“No, Mama, I know better than that. But I also know when Susie and Gray are hiding something from me. When I told Susie about Eddie’s murder, she threw up.” Melanie’s pulse skipped a few beats remembering her sister’s expression.
“I had nothing to do with Eddie’s murder.” Gray folded his arms and gave the three females standing on the other side of the kitchen the famed white wolf alpha scowl. “But he and I did have it out the other day.”
“Okay. From the top. When and how often have you worked with Eddie?”
“Five months ago, Mike and Drake Dorland hired Eddie to fix up the old Laroque building. I have every fifth day off from football. I worked with Eddie, and he helped me get the radiators working again and showed me how to repair the roof. There was no way we’d make it through another winter otherwise.”
“How did you repair the roof and the radiators without me noticing?” Melanie jammed her hands on her hips.
Gray rolled his eyes. “We haven’t had to use the radiators as yet. Roof was easy. Did it after you and Mama went to work.”
All at once a whole heap of square pegs and round holes connected. “Those plants you brought home for the front path, they weren’t extras from the landscaping at the indoor stadium, were they?”
“Does it matter now?” Gray shrugged. “They were left over from the Laroque job. I mentioned how much you and Mama loved gardening to Eddie, and he was glad to get rid of them.”
“I don’t get it, then. Why did you and Eddie have it out?” Had she been so out of it since the bear killings started?
Susie’s cheeks colored, and she scuffed her sneaker. “It’s not Gray’s fault. I may have flirted with Eddie, and he may have thought I’d welcome his attentions.” Susie’s flushed face and clenched fists indicated more than that had happened.
“I caught the bastard with his hand down Susie’s blouse. He got what he deserved.” Gray’s mulish expression didn’t waver.
“What happened, Gray?”
The doorbell rang, and Melanie near hit the low ceiling, she jumped so hard and high. “Since when does the doorbell work? Lordy, no. Tell me Eddie Mato’s not part of that too? What else has he interfered with?”
“I did nothing wrong. Certainly broke no laws.”
“I think he broke Eddie’s nose.” Susie hugged herself. “It was kind of crooked off to one side. And he bled like a stuck pig.”
“When did this happen?” Melanie prayed Gray would say a few weeks ago.
“I cornered the asshole after football practice two days ago.”
“Two days. Not good. That’s the day Eddie was killed.” Melanie rubbed her throbbing temples. “What time did practice end?”
“Around seven.”
“Tell me you didn’t get him in that clearing by the bus stop.”
“And what if I did? Eddie had a ton of enemies.”
“Who do you think Dodge Pincer’s going to focus on?”
The doorbell pealed insistently. Susie drew the curtain back a tad and peeked out the window. “Talk about the devil. He’s the one ringing our doorbell.”
Mama stepped around Gray and Susie. “Hush. What’s done is done. Gray, go out the back and hightail it to Shuman’s place. Melanie, Susie, sit down at the table. I’ll handle Sheriff Pincer. He has no authority on the reservation, and none of us is stepping foot outside this door until Gray returns with Shuman and the tribal lawyers. Susie, take that glower off your face. Melanie, put on a pot of coffee. We just finished a late supper. Gray went to visit a friend. We don’t know what time he’ll be back.” Mama patted her bun, smoothed her dress, and strolled to the door, looking like she had not a care in the world.
Melanie had never been more proud of her mother. It took tons of guts for Mama to open the door, look the sheriff full in the eyes, and say, “Good evening, Sheriff. To what do we owe this pleasure?”
Susie and Melanie moved to stand on either side of their mama.
“I need to take your son in for questioning. His fingerprints are on the weapon that killed Eddie Mato. The murder didn’t happen on reservation land. So it’s under my jurisdiction.”
Chapter Eleven
“Brinda told you.” Mike dragged a hand over the stubble lining his cheek.
“Why the big secret?” Drake turned to face him. “So we half own the Caboose? Why not tell me before?”
“Out of curiosity, how did Brinda find out?”
“Virgil asked her to get a bill from his desk. She saw an e-mail from you. So what gives?”
“There’re a few things I haven’t shared about Dad and Uncle Boyd’s deaths. And all the crap that happened afterward.” He hadn’t wanted to have this conversation ever, but it was time, and he needed Drake as a full backup.
