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“I left when I was fourteen. I was twenty-seven before I came back. ”
He glanced at her as she nodded slowly, her violet gaze locked on him.
“I came back, because I thought surely, with Thad Mayes’s death, it couldn’t be as bad as it was when I was a kid. And if it was, I had a plan. ”
Bitterness welled inside him.
“To become sheriff,” she stated.
He nodded at that. “To become sheriff. To clean out the filth I knew lurked just below the surface of one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I’d make it safe, I thought. ”
“You have made it safe, Zeke,” she ventured softly.
Zeke shook his head as he released her hand. “No, the Mackay cousins and DHS made it safe. I worked for ten years to gather the evidence I needed, and I was blocked at every turn. I couldn’t figure out how it was happening for years. ”
He moved away from her then. “It took an old man’s careless comment to remind me of a few things, and then it fell into place. ”
He turned back to her and breathed out harshly.
“I’m not leaving town,” she said then. “I can see it in your face, Zeke. You’re going to ask me to leave again. ”
He shook his head to that. “It’s too late for any of us to escape this fucking mess. ”
He turned and faced the contents of the boxes he’d emptied.
“Mom was like a pack rat. ” He sighed. “She had so much junk she had to rent a storage unit for it. When she died and the house burned around her, I just packed all these boxes away after I retrieved them, thinking I’d go through them someday. See what she had kept. I didn’t expect she had everything I had ever searched for. Once I found some of it, it wasn’t that hard to know where to look for the rest of it. ”
There were pictures, there were journals he’d never known his mother kept. Dozens of journals, each day of her life from the day she married Thad Mayes recorded. She had never told him about the journals and he had never known she kept one. After the divorce she never took pictures, so Zeke hadn’t remembered the camera she had carried with her during her marriage to Thad Mayes.
He’d forgotten most of his life as a child, because remembering always brought him back to the scent of blood in the air, and the betrayal of a father he had adored.
“What were you looking for?” she asked.
“Proof,” he answered, turning back to her. “Proof that Dayle Mackay, Nadine Grace, and several of Kentucky’s highest ranking political figures were involved in treason. I knew. ” He shook his head as he moved to the pictures. “I’ve always known, I just couldn’t prove it. ”
“Dayle and Nadine are gone,” she whispered. “They’re dead, Zeke. ”
“They’re dead, but their legacy lives on. ”
&
nbsp; “Zeke, you’re scaring me. ”
There was a hint of fear in her voice, in her gaze as he turned back to her, and he knew that the time for the truth was now or never.
“Thirty years ago, there were three friends,” he told her. “They were as close as brothers. ”
He laid out the three individual pictures. Thad Mayes, Gene’s father, James Maynard, and Danny Jones.
“These friends hunted together, they partied together, and like the Mackays did for a time, they fucked together. ” His lips quirked bitterly at the little gasp that fell from her lips.
“Then, along came a woman. ” He pulled another picture free, that of Nadine Grace, then Nadine Mackay.
There was a series of pictures then. Depraved, sexual acts the three men were involved in with the woman that had been photographed. He glanced at Rogue’s face and saw in her eyes the same disgust he felt each time he had looked at those pictures after finding them. He had no idea who had taken them, or why. But they were the reason his mother had died.
“Then, Nadine Mackay set her eyes on another man. ” He drew a picture of a young John Calvin Walker free.
He looked like his son, John. This picture showed Cal Walker in front of the Bar, a bright smile on his face as he shook Danny Jones’s hand.
