It was a room where it was space like Celeste needed her space.
Her burgeoning, self-possessed young woman was stamped all over it.
“Okay, lovely, you’re staying home today because your dad got a call last night and the latest news I had, they found the guy and were in a standoff with him in Ash Peak. If you hear at school, you won’t be able to concentrate. And if I didn’t tell you, you’d be validly upset with me. So we’re going to stay home, camp out and wait. But if you want to go to school, okay.”
This brought back the pale and haunted in her that was gorgeous, but I hated it.
“I don’t wanna go to school.”
“Do you want breakfast?”
She shook her head. “Just coffee.”
I gave her a shaky smile. “I’ve already got that ready.”
I left her to it.
She came down dressed and got her coffee.
I left her to that and went upstairs and got dressed.
It was just over two hours later.
We’d spent that time talking.
Or, maybe because of nerves, Celeste did.
Therefore, I now knew why Bohannan was the force he was in that town.
Because the Bohannans had been the cornerstone of the community since practically its beginnings.
His father may have fallen down on the job, but we could just say that Bohannan wasn’t the first overachiever in that clan.
“The town looks at us as kind of this weird, unofficial first family,” Celeste shared. “It was bizarre when we first moved here because it was almost like we were celebrities. And some of them seemed like they felt some kind of…relief that Dad was back, and he brought all of us with him. Like, the town couldn’t survive if there wasn’t a Bohannan living here. I guess my great-great granddad was like a big deal. When he was a marshal, he brought down some scary outlaw gang. And Great Granddad was the sheriff, and he was a big deal too. There’s even a plaque about him and another one for Great-Great Granddad in the county courthouse. And I guess, even though Granddad was messed up, since Dad was good at what he did, they just, I dunno, expected Dad to be that thing too. And Dad’s, well…Dad. So really, he just was that thing.”
He certainly was “that thing.”
And I was looking forward to the time when I could have deeper getting-to-know-you sessions with my man that didn’t involve how we were reacting mostly to current events.
Celeste also told me about how the log cabin was older than this house, because that was where the second and third generation of Bohannans lived before her grandfather built this place.
The first generation lived where my house was.
But to Bohannan’s dad’s fury, Fred Nance had pulled that house down to build what was there now.
And by the way, Bohannan’s dad’s name was Battle—Battle Bohannan—which I didn’t want to think was fierce, but it kicked ass. Though I wasn’t sure that was my favorite, since Celeste shared them all with me and the first to head west, fur trader Prosper, begat US marshal Obadiah, begat sheriff Lazarus who begat Battle.
And then there was Cade.
So yes, that family had a way with names because Jace, Jess and Celeste might be less unusual, but they didn’t suck either.
The big house at the end, beyond my place, her grandfather built as a rental property to piss off Fred Nance, who was a privacy nut with a healthy dose of survivalist because, “When he died, they found a bunch of guns and ammunition and supplies in your closet.”
So I was learning a lot of things that morning because that explained my big closet.
The Bohannan fortune had been made (and yes, it had been a fortune) in the trapping and fur trade, with some railroad investment and a local saloon and whorehouse thrown in for diversity of portfolio.
I would be curious to know how fur trading and whorehouse owning moved on to the next generation being law enforcement, but Celeste didn’t know that story.
The family used to own a lot more of the land around the lake, almost all of it, but it had been sold off in parcels over the years because it was expensive to keep, and in the end, her grandfather was an alcoholic and a wastrel.
Nevertheless, Bohannan’s inheritance had been significant, because Bohannan’s dad might have been fonder of drinking than working, but he didn’t much like banks.
Thus, he cashed in everything he could, “And when Dad opened the safe in Granddad’s office, there were like, real gold bars in there, a bag of diamonds and a whole lot of money.”
Onward from this, she shared the accepted local lore that her Granddad didn’t come about his distrust of financial institutions on his own. Generations of Bohannan men took pains to keep the Bohannan legacy safe.
And as such, somewhere around that lake, it was widely known that there was buried treasure.
It was just that no one knew where it was.
I was digesting this latest fanciful story when a Yukon and a Ram growled into the clearing.
We ran to the window and were standing, holding hands, when all three of our boys walked in.
“Is it over?” Celeste burst out.
Bohannan looked to her and then to me.
“It’s over,” he replied.
Fifty-Four
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I made them food.
They sat all in a row and started eating it.
I positioned myself across the bar in front of Bohannan, and after he shoveled in his third forkful of scrambled eggs, and the gray of his eyes hit me, I urged, “Talk to me, Goose.”
His beard quirked, his throat bobbed with his swallow, he put down his fork and picked up a piece of bacon.
And then he said, “It was Betty,” and he gnawed off some bacon.
Holy cow.
“Pull some stools around this way, lovely,” I ordered Celeste.
She did as asked, sat beside me, and we gave Bohannan all our attention.
He didn’t make us wait.
“I was right and wrong. He was military. An army sniper. Info’s still coming in, but what we know is, he’s pegged a lot of kill shots. He was decorated. He got out a while ago and was making a mint taking weekend warriors from whatever city they lived in on hunting and camping trips, teaching them to shoot, the whole survival-in-a-luxury-tent thing. Lots of four-star Yelp ratings. He expanded, took corporate types and millionaires out on excursions they paid a fortune for, including hunting big game in Africa. Big man expert lording it over a lot of important men who were not real men, but they played that on vacation.”
And the puzzle pieces started falling.
I nodded when he paused.
“He had that setup in Wyoming but moved it here about two years ago.”
What was left unsaid was because of me.
“He hooked up with Betty, my guess is, because he somehow figured out that Betty’s husband Ed had also had an affair with Audrey. Or maybe he targeted her because he sensed that wound, he pulled it out of her, and the rest of it came from there. She was nursing this hurt, he tapped that vein, became her lover, groomed her, and even now, under Robertson and McGill’s interrogation, she was unfazed. At first, including about Alice, who according to her, was a spoiled brat.”
I winced.
“Though, after she said that, McGill told her what he did to Alice. She clearly had no idea, and that shook her. But it was the only thing that shook her.”