Her lips thinned. Insurance. Insurance against their conversation being overheard as they discussed the past and the possible reason why?
Why did the Corbins, the Raffertys, and the Robertses want the Callahans out of town so desperately?
Why did the citizens of Corbin County follow three families who had turned on their own grandchildren? Even more important, at the time they were the only grandchildren those families had.
Clyde Ramsey, Rafe’s uncle, had taken all three boys in. He had called each of them his boy and would stand in any man’s face, or woman’s for that matter, red faced, his gray eyes bulging, his heavy nose twitching, as he defended each of “his boys” against the dictates of crazy old men — Saul Rafferty and James Corbin — who thought they had to attack children for the fact that their daughters had had minds of their own and hearts of their own.
Clyde had been known to say often that he hadn’t approved of his sister’s choice of husband, but by God, his wife’s parents hadn’t cared much for him either. But they sure as damned hell, he’d claimed several times, had not disowned their beautiful little baby girl.
Saul and Tandy Rafferty, Logan’s grandparents, had doted on Logan, as long as his mother, Mina, had been alive. When she had died, Logan’s grandparents had joined the Corbins in attempting to take the inheritance that went to Logan on her death, just as the Corbins attempted to do with Crowe and Dale and Laura Ramsey had done with Rafe.
It just didn’t seem reason enough, though.
“Clyde knew something,” Rafe murmured. “He called before the accident, but I was on an operation and didn’t get back in time to return his call. At the time, I didn’t think a lot of it, but it was rare for Clyde to try to get hold of me while I was out of the country.”
Because he knew what Rafe did, Cami suspected, and knew it would do very little good to try to get hold of him.
“He could have called one of us,” Crowe reminded Rafe.
“He didn’t trust us enough to tell us what was going on,” Logan sighed, the words barely decipherable above the noise of the generated static.
“Hell, he wouldn’t even allow us to stay at the house when he wasn’t there.” Rafe’s voice held a thread of amusement.
Cami could see both Logan’s and Crowe’s expressions as well as Rafe’s. They all thought Clyde hadn’t trusted them.
“Perhaps he thought we were going to steal the silver,” Crowe stated with an irritable breath.
How three supposedly smart men could have such tunnel vision she wasn’t certain.
“Maybe he didn’t want any of you hurt.” Cami turned away from the window, keeping her arms in place as she watched the three men in exasperation. “Did Clyde ever say he didn’t trust you?”
The three men looked back at her, their expressions knowing and suspicious.
“He said blood would tell,” Rafe stated somberly. “He obviously simply didn’t trust Callahans.”
Yet these three men had cared for Rafe’s uncle, and even more, they’d respected him. But they were so wrong about Clyde.
“And you’re certain he was talking about you?” she asked. “Or was he talking about the Corbins, Robertses, and Raffertys? Three families who have been known, for generations, to strike out in violence if needed. Perhaps he was more worried about his ‘boys’ than he was about his silver?”
“And you come up with this how?” Rafe sat back in the chair, arched his brow inquisitively, and stared back at her, his eyes so deep, such a dark blue, she wondered if she could drown in them.
But the question held her attention. She knew the answer to it, despite the doubt she saw in his eyes.
“Because the year my mother was the assistant principal when you were in the eighth grade, Rafer, just before she retired for medical reasons, Clyde Ramsey had occasion to pay her a visit, and during that visit he informed her quite frankly, and quite furiously, that there wasn’t a single one of his ‘boys’ that would steal so much as a drink of water if they were dying of thirst.”
Rafe’s gaze narrowed on her.
“You remember that, don’t you?” she asked him softly, careful to keep her voice low, just as she had from the first word she spoke.
“The principal, Todd Collingsworth, had accused us of stealing brass from the science lab to sell,” Rafe remembered, his expression thoughtful.
“I don’t think Clyde ever believed you’d steal. I think he didn’t want you there alone, because it was so far from town and anyone could have struck out at you with no one knowing. But at the town socials, if you stayed there, or later if you went camping on those weekends he was out of town, then you were much safer.”
The three of them watched her. The doubt she had seen earlier was still there, but there was also the knowledge that it was possible she was right. They were considering her argument; that was what mattered.
“Anything’s possible,” Rafe finally admitted. “It doesn’t change the fact that he never told us of any of those battles and there were only a few of the fights we were aware that he had with the Corbins.”
The fights with the Corbins had been bad, but the ones he’d had with his father and mother, Rafe’s grandparents, had been particularly brutal several times.
“Did you hear of the arguments he had with Dale and Laura Ramsey?” she asked.
She didn’t call them Rafe’s grandparents. The disrespect to Clyde and to Rafe was more than she could bear.
“Let’s say, we caught wind of them,” Rafe sighed. “Just as we noticed that neither of them were at the funeral when he died.” Rafe’s voice hardened as his eyes looked like chips of ice for just a second. “Clyde never told us about them, though, and he never admitted to them.”
Of course he couldn’t admit to them, Cami thought. If the stories her uncle had told over the years had been true, and Eddy wasn’t prone to lie, then Clyde had nearly attempted murder the first time his father and mother showed up in court against Rafe to claim the inheritance Dale’s daughter had left to her son.
“He did it to protect you. Jaymi told me of several times Clyde came to the high school after she began there as a substitute. The principal was known to run and hide when his truck was seen pulling into the parking area.”
Jaymi had always believed Clyde Ramsey had loved each of his “boys” and had done his best by them. Cami had always argued that he could have done so much more.
“None of this answers the question on the table, though,” Logan pointed out. “Why were you warned away from Rafe, then attacked when you didn’t obey the demand carefully enough? And why was Jack Townsend’s place just blown to hell and back this morning?”
“Are we sure it began here?” she asked them all. “Jaymi was receiving the same phone calls. Maybe we’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe she wasn’t a random choice by a crazed serial killer. The FBI said there were two men committing those crimes, not just one. Maybe Jaymi was targeted for other reasons? Because she refused to do as she was told.”
“Why would anyone care to kill the women we sleep with, Cami?” Crowe asked incredulously. “Why give a fuck? There are no heiresses left in Corbin County with the exception of William Corbin’s daughter, and she’s rarely in Corbin County, let alone around any of us.”
At that point, Cami’s hands fell from her shoulders to allow her to rake her fingers through her hair in frustration. “I didn’t say I knew why,” she admitted. “But as you said, why give a fuck who you fuck? Why call Jaymi and threaten her? Why do the same with me? And why resurrect a monster? Unless there were two killers and one of them has decided to start killing again.”
Her gaze met Rafe’s, and she saw the suspicion her questions had raised, but she also saw doubt. The cousins didn’t want to accept that Jaymi could have died because of her tie to Rafe, but Cami had accepted it a long time ago. She had simply believed the past was dead.