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Keeping my gaze as steady as possible, I clenched my jaw.
“We’ve got the guy in the hospital, Marcus Jones, in custody, and we’ll be interrogating him once he’s more conscious, as well as this perpetrator, but if you know something, anything, now’s the time, Cassidy. Especially if you’re in danger,” Sheriff Jones added.
Briar’s fingers loosened around my thigh, and she slowly sat up. “I’m sorry, Cassidy,” Briar whispered just to me. “But I won’t be the reason you get hurt anymore.” I closed my eyes, knowing her suspicions and these incidents brought her to the same conclusion as they had for me. What worried me more was the fact that I wasn’t the final target. I feared I’d just been in the way, and his entire goal was to get through me to kill Briar; otherwise, that knife wouldn’t have ended up just in my arm.
I shook my head, twisting the loose hair around my fingers even tighter. “Don’t apologize. I wish it wasn’t true. I wanted to believe that they were all separate incidents and had nothing to do with Wayde,” I answered quietly, and I felt her collapse into my chest again.
The sheriff cleared his throat, and I opened my eyes. “We have no substantial evidence to support the claims that I’m about to make,” I began. “This may be better off the record until we get some results back we’re waiting on.”
Sheriff Jones pulled out a notebook and flipped it to a blank page, clicking his pen. “Fair enough, now tell me what’s going on.”
As I shared one last glance with Briar, she gave me a tight smile and faced the cop. “The name you should look into is Wayde Jenkins.” She balled her hands up, but it did nothing to stop them from trembling, and her eyes darted back toward me briefly. “I haven’t even told you everything, and I’m sorry. I should’ve, but I thought there’d be more time, I just…” Her voice trailed off as tears brimmed against the edge of her eyes.
“It’s fine, Goldie.” I gave her a tight smile and continued to braid her hair, making sure not to fumble at all in hopes that it gave her the reassurance she was seeking. Especially since there was definitely a connection between Wayde and Levi—they both had the same last name.
“Wayde Jenkins bought the farm across the street from my father and I around five years ago. It’d been foreclosed on and sitting vacant for a while, so it was exciting, to say the least, thinking someone would start fixing it up. But he did nothing of the sort. From the moment he arrived, there was something…off about him. He did really well hiding it for the first few years, but eventually every abuser slips up. Anyway, my dad called any and every authority under the sun that would listen to us in Idaho about his animal abuse.” She paused and inhaled deeply. I let the hair unravel on its own and simply began gently raking my fingers through her tresses. “Nothing ever stuck. I don’t know how he managed, but he would dissuade any and all of the officers that ever came out from pressing charges. Part of me thought it was because he was in a suspected poacher ring. My dad heard rumors and such about that. But I mean, this is a small town with mostly older couples who had kids that didn’t want the property left to them. So, I think that the authorities deciding to look the other way was a last-ditch attempt to keep some economy going.”
Sheriff Jones nodded, his pen scratching across the notebook was the only sound filling the tense space around us. “Why do you think this man is the cause of what’s happening now?” he asked without looking up from his pad.
Her entire body shuddered, and her stare distanced, glazing over as it locked against the blank wall. “He found out who was reporting him and came around threatening my dad. But Dad was a big man and didn’t scare easy. Wayde knew this, so he changed tactics.”
My heart pounded against my ribs so hard, I swore they cracked upon impact. She wasn’t about to say what I thought she was. Please tell me she wasn’t…
Taking a deep breath, her lashes fluttered over her eyes, closing off sight from her beautiful, tortured gray gaze. “He came after me. First, it was just creepy letters, then it escalated to flowers and little presents. I didn’t even know about them for a while since my dad would let the officers know and then throw it all away. But when that didn’t change anything…” A tear slid down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away. “I was walking home from Rooney’s house one night. We’d borrowed his tractor since we were waiting on a part to fix ours and I’d dropped it off. Wayde was drunk. It was late and dark. And I was…I was alone.”
Everything fell into place. Her fear of being vulnerable with me, accepting her feelings for me had nothing to do with me. Swallowing stiffly, as quietly as I could, I placed the bag of peas down on the table and gently rested my now free hand against her thigh.
“My dad told me he had no idea why he had the thought to come get me that night since I’d walked home for years by myself, but he showed up just as Wayde managed to shove my face into the dirt.” She suddenly whipped her head toward me, a waterfall of tears streaming down her face. “I fought really hard; I promise I did. I’m not weak. My daddy raised me to be strong, not a coward and—”
“You did so good, baby,” I whispered, raising my hands and quickly wiping away the tears. “You did good.”
She nodded over and over, then locked onto my eyes, silently begging for reassurance. Reassurance that she must have found as she spun back around to the sheriff and lifted her chin. “He hadn’t actually been able to hit me or anything like that yet, just tackle me to the ground before my dad showed up. Rooney, for whatever reason as well, looked out his window and saw what was going on and stopped my dad from going too far. Then a week later, my dad was dead.”
Sheriff Jones looked up and his brows stitched together. “What was the cause of his death?”
“The police in Emberwood, Idaho ruled it accidental because the roads were icy that night, and he just happened to run into a telephone pole going too fast for road conditions,” she spat angrily, not at the sheriff but at the events she was recalling.
“Yeah, the timing sounds a bit suspicious. Was Wayde’s attack on you ever reported?” he asked.
She shook her head. “My dad was worried it would only make things worse and rile him up to retaliate. Do something…more.”
He gave her a gentle smile, placing his pen down on the table. “And how did you end up here at Duke Ranch?”
“After my dad died, I probably went a little overboard, but Wayde still worried me. So, the moment the sun went down, I only left the house if Rooney came over and was with me. I locked my doors whether I was home or not, and typically only went out with the herd when I knew Rooney was home. He’d go sit on his porch and just relax…” She winced. “You know, with a shotgun in his lap.”
The sheriff chuckled as I bit back my smile.
Good on you, Goldie, I thought. Man was I proud of this incredible woman.
While I worked my fingers back into her hair, she continued. “It worked. Wayde didn’t even try to approach me, so I thought I was all in the clear until three months later, and I woke up to about five steers dead, and three more looking absolutely sick. They were gone within ten minutes. Within the next three months, every single head in the herd was dead. I’d go to bed and they’d be fine, wake up and they were dead or close enough to dead they’d be gone before the vet could come out.”
“And you didn’t install security cameras anywhere?” he asked.
She sheepishly shook her head. “I was already in debt from paying for my dad’s funeral. Rooney already helped with some of those expenses, so I didn’t feel comfortable asking him for more money.”
“That’s understandable. They can be expensive. So, what happened next?” Sheriff Jones picked his pen back up and began with his scratchings again.
She inhaled sharply, chewing on the inside of her cheek for a minute. “I did something probably stupid, but I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing at all.”
