Mo swore. “Tell me who the man was.”
“Tell me why I should? Tricia’s dead. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone ever, especially you.”
“How long had she been seeing him?”
Hope looked away for a moment. “Over a year.”
Brick heard Mo emit a painful sound that made Hope smile. But he knew what Mo had to be thinking. There was the possibility that the baby had been her sister’s lover’s and not Tricia’s husband’s—just as Natalie had questioned.
“Was she in love with him?” Mo asked.
Hope shrugged. “At first it was just a fling. She didn’t think it would last. I think she realized that she’d gotten married too young and she wanted to see if she’d missed out on something. Apparently she had. It was thrilling, she said. I think it was fun because it was a secret. No one knew but me. Your sister knew what you’d say if she told you.”
Mo seemed to ignore that. “Did you meet him?” Brick saw the answer. “So you never met him.”
“They had to keep it secret. Billings may be the largest city in Montana, but it isn’t so large that you can have an affair and people don’t find out,” Hope said.
“So you don’t know his name,” Brick said, making the woman look over at him. He got the feeling she’d forgotten all about him until then.
“I didn’t need to know his name,” Hope said irritably. “But why should I tell you even if I did know?” she demanded of Mo.
“Because I have reason to believe Tricia didn’t kill herself.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“So...” Hope was frowning again. “You think someone killed her?” Mo said nothing. “You can’t think it was Andy.”
“Andy?”
Brick saw that Mo’s eyes had widened in surprise. “Who is Andy?” he asked.
“A friend of Thomas’s.”
MO COULDN’T BELIEVE THIS. “Andy? It’s Andy?”
“She never told me it was Andy,” Hope said quickly, backpedaling. “Just that it was someone from college, someone she’d had a crush on.”
With relief, she realized that if Natalie had been telling the truth, the man Tricia had been having the affair with was blond and more than six feet tall. Andy was short and dark-haired.
She looked at Hope, wanting to throttle the woman. “So you never saw him, never met him. I’m beginning to wonder if Tricia even confided in you.”
“She did!” the woman cried. “She was in love and heartbroken because she didn’t want to hurt Thomas.”
“She was in love?” This wasn’t adding up. “I thought it was just a fling?”
“At first. She thought it was just for fun, but then it turned into something else and then...” Hope looked away.
“And then she got pregnant,” Mo guessed. All those months of trying to get pregnant with Thomas’s child and suddenly she had an affair with another man and got pregnant. “Whose baby was Joey?”
Hope shook her head. “She didn’t know. She was in a panic. I tried to get her to take a DNA test before the baby was born.”
“Did she?”
The woman shook her head. “She was determined that it was Thomas’s. She broke off the affair. She told me her boyfriend was really upset.”
Mo thought about the emotional roller coaster Tricia had been on during her pregnancy. No wonder she’d been all over the place. “Did her boyfriend not want the baby?”
“Oh, no, he wanted it. He wanted her to leave Thomas and marry him, but she was having second thoughts, regrets, you know. Thomas had found out that she was pregnant and was so happy that she convinced herself that it was his and lied to her boyfriend about taking the test. She said the baby was her husband’s and that the affair was over.”
“But she didn’t know who Joey’s father was?”
Hope shook her head. “Then when he was born with so many medical problems and the doctor said he probably wouldn’t live...”
Mo knew her sister. “She blamed herself.”
“I told her it was stupid. That it was just bad luck.”
Mo sat back on the couch. This explained so much. Natalie must have seen how out of control Tricia had been. Once she saw Tricia with the other man... “If you think of anything she might have said about the man that might give me a clue who he was...”
“Like I said, she didn’t tell me that much about him. Mostly she talked about the way he made her feel. He was like her. He loved animals.” Mo thought about her sister’s disappointment that she couldn’t have a dog because Thomas was allergic. “And he was romantic,” Hope was saying. “One time he carved their initials into a tree.”
Mo pulled out of her thoughts to look at the woman. “Where was this?”
“On a camping trip they took some weekend when Thomas was at one of his seminars. Their inside joke was how taken Thomas was with the Jeffrey Palmer seminars.” She looked over at Brick. “Jeffrey Palmer is a self-made millionaire. He gives leadership seminars that he charges a fortune for so others can believe they might one day be rich, too. Thomas idolizes him and never misses one of his seminars, especially since his company sends him along with his associates so they can become leaders.”
“The carving on the tree,” Mo said pointedly. “Where was it exactly?”
Hope seemed to give it some thought. “I think it was near Red Lodge by a creek.” She shrugged. “I just remember how happy Tricia was.”
“Until she wasn’t.”
“I hope you find him. I do remember that when Tricia told me about breaking up with him over the pregnancy, she didn’t come out and say it, but I could tell that she’d been worried about how he was going to take it. She said he was so angry, she’d never seen him like that, and she was sure that she’d done the right thing by breaking it off, but then later he called. She sat right here and cried her heart out. I think she really loved him.”
Mo felt her
