Dead Right (Stillwater Trilogy #3)(99)
Author: Brenda Novak

“I’m not excusing anything. If this was easy for me, I would’ve done it a long time ago.”

Appearing quite stunned, she set her drink down. “But—but what about your daughter? Are you walking away from her, too?”

“I’ll never walk away from her. I’ll stay in touch, be patient and hope she eventually changes her mind about me.”

“She’ll never change her mind about you. Not if I can help it!”

It was a final jab, an attempt to drag him back onto the old, familiar battlefield, where she could continue to manipulate him through his love for Maria. “She’s a smart girl,” he said. “I trust that someday she’ll figure it all out.”

He took the check he’d written for next month’s child support from his shirt pocket and slid it across the metal table. “Here you go,” he said. Then he got up and started to leave.

“Wait!” she called.

He turned back to see her wearing an expression of panic. “What’s different? Have you met someone else?”

He thought about Madeline and smiled. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

Madeline sat at her computer, trying to write the most difficult article of her life. Ray had required several pints of blood and hundreds of stitches, but he was already out of the hospital and in jail. His trial hadn’t started yet, but with her testimony and his confession, he’d be going to prison for pedophilia, kidnapping and attempted rape, buying and selling child  p**n ography, incest and possibly the murder of Bubba Turk. Thanks to Hunter’s insistence, they’d sent Bubba’s body for an autopsy, and petechial hemorrhaging indicated that he’d been smothered. Judging by the time of death, Pontiff was now theorizing that Bubba had somehow caught Ray doing something he shouldn’t, so Ray had made sure he’d never be able to tell.

Sounded logical, but no one really knew. Ray wouldn’t say what had happened to Bubba. But he was more than willing to talk about anything else. He told everyone who came within ten yards of him the gruesome details of what her father had done to Katie and Rose Lee. That he and Barker had raped and tortured them both and they’d done it together. He’d laugh when others cringed and get increasingly more explicit, gaining some grotesque satisfaction from their horror and revulsion. He claimed Grace must’ve received similar treatment—thank God he didn’t really know. He even announced the details of what he’d planned to do to her at the cabin.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Just yesterday he’d told Toby Pontiff that her father had run Katie down when she tried to get away. And he’d suggested that her father had killed her mother and covered it up by making it look like suicide.

Madeline had been up most of the night thinking about that. She’d read through Eliza’s journals with an open heart this time—seeking the essence of the mother she’d lost when she was so young—and had decided she believed Ray. Her mother wouldn’t have left her willingly. That was the biggest lie Lee Barker had ever told. And the only positive thing knowledge of his true character had brought her.

So now she was like Clay and Grace and Molly, without a father she would acknowledge as her own. Lee Barker had nearly destroyed them all, and she felt obliged to write his story. The citizens of Stillwater, who’d always loved and supported him, deserved the same kind of resolution she’d sought for herself. The only part she’d leave out concerned Grace and the accident at the farm. Those who didn’t already know who’d killed her father would simply be left to speculate.

“Where did it all start?” she wrote. “At what moment does a man who otherwise seems sane and good, who preaches about God and the Golden Rule, choose to indulge his own darkest desires? What turns an ordinary man into a monster? That I can’t tell you. But I can tell you what it was like to live with such a person—”

The telephone interrupted her. Pausing in her work, Madeline reached across her desk to answer it. “Hello?”

“Maddy?”

It was Grace. Her stepsister had stayed in frequent touch since the ordeal at the cabin. What Madeline had suffered at Ray’s hands had brought her and her stepsister, who’d always been a little aloof, closer together, maybe because they were both victims of the evil spawned by her father. “Yes?”

“I have a lead on a story.” Her voice was warm, cheerful.

“Really?” Grace didn’t usually call her with that kind of thing, so she knew this must be good. She grabbed a pad and pen to take notes. “What kind of story?”

“A love story, actually.”

Madeline frowned in confusion. “What?”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard?”

“Hunter Solozano just moved to town. He bought the old Dunlap place.”

“What?” She hadn’t received a call from Hunter in over two weeks. She thought he’d put their brief affair behind him, forgotten her already. “That can’t be true.”

“My source is pretty reliable.”

“Who told you?” she asked, her pulse beginning to race.

“He did. I ran into him at the Piggly Wiggly.”

Madeline’s mouth went instantly dry. “He was grocery shopping?”

“No, he was standing in the parking lot, frowning at the sign. When I approached, he said he couldn’t believe he’d be shopping there from now on.”

That sounded like him. Madeline couldn’t help laughing. But why hadn’t he called her? “He told you he moved here? That he’s staying for good?”

“That’s what he said. And he told me something else.”

“What?”

“He came back because of you.”

The bell jingled over the door. When Madeline turned to see who’d just come in, her heart skipped a few beats. Grace was right! Hunter was in town. He was standing in her office.

“I have to go,” she said numbly. “I’ll call you later, okay?” She wasn’t sure if Grace answered or not, but she put the phone back in its cradle.

“Hey,” Hunter said, offering her a sexy smile. “Got time for lunch?”

Epilogue

Six months later

“Where do you want this to go?”

Madeline stopped digging through the box in front of her and rocked back on her heels. “What’s in it?” she asked her stepbrother.

Clay’s expression indicated he wasn’t impressed with the contents. “Mostly yarn. And some old knitting books.”