. I think so.”
Amanda Clarke straightened up. “I sure wish I could be more help.”
Adam rose to his feet. “You’ve given us a piece to the puzzle we didn’t have before,” he said, and extended his hand to Amanda. “Thank you. We’ll see ourselves out.”
Back in the first room, Adam ran a hand over his eyes. “How does this fit with Uncle Pete’s and Dad’s versions of that night?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Echo said.
“I keep thinking about Lonnie. I know what he told his friends, but think about it this way. Lonnie collects relics. Garvey comes up with something new only this time, Lonnie recognizes it because he last saw it years earlier when he hid two bodies. He decides to make sure so he stalks Garvey only he wears my Dad’s hat to confuse the issue. When he finds out he’s right, he kills Garvey with my dad’s gun which he lifts from the house the same way he did before, leaves the concho at the murder scene and prepares for the fireworks. Then he starts the fire to get rid of the evidence.”
“And his wife?”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe she was catching on. Maybe he wanted to get rid of her, too.”
“Well, it all makes a kind of perverted sense.”
“Yeah,” he said, but then sighed. “But it could also be one of the others. They all lived away from Wyoming when they were young. They all came back after having done well. Del at the bank, J.D. with his mining operation and Lonnie when a great uncle died up in Canada and left him a small fortune. Even Uncle Pete was away. Dad is the only one who never left.”
“It can’t be Pete,” she said, heart pounding, but of course, it could be. She knew he’d met her mother in New York, soon after Echo’s birth. Her biological father had died before Echo was even born. After their whirlwind courtship, the new family had traveled to Wyoming. Later, Pete had moved them even farther west. At last Echo understood why he’d done that: he thought his brother was a murderer.
At least that’s what he said. Everything he had told them was unsubstantiated.
Wait. He couldn’t have killed Willet.
But he could have. He was out on a tractor with a truck at his disposal like everyone else, out of sight of the others for hours at a time, and most importantly, Willet had died the day after she and Pete had come back to Wyoming. No…
“We need to get back to the ranch,” Adam said as they walked out on the sidewalk. “I’d call Inkwell if—”
&
nbsp; “Not yet,” Echo said. “Not until we run this by your dad.”
“And Uncle Pete?”
“Your dad first,” she said with a meaningful look. “He’s the only one who never left Wyoming.”
Chapter Twenty
She insisted on driving. He knew he was beyond exhausted, so he settled for calling the ranch, unsure who exactly to warn about who. It was a hopeless quandary and in the end, immaterial as no one picked up the phone. He wasn’t even sure what kind of message to leave. He closed his eyes and tried to shut off his thoughts.
The next thing he knew he was startled awake by a sharp cracking sound. His eyes flew open to find Echo struggling with the wheel while the truck swerved radically to the right. Adam’s hands flew up in the air as the vehicle careened over the top of a rocky embankment and sped down to a creek twenty feet below. It all happened so fast there wasn’t time to do anything but brace himself.
Within a few seconds, the truck ran into a line of trees and came to an abrupt and crashing halt.
Both airbags inflated with the impact, then instantly lost air. He looked over at Echo and she met his gaze, lips trembling. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, flicking her seat belt open, then his own.
They tumbled out their respective doors and ran around the back toward each other. They met near the tailgate.
“Are you okay?” Adam asked Echo as he took her shoulders in his hands. There were tears in her eyes and she was shaking, but she nodded.
“You’re not supposed to ask me that, remember?” she said, trotting out a laugh that sounded more than a little hysterical.
“What happened? Did we hit something?”
“No. Someone shot at us! I saw a car parked on the other side of the bridge. Then something dark extended through the window and the next thing I knew, our windshield cracked.”