“The fire.” Outrage seared through all the other emotions that rocked Dylan to his soul. “You heartless bastard. You hired Lenny Castellano to set the fire!” His arm tightened around Gracie. “Gracie could have been killed. But that didn’t matter to you, did it? What was one more casualty, after all?”
His uncle flinched and turned to Dylan with a shamed face. “I never intended for that to happen. No one was supposed to be there. And you weren’t hurt. Neither one of you.”
Dylan’s lip curled in contempt. “No thanks to you.”
“How did Henry Stillberg enter the picture?” Fleming asked.
“As the night watchman at the factory, he knew I occasionally met Lana there. He started putting the squeeze on me for a little cash now and then. After her death, he told me the security camera had caught pictures of me carrying out the body.” He picked one of the photographs up and shook his head. “His demands escalated over the years. But I paid them. I would have paid anything to keep the story under wraps.”
“Are you Clay’s father?” the police chief asked.
Arthur’s shoulders slumped before he exposed another guilty secret he’d lived with for so long. “Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Dylan had suspected as much. “And you let everyone here think my father was the two-timer? Even Clay?”
“I couldn’t claim him. You must see that,” Arthur pleaded. “And Matt had been quite the playboy before he married. It amused him to let the reputation linger.”
“Did he know about Clay?” Gracie asked.
“He figured it out. He didn’t approve, but there wasn’t much he could do. I’d broken it off with her, but whenever I was here, she’d come around. When Lana told me there was another baby coming, she demanded that I make a choice. When I wouldn’t, she went to Matt, thinking he’d pressure me to do more for her. He offered her a generous settlement if she went away with Clayton before she had the second child. She agreed, but wanted to see me one last time, and we set up the meeting at the factory. Matt told me not to meet with her, but I went anyway.” He shook his head sadly. “When I got there, she was dead.”
“Did you love her?” Gracie asked, as if any explanation could excuse the heartache Arthur’s folly had caused for so many. One careless affair had destroyed countless lives. If that was the kind of thoughtless damage people wreaked in the name of love, Dylan wanted no part of it.
His uncle’s expression returned to icy calm. But as he took another sip of water, a tremor shook his hand. “I was crazy about her. She was so vital and alive and beautiful. Like an addiction. The sex was amazing. I couldn’t get enough of her. When I was with her, she was everything to me. But when I went home, I couldn’t picture my life with anyone but Delia. Father would have been furious. It would have been detrimental to my political future. I was torn between the two women. Truly torn.”
Chief Fleming cleared his throat and veered the narrative away from the emotional and back to the factual. “Did you get tired of being blackmailed? Agree to meet with Henry and then run him off the road?”
“Absolutely not. I didn’t even know he’d be in town. I transferred another hundred thousand dollars to him on Thursday.”
“How often did he make a demand?”
“Once or twice a year.”
“And you weren’t tired of forking over that kind of dough?”
“It was worth it to me, as long as he kept the secret.”
“Was he threatening to tell someone? Is that why you killed him?”
The sharp exchange ricocheted back and forth between them.
“No.” Arthur resumed his normal air of confidence. “As long as I paid up, he never threatened to tell, and I didn’t kill him. I think it must have been Lana’s killer who did. If he was blackmailing me, chances were good that he’d be blackmailing the actual killer, too.”
“Didn’t you ever try to find out who it was?”
“At first, but later I just tried to forget about it.”
“Not very admirable, Uncle.” Dylan’s stomach turned over.
“Few men’s secrets are. I thought you knew that.”
Dylan had heard enough. “Am I free to go?”
“Sure,” Fleming said. “Just don’t leave the county.”
Gracie accompanied him from the cramped office, and so did the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know if his head or his heart would explode first, but he needed fresh air immediately.
Outside on the steps, he bent at the waist, put his hands on his knees, and drew great gulps of air into his lungs. Gracie rested a cool hand on the back of his neck, but he shrank away from her. “I don’t think I can ever forgive him.”
“Understandable.” Her clipped voice reminded him that the unpleasant facts affected her and her loved ones, too. “He caused people I care about enormous pain and not for good or honorable reasons. I don’t picture this being a resolution Clay can embrace with pleasure.”
With his own pain almost more than he could deal with at the moment, he still felt the need to comfort Gracie. He reached out and stroked her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said, aware of the inadequacy of his words.
She wouldn’t meet his gaze, shifting her line of focus over his shoulder to the Town Square. “Not your fault.”
“It’s my family.”
“You’re related to him, you’re not responsible for his actions.” She peeked at her watch, and he remembered she had other places to be.
“You should get to the hospital.”
“I can stay here a bit longer.”
He took her hand and tugged her in the direction of the church parking lot. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
He could see her waver, but his insistence and her concern for Clay and David tipped the scales.
As they walked along, Gracie asked the question Dylan had been asking himself. “Do you really think he killed Lana? And Henry?”
In the past twenty-four hours he’d guessed that Arthur was Clay’s father. Even when the truth had stared him in the face, Dylan hadn’t wanted to see it. Too ironic to accept the fact that his father’s good name had been cleared at the expense of his uncle’s. And it hurt to know Arthur had been capable of wreaking such havoc. “The man I know couldn’t have committed murder. But obviously, I don’t know him at all.”
“If not him, then who?”
That was the million-dollar question, and one he could only guess the answer to. “I don’t know, Gracie. There are still pieces of the puzzle missing, and some of the pieces I have don’t fit.”
She tilted her head to the side and studied him. “Which ones?”
The puzzle piece with Karen Hammonds’ name on it kept coming to mind. “There are a couple of things I need to check out then I’ll tell you, okay?”
Gracie frowned. “This doesn’t bode well for our investigative partnership, does it?”
“Well, look at it this way,” he said. “We teamed up to find out who Clayton’s father is, and our quest has been overwhelmingly successful.”
“And neither one of us likes the answer.”
“Be careful what you ask for,” he said. “Isn’t that what they say?”
“I guess.” Her face fell into a dispirited expression.
“Are you going to tell Clay?”
“Probably, but it will depend on David. This is a lot to absorb, you know, on top of everything else.”
“I know.” It would probably take him a lifetime, and then some, to make sense of it.
“Will I see you later?” she asked as they stopped beside her car.
Dylan shrugged. He couldn’t seem to think straight. Bleak thoughts whirled around in his head. His relationship with Gracie was a more challenging complication than he could deal with at the moment. “You heard the police chief. I can’t go very far.”