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“Yes, it was clean. The only—” He stopped abruptly. “Hang on. There was a list of names.”
He stepped out of the shower and reached for his phone. Magnificently naked, he stood dripping on the bath mat while he scanned his phone. Cursing, he turned back toward her. “James Marsh. Works at the pharmacy. Damn it.”
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Sam picked up a towel and wrapped it around his hips. “I’ll text Bradley right away. If Marsh was tampering with prescriptions, that’s grounds for probable cause.”
Molly turned off the shower water and stepped out, so gloriously pink and wet that he nearly forgot what they were talking about. She patted her hair with a towel, then wrapped it around herself. “It could be more simple than that. Maybe they just sent messages in her prescriptions. They’re paranoid about cell service and internet, but no one’s going to inspect her birth control. Maybe other shipments had messages too, groceries and so forth.”
“Fuck.” He felt a little queasy. “So I’ve been helping them communicate with the outside world.”
“It’s just a theory. I was also thinking the sedative they used for Elias might have come in those packages.”
Either way, he’d been played for a fool. He frowned as he turned various puzzle pieces over in his mind. “You said ‘they.’”
“Yeah, so?” She patted her face with the towel.
“What if it’s not a ‘they’?”
“What do you mean?”
“That note from Soraya, that said not to trust Luke and Naomi. She said she was forced to shoot at me. What if she’s going against Luke? She and Jimmy Marsh could be using her prescriptions as a secret backchannel that Luke doesn’t know about. Or maybe Luke did suspect, and that’s why he was waiting for me at the airstrip that day we flew in right before the storm. Soraya said he was getting suspicious, but maybe she really meant suspicious of her.”
“That could be it, but they seem so unified. Everything they do is as a community.”
“But Elias ran away,” he pointed out. “And wasn’t Luke grumbling about how kids are supposed to listen and learn? Maybe there are disagreements and factions within the group.”
Molly twisted a towel into a turban on top of her head. It made her look like a queen, which was exactly what she was, he thought.
Naomi had a queenly air about her too. That prophecy…was it real, something from her “Celtic druid ancestry”? Or something they’d made up to justify their claims to the land? The Chilkoots had purchased the property they currently occupied, so they didn’t need any more justification than that. So were they eyeing more territory? Maybe near the Ice Falls?
So many questions still needed answers.
“We really do need a murder board,” he said to Molly.
“Right? We actually do! I wonder if we can have the front desk send one up.”
Laughing at that, he drew her by the hand out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Molly took the towel off her head and let her hair flow across her bare shoulders.
“I know that your focus is the Chilkoots, but mine is Elias and Daniel,” she told him as she pressed the last drops of water from her hair. “If the Chilkoots really deliberately buried Daniel under an avalanche?—”
“Still speculation,” he pointed out.
“That’s what murder boards help with,” she said impatiently. “You speculate and look for connections.” She crouched next to her red tote bag and rummaged around. A moment later, she came up with a manila envelope. “We can write on the back of this.”
“What is it?”
“No idea. It’s from Martha.” She untwisted the fastener and opened it, then hissed in a breath. “Oh my God. I think this is Daniel’s story.” A note was attached to it with a paper clip. She read it out loud. “Toni said you’d be able to get this published. Daniel gave it to me to read before he died, but I lost it in the barn. Just found it the other day.”
Sam hurried to her side and peered over her shoulder as she scanned it. “Is it about the Chilkoots?”
“Nope. It’s a love story. Pretty sexy, too. His man flesh inflated like a balloon animal as she bared her womanly curves to his voracious eyes,” she read. “Day-um. I wonder if it’s about Ruth.”
“Is her name in there? No need to read more,” he added quickly.
She scanned further. “No. No names. But it’s actually pretty tender.”
“If it didn’t include names, then even if it’s about Ruth, or inspired by Ruth, it wouldn’t be a reason to kill him.”
