Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“Did Jeff tell you this?” Harry queried.
Tru shook his head.
“Not back then, though Linc knew it, because Jeff told him. Even Kennedy didn’t know it, until about an hour ago at the hospital, when Jeff told us. I knew bits and pieces. Nothing about Sharon, except Lincoln’s concerns about her. I only knew that Mom and Dad were dead. For some reason Jeff shot them. Linc was going to go down for it. And we all had to look after Jeff because he was fourteen, he got his head mixed up, so he was troubled.” Again, he nearly spat his last word. “The rest of this is brand-new to me.”
And now they had the explanation behind his detached demeanor and the slow leaking in of emotion.
He was just finding this crap out.
Christ.
He had to feel like he’d been hit by a train.
Harry asked Riggs’s question when he said, “Why do you think Lincoln didn’t tell you about Sharon?”
“At first, because I was only seventeen,” Tru answered readily. “Then, I was in college, grad school, residency. Frankly, sheriff, Linc loved me, and his son took my mom and dad. Jeff had already fucked up my life. It was a lot, and all of this is a whole lot more, specifically, Jeff being weak enough to fall for her crap. So I don’t think he wanted dealing with Jeff fucking up my entire future.”
Lincoln Whitaker was clearly a solid guy.
Tru was still talking.
“Now, Jeff’s freaked that he’s finally going to have to face up to what he did to our family, and he’s freaked Sharon is going to throw him under the bus. And mark my words, she will. So, now, he lays this quagmire on Kennedy and me, asking us to help him out. Consequently, Kennedy is also freaked. Though, I don’t think she’s too broken up about Jeff. She’s pissed as hell he’s still been hanging with Sharon, when, after we lost Lincoln, he promised her he’d ceased all communication with her.”
“Why didn’t your uncle deal with his estate appropriately?” Harry asked another question Riggs wanted to know.
“Honestly?” Tru asked in return.
Harry nodded.
“I don’t know,” Tru said. “It’s been a total headache. I’m done with it. When he came to visit me after getting out of prison, he was all about us getting back to the lake. Pulling together the pieces of our family. Seeing to Jeff. Helping him heal. Like I had a lot of interest in doing that, which I didn’t. But I had interest in helping Lincoln pick up the threads of his life, and I was all in to do that. And if part of it was dealing with Jeff, okay. Linc was the only parent I had left, so I loved him enough, if that was what he needed, I was there. So when I got the call the day after he left me, telling me that he’d committed suicide, I was heartsore, sick with it, but also, I was utterly staggered.”
Harry didn’t give anything to that, like the fact that there was a reason to be surprised, seeing as his uncle might have been killed.
But at least that was an explanation of why the estate was a mess.
As far as Lincoln was concerned, he’d given instructions as to how to use the money on the kids while he was in prison.
Then, he was out, and since he was alive, and fresh from doing time for a crime he didn’t commit, he was intent on dealing with other things. Not seeing immediately to his estate, when he was only fifty years old, he thought he had a lot of life left to live.
Harry moved them in a different direction.
“Do you know what they were looking for at the lake?”
For the first time, straight out, the guy showed his feelings.
He smiled, huge, and said, “Yeah. That was something Lincoln did tell me.”
“And it is?” Harry prompted.
“Lincoln didn’t write the books after the first three, but he worked closely with Dad, and bottom line, he was still a thriller writer. And I know this was to get back at Sharon. So, when she visited him in jail, he told her he printed out Dad’s last manuscript after she’d left, deleted the digital files, took the pages and some contracts he told her he’d persuaded Dad to sign, which sold the movie rights to the next six books in Dad’s flagship series, put them in a lockbox and buried them somewhere by the lake before he called the cops.”
“Why would he bury those things?” Harry inquired.
“He didn’t,” Tru declared. “There wasn’t a last manuscript, and there wasn’t a contract. Lincoln had given up on talking Dad into selling more, because the attention made Dad uncomfortable, and Lincoln felt that, literally. But Sharon came to Dad first as a huge fan. The main character of the books has an identical twin, no surprise, and I think in her twisted head, she thought Dad was Lucas Washington. And if there’s a missing Roosevelt Lincoln book, it’d be worth a lot of money. And if there was a contract for film rights, that’d be worth a lot more. And those were what I figure Jeff was after. And for his part, he couldn’t have any of the rest of us knowing until he figured out how to cut everyone else out and get a lock on my father’s estate.”