Taylor hesitated. Ashe’s fear touched him, but he didn’t want to come back to this house. It wasn’t just having a gun pointed at him or Ashe’s drinking or his troubling passive-aggressive comments. He wanted to see Will, talk to Will, get Will’s take on the situation. He wanted to sleep in Will’s arms, listen to the reassuring beat of Will’s heart, and take a moment to appreciate how very lucky they were. How lucky he was.
At the same time, the whole point of this was to help Ashe. And if Ashe was truly afraid?
But then Ashe made it easy for him. “One last night together. For old times’ sake?” His smile was sort of sly, sort of hopeful.
Taylor said, “What about Josip?”
“I won’t tell Will if you don’t tell Josip.”
Taylor smiled, shook his head. “Thanks. But I think we better let our last goodbye stand.”
Ashe laughed. “It was a record breaker. Wasn’t it?”
Taylor smiled again, continued down the steps.
Ashe called after him, “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
* * * * *
Ashe was right about one thing.
Down at the Carpinteria sheriff’s station, they did indeed think Mr. Dekker had, at the very least, toyed with burning down his mother’s house for the insurance money.
The interesting part was nobody blamed him.
“It’s a hell of a situation,” Lt. Don Capaldi told Taylor. “He needs money, but because of this lowlife loser, he can’t sell the house.”
Capaldi was a genial-looking fiftysomething with thinning gray hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and warm brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.
“How is it that Zamarion and the others managed to take possession of that house without anyone noticing?”
“We did notice,” Capaldi said. “The whole valley noticed. But he and his girlfriends had been living there with the old lady for several months before she passed away. Zamarion claimed she was leaving the house to him, that it was in her will.”
This was at odds with Ashe’s story, but Taylor was not entirely surprised. It had seemed unlikely a tribe of hippies could have moved into that house and lived there for two years without anyone noticing.
“What about the will?” Taylor asked.
“There is no will.” Capaldi smiled grimly at Taylor’s expression. “Exactly. Mrs. Dekker died intestate. It seems like there had been some rift with her son, which is why, I guess, it took him so long to come back. If his trust fund hadn’t run out, I don’t know that he would have come back at all. I don’t know that he’d have cared about the house or who lived there. But now he needs to sell the place, and Zamarion is standing in the way.”
Hell. It was all starting to add up.
Or was it?
“But since there’s no will, wouldn’t the house automatically go to Ashe?”
“Yes. Correct. Well, technically, the estate is in probate, but it’s all going to go to Dekker. The main asset is the house, from what I understand. If Zamarion still had possession of the property, it might be more complicated, but rightly or wrongly, he and his family were evicted.” Capaldi cleared his throat. “Anyway, the most he can do is sue for wrongful eviction and destruction of private property, but I can tell you that he’s not likely to find a sympathetic jury in Carpinteria.”
“But you said Zamarion is standing in the way of Ashe selling the house.”
“That’s right. Because when you sell a house, you have to declare if there are any liens or claims against it. Well, Zamarion is claiming that there was a will naming him as the sole beneficiary, that Dekker destroyed it, but that he, Zamarion, has a copy of one of the original drafts. He’s supposed to have hired some shyster lawyer to stop any attempt to sell the house. That’s the rumor anyway.”
“I…see.”
“I don’t know if it’s true. And of course, I’m no lawyer. But I sincerely doubt anyone or anything is going to court. Zamarion is just a nuisance.”
“Just a nuisance? Then you don’t think he tried to run Dekker off Toro Canyon Road?”
Capaldi sighed. “I don’t know if he did or not. Zamarion is an unsavory customer. But we can’t do a whole hell of a lot with a single pair of skid marks and no witnesses.”
* * * * *
It was after eleven in the evening when he finally made it home.
The kitchen light was on, the house otherwise dark and silent. Well, not entirely silent. Riley came to greet him, tags jangling, tail wagging.
“Hey, Riley.” Taylor knelt, murmuring to the dog.
No sign of Will, though. Which was to say, there was every sign that Will was home but had already gone to bed.
Well, not already, because it was late, but not that late. Usually they tried to stay up for each other. Usually they came in together.
Taylor considered the rather heavy silence as he patted Riley.
If Will was really that beat, he didn’t want to wake him, but it was disappointing. He had wanted to talk over the day with him, talk over the things he had learned, the things he was still trying to figure out, the things that worried him. A lot of things were worrying him.
But Will had probably had a tiring day himself—made more tiring by the fact that Taylor hadn’t been there to shoulder his half of it.
He was guiltily conscious that, as weird and frustrating as his day had been, he was sort of relieved he hadn’t had to sit through another round of meetings at Webster Fidelity.
Was Will sleeping? Because the house had a listening quality to it.
No. Will would not be lying there…what? Sulking because Taylor hadn’t made it to any of the day’s meetings? Because he hadn’t made it home for dinner?
He moved quietly around the house, poured himself a glass of water, drank it, checked the fridge for something to eat, tried to decide between a bowl of granola and an English muffin, and gave up.
He turned off the stove light,
