Someone had been in my house.
The couch cushions in the living room were turned up at odd angles. The drawer of one of the end tables was hanging open. Even the movies in the entertainment stand had been pulled out, like someone had searched behind them.
The disarray continued into the kitchen, where all of the cupboard doors were open and the drawers ajar. I walked as quietly as possible down the hallway toward my bedroom, hoping that if the intruder was still inside, I’d catch him or her in the act.
But my bedroom and adjoining bathroom were empty except for the items tossed and turned out of their normal place.
I turned from the bedroom, retreating quietly down the hall toward the other end of the house. My heart was racing, but I did my best to keep my breaths shallow and even as I approached Ryder’s room.
As I peered around the door, I saw no one. Though his room was in much worse shape than the rest of the house. Whoever had come in here had obviously spent most of their time in this room. The mattress had been upended completely, tipped on its side against the wall with a huge gash cut into the back. The nightstand was smashed to pieces and the drawers to his dresser were scattered across the floor, each of them broken.
I finished my search of the house, hitting the laundry room and other bathroom, but I was alone. Whoever had come in here had either found what they were looking for and left or run before they could get caught.
“Fuck,” I cursed in the living room, taking it all in.
Who had done this? What were they looking for?
The screech of tires outside sent me hustling out the front door. Willa was still inside the truck, watching with panic from the passenger window as Sheriff Magee and two of his deputies hopped out of their cruisers.
With hands on their holsters, they rushed toward the house.
“Is anyone inside?” Magee asked.
I shook my head. “No. I checked all of the rooms. They’re all trashed but there’s no sign whoever did it is still in there.”
“Mind if we check, just to be sure?”
“Be my guest.” I stepped out of the way as he and his deputies rushed inside to sweep the house.
Meanwhile, I went over to the truck, opening the door for Willa.
“What happened?” she asked, clinging to my hand as I helped her out.
“I don’t know, babe. Someone broke in and made a mess of the place looking for something.”
“What?” she gasped. “Who? Why?”
I pulled her into my chest, hoping some of my body heat would stop her shivering. Though I doubted it was from the cold.
“I don’t know. Let’s go inside and talk to Magee.”
She nodded, leaving her arms wrapped around my waist as we walked. The minute we stepped inside, she gasped again and slapped a hand over her mouth. “No.”
“Better stay there,” a deputy warned from the kitchen. “We’re going to dust this whole place for fingerprints.”
Fuck. Even with the carnage all around us, it was hard to believe this was happening. When were we going to catch a break?
“All clear, Sheriff,” one of the deputies called from the direction of my bedroom.
“Same here.” Sheriff Magee’s shout preceded him as he emerged from the hallway going to Ryder’s room. As he stood in the living room, he surveyed the mess and shook his head. “Your brother’s room is the worst. Whoever did this spent more time in there than anywhere else.”
I nodded. While things in the rest of the house had been upended, his room had been fucking destroyed. “I noticed the same thing.”
“I think you’d better go get him from school and bring him to the station,” Magee said.
I sighed, tucking Willa closer to my side. “I think you’re right.”
My brother had some explaining to do.
Willa and I left the house immediately, driving straight to the school. We went inside, stopping at the office to request Ryder’s early release. One of the aides went to get Ryder from his classroom and it only took a couple of minutes for him to come rushing around a wall of lockers. The moment he saw us in the hall, he jogged toward us.
“So?” he asked, hiking his backpack over his shoulder. “What happened?”
“They know I didn’t do it,” I told him.
Ryder dropped his backpack and flung himself at my chest.
I wrapped my brother up in a hug, realizing then just how much of his worries this past week had been for me.
“I was worried they’d take you away.” Ryder’s voice was muffled in my chest. “Then they’d take me away too.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I dropped a cheek to the top of Ryder’s head. “Neither are you. Love you, kid.”
“Love you too.”
I looked up at Willa just in time to see her turn to a bulletin board and swipe a tear from the corner of her eye. Did she know that it was because of her I could even say those words to someone?
Besides her, I’d never said them to another living soul, not even Hazel or Thea or Charlie. But since I’d begun saying them to Willa often, they’d become easier to speak. And if there was another person on earth who deserved to hear them, it was the kid in my arms.
After a few moments, Ryder pulled himself together and stepped back, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “I don’t want to go back to class. Do I have to?”
“No.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “But we need to talk.”
“About what?”
I took a deep breath. “Someone broke into the house today and tossed the place.”
“No way.” His dark eyes widened.
“They went to town on your room.”
This time there wasn’t just shock on his face, but guilt as he dropped his chin to study the floor.
“The sheriff needs to talk to you.”
Ryder nodded. “Uh, okay.”
“We’ll be with you the whole time, but you have to be honest with him. About everything.”
