Page 41 of Broken Reins (Whittier Falls #4)

Twenty-Three

Ford

L ater that week, I sat alone at Chickadee, grumpy as hell that Lily needed to be up even earlier than usual.

I’d been staying over every night since we had that talk, and each night got better and better.

But tomorrow she had to open the bakery for Sutton, and went on about ‘needing a solid seven hours of sleep not interrupted by you humping me’ which made me only want to hump her more.

But I obeyed and drove back home after I surprised her and Noah with pizza. Now I was doing what I’d been dreading ever since I heard about that damn podcast. A deep dive.

The only light in the living room was the blue ghost-glow from my laptop screen, which cast weird shadows over the half-painted drywall and the tools I'd left scattered across the coffee table.

Outside, the wind howled across the near-frozen pasture, throwing itself against the windows with each new gust. It sounded pissed off, and honestly, I could relate.

My hand was wrapped around a mug of coffee gone cold hours ago.

I hadn’t bothered to heat it up. The taste matched the mood: bitter, stale, maybe a little burned.

Most people just listened to the podcast, but their YouTube channel had video of it and I thought it would give me more insight into whatever lies they were about to tell.

On the screen, the spinning circle finally resolved into the scratchy, homegrown intro of "Unsolved Montana.

" The host’s voice was sharp and nasal, oozing with the kind of performative empathy that made my skin crawl.

“—and now, an update on the murder of Ty Higgins,” she announced, her vowels stretched wide as the county lines. “We all know the story. We’ve all heard the rumors. But today, for the first time, someone claims they know what really happened out at Sucker Creek.”

The next sound was a jarring cut to old news footage: a reporter standing in front of the Whittier Falls police station, the sign behind her battered and faded.

“Ty Higgins was found here, early October, his body pulled from the water less than a hundred yards downstream from the old rail bridge. The official report lists the cause of death as accidental—from injuries suffered in the crash. But locals aren’t buying it.

They say it was murder. And they say they know who did it. ”

Another hard cut. This time, the voice wasn’t professional. It was raw, maybe a little drunk, thick with the kind of rural accent you only pick up if you’ve spent most of your life within three miles of your own front porch.

“I saw Ford Brooks out there that night,” the man slurred. “He was yellin’ at Ty, right before Ty went into the water. Everyone knows he hated him. Everyone knows he’s the one that did it.”

My jaw tightened so hard I felt my molars grind.

I flexed my grip on the mug until the ceramic threatened to snap.

There it was again—the same old story, played on loop by anyone with a beer in their hand and an axe to grind.

It didn’t matter that the police had cleared me.

It didn’t matter that we fought hours before then, at a different location entirely, didn’t matter that there wasn’t a shred of proof.

If you let a rumor live long enough, it grows teeth and starts biting back.

The podcast host came back on, her voice syrupy with concern. “Authorities have declined to reopen the investigation, but sources tell us there’s more to the story. Much more.”

A musical sting, followed by static. Then, after a dramatic pause, the voice of the host came back, quieter now, like she was sharing a secret at a funeral.

“We received a voicemail this morning from an anonymous tipster. They claim to have information that could change everything. Listen for yourself.”

A click, a breath. Then, a new voice. Genderless, shaky, run through some kind of filter that made every vowel sound like it was underwater.

“It wasn’t Ford. I saw someone else at the creek. Someone with a limp. They had a flashlight, and they were dragging something through the mud. I tried to call the sheriff before, but no one would listen. Please, just look at the security cameras from the feed store. You’ll see what I saw.”

The message ended. Silence hung in the air, thick enough to taste.

I rewound it and played it again. And again.

Each time, I tried to pick apart the edges—listen for the tells in the voice, the half-swallowed vowels, the static at the end that felt almost intentional.

I scrubbed back and forth over the word "limp," because whoever called in, their voice caught on that word like it meant something personal.

A limp. I didn't know anyone in town with a limp, not one that stood out. But maybe that was the point.

The host returned, this time with a hint of triumph. “For those following along, we’ve posted a transcript of the voicemail on our website. If you have any information, you know where to find us.”

