“It’s three,” Mom said after checking her watch. “Ryder will be getting out of school before long. One of us should be there when he gets home.”
I nodded. “Would you mind going to Jackson’s? I don’t want to leave.”
“Of course.” She gathered up her purse and coat from a chair in the sheriff’s station’s waiting room. I’d called her on the drive down here from the camp because for situations like this, I still needed my mom. “Call me if you hear anything.”
I nodded again and dug Jackson’s truck keys from my puffer coat. His truck was in the parking lot next to Logan’s SUV. My car was parked at the bar because he’d been brought to the sheriff’s station in the back of a cop car like a criminal.
My mouth flooded with saliva and I swallowed it down. The nausea took a second to go away, but it would be back. Every time I thought of Jackson in a jail cell, I fought the urge to puke.
I was desperate for information but we’d been sitting here for hours and no one had told us a thing.
With tears in my eyes, I took Jackson’s house key off the chain and handed it over to Mom. “It’s for the side garage door.”
“Okay. I’ll take care of Ryder. You just stay strong.” Mom squeezed my shoulder, but before she could leave, I grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t tell him anything.”
She shook her head. “I won’t.”
Someone would have to explain to Ryder that his mother was dead and Jackson was being accused of her murder. That someone should be Jackson.
Or me, if he was going to be held in custody all night.
As Mom walked out the door, I pulled my coat further up my neck, burrowing inside. It was freezing in the little lobby where we were sitting, or maybe it was just me. Everyone else had taken their coats off and seemed fine with the room’s temperature.
But I couldn’t stay warm, even with the coffee cup that people kept refilling for me. The thought of Jackson being accused of murder chilled me to the bone. The thought of having to tell Ryder this was happening made me shake. I wanted to go back to this morning when Jackson and I had been snuggled warm in his bed.
The front door to the station opened—Hazel coming back inside from her smoke break.
“Anything?”
I shook my head as Thea did the same from the chair across from me.
Thea’s hands kept patting her stomach. You couldn’t tell she was pregnant—it was too soon for her to be showing—but that gesture gave it away. It was her nervous tell, whereas mine was my bouncing feet on the floor.
Thea and Hazel had walked into the sheriff’s station just seconds after I’d come in with Logan. Hazel had led the charge to the front desk, marching up to the deputy stationed there and demanding to see Jackson.
The deputy had politely but firmly told us it wasn’t possible. Jackson had to be “processed” and “questioned” before they could determine whether or not he could be released.
Hazel protested and she put up a good fight, but the deputy didn’t budge. So we’d all sat down in the lobby while Jackson was somewhere in the building. The nausea rolled again when I thought about him getting fingerprinted and having his mug shot taken.
He was not a criminal.
Hazel dropped her pack of cigarettes and lighter into her purse. “I’m going to go ask again.”
She stomped up to the desk and put her hands on her hips. Her back was blocking the view of the deputy’s face so I couldn’t make out what he told her. I didn’t need to. The way her shoulders sank and her arms fell to her sides said it all.
Hazel nodded to the deputy, then came back to her seat next to Thea.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered. “Do you know him?” she asked Thea, nodding backward at the deputy.
“No, he’s new. I think he lives up in Kalispell and commutes down here. He hasn’t been into the bar yet.”
Hazel frowned. “I used to know all of the deputies. I had them all on speed dial in case there was a problem at the bar.”
“I’ve got Sheriff Magee’s and Porter’s numbers both memorized.” Thea hung her head. “But I haven’t called either of them in ages. If there’s a problem, I call Jackson first.”
She looked up and met my eyes. We were both thinking the same thing.
What will I do without him?
Our stare was broken up when Logan walked over, tucking his phone into his jeans. He’d been on and off various calls since we’d walked into the station.
“They got ahold of her.” He sat on Thea’s other side and took her hand. “She’s getting off the ski hill and will be here as soon as possible.”
Logan’s first string of phone calls had been to attorneys up in Kalispell. There wasn’t a plethora of lawyers in rural Montana, especially those with experience in murder investigations. But after numerous calls, Logan had found one who had excellent references and adequate experience—or so he’d deemed.
The problem was that the lawyer Logan wanted for Jackson, a Rita Sperry, had taken the day off to go skiing. Her office had called her a thousand times, mostly after each one of Logan’s thousand calls to see if she’d checked in yet.
Finally, after we’d sat here all day feeling lost and hopeless, help was on the way.
