if I . . . wanted him to be gone, so I didn’t try hard enough to keep him away from those people?”
“But you did talk to him, right?” Helania said. “You did warn him about not going.”
“Maybe I could have done more.”
Butch shook his head. “I was there when you came to speak to Wrath. I saw the conviction on your face when you went on about your dad. If I could play my mental tapes back to you? You’d see what I did—a good son trying to do the right thing privately and then coming to his King when he’d taken things as far as he could on the DL. And the reality is, if you hadn’t told us what was going on, the Brotherhood wouldn’t have been there and more people would have died that night.”
“What happened?” Helania asked.
As Boone gave the details factually, he wished he could believe what the Brother said. Doubts lingered, however—and the same appeared to be true for the other two.
They had all lost a family member in a violent way, and each one of them felt responsible.
Looking around the table, Boone felt like a little club was meeting in this room, and how apropos that the mountings on that wall were about death.
After a quiet stretch, Butch looked past Helania’s shoulder at what he’d put up. “You know, as someone who’s walking the same path you guys are on, but who’s a little further along? All I can say is that it’s a process, and the only way through the worst of the pain is putting one foot in front of the other. There are stages, but the bitch of it is is that you never really get to the end. You never stop missing them. The stuff at the beginning is the worst, though. You’re both going to be looking under all kinds of stones and searching for answers for a while. What you have to do is ride it through and don’t self-medicate. I tried that for three decades, and drinking and using drugs didn’t do shit except give me cirrhosis of the liver. It’s better to do the work and get it over with than put your head in the sand and drag the shit out forever.”
“I miss Isobel so much,” Helania said.
Without thinking, Boone reached across and took her hand. When he realized what he’d done, he wondered if she’d prefer he not touch her. But instead, she held on to his palm hard. As their eyes met, he felt a communion with her, although it was sad the kind of territory that they had in common.
It would have been so much better if it had been . . . needlepoint, for example.
Still, he was grateful to know he wasn’t alone, and that she was with him. The Brother as well.
Ducking his thumb under, Boone deliberately stroked the fine network of scars that marked Helania’s palm, leftovers of her work with that shovel.
She offered him a sad smile. Then she focused on the Brother. “So do you have anything new?”
The Brother tilted back in his chair again and crossed his arms. His hazel eyes once again narrowed on the photographs, the articles, the notes on that wall.
“No,” he muttered. “We’re going cold at this point. But Boone said you’d reached out to some of your sister’s people on social media?”
“I can give you the sign in details to Isobel’s stuff so you can see for yourself?” Helania shrugged. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything super helpful. Maybe you’ll notice something I missed, though. You’re the professional.”
“Something has to break,” Butch said under his breath. “We just have to catch a break before someone else gets hurt.”
As Helania recited the sign in and password to her sister’s Facebook page, she watched the Brother Butch take down the details on a fresh sheet of paper. She never would have guessed that he knew firsthand what she was going through with Isobel’s killing, and the fact that they had both lost siblings made it possible for her to give him free rein with anything that might help him.
They were a kind of kin. By bloodshed.
“There’s a computer in the office down here,” he said. “I’ll sign in on it after you all leave.”
“Can I do anything to help?” she asked.
“Just let me know if you hear from anyone on a different platform.
All we can do is keep digging until something turns up. It always does. Unfortunately, the revelations are on