Benjamin and Luna pulled up to the ranch, and immediately he wanted to leave. Luna sensed his apprehension and reached for his hand. “I’m right here. If you want to stay, we can stay. If you want to go, we can go. I’ll follow your lead.”
Knowing that she had his back no matter what gave him the strength to nod and say, “Let’s get this over with,” and exit the car with a strengthened resolve.
“It’s a gorgeous place,” he acknowledged, almost hating it for its beauty. Nothing should look this good when something terrible had happened behind its walls. “If it were up to me, I’d burn it to the ground.”
Luna regarded the sprawling ranchette with the same apprehension. The rigid set of her shoulders mirrored the tension roiling in him. “It likely won’t sell locally,” she shared. “It’ll have to sell to someone looking to relocate to Cottonwood but even then, houses with violent pasts are a hard sell.”
“Whether it sells or not, I couldn’t care less. The money means nothing to me.”
“You could donate the proceeds to a charity Charlotte supported,” Luna suggested.
“Not a bad idea,” he agreed, considering the possibility. “Charlotte would approve of something like that.”
He wasn’t superstitious by nature, but he couldn’t help but believe trauma clung to the ranch’s framework like a hidden virus, lurking in the timbers to contaminate any future joy. He still thought the best course of action would be to burn it down.
But Luna gently rubbed his shoulder, saying, “Someone will buy it and it will be a happy home again. Charlotte loved this house. Just because something bad happened here doesn’t mean that it can’t be a wonderful place for someone else. My mom once told me that an ending for one person is a fresh start for someone else and I think Charlotte would agree.”
“You’re right,” he conceded but for him, it would always be tainted.
Luna pointed at the gazebo off to the left. “According to Mark Duncan, that’s the gazebo he built for Charlotte and Roger and why his prints were all over the garage.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I do. He has no motive. I looked into his background and he’s not a killer.”
Benjamin grunted in agreement, but where did that leave them? With nothing. “Who could have motive to wipe out an entire family? I mean, you’ve got to be a stone-cold killer to kill two defenseless little kids.”
Luna nodded. “Whoever did this is definitely a sociopath.”
Upon entry, the smell of bleach and harsh chemicals assaulted Benjamin’s nostrils. He rubbed at the tingle in his sinuses. “At least the company I hired to do the hazmat cleanup did a good job.” The place was pristine. Any evidence of the tragedy was gone. They’d cleaned away the broken glass, washed the blood, replaced the soiled carpet and put a fresh coat of paint where it was needed. It was showroom ready and looking to seduce future buyers.
He closed his eyes, remembering the last time he was here—Christmas three years ago.
Charlotte, beaming as the consummate hostess, bringing countless baked goodies to the table as if she were feeding an army and not just her family and brother; her joy was contagious.
“I made your favorite—banana cream pudding—and you have to try the macarons. I’ve fine-tuned the recipe and they’re as perfectly French as they will ever be.”
He’d chuckled at her determination to master a French pastry. “I’m sure they’re delicious. I’ve never tasted anything you’ve made that hasn’t been perfect.”
“There isn’t a single dessert my wife can’t recreate with the precision of a classically trained pastry chef,” Roger had cooed, kissing Charlotte on the cheek, which had elicited groans from the boys that Benjamin felt in his bones.
But now that memory hit differently.
Maybe he’d been a real dick to Roger when all the man had wanted was to be a good husband.
He shook off his thoughts before they ran away from him. “Where should we start?” he asked, clearing his voice, but as he looked to Luna, her hollow expression stopped him. “Luna?”
“I’m fine,” she said too quickly to be true. Luna looked away, but not before he saw the pain. He wasn’t the only one struggling. Luna had found their bodies. He couldn’t imagine the horror of her memories. It was bad enough to find her best friend, but to find the boys, too? Hell, if he’d been the one to find them, he might’ve lost it completely. She looked to Benjamin, her eyes glassy, admitting in a strangled voice, “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”
“C’mere,” he murmured, pulling her into his arms to hold her tightly. She trembled in his embrace, and he absorbed the pain rolling through her as if it were his own.
Luna shuddered and reluctantly pulled away, wiping at her eyes. “Sorry, I got overwhelmed. I didn’t think it would hit me like that,” she admitted, embarrassed.
“No need to apologize,” he assured her, giving her distance. The best course of action was to get what they needed and get the hell out. He drew a deep breath and glanced around, puzzled. “So, where should we start? The office, maybe?”
“It’s that way,” she said, pointing down the hallway.
They walked into the office, expecting the same level of tidiness as the garage, given that Roger liked his space to be organized, but that’s not what they saw.
“What happened here?” Luna asked, troubled. “Do you think the cleaners didn’t clean in here?”
“No, they were supposed to clean the entire house, top to bottom,” he answered, equally troubled.
