“Nobody ever came around looking for him? Like family?”
“No. Helena said he never had any that she or her mom knew of.”
“Huh, that’s odd.”
We sat quietly, each lost in our own thoughts, until Adam cleared his throat. “So now you know what Chelsea was blackmailing me with. You know every detail. There’s nothing else, I promise.”
Yes, now I knew the truth. But it didn’t make me feel any better than before. A terrible, tragic event had given Chelsea the means to corral Adam. Damn the person who’d told that bitch.
Suddenly angry—and naturally assuming it was Ami who’d told Chelsea—I said in disgust, “God, Adam, you all protected Ami and she repays the favor by telling Chelsea your biggest secret. What a bitch.”
“It wasn’t Ami who told her,” Adam stated all matter-of-fact.
My eyes widened. “You…?”
“God no, Maddy, are you crazy? I don’t know to this day how Chelsea found out, but I’m positive none of us ever told her.”
“But she and Ami…”
Adam cringed. He’d not known, until recently, that Ami and his one-time fiancée, Chelsea, once had had an affair. The solving of the Harbour Falls Mystery had brought that unsavory detail to light.
“I know,” he said, “but if Chelsea had had that kind of information on Ami, she would have used it, especially when she was trying to get Ami to back off. But we know she never did.” He shook his head. “No, Chelsea found out some other way.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“Because Chelsea thought I was the only one involved. She thought I had killed Ron, by myself. She had no idea Nate, Helena, or even Ami were ever even at the motel. But she knew for sure Ron Mifflin was dead. And she knew he’d died at Fowler’s.”
“You could have denied it,” I said, wondering why he hadn’t. “Maybe she was just guessing.”
“No, she wasn’t just guessing. She knew too many details…like where the crime occurred, and that Ron had been shot. She even knew where the body was buried.” I tried to interject here, to ask where they had buried Ron’s body, but Adam rushed on. “We’d dumped Ron’s car out at a lake in the woods, and Chelsea knew that, too. So, no, she wasn’t guessing.”
“Who would know all that stuff, though, besides the four of you?”
Adam shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it much in the past four years. After Chelsea went missing, I just put it in the back of my mind.”
“Did Nate and Helena know Chelsea was blackmailing you with Ron’s murder?”
“They suspected early on. How could they not? But I did everything I could to throw them off. At one point, I almost even came to blows with Nate.” I’d heard about that, but I didn’t interrupt. “I was worried if they found out; they’d do something to try to help, and I couldn’t allow them to unknowingly put themselves in that kind of danger. Chelsea had something she could get out of me—marriage—so she kept her mouth shut about what she knew. But if she had known Nate and Helena were involved…there’s no telling what inventive things she would have come up with to torment them. They’d been through enough; they didn’t deserve that.”
“So you protected your friends,” I said, placing my hand on his thigh.
He covered my hand with his own. “I did what I had to do, Maddy.”
I suddenly had another revelation. “That’s why you always had a soft spot for Ami. You never saw her as anything but a victim, because that’s what she’d been back at the motel.”
Adam rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I sure turned out to be wrong about that, now didn’t I?”
I knew he was referring to Ami’s many subsequent criminal acts, many of them perpetrated against me.
“Adam.” I twisted in my seat to face him. “We were all duped by Ami. She was once your friend and you trusted her. We all did. You acted out of kindness and trust, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He touched my cheek. “I still should have known better, Maddy.”
There was no way Adam could know everything about everyone, but I didn’t try to tell him that. And there was no point in dwelling on the past when we had problems right here and now. One of which we still hadn’t addressed.
Quietly I said, “This Ron thing…it’s not over, is it? There has to be a reason why Ami said you were in danger.”
“There is something going on,” Adam confessed.
I was sure he was about to tell me about the gold band Helena’s mom had received in October, but since I already knew, I stopped him. I had a confession of my own to make. I told Adam how I’d heard him talking with Nate and Helena in his office. He tried to give me a withering look, but he seemed too weary to be mad that I’d eavesdropped.
“What do you think is going on, Adam? Who would send that ring to Helena’s mom? Do you think it was Ami?”
“I thought it was her…but now I’m not so sure. Before tonight, I never thought the ring was really Ron’s. But, now, I do.” Adam picked up the wallet. “See, because this changes everything.”
“Why?” I asked, not sure what he was getting at. “It’s better in our hands than it was in Ami’s.”
“That’s true,” he agreed. “But I think we may have a much bigger problem. And that’s why we need to go to Fowler’s.” Adam gestured to the neon sign up ahead and put the Escalade into gear. “It won’t take long. I just need to check on something in the woods behind the motel.”
“What? Why?” I stumbled over my own words, not liking the sound of this as we drove forward and turned into the narrow motel drive. “What’s in the woods behind this place?”
Adam slowed, the neon sign momentarily bathing his face in red light.
“Ron Mifflin is buried in the woods behind this place,” he confessed
