Taken In Texas. Susan Sleeman

to go right between them so he could feel some sense of knowing he was doing the right thing by his nephew.

      “Cord? Is everything all right?” Kendall rested her hand on his shoulder.

      He shook off his thoughts and looked up to find her carefully watching him. He didn’t want to burden her with his struggle. “I’m fine. What’s next?”

      “I know the answer to this will be no,” she said. “Or you would’ve already mentioned it. But I have to ask. Do you know of anyone who would want to harm Eve?”

      “No. She’s a sweetheart.”

      Kendall cast him a skeptical look.

      “I get it. You have to doubt my answer. I would too if I was doing the questioning, but she really is just a sweet old lady. Unless she got into some trouble that I don’t know about. Maybe that thing she wanted to talk to me about, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

      Kendall tapped her pen on the notepad. “Does she have a cell phone, or do you call the house?”

      “The house. She has one of those emergency phones, but she never turns it on.” He gave Kendall the cell and home phone numbers, as she would want to request the call records.

      She jotted them down. “Okay, so motive. You said no one wanted to harm her, but does she have a sizeable bank account that someone might try to get their hands on?”

      “I don’t know about sizeable, but she didn’t have to worry about money. Her husband, Oliver—Ollie to his friends—passed away three years ago. They never had children of their own. He made a good living in oil and left a generous insurance policy. Plus, she’s a retired teacher and has a nice pension.”

      And a wonderful woman he’d spent many weekends with growing up. Hunting and fishing with Ollie and eating Eve’s amazing cookies and playing board games with both of them. And then when Ollie passed, making sure Cord paid her back for everything she’d done for him by just being there for her.

      “We need to get a look at her bank account,” Kendall said.

      “Won’t be a problem. I have power of attorney. I’ll bring the paperwork back with me in the morning.”

      Kendall nodded, a quick, concise tip of her head that ended in a grimace of pain. She started to lift her hand toward her face but caught herself and stopped. “Is there anything else I should know?”

      He shook his head. “At least not that I know of.”

      She sat down. “Are you familiar enough with Eve’s belongings that you’d know if anything was missing?”

      “You thinking a burglary gone wrong?”

      “No. That wouldn’t explain why Eve is missing.”

       Unless...

      Kendall didn’t say the word, but her expression matched his gut feel as a detective. It could be a burglary if the intruder had hurt Eve and got rid of her body, then felt free to search the house because he knew she wasn’t coming home.

      It took a callous person to hurt an older woman and then invade her home. Callous and dangerous, making it even more likely that the creep could come after Kendall, and Cord would now have a second job in Lost Creek.

      Sure, he needed to find his aunt as much as he needed to breathe, but in addition to that, he would be watching Kendall’s back. Even if she balked at his every move.