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“Of course they did. I get it. My point is that Mom—and the rest of them—aren’t above hiding stuff when they think it’s for the greater good. The good being the lives of their children.”
“Not such a bad thing,” I say.
“Did I say it was a bad thing? Did I?” Dale rakes his fingers through his mass of hair, making it so unruly he looks like a wild man. His green eyes light on fire.
“Easy, Dale. I wasn’t criticizing. Just observing.”
“Right. I can tell by your tone that you’re pissed off.”
I breathe in. Out. He’s not wrong. “Okay, I’m pissed off. But not at you.”
He gives me the patented Dale Steel side-eye.
“Okay, a little at you. But more so I’m pissed at this situation. At our grandfather for putting us in this situation. That quitclaim deed has me bothered. It’s got to be about Grandpa’s affair with Wendy Madigan, like we talked about at the Bluebird. The kid that came out of it has to be Uncle Ryan.”
He sighs. “Yeah.”
“We can find out for sure. Or we can at least access the files necessary to get more information.”
He lifts his eyebrows. “What are you suggesting?”
I pull out a key card Mom gave me earlier. “We go into town.”
“What’s that?”
“The key to get into the courthouse,” I say. “And into the databases.”
I slide the card through the reader at the courthouse. I’m not breaking in. I’m the assistant city attorney. So what if it’s the wee hours of a Saturday morning? I worked through the night many times at my firm in Denver.
“Wait,” Dale says. “Let’s not go in yet.”
“Why?”
“What if it’s not safe? What if there’s surveillance or something?”
“There probably is. It’s a courthouse. But I’m the assistant city attorney. I have the right to be here, to access the files.”
“What if the files are hidden? Deleted?”
“Since when are you a conspiracy theorist?”
“I’m not. Except here’s the thing. If Mom and Dad are hiding this much, what else might they be hiding? A secret quitclaim deed—that they may not even know about. A secret lien. A secret uncle. It’s all too much.”
He’s not wrong. “Tell me,” I say. “How did you find out about Dad’s childhood? About…” I don’t even want to say the words.
“He was sharing some stuff with me. I was going through a rough time, with the fire, and Floyd, and Ashley… I think he thought it would help me to know some family secrets or something. To explain that I wasn’t the only person in the family with struggles.”
I sigh. “Sounds like Dad. Always trying to make things easier on us. He never seemed to understand that we just have to get through it on our own.”
“That’s what I thought too, but now, I think he understands better than we ever knew.”
I nod. “You may very well be right.”
“Anyway, back to the original point. The quitclaim deed was probably something that Uncle Ry’s birth mother demanded. Got Grandpa to sign or something. I don’t know.”
“Maybe. At least now we have a theory as to why such a deed even exists. The birth mother wanted everything to go to Ryan, her offspring.”
“Right,” Dale says. “But it was never dated or recorded. So we have no idea when Grandpa signed it.”
“First thing we need to do is find all the deeds pertaining to the Steel property. If Dad and the others inherited via joint tenancy on a deed, then they all legally own the property. If the property went through probate, we may have a problem.”
“There’s no problem if we get the quitclaim deed from Murphy and destroy it.”
“True. But until we get the lien released, we don’t have the deed. And even if we can get the deed, there are still so many questions it raises. We’re going to have to approach Dad at some point.”
Dale nods. “I know,” he says, his voice soft and resigned.
I get it. Dale is close to Dad like I’m close to Mom. He doesn’t even want to think that Dad may have done anything even slightly unethical.
“Maybe it’s time,” I say, “that you stop thinking Dad is perfect and I stop thinking Mom is perfect.”
“I never thought—” He stops.
“Yeah, you did.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And so did I. About Mom.”
“You still want to go in?” Dale asks.
I look up at the two-story building. The window to my corner office on the second floor is visible.
What secrets does this building hold?
More than I ever imagined, it seems.
“Yeah,” I say. “I still want to go in.” I slide the card back through the reader.
I pull the door open and follow Dale through. This is a small town, so we don’t have twenty-four-seven security. I look around. No cameras watching me, at least not that I can see, though I’m sure they exist.
“Here goes nothing,” I say.