I just hoped Jackson hadn’t said too much already without an attorney present.
“I think we’d better make a plan just in case he doesn’t get out,” Thea told Logan.
He shook his head. “We’ll get him out.”
“How do you know?” Thea rubbed her belly in fast circles. “This lawyer might not be able to do anything today. This is a criminal charge, Logan. He could go to prison. He could—”
“Hey.” Logan placed his hand over hers. “We’ll get him out today, then we’ll figure out the next step.”
Tears welled in Thea’s eyes. “But what if he did it?”
I winced so hard my chair squeaked. How could she have let that thought even cross her mind?
“He didn’t,” I declared. “He did not do this.”
I looked over at Hazel for some support, but her gaze was down in her lap.
“He did not do this,” I repeated.
Hazel looked up and gave me a sad smile. “I don’t want to think that either. But—”
“No,” I snapped. “No. He didn’t. He wouldn’t.”
Thea checked over her shoulder to make sure the deputy at the desk wasn’t listening. When she saw he was on the phone, she turned back and leaned in close. “He hated her. He had every right, but he hated her.”
“Enough to murder her?” I hissed. “That’s not Jackson and you know it. Yes, he hated her. But do you really think he would hurt her?”
She sighed. “No, I don’t.”
I turned my eyes on Hazel. “Do you?”
Hazel shook her head. “No.”
“Logan?”
He shook his head too.
“Okay then.” I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms. “He needs us behind him, one hundred percent.”
The lobby went silent again except for the dull murmur coming from the deputy on the phone. I unbuttoned my coat as my frustration with Hazel and Thea warmed my insides.
How could they think he was guilty? How dare they? Shame on them for doubting him. Even if it was just for a moment, it still made me angry.
I wished Mom were still here. She wouldn’t have contemplated the worst. Or would she? Had she already considered that he could be guilty too? Was I being naïve to not at least consider all of the alternatives here?
Sheriff Magee was good at his job. He wouldn’t have arrested Jackson if there weren’t a reason. Which meant Jackson was a suspect because there had to be some sort of evidence against him.
But what? It had been two months since his mother had come to Lark Cove. He hadn’t seen her since the day she’d abandoned Ryder.
Right?
Had he seen Melissa again and hidden it from me? We’d been in such a good place these past couple of weeks. The two of us had become closer than ever and we talked about everything. We confided in one another. We trusted each other.
At least, I thought we did. So if he had been in contact with Melissa, why hadn’t he told me about it?
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered.
“What was that?” Logan asked.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I repeated, louder. “She left Lark Cove months ago.” I looked at Thea and Hazel. “Did he say anything about her coming back?”
Hazel shook her head. “Not to me.”
“Me either,” Thea said. “As far as I know, he hasn’t seen her since she left town after dropping off Ryder.”
Unless he was being framed, that meant he’d hid something from all of us.
He’d lied to me. A lie of omission, but a lie nonetheless.
The questions began to roll through my mind, an endless string with nothing but a question mark to separate them. When had this happened? How had she died? When had Jackson found the time to see her?
I’d been with him almost constantly these past few days. The only time we’d been apart was when he’d been at the bar working and I’d been at his house tutoring Ryder. So when? When could he have possibly seen his mother again?
There was no way he could have killed her. The entire thing made no sense. I couldn’t picture Jackson hurting someone, no matter who they were. He rarely lost his temper. When he was upset, he didn’t lash out. He shut down.
Except that wasn’t exactly true.
The night he’d thought I was flirting with that guy at the bar, he’d lashed out. He’d shattered those beer bottles so hard in the trash can I’d nearly startled off my stool. And he’d been so angry that night, saying such hurtful things. I hadn’t seen him like that before or since.
Maybe his mother had come back while he’d been drunk. He’d blacked out the night he’d kissed me this summer. Maybe he’d been drunk when his mother had come back to town and he hadn’t told me because he didn’t remember.
But when? When had he been drunk? The only night that came to mind was weeks ago when he’d left in the middle of the night and come home smelling like booze.
I closed my eyes as my stomach churned.
Oh, no. Jackson, what did you do?
That phone call, the one he’d told me was a wrong number, had to have been from his mother. It was the only explanation.
I ticked the days off on my fingers, counting backward. That call had come before Thanksgiving, in the middle of November. It had been almost three weeks ago.
Three weeks and it was all starting to make more sense.
He’d been acting distant. He’d been short and snappish. He’d tried to break us apart. Was it all because his mother had come back to Lark Cove?
