Syder chewed the mints up and swallowed them. He wiped his hand over his mouth and leaned in to Ledger. His breath stank of peppermint, enough to sting Ledger’s eyes.
“Where was it?” he asked intently. “Your dad had to have somewhere else, somewhere secret, to do his… business, that no one has found yet. Not his house, not the cabin, somewhere else. Where?”
Ledger retreated from Syder’s closeness as far as he could get. The cuffs dug into his wrist as he awkwardly twisted his elbow up behind him.
“How would I know?” Ledger asked. “It wasn’t in Bell’s will.”
Not that Bell had written a will. If he had, though, Ledger didn’t think he’d have listed a secret ritual murder hole. If he had, it would have been left to Abigail.
Syder mugged bafflement. “I don’t know,” he said. “How did you know about Bell before anyone else did? How did you find out about the dead bodies in the basement? Because you were always putting your nose where it didn’t belong, and you saw what no one else in town did. But that one secret he kept to himself. You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t expect anything,” Ledger said. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anything I knew, I already told you the last time I was here. Check your files.”
Syder clenched his jaw, the muscles knotted and prominent in his lean face, and then he visibly softened his expression.
“All I am asking is that you think back.” He clapped one hand on Ledger’s shoulder. “Did Bell ever take you somewhere or mention someone you didn’t know? Did Abigail ever tell you anywhere he’d taken her? He liked her more than you.”
He had. Most of the time, that was a relief. It was just a little odd to hear it from someone who’d known you as a child. People were supposed to lie about things like that.
“Do you want me to make something up?” Ledger asked.
Syder looked down and shook his head. “No,” he said. “But you got to bury your dad. Just think about all the victims whose families would like to do that.”
He tightened his hand on Ledger’s shoulder hard enough to make Ledger’s mouth twitch in discomfort, and then he pushed himself up off the bench.
“I just want you to try and remember,” he said. “It’s not a lot to ask.”
Syder hitched his gun belt up over lean hips and stalked off. Ledger watched him go and then snorted.
“You know what I’m remembering,” he said to Syder’s back. “It seems a lot to me.”
About five minutes later, a short deputy, her curly hair cropped close to her head, uncuffed him.
“Sheriff says you can leave,” she said as Ledger rubbed his wrist. “But he might want to speak to you again, so don’t leave town.”
Ledger slid further along the bench before he stood up so he wouldn’t loom over her.
“People keep telling me that,” he said as he made a good-faith effort to straighten his shirt. “You’d think you guys liked me around here.”
She looked at him, mouth straight and face still.
“If you didn’t know any better,” she said.
“Yeah,” Ledger said. “Good thing I do, huh?”
He nodded politely to her, glanced briefly over toward Syder’s office, and then headed down the hall. It was going to be a long walk back to Main Street to get his car.
CHAPTER9
THE BOOKSTORE WASon fire.
That was unexpected.
Ledger stood on the other side of the road and folded his sleeves back absently as he watched through smoke-darkened glass as the flames licked at the walls. Books smoldered on the charred shelves, and pages lifted into the air as they caught light, the fire bright as it burned the dry paper down to ash, along with the stack of books he’d taken in there.
“How long has it been there?” a woman asked. She fanned herself with a laminated menu from the nearby bar as she watched the building burn. “Wasn’t it a grocery or something?”
“They sold up,” her date—maybe husband, maybe not—said. He still had a napkin tucked into his shirt, a blob of pasta sauce or bolognese on the corner of it. “A few years ago, I think.”
