“Me too,” Margo offered.
“I would,” Harvey said, “but the shop’s drowning.”
“I’ll do it,” Carmen said. “I’ll be your third.”
“Great,” Ace replied easily, then pushed away from the doorframe and walked into the room as if this had all gone exactly as he had planned it. He pulled out a chair and sat beside Willa. “And while I’m here, I’m going to assume my invitation to this meeting got lost somewhere in the ether.”
“Actually,” Holt said, deciding he was too tired to dance around the truth, “I hadn’t decided whether to include you because of your relationship with Sienna.”
“I did vouch for you,” Harvey assured Ace. “But you and Sienna do date.”
“We’re friends. Well, friendly. I take her out when she needs to get away from her overdomineering mother.” Ace turned his head and looked at Harvey with narrowed eyes. “You, Harvey, have a much closer relationship with Sienna and Clive than I do, yet here you are.”
“Harvey has already proved he can be trusted,” Holt explained. “More than once.”
“And I haven’t.” Ace nodded once, leaned forward, and took a cookie from the tray in front of him. “Fair enough. But let me save you some guessing. I’m not loyal to the Morrisons. Not in any way that would matter here.” His gaze drifted to the right-hand board as he bit into the huge cookie, and his brow furrowed.
“Why is Margo a target?”
The room stilled again.
Margo looked at him.
“Because when Aunt Lacey was run off the road, I was supposed to be doing my delivery route in my mother’s truck at that time.” Her voice was soft as she updated Ace.
Ace turned more fully toward her.
“Margo was also in the vet office when it was attacked,” June said.
“And I was supposed to be going to Henderson Farm on the day of the fire there,” Margo added.
Rad’s head came around so fast his chair creaked. “What?”
“I asked Aunt Lacey to take the deliveries that day.” Margo’s fingers tightened in her lap, but she held his gaze.
The weight in the room changed.
Holt felt it at once.
Not because he hadn’t already been considering Margo as a possible target. He had. But hearing it from Margo herself, hearing the practical reality of where she had been meant to be and who had taken her place, gave it a different kind of force.
“Margo…” Willa said softly. “You think you were being targeted?”
Margo nodded. “There’s one more thing,” she continued.
Holt uncapped the black marker again and turned toward her. “Go on.”
Margo drew in a breath.
“I was leading a camp troop through the forest surrounding the campground near where the fire was that day,” she told him. “I was teaching the kids about the plants. But we had started a lot earlier than we planned and were already finished by the time the fires had started.” She shifted nervously in her seat. “But if we hadn’t started an hour earlier… we’d still have been in the forest, like what was on the calendar for activities that day.”
For a moment, the room went utterly silent.
Holt’s eyes widened before he could stop the reaction, and around him, he could feel everyone else arriving at the same terrible conclusion.
Margo had just shifted the center of the board.
Not Judy’s line. Not the Cedar Key piece. But nearly everything else.