None of it made any sense. Jackson wasn’t a murderer. He was sweet and loving and kind. He wouldn’t do this to me and he especially wouldn’t do this to Ryder. Something wasn’t adding up.
If I could just talk to Jackson, we’d figure this out.
I stood from my seat and went to the front desk, giving the deputy a slight wave as I approached.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t have an update for you.”
“That’s okay.” I looked beyond him. The counter that separated us ran the length of the small lobby, effectively creating a barrier to the rest of the building. You couldn’t get into the station unless he unlocked the door to my side.
I stared at the door longingly, wanting to go through it and search for Jackson. My attention snapped back to the deputy just as Porter and Sheriff Magee came from the doorway at his back.
My eyes went to Porter’s first, hoping to see something promising in his face. But he didn’t spare me a glance as he handed a file folder to the front desk deputy.
“Hi, Willa.” Sheriff Magee extended his hand over the counter.
I gave him a small smile. “Hi, Sheriff Magee.”
It had been a while since I’d seen the sheriff. I’d run into him at the grocery store a year back in the beer and wine section. He had teased me about not being old enough to buy alcohol. He hadn’t been able to believe I was the same little girl who’d he’d once helped up after a bike crash in front of his house.
I’d grown up. Sheriff Magee had changed a lot too since then.
His black hair, which was normally pulled back into a ponytail and covered with a Stetson, had grayed substantially. The lines on his tanned face were deep. Even his stout frame seemed to have lost some of its bulky mass.
But he still had the same warm smile I remembered, an older version of Dakota’s, his nephew and the bar’s new bartender.
They had the same eyes, nearly black, with high cheekbones and a strong chin.
“Can I see Jackson?” I asked him.
He sighed. “I’m sorry. Not yet. We need to ask you a few questions.”
My heart sank. “Okay.”
“Sheriff.” Logan appeared at my side, holding his hand out.
“Logan. Thea.” He nodded to them both. “Hi, Hazel.”
“Xavier,” she grumbled.
No one ever called the sheriff anything other than Magee. He went by either Magee or Sheriff Magee. Not even my father used Xavier and he’d known Sheriff Magee for decades. Why did it not surprise me that Hazel, of all people, called him by his first name?
“Where’s my boy?” she asked him.
“We’re asking him some questions.”
“Are you about done? We’ve been here all damn day.”
He frowned. “I need to talk with Willa. And I might have some questions for you too.”
“Fine.” She narrowed her eyes, sending him a glare that would have made me cry.
“Can I do that?” he asked. “Or did you want me to stand here so you can glare at me a little while longer?”
She dismissed him with a flick of her wrist. “Get on with it.”
I looked back and forth between them, wondering what the deal was with these two. Everyone liked Sheriff Magee. Everyone. He’d won his last election in a landslide. And everyone liked Hazel. So how did these two not like one another?
Now wasn’t the time to ask.
“Willa, come on back.”
“Okay.” I nodded and took a step toward the door but stopped when Logan touched my shoulder.
“I think you should wait until the lawyer gets here,” he said quietly.
“That’s still at least an hour away, and it’s already three o’clock.” I turned to Sheriff Magee, a man who I trusted to give me sound advice. “Should I wait for a lawyer?”
“That’s your call and you have the right to wait. But I don’t think you need one for this. I just have a couple easy questions.”
“Then I’ll come back now.” If answering some simple questions meant that Jackson might not have to spend the night in a jail cell, I’d cooperate.
Logan frowned. “Willa—”
“It’s okay. If I get uncomfortable, I can always stop talking and wait for the lawyer.”
The door buzzed and the lock popped, so before Logan could stop me again, I opened it up and went inside.
I met Sheriff Magee in the short hallway behind the front desk. He led me around a corner and down a hallway toward a bull pen. We skirted past empty desks, going straight for a small room along the back wall.
As I stepped inside, I realized it was an interrogation room. The overhead fluorescent lights were bright, but without windows, the room was gloomy. The beige walls were dull and the wooden table in the middle of the room had seen better days.
There wasn’t a two-way mirror, but there was a camera in the upper corner of the room. Its blinking red light made me even more nervous than I already was.
I took the chair on one side of the table, sitting on my shaking hands. Sheriff Magee sat across from me, slapping down the yellow legal pad and pen he’d been carrying. Then he pulled a small black recorder from the breast pocket of his brown shirt. He clicked it on and set it down, its red light intimidating me too.
