I swallowed, fighting my rising dread. “We need to talk to him,” I said in a flat voice. “Now.”

I only hoped I could handle what he had to tell me.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“There’s no sense jumpin’ to conclusions,” Marco said as he headed toward Drum. “You don’t know it was him.”

“And I hope to God it wasn’t.” I turned to Marco. “But what if it was?”

He gave it a moment’s thought. “Then I guess you need to determine your line in the sand, your deal breaker. We know it’s unlikely he killed her, but he may have supplied her with the drugs. Especially if he believed she was going to use them on Bart. You know Hank’s committed crimes, Carly. I think you need to figure out which crimes cross the line for you. Have you given it any thought?”

“Not as much as I probably should have,” I admitted. “This shouldn’t even be a question. A year ago, I would have been horrified by all of it.”

“But a year ago, you were a different person. You’ve lived in Drum long enough to know the people here are desperate and unhappy enough to look for escape. Whether it’s goin’ to Max’s Tavern three or four nights a week to shoot the shit, hanging out at a friend’s house to get drunk, or finding an even deeper escape with drugs. I’m not condoning people gettin’ high, but to combat that kind of behavior, you need to understand why they do it. And in this case, I think you need to look at Hank’s motivation for dealin’.”

“I thought you were a sheriff’s deputy,” I said in a dry tone as I sat on my hands to quell my anxiety. “Aren’t you supposed to arrest criminals?”

“Unless you fix the disease and not just the symptoms, the cancer’s just gonna keep spreadin’,” he said with his eyes on the road.

“You sound like more of a social worker than a deputy.”

“Some days I feel like a social worker. There’s a lot of poverty and lack of education, both of which are contributors to crime. I’m no fan of Bart Drummond, but I sure hope his resort helps people around here get good jobs.” He shot me a glance. “Now let’s go over the rest of your conversation with May. Did you think she was on the up and up?”

“You didn’t?” I asked.

“It was hard to tell over the phone. I would have preferred to talk in person, but it seemed too risky.”

“Do you really think Paul would have May watched? Surely that would mean he was guilty of something. Do you think we have enough evidence to confirm that he was helpin’ Heather?”

“We don’t have any evidence. All we have are interviews, and there’s nothing directly tying him to Heather,” Marco said, “yet in my gut, I feel like he’s part of this.”

“Plus, his ex-wife confirmed that he met his girlfriends at the Mountain View Lodge, and we know Heather was meeting someone there.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Marco said. “I’m sure a lot of cheatin’ spouses go there.”

“Classy,” I said in disgust.

He turned to look at me for a second before turning back to the road. “There’s nothin’ classy about cheatin’. It’s dark and dirty, and it tears lives apart.”

“Why do I feel like you have personal experience with this?” I asked softly.

“My mother cheated on my father.”

“I’m so sorry, Marco.”

He shrugged. “She had a few boyfriends off and on over the years. I didn’t realize what was going on until I was in high school. My father is a dreamer, and I can see how my pragmatic mother became disillusioned with him and found what she was lookin’ for with someone else…and then another someone else. Mom said they stayed together for me, but it only made me feel like we’d all lived a lie. All along, she’d been cheating on him, and he knew about it. She’d end one and tell him never again. Then a year or two later, she’d start makin’ excuses about goin’ to help her cousin with her baby, or some such errand, when she was really meetin’ her latest fling.”

He paused before continuing. “I didn’t put it together at the time. I only saw my father shrink deeper and deeper into his shell. And then my senior year of high school, she thought she found the one, the guy who was worth breakin’ the cycle for, so she left. Left Dad. Left Drum. Left me the day after I graduated from high school. That guy didn’t work out, but then she found her current husband. And Dad…he was left with nothing. He lost his house in the divorce. He’d lost his wife years ago. When I went away to college, he moved to Knoxville to be close to me, but I didn’t visit him much because I blamed him for what happened. Since then, he’s retreated from the world even more. Now he lives in a one-bedroom apartment with a couple of cats.”

“You lost something too, Marco. That counts for something. That matters.”

His mouth quirked to the side as he kept his eyes on the road. “I was a grown man. They both figured I was fine on my own. Neither one of them thought to make sure I was okay. Mom was too excited to be free, and Dad just wanted to ignore everything.”

Which explained why he hadn’t called either one of them to help him after he was shot. Why he hadn’t allowed anyone to help him. He believed he couldn’t count on anyone. Funny how I’d come to believe that too.

And yet here we were, counting on each other.

“When I first found out,” he continued, “I thought, Well, that’s no surprise. Dad ignored her for years. Of course she went looking for love and comfort somewhere else. But over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time thinkin’ about their relationship and what I remember. And now I wonder if I got it all wrong. What if my father retreated deeper and deeper into his work because she broke his heart over and over again? What if I broke his heart when I chose her over him?”

“Oh, Marco…”

“I think it affected me more than I realized,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “It’s made it hard for me to trust people. To accept them at face value. My parents seemed to have a decent relationship, and my mom always acted like a good, caring person. I realize that’s why I’ve had trouble committing.”

Was that why he hadn’t been seeing women over the last few months? Because he’d been trying to sort out his feelings? Had I gotten everything wrong?

“My mother had an affair,” I said. I’d told Marco that Randall Blakely wasn’t my biological father, but I’d given him no details, and he hadn’t pressed. “I have no idea why she cheated. When I was young, my parents always seemed so happy and in love. They were trying to have another baby and couldn’t get pregnant, so they went to an infertility specialist. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect they found out my father was sterile…and that’s how he knew I wasn’t his biological child.”

I ran a hand over my head. “I was young, only eight or nine, so I only understood bits and pieces of their arguments. It wasn’t until I was much older that I put the pieces together. I realized that the accusations my father had hurled at her were about his own brother.”