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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T here’d been a moment, a brief moment, when Brooklynn had looked at Forbes like he might be an enemy.

It made sense, considering she’d only known him for three days, and all she knew about him came from what he’d told her.

Meaning most everything she believed about him was a lie. She seemed discerning enough to know something wasn’t right, even if she didn’t know exactly what.

Forbes. Ford. They were the same person. He was using his alias, sure, but his personality was the same.

Except Ford wasn’t Forbes. Ford wasn’t one of the five hundred richest men in America. Ford didn’t own a majority stake in a Fortune 100 company. Ford was an illusion, a creation of his grandmother.

Ford Baker was a historian writing a book about unsolved mysteries who paid the bills working as a freelance handyman and dabbled in real estate.

He must’ve inherited his father’s knack for investing because Ford had become a millionaire by the time he was thirty. Not that Ford…Forbes…needed the money. It was just a cover story. Real estate was the thing he did to kill time.

Forbes’s whole life had felt like killing time, just waiting until he could find out who’d killed his family. Find closure and move on.

Ford wasn’t writing anything to publish, of course, but he had been researching unsolved mysteries—one mystery in particular.

To satisfy Ford’s curiosity—and Forbes’s obsession—Ford spent time with other historians, with college professors, and with private detectives, learning their methods, discovering how they uncovered secrets.

While keeping his own secrets hidden.

He’d played the role of Ford Baker, ordinary guy, for so long that he’d felt comfortable in it.

Being in this house, surrounded by memories, his false persona felt distant. Here, he was Forbes Ballentine.

That was why he desperately wanted to tell Brooklynn the truth. It was why his alias, which had rolled off his tongue since he was eight years old, now felt like sand in his mouth.

His whole life had been a cover story. Lie, pretend, hide. Nobody could know who he really was.

He couldn’t get close to anyone. Ever. No serious relationships, no close friendships.

He’d never cared before. Sure, in college he’d met a woman he’d thought he could love. But even then, he hadn’t felt compelled to tell her the truth.

It was Brooklynn and her cheery attitude and honest disposition and…

Everything. It was everything about her that made him want to be himself. Or a better version of the man he’d become.

Her footsteps sounded in the hallway—she’d gone to the restroom—and he turned as she stepped into the office.

“I’m so proud of myself.” Her voice was, as always, filled with joy. “I didn’t get lost once!”

“Congratulations.”

“I know, right. This place is amazing. I just want to explore and find out all its secrets.”

He had no idea what to say to that.

She slid into a chair across the desk. “Did you figure it out while I was gone?”

“Uh, no.” He’d barely looked at the ledger, just stared out the window and wished everything were different.

“Let’s see it, then.” She pulled it close and studied it.

He wasn’t a pro at upside-down reading, and the desk was wide. So he stared at her, at the way her braid draped over her shoulder, the way curls framed her face. At the tiny wrinkles on her forehead that appeared when she was trying to figure something out.

He needed to stop.

He had two choices. Sit across from her and try to resist her beauty, or sit beside her and try to resist her enticing scent.

Neither option was ideal, but beside her, at least he could look at the ledger.

He rounded the desk and settled in the second guest chair. “Can you share?”

“I had four sisters. Sharing was never my strong suit.” She slid the ledger closer to him. “But I can try.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

She chuckled, shaking her head.

He shouldn't banter with her. Not to joke or laugh or let his guard down in any way. If he did, she’d slither through whatever crack he allowed, and then he’d be a goner.

Focus, Ballentine.

He tried. Really, he did.

But he’d stared at the first page of the stupid ledger for hours the night before. All he saw were dates, dollar amounts—assuming those squiggles were supposed to be dollar signs—and other numbers that made no sense. The first line read:

3/4/99 650 x 4 $10.5m

Not exactly a paltry sum.

The other lines were similar. The numbers were slightly different, but all had the same pattern. A date, three digits multiplied by single digits, and then a dollar sign and high number.

There were only four lines, one a month for four months. His family had been murdered on June twentieth, seventeen days after the last date.

“Let’s assume,” Brooklynn said, “that Ballentine was smuggling drugs.”

Drugs.

This was why Forbes couldn’t make heads or tails of the journal.

Because of course his father wouldn’t be involved in drug smuggling. Antiquities, tobacco, or liquor, to avoid the taxes, maybe.

