“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re going to have to trust me, Tanner.” She was doing all the giving here; the least he could do was cooperate.
His hesitation dragged on a moment or two too long. “This had better be good.”
She was fairly certain that nothing about it was good.
“We’ll need flashlights and a shovel.”
Carson drove. Baxter provided the directions. He wasn’t about to let her out of his sight after what she’d told him. Dammit. Dane had monumentally screwed up this time. The senator would be devastated by this turn for the worst.
Dane’s actions had actually killed two people. The idea that Dwight Holderfield had committed suicide because of his son’s death ... and Dane was responsible. Damn.
“Turn here.”
He took the right. It wasn’t that far from the house where he’d grown up. A side road that as best he recalled was a dead end only a couple hundred feet into the woods. Deeper into those woods was a path that led from his house to Elizabeth’s. A slight detour from that same path ended at his uncle’s shack. They’d used those paths all the time when Carson was a kid.
Where the hell was Baxter taking him? Were there more skeletons he hadn’t heard about yet?
He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to that question.
They emerged from the car and gathered the flashlights and shovel.
“It’s this way.”
He followed her through the dense underbrush until they found the mostly overgrown path of his childhood adventures in these woods. He didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t offer any information. Something about coming here made him uneasy and, for the first time since the night his family was murdered, he felt afraid.
Baxter stopped suddenly. “Give me a minute.”
While he watched, she walked in circles scanning the ground with the aid of the flashlight. Eventually she appeared to find what she was looking for. Essentially, a spot like a hundred others.
Baxter dropped to her knees and brushed the leaves away. He crouched beside her. Using the shovel he’d brought along, she dugfiercely for a minute or so until he heard the sound of metal on metal. Then she pushed aside the dirt to uncover what she was looking for.
A Beanee Weenee can. What the hell?
She tossed the shovel aside, squeezed the end of the can open, then looked up at him. “Hold out your hands.”
A smart man would have declined, but instinct urged him to do as she said. He cupped his hands, and she poured the contents of the can into them.
It wasn’t until she aimed the beam of her flashlight on the items that he realized what he was holding.
Wedding bands.
Some instinct he wouldn’t name had him searching the inside of one for an inscription ...Forever, Olivia.
The missing wedding bands ... the symbols of his parents’ commitment to each other.
Stokes had been telling the truth ... he wasn’t the one.
The drive back to Tanner’s childhood home was made in silence. Annette wanted to explain but she couldn’t find the words.
When he parked next to her rental, he finally spoke. “How did Dane come into possession of these items?”
“That I can’t answer. But I can tell you that once he’d realized what he’d done, trading the rings for drugs, he was frantic to get them back. He and Zac argued, and Zac ended up dead.” God, she was suddenly so tired. “You have to remember he was pretty messed up when I got to him.”
“So he told you nothing.”
She stared at him through the darkness of the car’s interior. “He kept mumbling something about keeping secrets too long. That it needed to be over.”
