“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says. “Never seen you here before. Didn’t even know you could read, Wyatt.”
“Only the little words,” I reply with a smirk. “Pictures help.”
He chuckles and shuffles toward the large print westerns. “Millie, you get that new Clive Cussler in yet?”
“Earl, if I hear that name one more time, I’m banning you for a week.”
He laughs as if that’s his goal.
I go back to the binder. Another small note catches my eye. A sidebar mentioning Bonnie’s personal effects being returned to the family.
No list. No details. No mention of where they’d been found.
That omission bothers me more than anything else.
I close the binder slowly.
This isn’t how straightforward accidents are documented. Not when there’s nothing to hide. Not when answers are easy.
I thank Millie, promise Earl I’ll keep learning my letters, and step back out into the afternoon sun with a weight settling low in my chest.
Because this isn’t about curiosity anymore.
It’s about the way Abilene reads those letters, shoulders tight, eyes sharp. Not afraid, but searching. It’s about knowingthat unanswered questions don’t stay quiet. They fester. They reach.
If something was misnamed here, if a choice was made to look away instead of look closer, I don’t want it clawing its way back into her life without warning.
So I keep going. Because Abilene deserves a history that doesn’t have pieces deliberately left out.
And if Colter Creek buried something decades ago, I’d rather be the one turning the soil than let it poison her from underneath.
On the way home, I’m… unsettled.
Off balance in that precise, irritating way that comes from noticing a hairline crack in something you’ve always assumed was solid ground.
The drive out of town is quiet. Too quiet. The road curves through pine and pasture, the late afternoon light slanting low and gold, and I should be thinking about dinner or tomorrow’s calls or the fact that I’ve misplaced my favorite mug. Again.
Instead, my brain keeps circling that word.
Unusual.
I stop at a pullout I’ve driven past a thousand times without noticing and shut off the engine. The silence presses in, broken only by the wind in the trees and the distant sound of cattle somewhere down the valley.
I rest my forehead against the steering wheel and exhale.
I don’t enjoy mysteries that pretend not to be mysteries.
I also don’t like the way this one feels personal.
Not because Bonnie Kentwood was Abilene’s mother, though that’s reason enough, but because this town has a long memory and a selective conscience.
Because I’ve lived here long enough to know when something’s been smoothed over instead of understood.
I hesitate, thumb hovering over my phone. Then I do what I probably should’ve done first.
I call my parents.
My mother answers on the second ring.
