Page 29 of Traces Of You

She needed to stay busy.

“You will not work over forty hours a week,” Brooke said. “Ford said we can’t pay you on the books right now and I’m not taking advantage of things. I’ll pay you the same hourly rate as I do my other staff and we’ll come up with a fair amount for rent and that is what you’ll work off. The tips are yours and not added to anything else. Anyone that gives it in the form of a credit card, I’ll cash it out for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking around the table. “Thank you all.”

Her eyes were itching, her throat closing around the support she was getting from people who were ultimately strangers to her.

Coworkers she’d known for months or years couldn’t get involved in her life. But the Ridgeways weren’t just getting involved, they were getting immersed.

Thirty minutes later, she was helping Brooke clean up dinner. The rest of the family conversation centered on business and talks with Clay and his parents.

She listened and took mental notes but nothing else.

There were talks about the old barn holding events and fliers to be created. She could help there too, but she’d keep quiet on that for now. It sounded as if they had it all covered.

“Why don’t you and Gale go to Callum’s office to talk,” Brooke said. “Ford, you can stay in here and talk to Clay about his security system.”

“Come on,” Gale said. “I won’t bite.”

Ford’s sister grabbed her laptop off the counter and Reenie followed Gale down the hall and into an office covered with brown paneling.

The house was charming, rustic, and homey at the same time.

“Where do you want me to start? I don’t know how much you know about what is going on.”

“I want you to tell me everything. I’m sure we are going to have to meet more than once, but tell me what happened the night you left. I’m going to be recording this.”

“Is that safe?” she asked.

Gale reached her hand over and laid it on top of hers. “It is. I’ll transcribe it after. For now, I want in your words what happened that night. Everything you remember.”

“I told Ford, but if I think of something else, he might think I didn’t give him everything.”

“Don’t worry about that. If you want him to hear this, you can allow it. I’ll start another recording for other facts that can stay between us.”

There were things she didn’t feel comfortable talking to Ford about.

“I came home from work,” she said. “It was April first, after five thirty by then. Oliver was home with his cousin Randy.”

“What are their last names?” Gale asked. Reenie hesitated. “You need to give them. Ford won’t do anything with them. He’ll protect you.”

“Oliver and Randy Frontage. They are first cousins. The kitchen was a mess. It always is when I come home and nothing stood out there more than Oliver might have been hungry and slamming around looking for something. I realized afterward that whoever had broken into the house was looking in the kitchen as well.”

She told the story to Gale the same as she had Ford as if she was walking through it in a slow motion memory.

From slipping the sleeping pills into his dinner to breaking her plate on the kitchen floor.

The cuts on her arms and the blood on the floor and walls that she’d cleaned up. Leaving her bloody clothes in the closet.

“Were you trying to frame him for a murder?” Gale asked.

“No. I wasn’t. I’m alive. Not dead. People knew and talked around the area. They knew he abused me. He’d think I ran away and he would come find me. He wouldn’t report me missing because of the break-in. I don’t know what he was hiding or why he wasn’t telling the police, but he’d need time to clean up. If he hadn’t reported me by now, my helpers would make an anonymous call reporting my absence.”

“You said he knows some law enforcement?”

“He’s got friends on the force, but something like this couldn’t be overlooked,” she said. “This was just to buy time. Nothing more. I swear.”

“I believe you. You didn’t intend to kill Oliver Frontage when you gave him the sleeping pills mixed with the alcohol he’d drunk?”