“What did she want?” Willa asked.
“Money.” I took a drink of my water, then sat back in my chair to explain the entire night. “She asked me to meet her somewhere. She said if I didn’t talk to her, she’d go to the authorities to take Ryder back. I didn’t want to even take the chance that she’d put him through it, so I met with her.”
I had just been trying to do right by Ryder. Even though I was working to get legal custody of him, my claim hadn’t been approved yet. Mom was still his legal guardian. I’d figured the fastest way to get her the hell out of Lark Cove again was a quick meeting to hear her out.
“I told her to meet me here in the parking lot. It was snowing pretty hard and I offered to talk inside, but she didn’t want to come in. She just told me that if I wanted to keep Ryder, I needed to give her three thousand dollars.”
“Did you?” Logan asked.
“No. I told her to go to hell, then got in my truck and drove off.”
Willa put her hand on my knee. “Then what?”
“Then nothing. I got back in my truck and drove around for a while. I was pissed and needed to think. After about an hour, I came back here and drank with Dakota for a couple hours.”
“That’s why Sheriff Magee called him down.” Thea snapped her fingers. “He’s your alibi for part of the night.”
I nodded. “He poured me tequila shots for two hours and kept me company, then drove me home.” Poor guy had walked from my house to his in the snow, but thankfully, Lark Cove was small and he didn’t live more than five minutes away.
Logan leaned forward in his chair. “So we just have to prove that during the hour you were driving around, you didn’t kill your mother.”
“That’s right,” I told him.
“How did she die?” Thea asked.
I shuddered as the photographs Magee had shown me earlier flashed through my mind. I think he’d shown me pictures of Mom’s lifeless body in order to gauge my reaction as well as to confirm she was in fact my mom.
I don’t know if it was what he’d been going for, but I’d almost puked up breakfast in the interrogation room’s trash can. The images of her gray skin and dead eyes were burned into my brain forever.
“She was strangled,” I said quietly. “In her car, they think. That’s where they found her. She’d turned off the highway onto Old Logger’s Road. I have no idea why she’d take that turn. Maybe she was lost or something, but that’s where they found her. Her car had been run off the road into some trees.”
“She died three weeks ago. Why are they just now finding her body?” Logan asked.
“It snowed,” Hazel explained. This was Logan’s first year in Montana, so it wasn’t a wonder he didn’t understand. Once upon a time, she’d taught me about those old roads too. “That road gets closed every winter because it sits at the base of two mountains. It drifts in so badly during the winter they can’t keep up with the plowing, so they just close it off until spring.”
“Someone must have followed her up there and killed her, then driven her car off the road,” Thea guessed.
I nodded. “And somehow we have to prove that someone wasn’t me.”
“But why?” Willa asked. “Why would they even think it was you? They just assumed that since you’re her son, you’d kill her? That makes no sense.”
I took another drink of my water, buying myself a minute. This was the part of my story I didn’t want to confess.
“I threatened her. When we were at the motel and after she dumped Ryder, I threatened her never to come back. I guess she thought I might be true to my word because when I met her in the parking lot here, she recorded our conversation on her phone. And I threatened her again, right before I drove off. I told her if she ever came back, I’d use her body as fishing bait.”
“Oh, Jackson,” Hazel muttered, shaking her head. “You didn’t.”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know she’d end up dead? I just wanted her to leave town.” I’d been pissed and not thinking clearly. I said some nasty words in the heat of the moment and now they might cost me my life.
“Magee found the recorder in her car,” I told them. “He found her phone and got the records so he knows I was the last person she called. So the evidence basically points to me following her out of the parking lot and killing her on an old deserted road.”
“What about fingerprints? Or her time of death?” Willa asked. “If she died after you were home, then you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“They didn’t find any prints in the car other than hers. Her body was frozen so Magee said the medical examiner might not be able to pinpoint exactly when she died. They’re doing an autopsy, but it will take a while. But the bottom line is, if they come back and say she died anytime during the hour when I was driving around, I’m fucked.”
I didn’t know what the odds were that he’d find more evidence, but at least they were better now than when he’d arrested me. This morning, Magee didn’t know that I’d gone home to Willa, and without her alibi, my window of opportunity was wide open.
Logan’s phone rang and he excused himself from the table to answer. The rest of us sat quietly, each staring blankly at the table.
“You smelled like perfume,” Willa whispered.
“Huh?”
She looked up at me. “You smelled like tequila and perfume when you came home.”
“It was Mom.” I sighed. “She was wearing strong perfume and she hugged me.”
She’d done it right before she’d asked me how Ryder and I were doing. The gesture had caught me off guard, so I’d just stood there. For a split second, I’d actually thought she’d regretted her decision to abandon him. But then she’d begged me for some money, giving me some bullshit sob story.
Looking back, I think the hug and the interest in Ryder were all part of her plan. She’d been recording me at the time. She’d put on a good show, pretending to be a mother who had fallen on hard times and needed some extra cash from her oldest son.
“How did they find her?” Thea asked. “The body and her car.”
“Magee told me that a couple was out cross-country skiing and came across her car yesterday afternoon.” I felt bad for those skiers. The image on the photograph I’d seen was bad enough; seeing it in person would have been awful.
Logan returned to the table and raked a hand through his hair. “We’ve got a lawyer coming down from Kalispell. She’ll be here soon.”
“Thanks.” I appreciated that he’d called in some help. And I had a feeling he wasn’t just doing it because Thea was his wife. Somewhere over the last couple of months, Logan and I had become . . . friends. I actually liked the guy. He was funny and smart. And he cared for the people in his life, me included.
“No problem.” He nodded. “I’m sure she’ll want to meet and discuss this with you as soon as she gets here.”
“Okay.” I blew out a long breath, glancing at the clock.
I needed to talk to Ryder, but I also needed to talk to this lawyer. I was going to need legal help if the autopsy came back with an incriminating time of death. This wasn’t a road to walk alone, and for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t even going to try.
I’d let the people at this table walk alongside me every step of the way.
“Do you think Magee believed you?” Willa asked. “That you didn’t do it?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I do. He told me more about Mom’s death and the evidence stacked against me than he had to. If he really thought I was guilty, he wouldn’t have shown me all his cards.”
Instead, Magee had treated me like an ally. He wasn’t trying to prove me guilty, he was trying to prove me innocent. So I’d told him every little detail I could think of, hoping it would help him put the puzzle together.