“He’d been sleeping less and less. Sometimes, he’d wake up and find her missing. It got to the point that he would lock her door when she was sleeping.But one night, he forgot. He fell asleep on the couch…completely passed out. He didn’t even know she was missing until it was too late.
“That was the day she kidnapped Dakota Walker. Jim didn’t know it at the time. He thought she was just out wandering in the storm. He brought her home, warmed her up, and we moved on with life. Never knew anything happened until six months later when they found her body.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
His eyes finally met mine. “She was sick,” he croaked out. “Mentally incapacitated. She didn’t know what she was doing. They would have put her in jail.”
“Or the psych ward,” I corrected. “After an exam, it would have been obvious she wasn’t in her right mind.”
“This was twenty-five years ago. Do you really think that’s true?” he argued.
I didn’t really know. I was just a kid when all this happened.
“Her records show that she died a year after the kidnapping.”
“That was Jim’s decision. Faked her death with the help of the sheriff,” he admitted.
And there was no way for me to verify that because the previous sheriff was dead.
“There’s a bunker under the cabin—a tornado shelter. She’s been living down there all this time.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You kept a woman in a tornado shelter for twenty-five years?”
“Not all the time. That’s just where she stayed when I couldn’t watch her.”
“Do your sons know about this?” I asked accusingly.
His eyes drifted off again, his jaw clenching in anger. “Austin and Clay. Not Wyatt.”
“Why would you do that? Go to all that trouble to fake her death?”
“Because she wasn’t okay, and I knew if anyone ever found out, they’d take her away. I made a promise to Jim.”
“This was before Jim died,” I argued. “The two of you made this decision. You kept the truth from a grieving family. You allowed a mentally unstable woman to live in a bunker for years. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”
“Yes!” he shouted, tears springing to his eyes. “Yes, I knew how wrong it was. But Jim knew we couldn’t keep the truth hidden if she was wandering around. And he couldn’t stand the thought of her living in a hospital the rest of her life after all she’d suffered. You have no idea what it was like every time they lost a child.”
That was true. I had no idea, but I also didn’t know how they condoned keeping her hidden all this time.
And then another thought occurred to me. John and his entire family blamed my family for a car accident that was no one’s fault. Yet, his sister-in-law killed a child, and no one said a word.
How the hell did he live with himself? How did he go to bed every night and think any of this was okay?
Better yet, how had he kept a woman living in secret for so long with none of us knowing? The Callahans were known for their secrecy, but this was stretching beyond anything I could fathom.
Pushing back from the table, I strode out of the room and into the adjoining office where Mav had been watching. “So?”
“What a clusterfuck,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. “So, he didn’t know she killed the girl until she was found. Well, I guess that’s something.”
“But they hid the true murderer,” I said, still unable to believe that this woman had been in hiding for twenty-five years.
“She would have been put in a mental hospital for sure if she hadn’t been shot in the head. She wouldn’t even have made it to trial. The district attorney would have struck a plea deal and moved past the fact that the former sheriff helped cover up her death,” he chuckled humorlessly.
“And Jim? He knew she was a killer,” I added.
“Precisely. That wouldn’t look good for the town,” he grinned sarcastically. “Thank God the bastard’s dead.”
“What about John?”