“I’m an expert hacker, remember? Over the years, I’ve pieced most of it together.”
“I didn’t tell you about the Caboose because Virgil wanted to do things on the quiet. He’s still not sure whether he wants to retire or not. And I didn’t want Melanie to find out she’s been indirectly working for me for the last few years. I’ve a strong suspicion she won’t take kindly to the idea.”
“Ha! You are so screwed. She’ll spit fury. Why’d you do it? It couldn’t have been the mate thing. That didn’t happen till our last visit.” Drake halted halfway back to the Caboose.
“We owe Virgil, Drake. After Shuman refused us sanctuary, he talked the old sheriff into looking the other way until I turned eighteen. If it weren’t for that, we’d have been split up and put into foster homes.”
“What’re you not telling me?”
“Let’s head back to the office.” Mike turned into the wind. “After Dad’s accident and his paralysis, Uncle Boyd took over the mill.”
“I know that part.”
“It’s time you knew all the parts. And when you judge me, remember this: I only did what I thought I had to. Boyd came back. It was such a relief when he took over the management of the mill. I hoped with him back, Mom would straighten out. After Dad died, Mom was always crying and popping sleeping pills like they were candy.”
“I hardly remember those days at all. I do remember when Boyd moved in with us. He gave me the creeps. Mom flinched every time he went near her. He smoked those nasty cigars all the time.” Drake hunched over. “I never liked him.”
“Neither did I. But he was all the family we had left, or so I thought. And things went well at first. We had so much to do. The mill, the properties. I was glad to give it all to him to handle. I mean, he was the adult and our uncle.”
“What happened to change your mind?”
“What you don’t know is that Dad had left the mill and all the properties to Mom. When Boyd found that out, he went ballistic. He thought the properties and the mill would go to him.”
“Should it have?”
“I found out later that the mill had always been passed on to the second son. Dad was the firstborn. So Boyd had every reason to expect the mill would be his. Then he started laying off workers at the mill. Things got worse and worse, and then I found Mom unconscious on the floor and that suicide note. Boyd convinced me that we had to commit her to that place.” Though he knew it was the coward’s way out, Mike skipped over what had happened the day before he found their mother and the note; the confrontation with Mom after he’d found his and Drake’s birth certificates, the confrontation that had pushed her over the edge and into a mental abyss that had lasted years.
“I wish I could say I remember this, but I don’t. All I recall of that time is wanting to be alone in my room. Hating to see Mom crying all the time.”
Mike shook his head. “Oh yeah, that was so tough on us both. With Mom in the institution, I signed over control of the mill and the properties to Uncle Boyd. Because Mom wasn’t a ‘fit parent,’ Boyd became our legal guardian, and it all happened in the space of less than three weeks.”
“That’s when you stopped going to school regularly.”
“I never told you, and it’s time you know that I tried to contact our birth mother only to find out that she had died. Her father, our grandfather, told me the tribe had exiled her and us.” They had reached their office door.
“I know all of this, Mike. How’d you think I became so good at hacking into systems? I started with you.” Drake shrugged his shoulders and nudged Mike. “You did what you had to.”
He stopped dead. “You know? How long have you known?”
The building’s doors opened. Drake met his gaze. “After we moved Mom into the new hospital.”
“Two years ago? And you never said a word?” Mike stared at his brother. What else had the pup hidden from him?
“You had enough to deal with. The cost of the new hospital, keeping me in college.” Drake shrugged. “And I was all caught up in becoming a wolf full grown.”
“How did you find out?” It had taken Mike years to track down their maternal grandfather.
“Does it matter?” Drake blew out a long sigh. “It was something Mom said. You were talking to the doctor and didn’t hear. She said Raine had been a good woman. I asked her who Raine was. She said, ‘Your birth mother.’”
Mike shook his head. “You never said a word.”
“Let’s finish this off in the office. Doc G.’s headed this way.”
Glancing across the road, Mike spotted Doc G. at the periphery of the Caboose’s parking lot. “Yeah. This isn’t a conversation I want anyone overhearing.”
The brothers entered the building, and Mike locked the doors behind them. “By the way, I have the locations of all the bear kills. Let’s start on those tomorrow.”
“Why not do a couple tonight? I’m antsy.”
