Diamond.”
“I guess Sam left her and her mother when she was a kid and now that she’s an adult she wants to meet him. This is the last place she could verify him working, so she drove from Odessa to talk to Chester and Lucas.”
Val continued to scratch Boomer as the dog flopped down at his feet. “She would be better off leaving that stone unturned.”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to keep from being curious about your parents. Especially if they leave when you’re only a kid,” Cru said. He understood this better than most because his mother had left him in a bus station when he was little and he’d spent the rest of his childhood in an orphanage. Recently, he’d reconnected with his mother and they had started to form a tentative relationship.
Val didn’t know if he could ever forgive his mother or father if they had left him and he was thankful that he didn’t have to test that theory. Which reminded him. He needed to call his parents. His mother had called wanting to know if he would be home for Thanksgiving. Last year, his parents and his sister’s family had come to New York City and he had taken them to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and then to a nice restaurant for turkey dinner. This year, he’d planned to go to Florida and spend the holiday with his parents. But that was when he thought he’d be finished with the first draft of his book.
“What was Sam’s daughter like?” Logan asked Holden. “Did she seem as two-faced as her father?”
“Not that I could tell. She seemed like a sweet, sincere young woman. Chester and Lucas, on the other hand, were a little more leery. I think they’re still upset about Sam pulling the wool over their eyes. They were short with Maisy Sweeney and didn’t give her any information at all about her father. Of course, maybe they just didn’t want her to know what an asshole he was while he was here.”
Logan poked at the fire with a stick. “Maybe Sam has changed. People do. I was an asshole father and I changed.”
“You were a scared father,” Cru said. “There’s a difference. But I hope you’re right. I hope when she finds Sam she finds the father she’s looking for.”
Val hoped so too, but he doubted it. There had been an evil meanness in Sam’s eyes that spoke of a psychological disorder—something Val knew about, having spent many hours researching the criminal mind for his fictional villains. Val wouldn’t be surprised at all if Miss Sweeney found her father in prison.
Suddenly, something clicked in his mind. He had planned for the murderer in his new book to be a mild-mannered businessman who goes to the psychiatrist hero for his nightmares, but what if Val made the murderer a sweet girl-next-door type who goes to the hero for the same thing? Like the businessman, she’s having nightmares about killing people. The hero wants to help her figure out what’s behind the nightmares and ends up falling in love with her. Which would make the stakes even higher when he discovers that the people she kills in her nightmares are ending up dead. Her backstory could be that she was adopted and finds out she’s the daughter of a psychotic mass murderer who’s on death row.
The title could be Like Father Like Daughter.
The idea took hold in Val’s brain, consuming it like the flames eating through the logs. The conversation moved from Sam’s daughter to Holden’s new law practice in Simple, but Val was no longer listening. He was figuring how to rework his story around the new plot twist. His fingers started to twitch like they did when his mind was flooded with ideas he wanted to get on to his laptop.
When he couldn’t take it a second longer, he jumped to his feet, knocking over his bottle of beer and startling Boomer awake. He grabbed up the bottle before the dog could get more than a few laps of beer. “I think I’m going to call it a night.”
Holden glanced at his watch. “It’s only a little after nine o’clock, Val.”
“I know, but I’m still on East Coast time.”
Cru stared at him in disbelief. “After almost a month of being here?”
He forced a yawn. “You know I’ve always been an early to bed kind of geek.”
“Bullshit,” Holden said. “You used to stay up way later than me scribbling away in your notebook.” His eyes