“Sheriff Xavier Magee questioning Willa Doon on December eighth.” He wrote down my name and the date on the paper, then looked up.
I held my breath, waiting for his first question as I sweated underneath my coat.
“Willa, could you state your relationship to Jackson Page?”
I swallowed hard, clearing the lump in my throat. “I’m his girlfriend.”
“And how long have you been dating?”
“A little over three months.”
He scratched something on the paper. I didn’t try to read it upside down, focusing instead on trying to calm my racing heart. What if I said something wrong? What if I made this worse for Jackson?
Maybe I should have waited for the lawyer. I wasn’t equipped to deal with this kind of pressure. I was a good girl. Good girls didn’t know how to act when being questioned about a murder.
“Do you recall where you were on the night of November sixteenth of this year?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. “I’d have to look at a calendar. But I was probably either at home or at Jackson’s.” That was three weeks ago. I would need a calendar to see the exact day of the week, but I had a feeling I already knew which night that was.
“Do you stay the night there often?”
I nodded.
Sheriff Magee smiled and looked at the recorder. “If you could say yes or no, Willa. Thanks.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, taking another breath. “Yes, I stay there often. Especially since he has Ryder now.”
“And did you ever meet their mother?” he asked.
“Twice.”
“When was that?”
“Um, the first day she came to Lark Cove. I was in the bar when she came in.”
“And what happened that day?”
“Uh . . .” I searched my memory, trying to remember all that had happened that afternoon. “She came in and said she was looking for Jackson. Thea was there too. We didn’t know who she was and when Jackson came out from the kitchen, she didn’t recognize him. He told her to leave.”
“He told her to leave? Or did he physically remove her from the bar?”
“He, um, escorted her out.”
Sheriff Magee didn’t need to write anything down. He already knew things had gotten heated that afternoon. But the only person who could have told him was Jackson since Thea had been with me in the lobby all day. Where was he going with this?
“And what happened next?” he asked.
“Nothing. I spent the evening at the bar with Jackson and then went home.” There was no way in hell I was going to tell him anything about the fight we’d gotten into that night.
“You went home alone?”
“Yes.”
“But you normally spend the nights together.”
Why did I feel like this was a trap? “Yes.”
“So you don’t know what else happened that night after you left.”
“Nothing else happened. I stayed until Jackson closed down the bar. Then I drove home and went to bed.”
“And when did you see Jackson again?”
“The next morning.”
He hummed and wrote down another note on the paper. He tilted it back, resting it at an angle to hide his notes.
“When was the second time you met Melissa Page?”
“The next day. I went with Jackson to visit her at her motel room.”
“And what happened?”
I took a deep breath, though it didn’t help soothe my hammering heartbeat. “Melissa introduced Ryder and Jackson. Then she told Jackson he needed to take Ryder for a while.”
That was the CliffsNotes version of our visit to the motel, but I was starting to feel like the less I shared, the better. If Sheriff Magee wanted details, he could drag them out of me one question at a time.
“Then what?”
“That’s it. We loaded up Ryder and his stuff, then left. We went to the bar for pizza.”
He set down the paper and pen, then steepled his hands by his chin. “And did you ever see or talk to Melissa again?”
“No.”
“Did she ever call to talk to Jackson or Ryder?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” I locked my eyes with his. “I’m sure. If she called, Jackson didn’t tell me. Ryder doesn’t have a phone.”
“Okay. Let’s go back to the night of November sixteenth. You’re sure you don’t remember where you were that night?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Nothing specific stands out from that date. But can I check my phone? I might have something in my calendar.”
“Go ahead.” Sheriff Magee waved me on.
I dug my phone from my coat pocket and opened up the calendar, swiping to November. I kept everything in my calendar, mostly because I didn’t ever want to forget a birthday, special occasion or dinner with the girls.
I noted everything, including my lunch dates.
And November sixteenth was the day I’d had a lunch date with my dad at the school.
That was the day that Jackson had been in to discuss Ryder’s grades. It was the day he’d gotten that late-night phone call and disappeared for three hours and seven minutes, only to come home smelling like tequila and women’s perfume.
“I spent the night at Jackson’s house,” I told Sheriff Magee.
“And was he there all night?”
I looked up, wanting to cry.
Sheriff Magee’s eyes were waiting, his gaze gentle and understanding. He knew the answer already and he knew it was going to hurt to say it.
He knew that with one word, I’d be turning against the love of my life.
“No.”