I slammed the laptop shut. The sound echoed through the empty house like a gunshot.

For a minute, I just sat there, letting the silence fill in around me.

I could hear the wind outside, the way it rattled the gutters and made the old wood siding creak.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath, but every time I exhaled, the taste of cheap coffee and sour adrenaline clung to the back of my throat.

The problem with rumors is, they never die on their own. You have to kill them. Dig them up at the root and torch the whole patch of dirt, or else they come back meaner.

I stood and started pacing the living room, stepping over loose extension cords and piles of sawdust. My hands shook—not from fear, but from anger.

Old, hot, familiar. The same kind I used to get whenever my dad decided a problem could be solved with a belt or a boot or a knuckle to the side of the head.

I grabbed the mug off the table and hurled it against the far wall. It shattered, leaving a splatter of brown liquid and a spray of ceramic teeth. I didn’t care. I’d fix the wall later. I’d clean up the mess.

I looked at the dark reflection in the window. I barely recognized myself. The haircut was too clean, the shirt too expensive, the body language all wrong. But the eyes—they were still the same. Still hungry for something I couldn’t name.

I walked back to the laptop and opened it again.

I scrubbed through the podcast, found the tipster’s voicemail, and played it at half speed.

I tried to pick apart the background noise—the subtle echo, the faint hum of a refrigerator, the quick, panicked breath at the end.

Every detail was a potential clue. Every detail mattered.

If the cops weren’t going to do anything, that was fine by me. I had resources they couldn’t dream of. And I was done waiting for someone else to clear my name.

If I wanted peace, I’d have to earn it myself.

A few hours later, the spare bedroom looked more like a NASA command center than any guest room you’d ever seen.

The walls were bare, the carpet still held the ghost of the old owners’ treadmill, and the only furniture was a folding table lined with a Frankenstein’s monster of computer guts and off-the-shelf monitors.

I didn’t miss my old job, but I’d forever love my gear.

I logged in under one of my dozen dummy accounts and spun up the VPN.

Two clicks later, I was “remote-desktopping” into a server cluster in Malaysia, which bounced me to an AWS bucket in Denver, which then ghosted back into Whittier’s municipal system through a backdoor I’d left during a bored afternoon in September.

The only security on the Whittier Falls PD was a single password that hadn’t changed in three years (“GoBobcats!”), so the only real obstacle was keeping myself from vomiting at the sight of Windows XP in 2025.

I grinned despite myself. It was almost too easy.

I’d spent most of my life waiting for the world to pull a fast one on me. Now, it felt good to be two steps ahead.

I went straight for the police case files—at first, the folder tree looked empty, but then I spotted the archives: “Higgins, T.” Inside were a series of PDFs and scanned handwritten reports. I set them to download in the background while I started scanning through the first document.

The initial report was a standard death-by-misadventure writeup.

Deputy Miller’s name was all over it. I skimmed past the basic stuff—the time, the temperature, the coroner’s best guess at cause of death.

Then I hit the first anomaly: the witness statements were all logged on the same day, within minutes of each other, but the time stamps didn’t line up with the timeline in the summary.

Miller’s log said he’d conducted the interviews himself, but the handwriting on half the scanned sheets didn’t match his signature.

I pulled up a notepad and started pasting in lines that didn’t add up.

Next up, the autopsy. It was three pages long, but the middle page was missing. Page 1 and 3, but no 2. The scan just jumped right over it, like someone had never bothered to double-check. I flagged it, then moved on.

The more I read, the more pissed off I got.

Every report had tiny discrepancies: font changes, date formats that didn’t match, lines that looked like they’d been pasted in from other cases.

Most people would never notice, but I’d spent a decade parsing logs for fraud and software exploits.

Once you see one, you start seeing them everywhere.

The real gut-punch came when I hit the final case summary. It was short—barely a paragraph—and signed by Deputy Miller.

Except, the signature was off. It was too perfect, almost traced. And the body of the summary didn’t match anything about his report from previous pages. It was all nonsense.