But not drugs.

And yes, he saw the irony of counseling Brooklynn not to trust her friends while he refused to believe his father had smuggled drugs.

Brooklynn didn’t look up, didn’t see his reaction.

“And let’s assume they were using the same size crates to smuggle back then as they used the other day. They looked like three-foot cubes, each carried by two men off the boat, then moved with a dolly.”

“Big men,” Forbes said, thinking of the so-called Bernie. He closed his eyes and remembered the photograph he’d been shown. His guess was, those crates had been heavy.

“Strong men,” she added. “So, what would fill three-foot cubes and be heavy enough that two strong men would struggle to haul it?”

He had no idea. “Let me do some research.” He nodded at the four lines. “See if you notice any patterns.”

Not that there was much data to draw from.

She reached for his notebook, moving into his personal space for a pen.

Her hair tickled his arm, causing a reaction that tingled to his toes.

He snatched the pen and plopped it on top of the ledger, probably too hard.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine.” He pulled his laptop close, opened an AI browser, and typed in the question, How much would a 3x3 crate of drugs weigh?

AI gave him a list of multiple drugs and their weights.

Heroin weighed thirty to forty pounds per cubic foot. Meth, forty-two to fifty-five pounds. Fentanyl, fifty to sixty.

A three-foot cube had twenty-seven cubic feet, meaning each of those numbers would have to be multiplied by twenty-seven.

Forbes did the math.

Calculating for each of the drugs, he doubted any of them fit the bill.

Few men could lift eight hundred pounds and carry it as the men in the photos had, much less the sixteen hundred pounds fentanyl would weigh.

Assuming the boxes were filled to the brim.

Assuming there wasn’t filler or something on top to hide the drugs.

Marijuana was much lighter. But would that much marijuana have a value in the tens of millions?

A quick internet search proved his guess was right. It couldn’t be marijuana.

It could be heroin. Or cocaine. Or…or any number of things.

If Brooklynn’s theory was correct, then the smugglers had been moving serious drugs.

How, how could his father have been involved in something like that?

Maybe Brooklynn’s theory was wrong. But what else could it be?

“Are you okay?” Brooklynn asked. “You’re pale as flour.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? You look…I don’t know.”

“I said I’m fine. What did you learn?”

She blinked at his harsh tone but didn’t respond. “Nothing on the first page, nothing that you wouldn’t have seen. The shipments came once a month. They got gradually larger, then abruptly stopped a few weeks before the murders. But I did see something else.”

She tapped the ledger sheet, not the list, but a tiny doodle in the corner. “Have you ever seen that before?”

He’d seen it, sure. He’d paid no attention. He studied it now and realized it was a tiny sketch of a bird in flight. “It’s just a doodle.”

“Was Charles an artist?”

“You call that art?”

“It’s detailed, a seagull. The tiny feathers along the back of the wings, longer at the tips. See how the wings are bent like that? It’s diving.”

He’d seen a squiggle. She’d seen a bird in flight.

She flipped to the next page and tapped another doodle he’d ignored. It was the same thing, a tiny bird, but this one was inside a circle, the beak poking out on the bottom right side.

There were similar doodles on the next few pages of the journal.

“Weird that they’re all the same,” he said.

“You’re sure he wasn’t an artist?”

“Maybe he wanted to be.” Forbes had no memory of his father ever drawing anything, though, so that didn’t feel right.

“Maybe.” Brooklynn nodded to the stack of files Forbes had yet to put away. “Did he doodle a lot on those?”

Forbes thought back. “I didn’t pay attention. I think there were some doodles, yeah.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

“What difference does it make?”

She took out her phone, took a photo of one of the tiny drawings, and then enlarged it on her screen. “This isn’t random. This is a specific image, drawn multiple times. You say he’s not an artist. Was he on the spectrum, do you think?”

“Are you asking if he had autism or Asperger’s?” Forbes needed to hide his irritation, considering that Ford would find the question fascinating.

Since nothing ever got by Brooklynn, she winced at his tone.

He tempered it. “I’ve seen no evidence of that. Why?”

“Maybe OCD? It’s just odd that he’d always draw the same thing. Six times in one journal, which was written over the course of months.”

He saw her point.

“It must mean something.” She nodded to the pile of manila folders Forbes had yet to put away. “Did you see similar doodles in any of his other papers?”