“I have a feeling I should. I saw your dad while he was in the hospital, Paul. I know what he did to save my brother, Harry. He was in hospital because of us. To help save my club.”
“Only because he wanted to be. Harry and he, they forged a brotherhood of their own in there, Drew,” Elise interrupted. “I spoke to him. He told me how much Harry meant to him. He even wrote about it in some of his letters.”
“Letters?” Drew raised a brow.
I could feel the atmosphere change as the four of them exchanged glances with one another. My hand went to Drew’s leg and rested there, feeling the tension in his muscles. I didn’t know what they were talking about it, but it was big enough to change everything as they stared at us.
“People talked to Dad,” Paul said cautiously. “He had a kind face. The kind people wanted to be around. He could make friends with a stranger after thirty seconds. People told him their life stories like he was some kind of priest they could offload their sins to.”
Drew stared at Paul, his face stony and unmoving as he waited for him to continue. He was good at that, extracting information out of people without having to say a word at all.
“People told him their secrets wherever he went. It’s been both a blessing and a curse in his life,” Paul added.
“Do you mean Harry said things?” Drew asked flatly.
Paul looked at his mum before he settled back on Drew. “How close to Harry were you?”
The question should have insulted Drew, but instead, hisresponse came out quickly, filled with assurance. “He was like a father to me. I loved him with all my heart, and he loved me with even more of his. But that idiot kept me in the dark for a lot of reasons.”
“To protect you.”
“What I didn’t know couldn’t kill me in Harry’s eyes.”
“But it killed him. And it got my dad killed, too.”
Drew’s eyes searched Paul’s, assessing him.
“I wish I’d known Clint the way Harry did,” Drew said softly. “But in the ten minutes I found a way to spend time with him, I saw an honorable man. A man of conviction. A man of worth. I wish I could have known more and done more to save him, but I can assure you, if there were things that could have done that, I didn’t know them then. I don’t know them now. All I know is that something shady and corrupt is going on in my town, and I sure as shit need to find out what it is.” He looked at Elise. “Sorry,” he said, excusing himself for the cursing. “I’m here, and I want to do something that’s going to stop everyone from losing the people they love the most. But I need your help with that if you can give it to me. I’m just a man in the dark, trying to figure out all the riddles everyone is putting in front of me.”
I searched the eyes of everyone. Each of them was haunted in their own way, and full of grief that Drew and I were more than familiar with. Paul wanted payback and retribution, but like most people in modern society, he had no idea how to pull that off without fucking himself and his family up in the process, and it was clear he didn’t want to end up making the same mistakes of his father. He was hurting, though. We wouldn’t have to push hard to get what we wanted from him. He would give it to us gladly.
“My husband was a good man,” Elise said before Paul could continue. “But he knew too much, and they couldn’t let him out with the information he had, so they killed an inmate and set him up to take the fall. He got almost thirty years added to his sentence for something he didn’t do just to guarantee his silence. We became collateral damage if he fucked up.” She looked at Drew and shrugged at her cursing, letting him know he didn’t have to edit on her account.
“I have one question,” Drew said quietly.
“And that is?”
He exhaled heavily, turning his palms over and shaking his head. “Who the fuck is thistheyeveryone keeps talking to me about?”
With one look at each other, both Elise and Paul rose from their seats.
“I think you’ll understand Clint’s letters better than we do.”
I frowned and watched as the two of them made their way toward to the house, their heads together as they discussed things quietly. My gaze turned to Clint’s aging parents, the sadness emanating from the two of them so brutally that my fingers curled into Drew’s leg. They didn’t say anything to us. Their eyes just rested on us as though they were waiting for a profound revelation of some kind.
One we couldn’t give.
When the sliding door to the house reopened, Paul appeared with a large Amazon box in one hand, the other helping his mother from the house as she carried a tray with two mugs and a mountain of food on it. They approached quickly, Paul barely saying a word as he handed the box directly to Drew. He turned to his grandparents, helping hisgrandmother from her seat with gentle concern, and huffing as the older gentleman batted his hand away when he tried to do the same for him.
Elise set the tray on a table and smiled at the exchange before straightening again. She was the chosen ambassador now.
“We’ll be inside if you need us. Please, if you need more coffee, feel free to come and get it. Take all the time you need. We have to get back to everyone inside.” She glanced to her son and in-laws. “I don’t know how much more help we can be, but anything at all you need from us, I will gladly give to help stop whoever the hell is behind all this.”
I nodded, clasping the woman’s hand in both of mine before releasing her and keeping my silence as she rushed around the pool to follow her family inside.
“This keeps getting weirder and weirder,” I said to Drew as the door was pulled closed.
“You ain’t kidding.”