Page 126 of Wild Sanctuary

“I’m sorry to call like this. I know I said I’d…” She trails off, and I can hear her breathing, ragged and too fast. “Something’s happened. I—I need to tell you something and I don’t have much time.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“My son. Stan.” Her voice cracks on his name. “We had an argument this morning. A bad one. He told me he’s going to do something for my uncle. He wouldn’t tell me what, but he said it would clear his debts and then we’d be left alone. Stan’s never said that before. ‘Left alone.’ That’s not how this works, Miss Monroe. Debts like his don’t end.”

Every nerve in my body fires at once. “And who’s your uncle, Alma?”

“Marcus Donnelly. Glacier Ridge’s accountant. He grew up next to my daddy, like an uncle my whole life. They’re brothers in everything but name.”

My hand goes white on the edge of the kitchen table as my stomach roils. Down the hall, I can hear the tap still running.

“Alma, I need you to focus. What does Marcus have to do with my father?”

“Everything.” The word comes out strangled. “I worked commercial accounts at the bank back then and your father paid me fifty thousand dollars for records I had.”

“Records of what?”

“Two accounts Marcus opened there. Whitmore and Associates, and Mountain West Acquisitions. He signed for both of them himself, and nobody questioned it because he was my uncle and an upstanding citizen of the town.”

“What was going through them?”

“Money. In from Glacier Ridge to Whitmore every quarter for eleven years, out to Marcus’s personal account by the end of the week. Land-sale money into Mountain West, out to Marcus the same way. I kept copies of three years’ worth of statements.”

“And my father?”

“He came to me. He had invoices from Whitmore for consulting work nobody could remember Bill ever approving. I had the bank side; he had the ranch side. We put it together on my kitchen table in forty-five minutes. He paid me cash because I asked him to. For Stan.”

Her voice breaks as she tries and fails to withhold a low sob.

“The accident happened before he could use what I gave him.” She pauses. “Marcus has been part of our family my whole life, but he’s been holding my son over my head for three years to make sure I never open my mouth.”

“Holding him how?”

“Stan owes money. To people who don’t negotiate.” Her voice goes flat in a way that tells me she’s said these words to herself a thousand times. “Marcus covers the debts. And in return, Stan does whatever Marcus asks. That break-in at your cabin? That was Stan. Marcus told him what to take and when to do it.”

Bile rises at the back of my throat, and it takes everything in me to push it down.

“Alma.” I keep my voice steady. “You worked commercial accounts at the bank. Were you working the morning my father died?”

I’m met with silence.

“Were you on the desk when someone called Wyatt Hartley about some kind of error on the ranch’s account?”

“It wasn’t a standard error.” Her voice is small. “That’s not the kind of thing he’d stay on the phone for. It was flagged as a concern on the operating loan. Something that needed signing off on, or the account would freeze.”

“Did you make the call, Alma?”

“No.” The word is barely above a whisper. “Marcus told me to arrange it. Told me to have one of the girls make the call, not to do it myself, and to make sure they asked for Wyatt specifically.”

She inhales a shaky breath. “He was the ranch accountant. It sounded routine. I didn’t think twice about it until after, when I put the timing together. Wyatt was on the phone for twenty minutes, and that’s how long it took for your father and Bill to die on that road.”

“Alma. What are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you what I know. Marcus asked me to make that call happen, and twenty minutes later, two good men were dead. And I’m tellin’ you I’ve spent three years trying not to count those minutes in my head, and I still can’t make them add up to an accident.”

Her voice drops almost below a whisper. “But I never saw anything. I never heard him say it. I’d swear it in a courtroom tomorrow and I’d still just be a woman with a feeling.”

The bathroom door opens, and then there are footsteps in the hall. A floorboard creaks as he gets closer, and panic swells up inside me, but I force it down by sheer force of will.