Page 162 of Embracing the Change

Beyond that were LLC documents, and Articles of Incorporation, none of which I understood.

I didn’t wish to, but I’d learned how Jamie felt about me keeping important things from him, so I sought him out, and found him with his laptop and some open files scattered across a coffee table in the hearth room.

Heiress was lounging on the velvet couch beside him.

He looked to me, his lovely blue eyes alert, but that hint of dissonance behind them that had been there since he learned his brother had died was unhidden.

“Darling, we’ve had an unusual delivery.”

I sat next to him on the couch and handed him the envelope with the papers on top.

First, after inspecting it, he lifted the notecard and flicked it to and fro.

“R?” he asked me.

“No idea,” I told him.

He nodded, set that aside and started looking through the documents.

I sensed his surprise when he saw what they were, and then I sensed when he put it together.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The paper trail from Paloma to Chet, through a few shell companies. Though it’s clumsy and not at all buried.” He turned from the papers to me. “She gave him money. Likely so he’d talk to the media and give them whatever bogus story he cooked up.”

“How much did she give him?”

“From what I can tell, two hundred thousand.”

Goodness.

That was a lot.

“Where is she getting that kind of money?” I asked.

Jamie turned back to the statements and shrugged. “Seems they’re cash deposits.”

“Does AJ have that kind of cash on hand?”

Jamie returned his attention to me. “He’s got assets he hasn’t tapped, but they’d be last ditch to anyone in his situation. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t sold them. Heirlooms. Jewelry. Art. Guns. He had the horses, which were worth a great deal of money, but all of their carcasses were found in that fire.”

I winced.

In the three days since it had happened, it had become official.

It was arson, and all the evidence pointed to the arsonist being Jefferson Oakley.

It didn’t take a genius to put together that Jeff had set fire to the entirety of the Oakbilly Gulch estate (save for one outbuilding that held tractor equipment, which he died before he could get to) in an effort to collect insurance. And as Jefferson Oakley was prone to do, he’d fucked it up, getting caught in one of the blazes he was setting.

The question that was beleaguering my beloved was if it was Jeff’s idea, something that Jamie didn’t think was possible, considering his brother wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. Or if AJ had not only told his second son to do it but did so knowing how gullible and dim he was, so also knowing there was a good possibility he’d get caught.

In other words, setting him up to take the fall, while AJ pocketed the proceeds and bought himself another chance to save his own hide.

Neither of us could wrap our heads around the idea that AJ did it thinking Jeff would perish, just that he could collect the insurance money, which was considerable, with his hands coming out clean, even if there was a chance that Jeff’s wouldn’t.

However, in all of this, the death of those horses, and how they must have spent their final moments, was the thing that could set Jamie into a fury. I knew because it had, on two occasions, and one of my old-fashioned glasses shattering against a wall was indicative of how deep his fury went.

This happened when Kateri had told him the horses had been insured as well, for quite a lot, and the stables were the first building Jeff set fire to.

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