AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No . . . ,” she said weakly. “But when I called and we talked about it . . . he pointed out that, with them gone, all of the royalties for the book would fall to me.”
“Does he own a rifle?” Martinez asked.
She didn’t answer immediately, seemed somewhere else, so Martinez repeated the question. She snapped to, and said, “Oh . . . oh, yes. Several,” she admitted. “He . . . he hunts.”
Settler felt that little sizzle again. This was it. “Does he have the guns here?”
Vera shook her head. “He always has them with him.”
“Dad’s a dead-eye with a rifle,” Jensen put in. “Got the shooting trophies to prove it. Sometimes he even refers to himself as ‘the Marksman.’”
* * *
“Go to bed.” Half sprawled over Remmi’s couch, Noah had his computer on the coffee table. Once they’d gone upstairs, they’d turned on the spy camera and checked its memory, but watching it had proved futile because, after swinging the baby off his feet and dancing, Vera had cleaned off the dining room table, which meant she’d placed the sunglasses in a drawer. All that showed on the screen was darkness.
Already connected to the Internet on his laptop, Noah was also linked wirelessly on Remmi’s iPad to Emma, his assistant, who, it seemed, never slept.
Remmi was next to Noah, her legs over his. “I’m not going to bed yet. Too keyed up.” They were too close to finding out the answers to questions that had haunted her all her life. As tired and emotionally wrung out as she was, she couldn’t just fall into bed and shut it all down, not with her mind spinning as it was.
Noah was FaceTime-ing with Emma, who was pretty and intense. In her early twenties, with brown hair that fell in loose, unkempt layers to her shoulders, Emma Yardley was chewing on her lower lip as she concentrated. Hazel-eyed and sharp-featured, with a smattering of freckles that she didn’t cover with any kind of makeup, she stared into the screen when she wasn’t checking other computers. According to Noah, she surrounded herself with electronics.
From the corner of her eye, Remmi saw Romeo saunter into the room, stretch, then hop onto the arm of the couch. She motioned for the cat to come closer, patting the vacant cushion next to her. Instead, he pounced onto the back of the couch just out of reach.
“So here’s the interesting thing,” Emma said as Remmi leaned in for a better view of the screen. “Oliver Hedges Senior, the old guy? He had a bad skiing accident that really messed him up. Lost part of his spleen, broke ribs and his legs, had a punctured lung, and a bruised spinal cord. From what I can see, he kind of gave up for a while, ended up in a facility called Fair Haven Retirement Center, one of those communities that has a graduated living scale, depending upon a person’s needs. Everything from independent living to full-time nursing care, you know what I mean?”
Noah nodded. “Yep.”
“Well, Hedges, he was in the upper limits of care requirement. Couldn’t walk and barely talked. He wasn’t that old, either. Sixty-one. So he goes to the hospital and then to the care center, and everything heals but his spine. The long-term diagnosis was that he would probably never walk again. So, his young, second wife—trophy wife—puts him into the home, as, apparently, she’s now having second thoughts about being married to an invalid. Within six months, she divorces the old man and then . . . ends up marrying his son, Hedges the second.”
“OH2,” Noah said.
“Okay, whatever. But it goes a little deeper than that. I guess Marilee and OH2 had been college sweethearts, which is how she met his father in the first place. OH1 was single at the time, having already divorced his kids’ mother. So Marilee and OH1 click and she dumps the son for his rich daddy. But after the accident and the awful diagnosis, wifey bails right into the arms of her former boyfriend. So much for ‘until death do us part.’” Emma held up a finger. “But wait, there’s more. The story isn’t over because the old man in the care center. The original Oliver Hedges, OH1? He finds love again.”
“What?” Noah said.
“At the nursing facility? In his condition? What were the chances, huh? But it’s true. He recovered enough to take back the reins of the company and marry again.”
Remmi just stared at the screen “Who?”
“Well, this is where your Shawna Whit
man comes in,” Emma drawled.
“Seneca?” Remmi whispered, feeling her pulse jump. “How?”
“Shawna Whitman, aka Seneca Williams, was one of the nurses at the care facility, and she worked directly with Hedges Senior. I guess you could say she gave him back the will to live again, and he started to improve.”
Remmi couldn’t believe it. After all this time? “Why an alias?”
“Turns out Shawna didn’t have a license to be a midwife. Never registered with the state; she just did it on the side. She was really just a nurse’s aide.”
While Emma was talking, Noah was typing on his laptop and, from the looks of it, checking out information on OH Industries. He’d clicked on the board of directors and pictures of the officers of the company, and front and center was Oliver Hedges.
Emma went on, “Remember I told you there were two sons? OH2, who died at thirty-seven, and his younger brother, Brett. Well, OH1 also has a twenty-year-old daughter. A girl named Kayla.”
“Ariel,” Remmi said and turned her attention from the screen to Noah. “It’s Ariel. Not his daughter. Though he might claim she is. Ariel’s his granddaughter!”
He typed quickly, Googling Kayla Hedges. Pictures appeared, shots of her growing up, from a toddler with her father to a gangly adolescent and eventually to a young woman who was a thinner, younger version of Didi, right down to her secret smile.
