Desperate for something to do with her hands, she crossed back to the blankets on the floor. She picked one up, folded it and stowed it in one of the open tubs.
“I wasn’t talking about the garage.” Mick tucked a quilt in a different container. “I meant we could read it in the house. We’ll turn up the heat and make some coffee and—”
“I’ve got to pick up the girls from Stacy’s. It’s getting late.” Rachel let her shoulders drop as she recognized that there was probably still time to peek…if she wanted to do that. “Don’t you get it? I can’t be here. Anywhere.”
In a place that she’d already suspected would be filled with ghosts, those records had turned the spirits sinister.
“Clearly, I didn’t know the man at all,” she said to fill the silence as she reached for another quilt.
Her breath caught as she recognized the double-wedding-ring design that once had been stretched over her parents’ bed. Before she could stop herself, she buried her face in the cloth. When she lifted her head, she caught Mick watching her, his gaze so compassionate that her chest squeezed. She wasn’t sure how to explain to him that on a day when her father had become a stranger to her, she still clung to that little-girl memory of her mother.
“How about we take the whole bag back to your house and go through them after you pick up the twins?” he asked.
“Maybe we should just—”
Mick crossed his arms and lifted both brows. He could be as stubborn as she could, and he would never agree to leave her to deal with this discovery alone. Since she was too tired to argue about it, she nodded.
“Remember you don’t know the whole story yet,” he said. “Even the stuff in the bag might not tell you all of it. Like why your father wrote a confession nearly twenty years ago and then never bothered to deliver it to police.”
“Maybe he had second thoughts?”
“Then why keep it where someone, like your brother or you, could find it?”
He stacked the first two tubs together and rested them against the wall. “It could be a fake. Or your dad could have been coerced into writing it. All we know for sure is your dad isn’t around to tell his side of the story.”
Her chest ached with the need to buy into Mick’s theories, to believe that her father was innocent and that this had all been some big mistake. But as her gaze shifted to Riley’s messenger bag, her throat tightened, her hope straining.
“The stuff in there will give me a good overview of my father’s side. If not that, his suicide made a pretty strong statement all by itself.”
Mick blinked as though he’d forgotten that part. The irony that she’d once tried to convince herself, and anyone else who’d listen, that her father’s death had been an accident, niggled at her as well. She couldn’t have been more wrong, but right now she was too angry and hurt to care if guilt had pushed him to that awful limit.
She returned to the truck to collect the messenger bag. Resisting the temptation to open the folder and read every word in this place that served as a reminder of her father’s betrayal, she tucked it inside and closed the flap. When Rachel returned, Mick pointed to the bag.
“You don’t have to look at it. You could just put it back behind the seat and pretend you never saw it. Just like your brother must have done. No one would have to know.”
She tilted her head and studied him. “You’d be able to forget what you saw?”
He nodded, then shrugged. “I’d try. If whatever your father didn’t involve the Mount Isabel FD, anyway. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Wouldn’t it bother you not to report crimes you’d become aware of?”
“Like I said, not my business.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute.” In her gut, she already knew Mick was an honorable man, just like Riley. And, like her brother, it would kill him to keep a secret that wasn’t even his.
But couldshe? For a second, she allowed herself to consider it, though nausea already rolled in waves inside her.
“Riley did ask me to forget about it. But we all know that’s not who I am. He only looked into our father’s suicide because I couldn’t let it lie. Then he was forced to hide our dad’s secrets. No wonder he—”
“You’re not going to blame his relapse on yourself again, are you?”
Lifting her chin, she crossed her arms. “Like you said about being cleared of responsibility in that fire last year, I can’t claim total innocence. I put him in that situation. He might have kept secrets to protect our family’s reputation, but he did it mostly to shield me.”
“He’s a good brother.”
“Wish he could say that I’m a good sister, too.”
“He can. And, no matter what stories you’ve told me, I bet he always could.”