“What if I get in trouble?” he whispered.
Willa stepped up to his side and took his hand, just like she did for me whenever I needed some reassurance. “Then we’ll help get you out of it.”
Ryder and I might have gone through a lot of our lives alone up to this point, but from here on out, we’d tackle problems together. Like a team.
“Go get your coat, kid.” I motioned for Ryder to go down the hall to the lockers. “Then we’ll get out of here.”
It didn’t take us long to be right back in the place where I’d vowed earlier never to set foot again.
The interrogation room.
Ryder, Willa and I sat on one side of the table with Magee on the other, his recorder in its place.
“Okay, Ryder.” Magee steepled his hands under his chin. “I’m going to ask you some questions and it’s imperative that you tell me the truth. The whole truth. Can you do that?”
Ryder, who’d had his gaze locked on the table since we’d arrived, nodded along with a murmured, “Yes.”
“I’m trying to find the person who—”
“Killed my mom?” Ryder interrupted.
“That’s right. And to do that, I need to know more about her.”
The kid nodded, keeping his eyes focused on the table.
“But before we talk about her, I’d like to know more about you.”
Magee looked to me, asking silently for permission to launch into his questions. I gave him a slight nod, then looked over Ryder’s head at Willa sitting on his right side.
I wasn’t sure if it was a mistake or not to be in this room again without our attorney, but I was going with my gut. And my gut said Magee would do everything in his power to make this the last time we met here.
For the next hour, Willa and I sat quietly as we listened to Magee’s questions and Ryder’s answers. It took the kid a while to open up, but once he did, Magee only had to guide the conversation.
We learned a lot more about Ryder’s childhood and the lifestyle he’d had with Mom. It made me realize that maybe bouncing from foster home to foster home wasn’t all that bad. At least I’d always had a home, whereas Ryder had slept a lot of his nights in the backseat of Mom’s old car.
Ever since he was a baby, she’d driven him from state to state, following whatever boyfriend she’d been with at the time. Occasionally, they would move in with one and stay for a year or two. But Mom’s relationships never lasted. Just as Ryder would get settled, she’d yank him out of his home and they would be off to somewhere else.
From what Ryder could remember, the longest Mom had stayed in one spot was right after Ryder was born. They’d lived in West Virginia, next door to one of Mom’s cousins, until he turned six.
Then she’d gotten restless. Instead of leaving him behind like she had with me, he became her traveling companion.
It was no wonder he’d gotten so far behind in school.
“So eventually you ended up in Las Vegas, is that right?” Magee asked.
“Yeah.” Ryder nodded. “We lived there with Mom’s ex-boyfriend Christopher.”
“And what was he like?”
Ryder scoffed. “He was a dick.”
“Really?” Magee perked up. So far, Ryder hadn’t had anything negative to say about anyone in his past, even our mother. “Why do you say that?”
“He used to push her around a lot.” Ryder frowned at the recorder. “One time, I came home from school and I saw him yanking her around the living room by her arm. She was crying and had a red mark on her cheek. She made some bull excuses for him, but the guy was a loser. It wasn’t the first time he’d put his hands on her.”
“Do you know what caused that argument?”
Ryder shrugged. “Probably money. That’s what they normally fought about. Christopher always had stacks of cash lying around.”
Warning bells rang in the back of my mind and Willa had the same alarm on her face.
Magee, on the other hand, kept his expression neutral. “What did Christopher do for a living?”
“Some kind of banker, I think,” Ryder answered.
Warning bells turned to blaring sirens.
“Interesting.” Magee jotted something down on his notepad. “Do you happen to know Christopher’s last name?”
“Unger.”
“Good.” Magee kept taking notes. “I don’t suppose you know why they broke up?”
“Not really. They got in a big fight and the next day, Mom told me she was sick of his shit. While he was at work, she loaded up all our stuff and we left.”
“And where did you go?”
“Denver. Mom bought a new car and we camped out in hotels for a while.”
“No school?” Magee asked.
Ryder just shook his head. “No. Mom said we weren’t staying long so I could just hang out and watch TV.”
My hands fisted on my thighs, not for the first time today, in anger at Mom. Instead of doing something for her son, like enrolling him in school or getting a fucking job, she’d let him sit on a hotel bed and watch television for the month of September.
Beside Ryder, Willa’s fists matched my own.
“Then what happened?” Magee asked.
“We came up here to look for Jackson. Mom was running out of money and thought he’d have some.”
I scoffed, earning a shut the fuck up glare from Magee.
“Any idea how much money we’re talking about here?” the sheriff asked.
“Um . . .” Ryder hesitated, looking between the adults in the room before muttering, “About fifty thousand dollars.”
