Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
So again, lore that involved the lake was not what Rus expected to hear.
Rus didn’t like hearing unexpected things.
He also didn’t get the chance to ask, Moran kept telling him about Bon Amie.
“Think it was Cin’s four- or five-times great grandmother who shot her pimp because she was tired of him roughing her and her friends up. The marshal was partial to her, decided it was self-defense. In the clear and to look after women in a place they had nowhere to go and nothing else they could do to put food in their mouths, she took over the bordello. It kept up in that bent until Cin’s great-grandmother decided it was time for the Bonner family legacy to move in a new direction. She took them out of the sex trade and into show business. Bon Amie is in the middle of nowhere, about fifteen miles north of town, not easy to find, not easy to get to, but people make the trek because it’s a helluva show.”
And with that, Rus knew Moran had made that trek to watch the show. Though he wondered if the man did it before or after that gold band hit his left finger.
Rus’s mind filled with the image of Brittanie Iverson in plastic.
“You sure they’re out of the sex trade?” he asked.
Moran was all about eye contact when he answered, “Absolutely.”
Right.
He was sure.
Next.
“Cin?” he queried.
“Lucinda Bonner,” Moran told him. “Owner of Bon Amie.”
“I’m gonna need to talk to her,” Rus told him.
“You want her to have that heads up now?”
First things first.
“Has notification been made to the family?”
Moran shook his head, but said, “Of a sort.”
“What does that mean?”
“Brittanie’s father is a piece of shit. No idea where the man is, but he’s not in Misted Pines or Fret County. And this is a good thing. He drank a lot. Cheated on his wife a lot. Got into a lot of fights with anyone who might piss him off, and that was a lot of people, including his wife. And Brittanie’s mom was all about those ‘a lots’ too. She’d get fed up and skip town a lot, leaving her kids with a dad who didn’t give a shit. Once they were divorced, she had a lot of boyfriends, and she had a lot of good times. So yes, she’s been notified. But since she was so hungover when I spoke to her, she was mostly still drunk, I’m not sure she processed her daughter was murdered.”
Rus understood he was telling Moran something he already knew when he said, “I’m gonna have to talk to her too.”
“My advice?”
Rus nodded.
“Go to Cin first. She’s not family, but I’ll lay money down she knows more about Brittanie than her mother or her brother put together. And I’m not a gambling man.”
So there was a brother as well.
And it was interesting Moran referred to this Bonner woman as “Cin.”
“But we’ve got that info for you,” Moran went on. “Polly’s already put it together.”
He didn’t know who Polly was yet, but good.
Next.
“Let’s talk about this town,” Rus said.
He could see Moran was getting impatient, but he didn’t give into it.
“You want more lore, or do you want to talk about Ray Andrews?” Moran asked, and Rus knew he was fishing.
“We can get to the lore later, when we figure this out and we’re sharing a beer. I want to talk about Ray Andrews.”
Moran leaned onto his forearms on the desk and shared, “Probably won’t surprise you, that shit hasn’t died down. I’m not sure it’s going to. Case like that lives forever. We get tourists. And then there’s the women.”
The women?
He knew about true-crime tourists. People so fascinated with famous cases, they had to go to the place it happened, immerse themselves in it.
Rus thought that was fucked up, but one thing he’d learned in his business, there was no end to the kind of people there were and the jacked-up shit they were into.
And Moran was right, what Ray Andrews did in that town would live forever.
So Rus was interested in “the women.”
“What do you mean, ‘the women?’”
“Misted Pines has become a mecca for women who are done with being screwed over by men and want to live around those who are like minded. They’ve shut down their lives and homes wherever they were, took what money they got, and created a space up here. Some call it a neighborhood. Some who don’t like it much call it a commune. Some who don’t like it at all call it a coven.”
Well…
Shit.
“Can’t say I blame them,” Rus noted carefully, watching Moran closely, wondering which camp Moran was in.
He shrugged, sat back and said, “If they don’t cause trouble, it’s not my business. They don’t cause trouble. But they’re an entity in this town, and some aren’t real happy about it.”