Lucas rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced wryly. “What would you say if I told you we’re looking for buried bodies?”
“I’d say that’s not very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Wade opened the door and spoke into the living room, raising his voice to be heard over the blaring television. “Lucas and I need to go out for a while. Can you guys keep an eye on Clay for me?”
Without looking away from the game, Trevor waved a hand. “We’ll watch him. Take your time.”
Wade zipped his jacket. “Okay. Let’s walk in the woods.”
A slender blond man in a World-War-II-style leather bomber jacket with a Sherpa collar stepped around the corner of the house. “You guys mind if I come along? I really don’t like football.”
Lucas frowned at Blake Fox. “You spend a lot of time eavesdropping on private conversations?”
Blake responded with a cocky grin. “You might say I’m somewhat of an expert at the art.”
Lucas debated, then decided maybe a P.L’s perspective would be useful. “Come on, then.”
Blake fell into step with them. “What’s this about buried bodies?”
As they walked the trail toward the rock house, Lucas told them the full story. That his mother had died young, leaving Josiah a widower with a young son to raise. That Josiah had decided, for some reason, to marry Nadine Peck, one of the “wild women” of Honoria. That Nadine had begun a clandestine affair with Al Jennings after the birth of her daughter—an affair that had come to light when Al and Nadine had run away together, leaving their spouses and children behind without a word of explanation.
“Want me to look into it?” Blake asked. “There’s a good chance I can find out what became of them.”
“Let me tell you the rest of it first.”
Lucas went on to detail how, nine years after Al and Nadine’s disappearance, Roger Jennings had come up with the theory that they had never left town at all. That they had, in fact, been murdered. And then Lucas described the dirt-encrusted gold bracelet Roger had thrown at him only a few days before he’d died in a fall from a thirty-foot bluff.
Wade reacted strongly to that bit of information. “The bracelet stolen from Emily had been dug up by Roger Jennings?”
Lucas nodded grimly. “I hid it, myself, before I left town, but Emily apparently found it and started wearing it.”
“She gave me the impression she found it among her father’s things after he died last spring.”
Lucas shook his head. “That’s not likely. I haven’t talked to her about it, though.”
“And from finding that bracelet, Roger concluded his father had been murdered?”
“He apparently found something else. Something I didn’t know about, myself, until Rachel showed it to me yesterday.” He told them about the wallet and its contents.
“Now that’s interesting,” Blake murmured. “Leaving the driver’s license behind—maybe. But the cash? Unusual.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lucas led them into the clearing at the end of the path. “This is where Al and Nadine apparently met for their trysts. Rachel and I used to spend a lot of time here, too.”
“Rachel. Roger’s younger sister?” Blake asked, following the story with a frown of concentration.
Lucas nodded. “Roger saw her here with me while he was looking for clues, or God knows what, and he went ballistic. He came to me the next day.”
“He ordered you to stop seeing his sister?” Wade hazarded.
“He said he’d kill me if I didn’t.”
Wade’s expression didn’t change. “And what did you say to that?”
Lucas knew exactly what kind of risk he was taking when he looked the chief of police in the eyes and replied, “I told him I would kill him before I let him come between us.”
Blake coughed, then scooped up three pinecones from the ground at his feet and began to juggle them.