“I can do that.”
“Thank you, Bonnie.”
Silence settled between them, the kind that happened when two people had run out of business to discuss but neither wanted to hang up.
“How’s the book the second time through?”he asked.
“Still heartbreaking.”A pause.“But I get why she keeps secrets.She believes loyalty requires it.But by the time she realizes the truth is more important than her loyalty, she’s in so deep that telling the truth will destroy everything she’s built.”
Something in her voice made him go still.She wasn’t just describing a novel.
He said quietly, “In my experience secrets always come out eventually.But the longer they remain hidden, the more they fester.”
She was silent for a moment.“Goodnight, Gray.”
“Goodnight, Bonnie.”
He set the phone down and stared at it thoughtfully.If he wasn’t mistaken, Bonnie had just hinted she had a secret she’d kept out of misguided loyalty and now was trapped by it.What on earth could she have to hide?
Outside, wind pressed against the bunkhouse walls, carrying the last of winter’s cold down from the mountains.In a few weeks, spring would come.Calving season would end.He would conquer the cones.And he would have to sit Bonnie down and tell her what he’d found.
He wasn’t ever going to be truly ready for that conversation.
But he wasn’t going to walk away from it, either.
8
The mayor came into the office Thursday morning looking like a man who had been arguing with God and lost.
Bonnie had worked for Lucas long enough to read his moods the way a rancher reads weather.There was regular grumpy, which was most days.There was post-doctor grumpy, which involved slamming his office door and ignoring her for two hours.And then there was this—a barely contained rage that radiated off him like heat waves rising from a hot highway.It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle nervously.
He didn’t say good morning.He stalked past her desk without looking at her, went into his office, and slammed the door so hard she was surprised the hinges held.She flinched, shocked by his fury.
What had happened to make him so livid?
She heard the scrape of his desk chair and the clicking of his safe opening.But then she heard a metallic sound she’d never heard before, the clang of something metal and heavy being set none too gently on his desk.
Her jaw dropped.The locked box inside his safe.She’d seen it the few times she’d glimpsed Lucas’s safe open.Gray metal, maybe ten by twelve inches in diameter and several inches tall.It sat in the bottom of his safe, stuffed way in the back.She’d always guessed it was a gun box that held a handgun and bullets.
Lucas wasn’t about to shoot somebody, was he?
Fear coursed through her.Should she call Sheriff Wheeler?Ask him to come over here?Talk Lucas down off whatever bridge he was teetering on the edge of?
As she picked up the phone to make the call, something smacked onto Lucas’s desk.It sounded like a stack of papers.Metal clanged again as if he had shut the metal box lid.The safe’s door closed with a bang.
She sagged in her chair and put the phone receiver back in its cradle.Turning back to her computer, she stared at the screen sightlessly.What on earth was that all about?
Lucas’s office door opened.He stood there with a manila envelope in his hand.It was thick and beat up around the edges.The flap was closed with a metal clasp, and a strip of yellowed masking tape ran all the way across the edge of the flap, further sealing it.
Lucas stopped at her desk, staring down at her with a look on his face that she couldn’t decipher.It wasn’t the anger she expected.That might have been a flash of guilt she spotted, or maybe something close to apology.Except Lucas Shoemacher never apologized for anything.
“I need you to shred these papers,” he said.“Do it now.”
“Of course.”
He set the envelope on her desk.Looked up at her.And smiled.
He went back into his office.
