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“Well nice work. What did you want to spitball with me?”
“I was thinking… The Hideout seems to be a pretty obvious place to look for a missing person, right? You said it yourself that locals know about it.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, then why the hell haven’t the cops checked it? How has Jesse not been found in this teeny tiny town?”
Rhett tosses a mound of dirt onto a pile. “Where are you going with this?”
“Detective Stroud is a local, he was born and raised here. He is lead investigator on Jesse’s missing person case… why wouldn'thethink to check the caves? Have you ever thought about that? Or, at the very least, talk to someone who would have suggested he look there.Ordid he already and isn’t telling anyone? Could he be in some sort of alliance with Jesse? Think about it… Stroud is tied to everything. He worked my mom’s case, was there at the scene—so he would know about the clocks and necklace—and he was the one who put you in jail. And now he’s working the case of the missing teen who delivered my dead mother’s necklace to my front door. What are those odds?”
“I’ve thought about all this, too. But, if you’re right, that Stroud is the killer and the guy who framed me, what does he have to gain by all this now? The letters, the necklace. Think about that.”
I exhale, frustrated. I should have known Rhett would find the hole in my theory, the same one that kept me up last night. No matter how I twist it, I cannot think of a single reason Stroud would reignite a twenty-year-old case that he got away with.
I notice then that Rhett is wearing the same clothes he’d purchased from the big box store days earlier.
“Have you got a place to stay?” I ask.
He nods to the sky. “Under the stars.”
“You’re sleeping on the street?”
“That’s dramatic.”
“So is being homeless.”
“Could be worse. Trust me.”
I wonder if this is the mentality Rhett will carry for the rest of his life now. Accepting life on the streets and living in poverty, yet grateful, because, hey, it could always be worse.
What a way to live.
I fist my hands on my hips. “What time do you get off here?”
“I work until they make me leave.”
I glance over my shoulder. “Looks like they’re packing up.”
“Likely so.”
“Have you been back to Deep Shadows? To the abandoned house?”
“Not yet.”
“Let’s go back tonight. Figure out who Dr. Harris Taylor is meeting in the middle of the night,” I say. “Finish your hole digging and I’ll come back after the sun sets. And afterward, we’ll swing by the store and you can get another outfit with all this money you’re making now.”
He doesn’t laugh at the joke—but he also doesn’t argue.
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
Rhett stabs his shovel into the ground. “Sylvia…”
I bite my tongue, keep walking away before he can protest—because I have already decided I am going back to that damn house. And Rhett is going with me, whether he likes it or not.
22
Marjorie
