Nate to reduce his size, he thought so. “Not yet,” he said, and pulled out his phone.
* * *
By the time their meal arrived, Rowan and Nate were so glum they were hardly speaking. They sat at the glass-topped table, heads bent. That Rowan didn’t get plates and proper silverware out showed that he was in a serious funk. He moved a plastic fork around in his lemon pasta that was still in the foam container.
“Can you get me a picture of William Thorndyke?” Nate asked. “But then, maybe I should check at a church because by now the kid is probably up for sainthood. Terri will float away on a cloud with him.”
“Rayburn! I just remembered. Didn’t her mother run off with some man?”
“Yeah,” Nate said gruffly. “Her mother did.”
“I was a kid but I remember when it happened. We were in Dubai at the time. Dad got angry and wanted to go home and find out what really happened. He was on the phone yelling at somebody.”
“I wasn’t there then or I’m sure it would have been me.”
Rowan ignored Nate’s statement. “It was the sheriff. Dad was yelling that Lisa—”
“Leslie.”
“Leslie could have been murdered and her body thrown in the lake, but the sheriff wasn’t investigating.”
“I can believe that. I was cleaning up garbage around the old dock and I saw something down there. It looked like...” Nate’s eyes widened like in a horror movie.
“Like what?”
“Like...” Nate’s voice fell to a whisper. “It looked like the roof of a car.”
Rowan looked at his cousin, trying to read his mind. “Maybe Dad was right. Could have been an accident.”
“She left behind a note,” Nate said.
“Any reason not to believe she wrote it?”
“Yeah. Everyone who knew her says she was mad about her husband and kid.” Nate took a breath. “Frank said that Leslie Rayburn didn’t exist before she came to Summer Hill. You have access to FBI files? I’d like to do some research.”
“I do.” Rowan was smiling. “Anything to get my mind off what’s in my brain!”
Nate took out his phone and started typing a text. “Frank gave me his cell number.”
Send me your files on Leslie. Everything you have.
He added his FedEx account number and the address of the apartment. At the end, he inserted: My FBI cousin is with me. He’ll search all. He put his phone on the table. “The files should be here in a day or two. If Frank is even speaking to me, that is. I’m going downstairs to the gym.”
“I’ll go with you.” They both needed the physical exertion.
* * *
At 4:00 a.m. the next morning, Rowan flung open Nate’s bedroom door. “They just called me from downstairs and said there’s a man in the lobby with a bunch of boxes and he wants to come up.”
Nate had had a hard time going to sleep and he was groggy.
“It’s your sheriff.”
Nate’s eyes opened. “Frank?” He threw back the cover, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and slid his feet into sandals. “I’ll go down.”
“So I don’t have to hear him say what he thinks of you?”
“That and so I can get my hands on the files before he changes his mind.” He quickly left the apartment. If he hadn’t been on the eighteenth floor he would have run down the stairs. As it was, the elevator seemed to take forever.
Frank Cannon, looking worn-out and angry, was standing in the big marble lobby, his hand tightly gripping the bar of a tall luggage cart. Half a dozen beat-up old file boxes were piled on it. He gave Nate a look that said he hoped he and his descendants went up in smoke.
Nate didn’t say anything, just gestured toward the elevator, then stepped aside. Silently, Frank pushed the cart inside.
Inside the elevator, cheerful music was playing. It seemed out of place considering the dark looks of the two men standing on opposite sides of the cart.
The elevator stopped on the sixth floor and a white-haired lady got in, her little dog in her arms. The door closed.
“How’s Stacy?” Nate asked.
“Tearing into the Thorndyke house remodel with a fury. She gave away all that white furniture and the bucking bronco pictures, and she’s sending you the bill. I think she’s keeping the barbed wire as a special memory of you.”
Nate nodded. The woman got off at the tenth floor.
“Brody and Elaine?” Nate asked.
Frank’s jaw was barely moving. “He’s staying in his office. Somebody asked him to help back a boat into the water and