“What the fuck?” I exploded, earning another glare from Magee. But I was too pissed to keep quiet. “Mom spent fifty thousand dollars in a couple of months?”
Her car was nice, but not fifty-thousand-dollars nice. And months in a cheap hotel wouldn’t have used up the rest of her cash. So where the hell had she spent it? Why had she been so broke that she’d had to beg me for money?
Ryder’s shoulders curled in on themselves at my outburst. He looked over at me with guilty eyes.
Magee sat poised. He gave me a single nod to keep pushing.
“Ryder?” I warned.
He shook his head, clamping his mouth shut.
“What happened?”
He still didn’t speak.
“You need to tell me. Now,” I demanded. It was the sharpest tone I’d ever used with him. It was the same one Hazel had used on me countless times when I’d needed to get my act together. “I won’t ask you again. What happened to the money?”
His chin began to quiver and he dropped his eyes. “I . . . I took it.”
“You took it?” Willa asked. “Why?”
His teary eyes found his backpack at his feet.
The backpack he never went anywhere without.
“It was just a little bit at a time,” he confessed. “I’d sneak it from her purse when she wasn’t looking and hide it in my backpack. I wanted us to be out of money by the time we found Jackson. Because every time she ran out of money before, we’d stay somewhere for a while, with her friends or whatever. I thought maybe it would make her want to stay here.”
My anger deflated and I put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. Do you still have the money?”
He nodded frantically. “It’s in my backpack. I didn’t spend any of it.” Ryder’s panicked eyes shot to the sheriff. “I swear. None of it. Not even a dollar. And I have some of her recorders too.”
“Recorders?” Magee leaned forward. “What recorders?”
“The ones she gave me to carry for her.”
The room went silent.
Mom had given Ryder recorders? Could they contain the link to her killer?
“Would you mind if I took a listen?” Magee asked me, not Ryder.
“No. Go for it.”
Ryder immediately began digging in his backpack.
From over his shoulder, I watched as he lifted a flap in the bottom, one I wouldn’t have noticed, and started laying stacks of cash on the table.
Willa’s eyes stared unblinking at the money as it just kept coming. How the hell had he been carrying all of that around and we hadn’t noticed?
Soon the cash stopped and out came three recorders. They weren’t as fancy as the one the sheriff had used in all of our interrogations. These were single use only, so once they were full, you either recorded over what you had or bought a new device.
“Mom didn’t notice you took all of this money?” I asked Ryder.
He shrugged. “She wasn’t so good with numbers.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this?” Willa asked him.
Good fucking question. This information could have saved me from a week of being the number one suspect in a murder.
Ryder hung his head. “I thought I’d get in trouble for stealing and they’d send me away.”
And since he had nowhere else to go, he would have gone right into the system.
The same system I’d been telling him horror stories about since he’d arrived in Lark Cove.
I sighed, then looked at Magee. “Is he in trouble?”
The sheriff shook his head, then nodded to the cash and recorders. “As long as I can have that as evidence, I don’t see any reason to punish Ryder.” He stood from his chair. “I think we’re done for the day. We’ll need you to stay out of your house until my team is done dusting for prints. But I expect that to be done soon.”
“Take your time.” I stood and held out a hand for a shake. Then I nudged Ryder’s arm so he’d do the same.
With my hand on the back of his neck, I steered my brother out of the interrogation room with Willa trailing close behind.
“Thank you, Sheriff Magee,” she told him as he escorted us out.
“You’re welcome. I’ll be in touch.”
He left us alone in the lobby and we all shrugged on our coats. With mine on, I tossed the truck keys to Ryder. “Why don’t you head on out and turn the heat on for us.”
“Okay.” He nodded and hurried out the door.
When he was gone, I turned to Willa and let out a deep breath. “That was . . .”
“Intense? I can’t believe all of this.”
I pulled her into my arms. “Me neither, babe.”
“I have a feeling this Christopher guy is about to meet Sheriff Magee. Do you think that he’s the one who killed your mom? Could he be the one who broke into your house looking for those recordings?”
“That’s my hunch, but we’ll know more once Magee tracks him down.” There was a flurry of activity behind the lobby desk as two deputies whispered to one another. I was guessing the sheriff had already started his search for Christopher Unger.
“One thing I know for sure,” I said. “We’re not going home until the sheriff rounds him up. I’m not taking any chances.”
Willa nodded. “We can just stay at my place and Ryder can crash in my parents’ guest room.”
The deputies behind the desk both disappeared deeper into the station. “For Ryder’s sake, I hope they find out who killed her. He deserves to know.”
“So do you,” Willa said.
“I said good-bye to her a long time ago, babe. Years before she ever came to Lark Cove. I just want to put it all in the past.”
She held me tighter. “It’ll be okay.”
With her in my arms? “It already is.”
