We All Sleep Alone (Finley Creek #11) - Calle J. Brookes Page 0,38
told his father she was leaving him at the funeral.
She could have waited a week or two. Reggie bit back the anger.
Maybe his dad had been an asshole to his mother, but his father had been really close with Ray. She didn’t have to hurt him like that.
She’d lived with his affairs that long, a week or two wouldn’t have killed her.
Instead, his father had almost killed someone else in his grief and rage.
Logically, Reggie knew his mother wasn’t to blame for that. Her timing could have been a hell of a lot better.
He had grabbed his phone, when someone knocked on the door to the small Craftsman bungalow he was currently living in. He liked to buy foreclosures and live in them while he repaired them in his spare time. It made him feel like he was making a real difference. Taking something old and broken and making it work again.
This place was half done. He had some subflooring to replace in the near future under the back half of the house, but for now, it was mostly livable.
A TSP detective stood on his porch. Reggie bit back a curse. The man was probably there to ask even more questions about Reggie’s father.
They were picking about his father’s life with a fine-toothed comb. Asking questions about their life twenty-something years ago.
Reggie didn’t understand a damned bit of it. He opened the door, resignation and irritation warring equally. That’s when he saw the gun gripped in the man’s hand.
Fire followed. Fire so hot Reggie knew he would never be ok again.
40
Something was happening. Jennifer had gotten fifteen messages in the last fifteen minutes. Asking about that bastard Turner Barratt. Something was going on with the mayor.
She’d heard everything from his house being engulfed in flames to the mayor being dead.
Well. It was about time. She’d been waiting for that for weeks.
Dennis Lee had made a few comments about how Turner Barratt was becoming more of an issue than he should be, but Jennifer had been consumed with dealing with everything that had happened to Ray and with what Wallace had done. Dennis Lee had finally had one of his multitude of lackeys take care of the problem.
That at least brightened her day.
For the first time since that nurse had been shot, she had something to smile about.
Jennifer had had such pretty dreams a few months ago.
She’d run for—and win—the mayoral seat. Ray would settle into his job and find happiness and respectability with the girl he had been seeing at the time of his death; Wallace—she’d deal with Wallace and go on to enter this next phase of her life with both a clear conscience and no ring on her finger tying her down.
She’d probably eventually openly date Carl. Play grandma to his orphaned grandson Jason.
Jason was in the pediatric wing now. Carl was likely nearby, too.
She needed to see Carl. She hadn’t seen him much since the storm. She missed him. A great deal.
Whereas she and Dennis Lee saw the world the same way and wanted to make it work for them, Carl was as heartfelt as Wallace used to be.
But far more honorable.
She felt like she was a better person when she was with Carl. She wanted to make him proud of her.
She’d find Carl as soon as she could and spend the night with him.
To feel a little less alone.
41
He was being used. Kyle was well aware of that. Jennifer was avoiding her son.
Mostly because of her guilt. She was blaming herself for what had happened with Reggie’s idiot father and that fiancée who’d left Reggie. He understood that.
Jennifer was pathetic over her son. Always trying to coddle him in a way Kyle himself had never experienced. Reggie had been chafing under his mother’s pampering since they’d met in high school.
It had been one of the things that had first attracted Kyle to her eleven years ago when he had first met her and her husband.
Reggie was very lucky to have a mother that gave a damn about him.
Kyle’s mother had been killed when he had been four. His father had made her out to be a whore. That had never been in doubt in Kyle’s mind. She’d died in her lover’s arms during a house fire, while he’d been with his father.
His father had never remarried. Victor Scott wasn’t exactly a trusting man. He had plenty of female companionship, but no woman would ever get into his father’s coffers again.