Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
“Hey, Lee. What’s going on?” Ramsey greeted, his voice light and almost chipper.
The man leaned around him, sweeping his gaze through the room. “I’m going to need you to step out front with me.”
Ramsey nodded. “Okay. No prob. My girl’s naked though. Can she have a minute to get dressed?”
Lee, who I assumed was his parole officer, pursed his lips. “One minute. You can get dressed too. Stay out of the bathroom though. Don’t let me hear that toilet flush.”
What. The. Hell?
Lee disappeared down the hall, and Nora bulged her eyes at her brother before following after him.
Keeping the sheet pulled to my chest, I rose to my knees and whispered, “What’s going on?”
Ramsey shut the door and spun on a toe. “I have no fucking clue.” He snagged my clothes off the floor and threw them at me.
“Are you in trouble?”
He yanked his top drawer open. “I don’t know.”
Bile crawled up the back of my throat. “Have you done anything wrong?”
He stepped into a pair of gray sweats and then tugged on a white fitted T-shirt. “I don’t fucking know! Just get dressed.” He threw a black hoodie my way and then marched to the door. “Put that on. You can see your tits through that goddamn tank top.”
Wow. Okay, then. I was too nervous to argue or bitch at him for being crass.
He waited until I was fully dressed and standing next to him before we exited the room.
My apprehension climbed as we walked down the short hallway together. Desperate for reassurance, as much as I wanted to offer him the same, I reached for his hand. He pulled it away.
“Stewart,” Lee called, motioning us over.
My heart stopped as I took in the cops removing the couch cushions and using flashlights to search the cracks. Nora was standing in the kitchen, watching a female officer go through the cabinets. The second our eyes met, she hurried over.
“It’s okay. Just relax,” she soothed, tugging me in for a side hug. She gave Ramsey an arm squeeze. “You’re going to be fine. This isn’t a big deal.”
My back shot straight when he looked at her and smiled. “I know.”
He knew? He was smiling and he knew? Funny because, in the bedroom, he was on the verge of jumping out the window and didn’t know a damn thing. Though I really liked the idea that things were going to be fine. And he “knew” it, so I let it slide.
“What’s going on?” Ramsey rumbled when we made it to the front door.
Lee planted a hand on his hip. “I need all of you to step out front with me for a few minutes. Clovert PD got an anonymous tip that you were selling coke out of the back of Joe Hull’s barbershop. They called me. I had to drag my ass out of bed on a Saturday morning, so I’m sure you can imagine how happy this made me.”
“What?” I gasped.
And then, as if I weren’t already shocked enough, Ramsey barked a loud laugh, nearly causing me to have a heart attack. “You gotta be shitting me? I wasn’t even in on a drug charge.”
I peered up at him in wonder.
What the hell was happening? I mean, seriously. What. Was. Happening?
Ramsey knew. He was smiling. And now he was freaking laughing?
I was about to lose my mind or possibly dry-heave—I hadn’t quite decided which—and he was laughing?
Lee walked out front, calling over his shoulder, “Well aware, Stewart. But you’ve been out less than two weeks. We gotta follow up on this. Quick search. We’ll be gone in an hour. Though I am going to need you to hit my office before end of day and piss in a cup.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, but he did it pressing his lips into the top of my hair and then guiding me out the door with his hand on the small of my back, so I decided to postpone my freak-out for a few minutes longer.
Unfortunately, I only got a few seconds.
And that was because none other than Clovert’s finest, Officer Jonathan Caskey, was standing in my driveway, leaning against his police cruiser.
Suddenly, everything and nothing at all made sense.
Nora and I had moved the twenty minutes from Clovert to Thomaston for a reason. And while it wasn’t completely because Josh’s older brother was a decorated officer in the Clovert Police Department, that had made our decision easier. I had no reason to hate Jonathan. He hadn’t raped me. He’d never even spoken to me. But his flat-out refusal to see his brother for the deviant he truly was made my skin crawl.
Each year on the anniversary of Josh’s death, Jonathan would host a stupid fundraiser for victims of bullying. Bullying! Like Josh hadn’t terrorized multiple innocent women. For a week, the whole town would wear green—a nod to Josh’s St. Patrick’s Day birthday—and the local newspaper would write a completely biased, utterly trash article about the Caskeys’ devastating loss.