Chapter 38

38

Dylan couldn't stop shaking. They were dead. Both of them. Right in the middle of the ravine behind the inn. She would never forget how they looked.

Quade had almost carried her back into the inn. He'd told Marin to call the police, but Sage had already been there eating dinner with her husband. Quade had told Sage there were dead men back there while Dylan was practically clinging to his neck.

He had been the one to take Sage back up the hill. To show her. But Dylan couldn't. She didn't want to go back there, ever. But she stood at the window.

Now there were lots of cops back there, and people were talking.

They knew there were dead men behind the inn. They hadn't been dead very long, but they were dead. And now…

Dylan stood next to the big windows in the lobby, watching as people walked around the back of the inn. The dead guys were actually mostly on Brandt Barratt's property and not the inn's. She'd been six feet past the boundary when she'd tripped over the first.

Someone came up behind her. A blanket dropped over her shoulders. She looked up. Into her sister Dixie's face. Dixie wrapped an arm around her. "I'm sorry you had to find them."

Dylan just nodded. What could she say? "I just…fell. Right over them. I landed on that guy's chest. The blood was frozen. He wasn't any older than me, Dixie. And he had a bullet wound in his head."

Dylan would never forget.

"I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry you had to see that." Dixie just pulled her closer and rocked a little. Dylan fought the urge to cling to her big sister and cry.

Then her father was there, demanding answers. Dylan took one look at him and started crying even more. Then her dad's arms were around her, and he was holding her close. Like he used to when she was just a little girl trying to make sense of things somehow.

Sometimes, sometimes, she wished they had never come to Masterson County. But then she wouldn't have her new sisters, too.

Then there was a woman there. She recognized her as Dusty's friend Claudia. She was a police officer, too.

"Dylan, I need to ask you a few questions, okay? We can sit down over here."

Dylan wiped her face and nodded. Pulled the blanket around her shoulders.

She could do this. She could. Then she was going to go hide in her room up in the attic and just pretend life was the way it used to be. When she didn't know about the nightmares in this place. When she just didn't.