Page 62

“No.”

“I have to call Piper, and I don’t want to. She’s been walking around thinking she had another sister. She’s going to be devastated. Again.”

Alli reached over and put her hand on his arm in a comforting gesture.

“He’s still not telling us everything,” she said as they reached their gate. “He was evasive when he answered the question about whether she’d changed her mind about telling Hannah.”

She had noticed. He’d had a feeling she would. It was the news reporter in her.

“I agree, but I don’t think we’re going to get any more out of him.”

“As far as I know,” she repeated. “Who says that about a woman they’ve known for thirty years?”

“Somebody who’s afraid of the answer.”

“But it doesn’t matter right now,” Sam replied. “The next mystery is back in Winslow Heights. Who is the father?”

Alli gave him a dubious look.

“Is that even our mystery to look at?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Sam admitted. “Unless Leigh wanted to tell Hannah the truth. The father may have been afraid that the road would lead back to him.”

“So he killed her?” Alli sucked in an audible breath, her eyes wide. “That’s kind of an overreaction, don’t you think? She could have just told Hannah she didn’t know who the father was.”

“We don’t know Hannah. She might not have accepted that answer, and pushed to find out on her own.”

“He didn’t know Hannah either.”

“It’s just a theory,” Sam said. “I’m not saying that it definitely happened; I’m just saying that it might have. It’s about all we have, to be honest.”

“Let’s add one more theory then,” Alli replied. “If Powell was afraid that Leigh would tell Hannah the truth, was he scared enough to kill to keep that information buried?”

Truly, Sam hadn’t wanted to think about that possibility, but he couldn’t deny it as a plausible murder motive.

“So, now we have two suspects,” Sam said. “One known, and one unknown.”

“If Leigh’s death wasn’t a robbery gone wrong, that means that someone did it on purpose,” Alli argued. “There has to be a reason. We just have to find it.”

Were there more secrets that they didn’t know about?

Leigh, who killed you? And why did they do it?

Chapter

Eighteen

Sam and Alli didn’t check bags on the flight home, so they grabbed their carry-ons and headed straight to the car. They didn’t say much on the drive until they were almost to Alli’s home, the silence stretching uncomfortably.

“I don’t want you to worry,” Sam finally said. “I’m going to work this all out. I mean that.”

“I know you do,” Alli said with a sigh. But just because he wanted to solve it didn’t mean that he could. “But there is no easy solution here.”

She was well aware of what people might say if she were transferred to a different department. They’d gossip that she couldn’t hack it as Leigh’s replacement, and hell, they might be correct in that assumption. She hadn’t been doing the job long, and Leigh might have been doing all sorts of other tasks that Alli didn’t even know about yet. The fact was, deep down she was a reporter at heart. If she’d been able to find a journalism job in town, she wouldn’t even have applied to Winslow Financial.

Did she care what other people said about her, though? She wasn’t the type that lost sleep over other people’s opinions, but this was a small town. People were already going to talk about her and Sam when they saw them together. People were going to gossip about her behind her back, whether she liked it or not. Dating a Winslow came with some baggage, and so far, she hadn’t cared. Much.

“I just want you to know that I want to make this work between us.”