Stella walked slowly back to her vehicle, turning it all over in her mind.
Steel had grown a pot crop. Had nearly gotten killed over it. He had been hanging out at the pit the other day. Chatting with teenage girls.
What would he have hoped to gain by engaging them in conversation?
Pot—the pit—teenage girls—
It was teenage girls overdosing. Ending up dead. A rash of them, just like there’d been the year her parents split up. She remembered everyone talking about it, remembered the adults’ hushed voices when they discussed it and the gossip at school. Everyone knew those girls were trouble. More than one person had said they’d gotten what they deserved.
This time around a different class of girls were getting in trouble. She recognized the family names in the paper. Rena Klein. Cecilia Holmes.
History was repeating itself but with a twist.
Why had her father and Dale been growing a pot crop the last time it happened? Why had William conceived of the plan and gotten Dale involved? Because Dale would know how to sell the pot? What had her father hoped to gain by it if not money?
Connections?
Stella paused by the door to her truck. It took connections to distribute drugs, right? Even pot? And if you teased out those connections, maybe you’d learn who was selling the other kinds of drugs in town.
Was her father trying to solve the mystery of the overdoses?
Had there even been a mystery?
Chills tingled down her spine as she opened the door and climbed in. Could she be right? Suddenly she burned to know. She put a call through to Angie Higgins, one of the other dispatchers, a woman who’d been with the Chance Creek sheriff’s department for decades.
“Angie, it’s Stella.”
“Hi, doll. You coming in today?”
“On my way. Just had a question. Remember all those overdoses that happened about thirteen years ago—those young women?”
“The prostitutes? Yeah, I remember. What a summer. Every time you turned around, one ended up dead.”
“Were they all prostitutes?” Stella was a little taken aback by Angie’s matter-of-fact description.
“Not all of them. Rough customers, though, from what I remember. Young but already on the wrong road.”
“They were accidental deaths, right? Not murders.”
There was a long pause. “You been gossiping with the deputies?”
“No. Why?”
“You’re not the only one talking about that summer. Hard not to bring it up with what’s going on out in Silver Falls.”
“So people did suspect a murderer was behind it?”
“Your dad did,” Angie answered slowly. “People thought he was off his rocker, and that’s still the general consensus today when anyone brings it up. Fentanyl is everywhere, you know. Kids don’t know how much they’re taking—they end up dead.”
“Is that what you think?”
Angie paused again. “Always thought your father was smart. Got a call coming in. See you soon.”
She clicked off. Stella pocketed her phone and started up the truck, thinking it over.
Her father had thought someone was killing those young women thirteen years ago. He’d enlisted Dale to try to infiltrate the drug community.
And then Maya and Olivia had seen their pot crop. Maya had been too young to recognize the plants for what they were, but Olivia, not so gently raised, had known right away. She’d dragged Maya back to Thorn Hill to get her away from the crop and taken her to play in her family’s barn, even though the Turners and Coopers were always fighting and Maya wasn’t allowed on Cooper property.
She might not have recognized the pot plants, but she’d definitely recognized the hides she’d seen curing there. She’d ended up telling the sheriff about them, who’d used Dale’s out-of-season hunting as an excuse to search his properties, including the hunting cabin where he’d stored firearms he’d planned to run over the border and sell in Canada.
Dale had ended up in jail, but he’d never ratted out William, Stella mused. Her father had gone back to his life as if nothing had happened. Dale had died behind bars.
No wonder her father had kept Thorn Hill solvent all those years—and made sure Steel and his siblings got their inheritance even if it strained her family’s finances.
Stella sat in the idling truck as the rain began to fall in earnest.
Now girls were overdosing again. Everyone was blaming fentanyl. But Steel had been growing a pot crop—was he trying to forge connections with the local dealers, just like his father had? Trying to discover who was giving those girls the drugs—
Or killing them?
Another shiver ran down her spine as she pictured Steel alone against an entire county’s worth of troublemakers. Some of them would resent his intrusion into their territory. Some of them would have secrets they wanted to keep hidden.
And one of them would want to silence him forever.
Chapter Three
“It’s bad for business,” Troy Melkin said when Steel caught up with him at the pit later that morning. Troy was a two-bit dealer who used far too much of his own merchandise to make it very far up the food chain, but he was chatty and sometimes let a bit of useful information slip when they hung out.
The warm sun was making the soaked ground steam. Steel had seen a junkie duck out of sight around the corner of one of the taller foundation walls, probably getting his fix. Otherwise, he and Troy were the only ones around.
“All these girls dying. Someone oughtta tell them to stay home if they’re going to be stupid like that.”
“Lot a girls coming to buy from you?” Steel asked, nudging a broken piece of concrete half-trapped in the dirt with his foot.
“To me? Nah. That’s not my clientele.” Troy grinned at the fancy word, showing off a mouthful of rotten teeth. “Wouldn’t mind, though.”
“Guess
