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“Now, he and Danny ‘Jonesy’ Jones were good friends. But I don’t think he knew what Jonesy was involved in with his other friends. Until this woman showed up. ”
Rogue’s mother, Brianna Evansworth.
“Zeke,” she whispered. “Don’t destroy me. ”
He turned back to her and saw the fear and desperation in her face.
Zeke shook his head. “Your father loved her the moment he saw her. ” He turned back to the pictures. “Do you know why your father left Somerset?”
She shook her head slowly, her eyes filling with tears.
“Because Dayle Mackay wanted her,” he stated. “Dayle wanted the Evansworth money that backed her, and he asked his three friends, Thad, James, and Jonesy, to help him. ”
It was all recorded in his mother’s journal. Years of sexual excess and photos that Dayle Mackay had sent to Thad Mayes when he’d tried to deny the other man anything that he wanted.
“Jonesy refused. That’s why his leg is messed up. Not from that motorcycle wreck, though that didn’t help it. He was shot in the leg by his good friend Thad Mayes when it was learned he had warned Cal Walker that Dayle Mackay was going to try to take the woman he loved. Dayle thought a woman could be trained like a dog. Chain it up, starve it, abuse it, and it will come to heel. ”
Sickness welled inside him.
“Cal and Brianna left for Boston,” he said. “Jonesy stayed, his friendship with Thad and James supposedly severed. But Somerset was his home. He eventually married and had a daughter. Thad divorced and his wife and son moved away, and James’s son, Gene, slowly separated himself from his father. They weren’t happy times for that little group, were they?” He glanced back at her.
“Except for my father. ”
“Except for your father,” he agreed.
“We flash to the present now,” he said. “Joe and Jaime. They were in love with a girl. ”
He turned to her, his chest heavy as she stared back at him. “A very young girl, and they were going to share her. And this is where things get dicey. This is where the sins of the father come back to haunt them. ”
He ran his hands over his face wearily. “This is where the sons have to pay the price for their fathers’ crimes maybe. ”
“You know the woman they were seeing?”
He nodded. “I think I know who she was. And I know why the boys and their grandmother died. ”
He slid a picture free. Gene, when he was younger, a teenager. It came from a stack of pictures that showed his friend throughout his life, until Thad Mayes’s death actually.
Because Thad believed in insurance. He had sent his ex-wife pictures for years.
He fanned the pictures over the table as Rogue moved forward. She stared down at them as he did, that same black fury growing inside him as her hand lifted to his arm and her fingers tightened there.
“Oh God,” she whispered when she came to the pictures that incriminated the man he had once thought of as a brother. The picture of Gene, his father, and Thad as they stood together with another couple, all dressed in camo gear, rifles held easily in their arms.
The couple they stood with was Dayle Mackay and Nadine Grace.
“They were a part of the Freedom League,” she whispered as she stared at the pictures.
“Even Gene. ”
It wasn’t hard to miss. The FL was emblazoned on the shoulders of their camo gear, but even more incriminating were the bound bodies in front of them. The dead bodies of two state police officers that had gone missing ten years ago.
It was an unsolved case, one that Zeke had been investigating himself for years. All this time, and the proof was under his nose.
“Goddammit, all this time. ” He swung away from her, the fury erupting inside him. “I had the proof all this time. That son of a bitch father of mine was sending Mom sealed envelopes of pictures and she never even opened them. Boxes of information, of proof.
She kept them in boxes in a frigging rental unit in Los Angeles and never even opened them. ”
Because she had known what they were. He’d read parts of her journals, bits and pieces.
