of bids. I might have to try for it myself.”
“My goal is to make enough to keep the doors open and pay my salary until we can get a grant or two that will provide more substantial funds,” Brenda said. “But what we really need is a major donor or two who will pledge to provide ongoing support. When Henry Hake disappeared, so did the quarterly donations he made to the museum. He was our biggest supporter.”
“And here everybody thought old Henry was only interested in exploiting the town for his rich investors,” Lacy said. “I wonder if we’ll ever find out what happened to him. Travis won’t say so, but I know since they found Henry’s car in that ravine, they think he’s probably dead.”
Henry Hake was the public face of Hake Development and Eagle Mountain Resort, a mountaintop luxury development that had been stalled three and a half years ago when a local environmental group won an injunction to stop the project. Brenda’s late husband, Andy, had been a new attorney, thrilled to win the lucrative job of representing Hake. But Hake’s former bodyguard, Ian Barnes, had murdered Andy. Lacy, who had been Andy’s administrative assistant, had been convicted of the murder. Only Travis’s hard work had freed her and eventually cleared her name. But then Henry had disappeared. And only last month, a young couple had been murdered, presumably because they saw something they shouldn’t have at the dormant development site. Travis’s brother, Gage, a sheriff’s deputy, had figured that one out and tracked down the couple’s killers, but the murderers had died in a rockslide, after imprisoning Gage and schoolteacher Maya Renfro and her five-year-old niece in an underground bunker that contained a mysterious laboratory. A multitude of law enforcement agencies was still trying to untangle the goings-on at the resort—and no one seemed to know what had happened to Henry Hake or what the young couple might have seen that led to their murders.
“I guess I don’t understand how these things work,” Lacy said. “But it doesn’t seem very smart to base a budget on the contributions of one person. What if Henry had suddenly decided to stop sending checks?”
“Henry’s contributions were significant, but they weren’t all our budget,” Brenda said. “When I started here four years ago, we had a comfortable financial cushion that generated enough income for most of our operating expenses, but that’s gone now.” Her stomach hurt just thinking about it.
“Where did it go?” Lacy asked. But the pained expression on Brenda’s face must have told her the truth. “Jan!” She hopped off the desk. “She siphoned off the money to pay the blackmail!” She put her hand over her mouth, as if she wished she could take back the words. “I’m so sorry, Brenda.”
Brenda had learned only recently that before his death, Andy had been blackmailing her former boss, Eagle Mountain mayor Jan Selkirk, over her affair with Henry Hake. “It’s all right,” she said. “I can’t prove that’s what happened, but probably. But if that is what happened, I don’t know where the money went. I mean, yeah, Andy used some of it for the improvements on our house, and to buy some stuff, but not the tens of thousands of dollars we’re talking about.”
“Maybe Jan was giving the money to Henry, and his donations were his guilty conscience forcing him to pay you back,” Lacy said.
“That would fit this whole sick soap opera, wouldn’t it?” Brenda picked up a battered miner’s lantern and pretended to examine it.
Lacy rubbed Brenda’s shoulder. “None of this is your fault,” she said. “And you’re doing an amazing job keeping the museum going. These auction items should pull in a lot of money. Didn’t you tell me that book you found is worth a lot?”
The book. A shudder went through Brenda at the thought of the slim blue volume she had found while going through Andy’s things a few weeks ago. The Secret History of Rayford County, Colorado. What had at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill self-published local history had turned out to be a rare account of a top-secret government program to produce biological weapons in the remote mountains of Colorado during World War II. Was that what had whoever left the threatening note so upset? Did they object to the government’s dirty secrets being aired—even though the operation had ended seventy years ago?
In any case, Brenda’s online research had revealed an avid group of collectors who were anxious to get their hands on the volume, and willing to pay for the privilege. Thus was born the idea of an auction to fund the museum—and her salary—for the immediate future.
“I still can’t imagine what Andy was doing with a book like that,” she said. “But I guess it’s obvious I didn’t know my husband as well as I thought.”
“Whyever he had it, I’m glad it’s going to help you now,” Lacy said.
The local paper had run an article about the fund-raiser, and listed the book among the many donations received. That must be where the letter writer had found out about it. Was it just some crank out to frighten her? Could she really take seriously a letter written on yellow stationery with cartoon flowers?
But could she really afford not to take it seriously? She needed to let someone else know about the threat—someone with the power to do something about it. “Can you do me a favor and watch the museum for a bit?” Brenda asked.
“Sure.” Lacy looked surprised. “What’s up?”
“I just have an errand I need to run.” She retrieved her purse from beneath the front counter and slung it over her shoulder. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour.” She’d have to ask the sheriff to keep the letter a secret from his fiancée, at least for now. In fact, Brenda didn’t want anyone in town to know about it. She had been the focus of enough gossip since Andy’s murder. But she wasn’t stupid enough to try to deal with this by herself. She figured she could trust the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department to keep her secret and, she hoped, to help her.
* * *
DEPUTY DWIGHT PRENTICE would rather face down an irate motorist or break up a bar fight than deal with the stack of forms and reports in his inbox. But duty—and the occasional nagging from office manager Adelaide Kincaid—forced him to tackle the paperwork. That didn’t stop him from resenting the task that kept him behind his desk when Indian summer offered up one of the last shirtsleeve days of fall, the whole world outside bathed in a soft golden light that made the white LED glare of his office seem like a special kind of torture.
As he put the finishing touches on yet another report, he wished for an urgent call he would have to respond to—or at least some kind of distraction. So when the buzzer sounded that signaled the front door opening, he sat back in his chair and listened.
“I need to speak with Travis.”
The woman’s soft, familiar voice made Dwight slide back his chair, then glance at the window to his left to check that the persistent cowlick in his hair wasn’t standing up in back.
“Sheriff Walker is away at training.” Adelaide spoke in what Dwight thought of as her schoolmarm voice—very precise and a little chiding.
“Could I speak to one of the deputies, then?”
“What is this about?”
“I’d prefer to discuss that with the deputy.”
Dwight rose and hurried to head off Adelaide’s further attempts to determine the woman’s business at the sheriff’s department. The older woman was a first-class administrator, but also known as one of the biggest gossips in town.
“Hello,
