I’m not sure what changed, but Blakely was no longer apprehensive about going through Ben’s boxes. She turned and got to work, going through box after box with no hesitation.
We worked together in a comfortable silence for a while before she spoke. “Let me know if you come across any papers pertaining to Kalen, like his birth certificate or social security card.”
“Okay. I haven’t seen anything like that yet,” I said and paused, unsure if I should ask the question that’d been lingering in the back of my mind since she told me Kalen was her brother’s child. But I really wanted to know. “Where is Kalen’s mother?”
She looked up from the box she was digging through and met my eyes. “I honestly don’t know. Ben told me he didn’t even know he had a kid until he found Kalen on his doorstep with a note and a few boxes. He said the note said she didn’t want to be a mother and Kalen was his problem to deal with.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I didn’t specifically ask, but it sounded like it was right before he was supposed to turn himself in for his jail sentence,” she said and covered her face with her hand, inhaling deeply. “He dumped his kid on me, didn’t he?”
“It kind of seems that way, but why would he leave all of his stuff here if he wasn’t planning on coming back?”
“I don’t know, but the more I think about it, the more I think he’s not planning on coming back,” she said.
“That’s a lot of money to leave behind,” I said and pointed to the guns.
“I think he dumped those on me too.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“If he stole them and couldn’t sell them, the next logical move would be to get rid of them, or in this case, hide them and disappear, right?”
“Maybe,” I said slowly. “But I don’t think we should waste too much time or energy speculating just yet. Let’s see if we find anything here. Then, we’ll go back to the clubhouse and talk to Spazz about doing some more in-depth searches, maybe from a different angle.”
“A different angle?” she asked curiously.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “He should be able to find out who Kalen’s mother is from his birth records. Maybe she knows something that could help us find Ben.”
“He can find Kalen’s birth records?”
I grinned. “I’m pretty sure he can find anything. And if he can’t, we have a friend in Croftridge who can.”
15
BLAKELY
We finished searching through Ben’s belongings, but we didn’t find anything useful. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved by that. On one hand, I was glad we didn’t discover anything else incriminating, but I would have liked to have found some more information regarding Kalen.
“What should we do now?” I asked, hoping Grant would know what to do. Because I sure as hell didn’t.
“I think we should take the boxes of guns back to the storage unit and cover them with a tarp,” he suggested.
“And then what?”
“Then, we leave them there until we can find your brother or figure out something better to do with them.”
It seemed like the best option, so I nodded in agreement.
Grant took care of moving the guns back to the storage unit while I waited in his truck lost in my thoughts. I was wracking my brain trying to think of where Ben could be and how to go about finding him, but I didn’t have the first clue because I knew very little about my brother. And what I thought I knew clearly wasn’t true.
“You okay?” Grant asked when he returned to the truck.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I was trying to think of where Ben could be and realized I don’t know anything about him. Not really.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “How is that possible? He’s my brother.”
“Society puts a lot of weight on the word family. But being a blood relative and being family aren’t the same thing. Being related to him doesn’t mean you have any obligation to him.”
I thought about his words as we drove back to the clubhouse. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. My grandparents were family. Landon was family. Kalen was family. My parents and Ben were not.
