Page 63 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

He was fatherly, seeming almost indulgent as he sat beside her, tender and kind. When he set down his half of the muffin and reached for his drink, she caught sight of a scar across the bottom of his palm.

“That looks like it hurt,” she said, nodding to it.

He regarded it a moment. “That’s what I get for trying to slice a tomato without a cutting board.”

“Ouch.” She didn’t know his politics, but she could see why people voted for him. He felt trustworthy and gentle.

When she’d eaten as much as she wanted, she set the plate down.

“What had you so discombobulated when I ran into you outside?”

“I was looking at old articles about…what happened. With my mom. And that lumber company.”

Brent looked pained as he leaned forward. “I’m sorry. That must have been very difficult.”

“Surreal. Dad told me she got into some trouble and disappeared. He never said anything about…”

“Your mother was an amazing woman. She was passionate and beautiful, and she loved the forest. She loved the earth.” He smiled at Aspen. “And she loved you, very much.”

She was thirty-one years old, and nobody had ever said that to her. Not even her father, though until that moment it had never occurred to Aspen that he should have.

“You were the driving force of her decisions,” Brent said. “To be fair, her decisions weren’t the best. What she did…” He blew out a long breath. “I wish I’d been there. I wish… I had no idea what she was planning. If I had, I could have talked her out of it. What she did was wrong. So wrong. But her heart was pure. She only wanted to save the forest from a company she felt wasn’t treating it well.”

“Was she right?” Aspen asked.

He shrugged. “At the time, a lot of people thought so. They’d been fined and claimed to have cleaned up their act, but I believed, like Jane, that they would slip back into their old ways when nobody was looking. In retrospect… You know how it is when you’re young. We were barely twenty years old, and so confident. Cocky. And stupid. That lumber company is still in business today, and as far as I know, they follow all the rules.So maybe we were wrong.” He shrugged. “But your mother was sure, and she was going to save the forest for her daughter, no matter what it took.”

Aspen wondered if Brent’s words were supposed to make her feel better. But how could knowing she’d been the motivation for a bombing that had led to a woman’s death be any kind of comfort?

“What you read about your mother this morning,” he said, “That’s true. I wish I could tell you it was all a big mistake, a misunderstanding. But Jane did what the papers say she did. She got it in her head something needed to be done, and she did it. I’m sure your father told you—and the articles, probably—that she suffered from mental illness. As far as I know, she never sought help, though we all tried to convince her to. It got to where she simply couldn’t think rationally.”

He paused as if waiting for Aspen to contribute something to the conversation, but what was there to say?

Brent continued. “So what she did, she did. That’s true. But there were other things about your mother that were also true. Equally true.”

“Like?”

“She was charismatic. People who met her remembered her, and people who remembered her liked her. She could stir up a crowd and get them laughing or crying or…or whatever she was feeling. It was amazing to watch. She loved people. She never forgot anybody. I remember once we were at school, and she saw this little slip of a girl. Mousy hair, glasses. The kind of person nobody noticed. I certainly hadn’t. But your mother had been in a class with her. She walked right up to her, called her by name, and gave her a hug. She asked her about a research project and then listened as if it were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard. I swear, when that girl walked away, she looked like she’dgrown a foot taller. That’s how your mother was. That’s the kind of impact your mother had on people.”

How could the person he described also have killed a woman?

Where had it all gone wrong?

“If things had been different,” Brent said, “she could have run for president.”

Aspen’s disbelief must’ve shown in her expression because he added, “I’m serious. We used to joke that she was the female version of Bill Clinton. Attractive and charismatic and smart. She was amazing.”

Aspen worked to fit Brent’s description of Jane Kincaid in with everything else she’d heard. She was getting a picture of the woman who’d birthed her.

“It seems like you and my mother were very close.”

He leaned back in his chair, nodding once.

“How long did you know her?”

“I met her when she and her family moved here. We all went to Plymouth State together.”

“Who iswe all?”

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