She unlocked the outer office at eight thirty.Turned on the lights.Started the coffee.Checked voicemails.A pothole on the lake road—again.A call from the county clerk about a zoning variance.A message from the Apple Pie Creek pharmacy confirming Lucas’s prescriptions were ready for pickup.
She sat at her desk and looked at the closed door of his office.
Four years.She had walked into this building five days a week, and every single one of those mornings she’d believed that the man behind that door had given her a second chance at life.
She’d been so grateful.
And she’d been so careful to please him.So competent.So unfailingly loyal.She’d answered every phone call, filed every document, managed every calendar conflict, buffered every irate constituent, and never, not once, questioned what Lucas kept in his safe or why he closed his office door when he opened it.
Because that was the deal.He’d given her a job when no one else would have hired a woman who could barely hold a conversation without crying.She owed him.And Bonnie Watson paid her debts.
Except the debt was never real.He didn’t hire you because he was kind.He hired you because he was keeping a potential enemy close.Controlling her without her even knowing he was doing it.
She went through the motions of doing her job this morning, not for Lucas, but for the people of Cobbler Cove.Someone had to keep the town running.
Lucas arrived at nine forty-five.He moved slowly as if the air had thickened around him and every step required negotiation.His breath rattled in his chest, and the short walk from the elevator to his office, maybe fifty feet, had winded him.The tanning-bed bronze couldn’t hide the gray flesh beneath it any longer.
“Morning,” he mumbled.
“Good morning.Your ten o’clock is confirmed, and the county clerk sent over the variance paperwork.I left it in your inbox to sign.”
He grunted.The grunt meant he’d heard her but wasn’t going to acknowledge the work she’d done before he arrived to make his day run smoothly.
She watched him walk into his office.Watched the door close.Heard the desk chair creak as he lowered himself into it.
The same sounds she’d heard every morning for four years.Except now the creak of his chair sounded like the settling of a man who’d hired a widow to shred the evidence of her own husband’s murder.
She turned back to her computer and opened the day’s schedule.
This was the thing that was going to drive her insane.Not the horror of what she’d learned.She could lock that in a mental compartment and deal with it later.The thing that was going to break her was the normalcy.The coffee.The voicemails.The grunt.The closed door.The ordinary, mundane rhythm of a workday shared with a man who might have murdered her husband.
Mighthave.She caught herself on that word and held it.Gray’s evidence was compelling.The payoff emails were damning.But she was not going to convict anyone, not even Lucas Shoemacher, on the basis of might.
She would wait for Cooper to trace the email addresses.She would wait for confirmation of who’d been paid and for what.She would be methodical and certain and wait to curse Lucas to the seventh circle of Hell until she knew for sure he was the one who’d set the fire and covered it up.
Not because she owed Lucas anything.But because she owed Brent that much.She owed the seven other men who died in that barn that much.
She owed herself that much.
At ten-fifteen, Lucas opened his door and leaned against the frame.“Bonnie.Call my daughter Ellie and see if she picks up.”
She kept her face neutral.“Of course.What should I say if she answers?”
“Tell her I’m calling.She won’t pick up if she sees my cell phone number.”
He retreated into his office before she could respond.
She dialed the number from the contact list she kept in the municipal files.It rang five times and went to voicemail.A young woman’s voice, clipped and professional:You’ve reached Ellie Shoemacher.Leave a message.
Bonnie hung up without leaving one and buzzed the mayor.“No answer.Voicemail.”
A long silence from the speaker.Then, “All right.”
The intercom clicked off.
She sat very still for a moment.
His own daughter wouldn’t take his calls.His health was failing.He was settling affairs, destroying evidence, trying to reach estranged children who wanted nothing to do with him.
