Luke sighed a heavy sigh. “Stop mentioning her name!”
Caleb bravely shook his head. “No. Mention her name! Don’t turn her and your children into some nameless murder victims. She was your wife, Luke. And John and Elise were your children! They deserve to be remembered…”
“How dare you?” For a moment, Luke’s face pulled into an even angrier scowl than before, and his voice came out like a growl. He’d known this man for almost a decade, and he’d never lost his composure in front of Caleb. This was the first time he’d expressed his raw pain.
Silence fell between them, and it took a minute before Luke was able to rein his fury back in. When he did, he put on a stone-faced mask of indifference and forced his emotions back into the dark hole he kept them in.
Caleb seemingly took no offense and looked at him empathetically. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. You can’t walk around like a ghost, not acknowledging your grief for your own family. You cannot hide from your emotions forever. It’s been too long. You need to mourn, or it’s going to kill you.”
Luke scoffed, walked over to the desk, snatched the nearly empty bottle of whiskey, and drank the rest of it in one big gulp. “I don’t even care if it kills me.”
Caleb sighed in obvious exasperation.
Luke considered himself to be a rational man, prided himself to be down-to-earth and easy to talk to, but this tragedy had turned his heart to stone and numbed his mind.
“I should have been there,” Luke said quietly, barely managing to speak the words. “I shouldn’t have stayed here at work. It was Christmas! I should have gone home to them. I had promised to be there for them. For John. For Elise and Isabelle. I could have…”
“Stop it!” Caleb grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “It’s not your fault! Blaming yourself for what happened is the last thing you should do. You had no way of knowing that this would happen to them! It was in the middle of winter!”
“Exactly! I couldn’t know, but I could have prevented it!” Luke growled.
“Maybe. Or maybe they would have killed you, too! You don’t know how many men were there. It could’ve been a group of five or a gang of fifty.”
“I will not give up until I have found them!”
Caleb shook his head. “We won’t. But none of this is productive in any way, Luke. I’m sorry to say this, but you need to find a way out of this black hole. Do it for Isabelle and your children. They would hate to see you like this.”
“They are the ones I am doing it for! So their souls can rest in peace!” Luke was yelling now. He shoved Caleb’s hands away and slammed the empty whiskey bottle onto the desk.
His voice broke, and Caleb looked at him empathetically.
“I’m not saying that I can relate to such a loss, but I understand. You have a lot of responsibilities, not just regarding this case, wanting to do right by your own family, but also everybody else in this town,” Caleb said quietly. “All I’m asking is that you take better care of yourself. You’re like a brother to me. I don’t want you to break down because you didn’t eat or sleep for weeks, which seems to worsen every year when Christmas comes around. I am genuinely worried about you.”
“I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself,” Luke said, using his firm sheriff’s voice again as he stared at the papers on the desk. “I appreciate your concern. I’ll be fine.”
Caleb seemed to wait for something more, but Luke didn’t say anything else.
“You need to forgive yourself,” he offered. “If you would talk to God, He would help you…”
“There is no God!” Luke said with a scathing tone. “If there was, he would have protected them! But they died! In a fire! BecauseyourGod wasn’t there to prevent it!”
“This is not how this works. The Lord is not responsible for the actions of men,” Caleb said calmly, but Luke didn’t want to hear it.
“Then what is He good for? Huh?! If not to protect the innocent? Children, no less? What use does your God have, if He betrays the ones most loyal to Him?” Luke was furious that Caleb had brought this topic up. Especially since he knew about his stance on it.
Caleb sighed. “He is still there. He is always there. He is just waiting for you to find your way back to Him.”
Luke didn’t want to entertain this conversation any longer and turned his back to him. “Thanks for the food,” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”
Luke heard Caleb sigh again. “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Caleb said, finally. “Why don’t you come over when you’re done here? Our door is always open,” Caleb said, but Luke was already too immersed in one of the articles. He heard footsteps as Caleb left, then the door fell shut.
He went to the cabinet behind his desk and took out another bottle of whiskey. It had become a habit to have a constant stash of whiskey bottles around, hidden in different places, in various states of consumption. He pulled the cork with his teeth and was once again completely immersed in his searchfor answers, shuffling through papers, letters, and newspaper clippings, mindlessly pushing aside the paper-wrapped parcels.
He didn’t touch the food until the clock struck midnight.
Chapter Three
Peterson Ranch — The next morning
