“Maybe we ought to get together everyone we can from that summer.” The idea took shape, feeling right as he said it. “The friends you hung around with. The other foster kids living in the Hastings’ house. Anyone who worked at the pizza shop.”
“Haven’t we already talked to a lot of them?” Zach opened his phone and flipped through the digital files that Sam had been sending him.
“The local ones. But how many people left town, the same way we did?” He wondered how he could hunt down those people. “Lorelei probably has contact information for everyone who’s gone through her house.”
Zach nodded. “It could be a great time for a Hasting fosters’ reunion.”
Why not?
“I’ll get on it.” He’d ask his foster mother to help him. But first he needed to speak with Amy.
“Good.” Zach’s phone chimed before he’d sucked down half his drink. “I’ll see if I can get Gabriella out here sooner rather than later.” Standing, he shoved his phone in his pocket. “Looks like Heather’s ready to go. It was a fast visit after all.”
No surprise there.
Sam walked his friend to the door. “I know you don’t want J.D. anywhere near your fiancée,” Sam observed just as Zach reached the door.
“I’ll kill the kid personally if he breaks that restraining order.”
Sam believed him. Zach wasn’t a fighter, but he’d held his own that day they’d found the Covingtons trying to kidnap Heather Finley and Megan Bryer.
“You’ll have my help, of course. But maybe so it doesn’t come to that, you could dip into that impressive Chance financial reserve and put a PI on the kid.”
Zach frowned, scratching the back of his neck. “I don’t want to do anything that could harm the case. Aren’t there conflict-of-interest laws at work there? Me being the mayor and all?”
“Heather will be your wife soon. How could any court deny you the right to protect her however you see fit?” That area of the law was far too gray for his liking. But sometimes, common sense counted in the legal system.
“But any information a PI gathers is going to be tough to use as evidence when I’m footing the bill.”
Sam shrugged, rubbing the kink out of his neck. “Not necessarily. All I know is that Heartache doesn’t have a dedicated police force, per se. I don’t have enough manpower to keep constant watch on everyone in town. We can’t even try the case in Heartache.” Criminal matters were heard in a court at the county seat. “You have a right to use your resources to make sure your family is safe.”
“I like the way you think.” He clapped Sam on the shoulder. “I’ll look into it this afternoon. But I know you’ve got another angle here that you’re not sharing with me.”
Oh yeah. The angle where Amy Finley was keepingsomething from him. But he couldn’t connect the dots enough to share with Zach yet. And he had a lot of angles to work before the pretrial screening in less than two weeks.
“Don’t look at me.” Sam held the door open, letting the cold fall breeze clear his head. “I’ve got a foster family reunion to plan.”
“Not in a million years would I have guessed you’d beat me to the land of family reunions and baby carriers.” Zach didn’t bother to hide a grin.
“Bite me.” Sam closed the door and padded back into the house in his socks, ignoring his friend’s laughter.
He was more interested in how soon he would see the woman who had never been far from his thoughts this week.
Chapter Six
“IDON’T KNOW how you and Erin got all this construction talent while I struggle to tell my wrenches apart.” Heather stared up at the new support beam Amy had added to the cabin after demolishing a wall. “Seriously. I don’t even remember setting foot in the family lumberyard until I was at least a teenager.”
Their first meeting in ten years hadn’t been as awkward as Amy had feared, but that had everything to do with her bighearted sister and very little to do with Amy herself. Heather had breezed in with a quick hug that had ended just before Amy could start to feel smothered, then proceeded to fill the dead air with chatter about Heartache and questions about the remodeling of the hunting cabin.
So far, they’d avoided anything too personal, including talk of the trial and the family.
Or at least, they’d only talked of the Finleys as it related to their construction business.
“That’s because we were forever sticking you with Mom.” Amy unplugged the cord for the reciprocating saw, not wanting her sister to trip since Heather wore heeledboots with her pink paisley shirt dress, a bold choice with her long red curls. “Erin and I were always the first to raise our hands when Dad gave any of us a chance to tag along on a job or help in the warehouse.”
She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. She and Erin would race shopping carts down the wide aisles, sometimes using them like go-carts and vaulting into the baskets at the last second.
Their oldest brother, Scott, had hated it when they did things like that, always trying hard to make the family more upstanding and respectable. Less...wild. But their father didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he hadn’t really noticed.
