Page 79 of Nowhere Good

Holy shit.

Vindicated, he said, “Do you have the necklace?”

A hopeless look sank her features. “No, I tried to go back and look for it, but I couldn’t find it. My dad must’ve moved it. I wish I’d at least taken a picture of it, but—I don’t have the proof, but I saw it in his room a few nights ago. I wouldn’t make something like this up, I swear.”

“Hey, I believe you,” he reassured her, and she deflated in relief. “How’d that make you feel? When you made the connection between the article and the necklace?”

“Confused. How could my dad have it if my mom was wearing it when she went missing?” She quieted for a moment. “Part of me kept thinking, maybe the poster was wrong, like, maybe my mom wasn’t even wearing it. Another part of me assumed the worst. Like maybe my dad does know what really happened to her.”

“Has he ever been violent with you or with anyone else?”

“Not like, hitting us. Not me or my sister, anyway. He could be rough with the boys. Smacking them if they did something wrong, grabbing them too hard, that kind of thing.”

“I see. So from what you’ve seen, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of character for him to be violent.”

“Not really.”

She was still holding things back, he could tell, but Claire had already given him plenty to work with. The threads were colliding—Ron’s physical and emotional power over these young men, the potential that one of them witnessed something to do with his wife’s death. A recipe for psychological trauma. And if what Claire suspected was true, about her dad being involved in drug trafficking, then the heroin itself could be part of the message. Part of what the killer was trying to expose.

“The farmhand you mentioned, who was there when your mother was still alive,” Seth said. “You said his name was Trevor?”

“Yes. Trevor Sloane.”

He wrote that down. “Is there anything else you can tell me about him? His demeanor, his attitude, anything at all?”

“Not a whole lot. I never paid much attention to him. Like I said, the farm stuff was the boys’ domain. But I do remember my dad would get frustrated with him. That was why he brought in Dylan with a Y. We usually only ever had two farmhands working at a time, but there was something about Trevor not getting enough work done.”

“You might say Trevor was a bit of a black sheep.”

“In a way.”

Seth took a moment to mull it over.

Some grudges could last a lifetime. Maybe Trevor never got over the fact that Ron “fired” him. Seth had no idea what would prompt him to come back now, but maybe his plan had been to bring an outside detective in because he assumed the Fairview police were all in Ron’s pocket. He orchestrated a homicide, brought in Robert Haylock, and gave him a map to Celine Dyer’s body.

But Haylock didn’t follow the map. He didn’t even include it in any of his reports. Maybe he told Ron Dyer about it, which gave Ron a window to go burn down the evidence and move the body somewhere else.

If any of this were true, then Seth really was in over his head here. It wouldn’t only mean re-opening a twenty-year-old case—it’d mean Robert Haylock, of all people, could have been a dirty cop. How was he going to convince Delaney—convince anyone—of that?

Not without the body.

He took a breath.

One thing at a time.

Before concluding the interview, he asked Claire to write down a list of every farmhand she could remember so he could let Chief Wells know. Claire gave him a list of six names, six possible suspects. But considering Trevor had actually known Celine Dyer, he held a firm spot at the top of that list.

He finished the recording with a simple, “Thank you for sharing all this with me, Claire. Interview concluded at 12:48 p.m.,” and shut it off.

With the recording no longer looming over them, Seth leaned back in the booth and crossed his fingers behind his head.

“Wow. That was a lot.”

“You’re tellin’ me…” Claire rubbed her arms like she was cold.

It was easy to see all this through the lens of his investigation, but these people were her family. Whether Ron murdered his wife or not, Claire’s fear of him was real. And Seth sensed she was still holding things back.

“I have to say, I don’t love the idea of bringing you back to Fairview after this,” he said. “You sure you don’t wanna get a hotel out of town or something, at least until we have a chance to look into everything? I’ll take you there. I don’t mind. I’d feel better if you weren’t in town at all until we catch the killer.”