“Maybe later. I want to check on Melanie first. And I have a feeling you’ve been keeping more from me than I know.”
They stepped into the elevator.
“Mikey, it’s always been me and you. The only mother I’ve ever known is Lucinda Dorland, and she desperately wants to be our mom. Works for me. How in hellfire does this point back to Boyd and the mill?”
“The fire at the mill wasn’t an accident. Boyd was after the insurance money.”
“I suspected as much. How can you be so sure? I read all the newspaper reports. The sheriff’s office investigated. The official report was that it was an accident.” The
ding
of the elevator pinged loudly in the momentary silence.
“I have no proof of any of what I’m about to tell you.” Their footsteps echoed in the hallway. Mike opened the office door and hung his jacket on the coatrack. “Boyd collected the insurance money. He was the only one who stood to gain. Nine people died that day.”
“He got his own in the end.” Drake plopped onto Mike’s desk.
“Did he? They identified him only by a partial dental match.” Mike sat down. “The whole thing eats at me.”
“Let’s get back to our birth mother. What were you going to tell me in the parking lot?”
“Our delightful grandparent, while he was snarling and raving at me, let out that Dad had been made an honorary member of our birth mother’s tribe.” Mike studied his brother’s pinched brows.
“No fucking way. I’d
never
have thought of even checking that. Why would the tribe have done that?”
“No clue.” Mike shot Drake a rueful grin. “It’s on my list of things to find out. Explains why we could be exiled, though.”
“Did he give a clue as to why we were exiled?”
“No. And there’s no record of anything in the tribe’s databases. But I’m guessing you’ve already been down that route?” Mike studied his brother’s bored expression.
“Once I tracked Raine’s origins down, I hacked into the tribe’s database.” Drake picked up the stapler and flicked it open. “There’s not a whole lot there, you have to admit. And definitely no record of this honorary tribal member thing. But it did get me to thinking about whether we were really brothers. So I had our DNA tested. We are genetically related. DNA doesn’t lie.”
“When did you become such an expert at hiding things from me? I had a DNA test done too. It looks like we’ve been tiptoeing around each other for some time.” Maybe he hadn’t given Drake enough credit. He’d definitely been too overprotective.
“What now, bro?” Drake spun his chair around, flung himself into the padded seat, cradled his head in his hands, and propped crossed, booted feet on the desk.
“I had thought about paying a visit to our maternal grandfather.” Mike sat and propped his face in his hands. “But no way I’d risk that now. Not with all this going on.”
“You know who can answer a lot of these questions.” Drake tore a slip off a sticky note stack and folded the paper in half.
“Mom.” Mike blew out a long sigh. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Definitely not a win-win solution. I can’t do it, Drake. I can’t open up that nightmare again. What if one question starts her into that mental place again?”
“We could ask the others who were around at the time. The Laroques, the de Verteuils, surreptitiously of course.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “There isn’t a surreptitious way to ask about that with the way things are right now. Not with all these reporters in town.”
“Yeah. We don’t want those rumors about Boyd, Dad, and Mom resurfacing.”
Both brothers fell silent. Once Mom had insisted on returning to Chabegawn, Mike had told Drake about the gossip that had laced the town during that period; that there had been a love triangle between Boyd, Mom, and Dad. That Dad had hired someone to kill Boyd. Though how a dead man could orchestrate such a deed had made no sense, but the gossip had been rampant and savage, one sordid theory after another spiraling around Chabegawn.
“Half of me wants to tell Mom everything; the other half’s too chicken to risk her mental health.” And that half had to do with his massive guilt about sending her into an institution in the first place.
“We’re going around in circles. We need to focus. What about starting with the mill fire and those who died that day?”
Mike jiggled his mouse and opened a document. “I have a list of everyone killed then. Sonny McIntosh, Molly Sledden, Debbie Carlton, Eddie Mato Senior, Jeff Arthur, Ronald Williams, Nick Poser, Tom Kildare, and Sam Millar.”
“Molly Sledden? Related to Virgil?” Drake hopped off the desk and paced a quick circle.
“His niece. The women were the office staff. Molly was in accounting. Debbie Carlton must be the daughter of country club coat-checking Harry.” Mike shook his head. “This is getting us nowhere.”