North Country(127)
“They’re cute when they sleep, aren’t they?” Jon murmurs, watching us with a secretive smile. “That’s how they get ya.”
“His luck is gonna run out one of these days, I swear.” My father lifts his hat from his head to brush the sweat off his brow before replacing it, our eyes on Mak in the pasture. The ranch hand moves in with ease, the tagger in his right hand, ready to chip the newborn calf. The cow bison watches on the other side, but other than a tail swish and a paw against the dirt, she doesn’t react.
“I don’t think it’s luck. That guy is a bison whisperer.” And possibly an adrenaline junkie.
“Maybe you’re right.” Dad pauses. “His ancestors are from the Siksika tribe, out in Alberta.”
“Yeah, Mom wrote me an entire letter about it.” She detailed the First Nation’s entire history with the plains bison and how they revered the animal.
The sound of approaching hooves from the east has both of us turning.
My heartbeat skitters with excitement as I spot Emery riding in on Flapjack at an easy canter. She’s home from work and out of uniform, her lengthy hair flowing freely. She’s been scarce around here as they work overtime to build the case against the Bale House owner.
“Something tells me she’s not coming to see me. I hope it’s good news.” With a salute her way, my dad ambles over to the UTV and continues on his lap to check the fence line.
I can always sense Emery’s mood as readily as rain arrives with the clouds, and now there’s a lightness to her approach, though she looks weary.
“When was the last time you were on a horse?” I call out.
She closes in. “It’s been a few years. Can you tell?”
“Nope.” My hand smooths over Flapjack’s muzzle before reaching for her jean-clad calf, offering her an affectionate squeeze and a playful smirk. “You’ve always been a natural at riding.”
She shakes her head, her cheeks flushing at my double meaning.
“So? What’s new?”
She takes a deep breath and then her expression breaks with a wide smile. “Matt confessed.”
“Seriously?”
She climbs down from the saddle. “He confessed to everything. We have it all on record.” She wears a stunned look that matches how I feel.
I listen quietly as Emery describes in detail everything she’s probably not supposed to tell me—how Matt went out back to grab a quick cigarette that night, only to discover a drunk and emotional Holly waiting for him, upset that he was ignoring her after they’d hooked up a few weeks before and he was now dating a server. She begged for another chance and, in an effort to calm her down, Matt had sex with her in the back seat of his car.
That genius move didn’t fix his problem. Holly insisted that Matt sneak her back into his bar. She refused to leave, sobbing hysterically and threatening to tell Shawna and everyone else what they’d just done. He needed to get back before someone noticed him gone and came out looking. She grabbed his arm and when he tugged it free, she lost her balance and fell, hitting her head on a protruding sharp part of the dumpster.
Holly didn’t get up.
Matt panicked. He knew his DNA was all over the fifteen-year-old girl.
So he did the only thing he could think of in that moment to protect himself—he popped his trunk, tossed her body in, and then went back inside, stopping in his office to change his soiled T-shirt while he was at it.
“I still can’t believe I didn’t catch it. Or the fact that I hadn’t seen the Civic in months.”
“Come on. You didn’t suspect him, so why would you notice that? And how many people have viewed the feed and nobody caught that.” I sure as hell wouldn’t have. “Plus, you said he was only gone for nine minutes? How do you do all that in such a short window?”
“She was in a skirt and he was in a rush …” Emery’s voice fades, her face pinching with repulsion. “He wrapped his denim shirt around her to try to stop the bleeding and said he was going to call 911.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. He threw her in his trunk and then went back inside to serve more drinks and pretend everything was okay.” Emery pauses a beat before she continues. “But then Matt remembered her phone. And the blood. So, fifteen minutes later, he pretended to need something from his office and went outside again to search Holly’s body and purse for it, then the ground. He admitted to wiping a rag over the fork pocket where she hit and digging up the blood-soaked gravel, dumping it all into his trunk. Somewhere in Lake Temagami, there’s a shovel from the Bale House.”
Emery goes on to describe the other things she started seeing through a different lens as she berates herself for not suspecting Matt from the start—the three glasses he broke, how Shawna struggled to grab his attention several times and he jumped when she touched his shoulder, how he spent less time chatting with customers than usual. They’re all subtle on their own—until she compared Matt before and after those fateful nine minutes when Holly died.
“She was likely still alive right after she hit her head. That’s what the autopsy showed. I mean, I doubt they could have saved her, but if he’d called for an ambulance, at least she wouldn’t have died alone in a trunk, stored like a piece of luggage.” Emery’s eyes well with tears, but she blinks them away. “Shawna obviously had no clue. When he said he was too tired to spend the night, she didn’t think anything of it.”