Her Scream in the Silence (Carly Moore #2) - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,34

and I sure don’t see any smaller prints. I suspect the snow they crossed over on the way back to the truck has all melted.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice any prints before,” I said, feeling like a fool.

“They were likely in the shadows,” Marco said, “and the prints are mostly gone. It just looks like patchy ground. I was specifically lookin’ for them.”

“So you think someone kidnapped her?” I asked, my stomach falling to my feet.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and turned to me. “But there’s not a deputy who will take this as a case. Just because the truck parked at the end of the drive doesn’t mean she was kidnapped. In fact, all the times she’s run off, she never once took her own car. All of that is gonna be held against her.”

We walked around the back of the house to look for more prints, only finding the ones I’d left earlier.

“She has an outhouse?” he asked in dismay.

“It stinks to high heaven,” I said, wrinkling my nose. When he gave me a horrified look, I added, “I was looking for Lula, not using it.”

“I know people live like this around these parts. Hell, I’ve come across ’em on calls, but I never once guessed that Lula lived this way.”

“Does Max know?” Marco and Max were best friends, and if anyone would know, it would be Max.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Otherwise, I suspect he would have done somethin’ about it. That boy has a good heart. More so than most people realize.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. I’d experienced it firsthand after Seth’s murder. I’d left my unregistered gun next to Seth’s body, and even though he’d only known me for a matter of hours, Max had intended to recover and hide it from the sheriff deputies…He would have too, except Jerry had gotten to it first. He’d used it to stop Carson Purdy, and now it was locked up tight in the Hensen County Sheriff’s evidence room. Jerry had told them he’d found it behind the motel, so they were none the wiser that it was mine.

But in the days that had followed Seth’s murder, Max had been worried enough about my safety that he’d given me a gun for protection to replace it. (Which had also ended up in the sheriff’s evidence room, although this one was linked to both me and Max.) And Max always, always protected Ruth and me from irate customers. He was a good man…The only thing that made me nervous about him was his connection with his father, but it occurred to me that Marco might know a thing or two about that.

“How close is Max to his father?”

“They’re amicable,” he said carefully.

“Amicable can mean a lot of things.”

“Are they best buds? No. Bart Drummond never fostered a close relationship with his boys.”

That didn’t fit with what Tiny had said about Wyatt. Then again, I knew people had different perceptions of shared events. I wasn’t ready to dismiss his observations just yet.

“How long have you known Max?” I asked as we started walking around the shack toward the SUV.

Marco chuckled. “Since kindergarten. We went through all thirteen years of school together, and I suppose that wasn’t enough, because we roomed together in college. But he left the university at the beginning of his senior year after Wyatt got arrested and quit the family business. Max had to take over.”

“What made Max decide to go to college when Wyatt didn’t?”

“Max presumed Wyatt would inherit it all. That’s what his father told him. That left Max with a whole lot of nothing. So he decided to forge his own path. He was determined to get a business degree and open his own business, but then his daddy came callin’ and Max gave it all up to come home.”

“Did he want to come home?”

“Didn’t matter,” Marco said as we reached his Explorer. “If Bart told them boys to jump, they jumped.”

“Does Max resent his father?” It struck me that his father might not be the only one he resented for hijacking his future. “Does he resent Wyatt for giving it all up and leaving it to him to take up the mantle?” Was that the cause of the brothers’ rift?

“Those are two very good questions I don’t have the answers to,” he said, then opened his car door and tossed his crutches into the backseat. When I got inside, he asked, “Why the interest? What does Wyatt