AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Right.”
“Oh, God…”
“I’ve been thinking back to the short time I lived with my father. He was nice at first, indoctrinating me, so to speak. Then, when he tried to rape me, I ran. But I’m wondering…”
“Yeah?”
“I’m wondering if he had plans to sell me as well. I was an early bloomer. I had the same body at fourteen that I have today.”
“Oh my God… What if Gina…”
“Is still alive somewhere?” Ruby cleared her throat. “I’ve thought of that. But Rodney claims they found her body in the garage and had her cremated.”
“Could he be lying?”
“I’ve thought about that too.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to believe any of this. I really don’t. But what other financial benefit would there be to molesting kids?”
“And Gina was no longer a kid. At least not when she died. Or disappeared.”
“True. But there’s lots of money in women too, and Gina was beautiful.”
She was. Olive skin, long dark hair, deep-brown eyes… She looked a lot like her mother. I cringed. And her uncle.
“I could be completely off base,” Ruby continued. “Just a working theory. We need more information. And the people we can get it from right now are Rodney, Larry Wade, and Wendy Madigan. But…Larry and Wendy can’t be trusted, and Rodney’s not talking.”
“Hmm…”
“What?”
I was hesitant to voice this, as Jonah’s money was not my money. But when we had visited Frederick Jolly, the registered agent for the corporation that owned the house I was held captive in, Jonah had said he could “pay him to talk.”
“How loyal do you think your uncle is to those three?”
“My father and the rest? Like I said, he cried, Melanie. I couldn’t believe it. He’s scared shitless. If I had to guess, it’s not loyalty so much as fear.”
“You say those three are greedy. What about Rodney?”
“I couldn’t say, but everyone likes money.”
“Would money make him talk?”
She laughed. “You don’t have that kind of money, and neither do I.”
“My fiancé does, and believe me, he wants to get to the bottom of this just as much as you and I do. Maybe even more.”
Chapter Forty–Eight
Jonah
The next day, I had to be out in the pastures early. After I finished my work, I came home to have lunch with Melanie. She looked radiant. Pregnancy agreed with her. With all the shit going down right now, she was the calm amid a stormy sea. We had discussed what we’d both found out the previous evening when we returned home. I’d had a voicemail from Mills that the house where Simpson had been holed up, where Colin Morse had been raped and tortured, was owned by the elusive Fleming Corporation, the same corporation that owned the house where Melanie had been kept.
Today, I was still in shock about my father having been the financial backer for whatever horrible things the future lawmakers club had been involved in. Tom had said, when I was imprisoned at Wendy’s house, that my father owed him, that there was something in his will that we didn’t know about.
I shook my head. None of that made any sense.
Or did it?
My father, whom I’d always looked up to as a pillar of strength, was now an enigma to me. I’d never been able to figure out why he swept what had happened to Talon under the rug, why he’d never let us deal with it as we needed to…
