“Getting a mite testy, aren’t you, son?” Watkins asked.
The man might be a couple of decades older than he was, but Zane wasn’t about to stand being talked down to like this.
“I don’t know. Am I?” he challenged. “What would you be like if it was your father who’d been kidnapped?”
“Stepfather,” Watkins corrected, a little of his folksy cadence slipping away.
Zane had had just about enough of this. “How about we just call him Eldridge?” he proposed in an exasperated tone. “Would that suit you?”
“Doesn’t matter what suits me, Mr. Colton,” Watkins replied calmly. “I’m just a lowly elected official of the county, trying to do his job.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly as they pinned Zane in place. “You wouldn’t happen to know who was on the receiving end of these regular payments, now, would you?” he asked, his tone halfway between being solicitous and friendly.
“I haven’t a clue,” Zane responded tersely. And then he reversed the tables. “Do you?”
“Not yet,” Watkins replied honestly. “But I aim to find out. You hear anything, Mr. Colton, I expect you to let me know,” the sheriff said in a mild voice as he rose to his feet.
Zane knew he was being put on notice but he went out of his way to maintain a friendly tone. “Can I expect the same from you?”
Watkins inclined his head as if it was a wait-and-see situation.
“If I can,” the sheriff replied.
Which translated to a big, fat No, Zane realized. The sheriff was not in the business of sharing. The only reason Watkins had come to him with this business of regular bank account withdrawals was to see his reaction to the news.
The sheriff was on a fishing expedition and he was looking to catch himself a big fish whose last name was Colton, Zane thought. He obviously believed that someone within the family had abducted Eldridge.
But why?
It wasn’t as if there was a dearth of suspects outside of the family. Eldridge Colton had made his share of enemies in his youth.
Taking great pains to make sure none of his thoughts were registering on his face, Zane rose to his feet less than a beat after the sheriff had gained his. Then, rounding his desk, he walked the man to his office door.
“Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “and for keeping me in the loop.”
Watkins’s eyes met his. Again, the sheriff’s were unreadable. His lips spread just a little in what passed for a smile. An exceedingly shallow smile. “Count on it.”
Zane felt as if he was once again being put on notice. This wasn’t the first conversation he’d had with the sheriff, nor was it the first time he’d had the impression that Watkins would have been more than thrilled to pin this all on him—or at least on someone in his family.
All that meant, Zane thought as he shook the sheriff’s hand and then watched the man walk away, was that he was going to have to get really serious about doing some intense investigating of his own.
His priorities converged with the sheriff’s only insofar as wanting to solve the mystery of Eldridge’s disappearance. Their paths diverged immediately after that because the sheriff suspected him while he, of course, knew he wasn’t the one responsible for his father’s disappearance.
He might have been at the house the morning of the abduction—they’d all been at the house that morning, it was everyone’s customary starting point every Monday morning—but he hadn’t gone anywhere near his father’s room until after Moira had screamed because she’d found the blood.
He’d told Watkins as much, and the sheriff might have nodded when he heard that part, but Zane strongly suspected the man wasn’t really convinced—and wouldn’t be until the real kidnapper was caught and confessed to the crime.
Until, Zane silently emphasized, not if.
Feeling momentarily overwhelmed, Zane suppressed a sigh.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Colton?”
Zane roused himself. Lost in thought, he hadn’t realized he was still standing by his open door, staring after the departing sheriff, rather than going back to his desk.
“Not yet,” he admitted, his voice a bit vague.
Looking at Mirabella, he flashed a quick smile in his administrative assistant’s direction because she had expressed an interest in his well-being.
These days, a lot of people went out of their way to avoid him rather than be faced with having to find words of comfort and encouragement.
“But it will be,” he concluded.
Mirabella pressed her lips together. Her stomach was suddenly rebelling again. Clenching one fist at her side, she struggled to exercise some sort of control over the queasy feeling. After all, she couldn’t very well just dash off to the ladies’ room in the middle of his sentence. Besides, Zane looked so lost for a moment, her heart went out to him.
“Was this about Mr. Eldridge?” she asked Zane quietly.
“Yes, it was,” he replied.
Her eyes immediately widened and he caught himself thinking, despite the quagmire he found himself in, that her pale brown eyes looked beautiful.
Not the time, he admonished himself. Besides, the woman works for you, you’re not supposed to think of her that way.
A glimmer of fear had frozen on her face. “The sheriff didn’t come to tell you...” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to. He could see Mirabella was thinking the worst. Zane immediately cut his assistant short, putting her mind at ease.
“No, he didn’t,” Zane told her. “It seems that there’s just been another puzzle piece added to this mix.”
“Oh.” The single word escaped her lips, indicating she had no idea if this was good news or bad.
Mirabella wasn’t asking him any questions and normally, he would have been grateful for that and wouldn’t have volunteered anything. But today, this minute, filled to the brim with a host of tumultuous emotions, he found himself needing to talk to someone. His concern about his stepfather’s ultimate welfare was eating away at him and he didn’t know who to talk to, who to really trust.
There was something almost sweetly honest about the woman who quietly took care of all the myriad small details that went into making his job run as smoothly as it did.
In all the time they had worked together, there’d been no slipups. Mirabella was good at her job.
In the blink of an eye, she went from administrative assistant to temporary confidante.
“It’s come to the sheriff’s attention that someone might have been blackmailing my father,” Zane told her without fanfare or hemming and hawing.
There was concern on Mirabella’s delicate, heart-shaped face. Not a rush to judgment, not a quick, terse correction to remind him that Eldridge Colton was his stepfather, not his flesh-and-blood father.
Zane wasn’t much of a talker, but he found Mirabella extremely easy to talk to. It was almost as if her very expression coaxed the words out of his mouth—and the weight off his shoulders.
“Blackmail?” she repeated in a small, hushed voice that almost vibrated with horrified disbelief. “Mr. Eldridge? Are you sure?”
Zane sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Right now, Belle, I’m not sure of anything. But the sheriff came to tell me that one of my father’s bank accounts