It looked like a tornado had ripped through the room. Papers were scattered about the floor, books tossed from the bookshelves, and the desk drawers had been emptied seemingly in a frenzy.
“What the hell?” he murmured, shaking his head. “Maybe thieves looking for easy cash?”
But Luna’s alarmed expression told a different story. “They’re still looking for something that was left behind. Don’t touch anything.”
Luna and Benjamin donned gloves to protect the scene, and Luna called dispatch to get forensics back out there, but while they waited, Luna pushed everything else out of her brain to focus on the smallest details.
“Whoever came back was looking for something specific, something they thought Roger would have in his office, which tells me it was something business-related,” Luna said, thinking out loud. “One of the original items missing was Roger’s laptop, so whatever had been worth killing over must not have been on the laptop, which sent them back to the ranch to look.”
Benjamin nodded, following her bread crumbs. “So, something they assumed would be on the laptop... Financial information maybe?”
“If not an electronic device, then something written in longhand,” Luna processed, slowly circling the room as she searched her brain. A childhood memory jumped out of nowhere. “Charlotte used to journal,” she remembered. “But she used to have to hide the journals from your dad. She’d hide them in the floor vent.”
This was news to Benjamin, but he quickly followed Luna and ran up the stairs to the master bedroom. She systematically went to each vent, carefully pulling it free from the ceiling and feeling around for anything that didn’t belong. Finding nothing, she went to the last vent on the floor, nearest the bed. She pulled the vent and exclaimed as she lifted a small notebook from the closed-off vent.
“Holy hell, you found something?” Benjamin said in shock. “What’s it say?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.” She flipped the notebook open and started skimming the contents. It felt like an invasion of Charlotte’s privacy to read her journal, but it couldn’t be helped.
Luna read a passage out loud.
Roger thinks he’s found a way to get us out of this terrible mess, but I don’t see how it’s going to work. We could lose everything, but we’d be alive. Roger says not to worry, that he’s got a plan, but I’m real scared. I wish we’d never agreed to take on The Book. The money isn’t worth the risks we’re taking.
“What book?” Benjamin asked, confused.
“I don’t know,” Luna murmured. “Maybe like a black book or something? A ledger of illegal activity?”
He nodded. “That makes sense. If Roger was doing the books for shady people, the black book would be a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.”
“It would also be the most incriminating piece of evidence that people would do anything to protect,” she said.
Luna skimmed down farther, her heart jumping into her chest at the last entry.
Me and Roger got into an argument tonight. He won’t let me tell Luna what’s going on, but I know she’d find a way to keep us safe if she knew what was going on. He said we can’t take that chance. He assured me he has a way out, but I have to be patient. How can I pretend everything’s okay when I’m scared to death most days? Maybe I should put the boys in the car and just drive away. I can’t take much more of this stress. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Not ever. What am I going to do?
Luna closed the journal, her throat closing. “That was her last entry,” she said, her voice hoarse. Damn it, Charlotte, why didn’t you tell me you were in trouble? She looked to Benjamin, her heart breaking. “I would’ve done anything in my power to keep her and the boys safe.”
“I know,” he said, stricken. “And she knew that, too. She put her faith in Roger and it cost them.”
Luna wiped at her eyes. “We have to find this book Charlotte was talking about. Whatever is in that book is what got them killed.”
“And whoever killed them thinks it’s still in this house.”
Luna didn’t have the resources to post a patrol outside the residence, but she couldn’t afford to let whoever killed Charlotte waltz in and out of the ranch at their leisure while they continued to look for The Book.
“We don’t have the manpower to post an officer 24/7,” she said. “I’ll have to stay out here and keep the place locked down.”
“Hell no, that’s not happening. You’d be a sitting duck out here in the middle of nowhere with no backup available if you got into trouble.”
“What choice do I have?”
“Then I’m staying with you.”
“I can’t let you do that,” she protested.
“There’s no discussion that ends with you staying in this giant house by yourself,” he said firmly. “If you can’t get your department to cough up the extra dough for another patrol officer out here, you’ll have to make do with me.”
Luna didn’t want to stay in the house alone but was it right to ask Benjamin to put his life on the line for her? No, it was not.
But he wasn’t going to budge. She could see from the set jaw and hard press of his lips that it would take an act of God to get him to change his mind, and that wasn’t likely to happen.
“Fine but I don’t like it,” she said with a glower.
“That makes two of us,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anything happen to you. At this point in my life, you’re the last person who means anything to me and that’s just the facts.”
Luna blinked back the sudden tears. It was possibly the sweetest and most messed-up thing anyone had ever said to her, and she didn’t know if she ought to be flattered or angry.
Maybe a little of both.
But the truth was, she wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep if left alone in that house.
It wasn’t that she believed in ghosts, but this would be a hell of a time to discover they were real.
They could use some luck right about now.
Luna worried they were running out of time to solve this case.