Page 38 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Nick stayed silent while he mulled over the connections. When he finally answered, it was with a simple nod of agreement.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Hadley studied him, wondering if it would be that easy. “No questions? No doubts that this is a wild goose chase?”

“Working that case with you last fall taught me something, Hadley.” Nick pushed away from her vehicle. “You put a forty-seven-year pattern together inside a week, back when every badge in this county, mine included, had spent years calling those girls a ghost story. So, when you tell me that a red pin on a road nobody outside Whistlerun could find has got your attention, I’m not going to sit here and talk you out of it. I trust you.”

The compliment settled over her, warm and unfamiliar. She’d never learned to take one, and she wasn’t sure what to say in return that wouldn’t come across as ungracious. Instead, she pushed off the Equinox and started across the lot toward the building. The morning glare threw her shadow, stretching it across the asphalt ahead of her, and it wasn’t long before a second one joined hers.

“I’m too close to this one.” The admission came easier than Hadley would have thought, though she kept her gaze fixed on the double doors ahead. “Reed. Mason. All of it tangled together until I can’t always find the seam where the case ends and the rest of my life starts. That’s the reason I want you in the room for the second interview. You’ll catch what I miss, even if you’re certain the Mercers are good, upstanding people.”

Nick let out a low laugh, and she side-eyed him.

“You’re twisting my words.” Nick met her gaze, the amusement tugging at the corner of his mouth. “What I said was the father’s a loan officer at the bank, close to retiring, and that he’d know Warren personally. That’s a man with reach in this county. It isn’t the same as me vouching for the family’s character. If you believe there’s something criminal under all this, then the reach is exactly why we cross every T and dot every I twice over. Do it sloppy with people who’ve got connections, and it won’t matter a lick what we turn up. It walks right out the door.”

“Point taken,” Hadley murmured, somewhat mollified by his response.

They came up the walk toward the entrance, and Nick slowed a half step to toss his empty cup into a garbage can. He held out his hand for hers and did the same. She’d been expecting him to pick up the Mercer thread, but he stunned her by crossing into personal territory instead.

“I heard Mason got the settlement money from the state.”

Hadley stopped short of the entrance, and Nick drew up with her. When she faced him, he merely arched that right brow again, the picture of a man who hadn’t known the topic was off limits.

“I found that out myself just last night.” Hadley didn’t bother to soften the edge on her admission. For a brief second, she considered walking back to the car for her antacids, but she hoped this interview wouldn’t take long enough to need them. “How did you hear?”

It shouldn’t have surprised her how fast a thing like that traveled the back roads of Cane County. She knew better than most how little stayed buried in this part of the world. Still, it didn’t sit easily with her. That amount of money put a fresh target square on her brother’s back, and the whole county knowing about it only widened the circle of people who might come around with their hands out, or worse.

“Warren called me yesterday afternoon.” Nick had the grace to look reluctant about disclosing his source. “He wanted to set a meeting before the end of the month about the Harvest Festival. The settlement came up in the middle of it.”

“Of course it did.” Hadley thinned her lips in irritation. It hadn’t crossed her mind that Warren would be first in line for that bit of gossip. “God, he’s infuriating.”

Nick reached past her and drew the door open, his mistake in bringing up Whistlerun’s mayor plain on his face. She murmured a thank-you and stepped into the lobby, the building’s stale air sliding over her and doing nothing for the burn already working its way up. The squeak of her boots was loud on the polished floor.

Nick’s hand came to rest on her arm, light, and brought her up short just inside the doors.

“You didn’t hear the news from Mason, did you?”

It was in that moment that Hadley understood with ugly clarity just how far she’d walled herself off from the rest of the living world. She’d spent eleven months stacking every last brick of it herself, too. No wonder Julian had driven all that way out to Whistlerun to check on her in person.

She’d given up the life she’d built, traded the badge and the troop and the city glow for the town she’d spent twelve years outrunning. And at the end of it, she didn’t have one friend within reach. The single night she’d finally done the normal thing people did, sit at Gus’s bar and let folks talk to her, she’d turned even that into one more way to chase Reed’s killer.

Hadley pressed her lips together.

They’d gone drier than they had yesterday, cracked at the seam, and she remembered too late that she’d stood at the café counter not twenty minutes ago with a whole basket of ChapStick beside the register and walked out without buying a single tube.

“It doesn’t matter how I came to hear about the money.” Hadley held his gaze. This was neither the time nor the place to test their personal boundaries, but she’d bend a little. “Mason stopped in at the station this morning, though. First time he’s set foot through that door since I pinned this badge on.”

Nick waited patiently for the rest of her story.

“I told him to take the money and run.” Hadley looked away and peeled a dry curl of skin from her bottom lip. “I told him to take every cent the state owes him and put as many miles between himself and Cane County as the money will buy.”

She hadn’t wanted Nick’s opinion so much as she’d needed to get the admission off her chest. Maybe she shouldn’t have been that honest with Mason. Maybe she’d overstepped in this new version of their sibling relationship. But wasn’t it about time the two of them were honest with one another?

She started across the lobby, grateful she’d parked on the right side of the building this morning. The staircase up to Roland’s floor was straight ahead and a little to her left. Movement near the tall side windows caught her attention, and she recognized Knox Hudson, deep in conversation with a student. She had no intention of calling out a greeting, and she’d just as soon the man not register her presence at all. She wanted this next interview kept low and quiet, before Roland Mercer caught wind of a second badge in the building and started arranging himself for an audience.

She reached for the railing.

A terrified scream tore down from somewhere above, guttural and short, more animal than human. Her mind couldn’t fix on where it had come from, only that it bounced off the stairwell’s hard surfaces and broke apart in the open lobby. For half a breath, time seemed to hang, and then Nick’s hand shot out and yanked her back out of harm’s way.