Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) by Letitia L. Moffitt Read Free Book Online Page A

man by her side right now understood it.
    Several blocks later, she finally spoke. “What do you think happened to Culver?”
    A long silence followed. He might have been seriously considering her question, he might have been trying to decide how much of his suspicions to reveal to her, or he might have been trying to think of a good lie to cover for . . . whatever he might want to cover. “I don’t know,” he finally said. He shook his head and she could see real frustration in his expression. “Culver and I were never close growing up. The age gap made it so he was too old to pal around with me but not old enough to be a sort of mentor. Plus his mother’s cancer ordeal and death made him very withdrawn for a long time. Nothing changed when we became adults. We still aren’t close. I don’t know my brother very well, though at least I’ve finally come to appreciate him.”
    “In what way?” Nola asked.
    “Culver is just not like anyone else—certainly not like any other rich guy. He genuinely wants to do right by people.”
    “Well, he was cheating on his wife,” Nola pointed out, noting Grayson’s use of the present tense.
    “I know how this is going to sound to a woman, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. He cares about both of them. He doesn’t want either of them to be hurt.”
    Nola could have bristled at the part about how this would sound “to a woman,” but she didn’t. “I understand that, and I didn’t say he was a bad person for having an affair. People—good, bad, men, women—have affairs. I’m just trying to see him the way you do. He did something that would have hurt his wife if she found out, so it’s hard to see that as wanting to do right by people.”
    “He loves Maureen,” Grayson said simply.
    Nola could see this was a dead end, so she tried new ground. “There’s his business, too. Call me cynical, but I have to believe it’s impossible to become that successful by being an altruist. What, when he buys up land does he insist on paying top dollar?”
    “The man isn’t Santa Claus, Nola. Of course he’s as self-interested as anyone else, and he’ll do what it takes to make his business deals succeed. But there’s still such a thing as honor among thieves, or ethics among businessmen. It’s rare—I wouldn’t say Vincent Kirke has much of it, for instance—but it exists in Culver. He’d screw over his fellow business moguls in a heartbeat because he knows they can handle it. He would never go after anyone who would truly suffer from a financial transaction.”
    As he talked, Nola couldn’t help noticing the way he moved. There was sureness in his stride. He had probably been an athlete himself in high school, maybe college, before he took up sports medicine. It took her a moment to refocus on his words. “The latest deal Culver’s working on? He bought up all that land where the old computer-parts factory used to be back in the ’70s before everything got outsourced overseas, and he’s putting in an affordable housing community—Greenbriar, it’s called. Unlike most developers of affordable housing communities, he’s insisted on top-quality materials. Everyone told him he was going to take a huge loss if he did that, but I’d be willing to bet he proves them wrong even on this. Culver makes things work.”
    Nola listened quietly, trying to gauge just how much envy there might be in Grayson’s depiction of his older brother. His admiration sounded sincere; this was no Cain resentful of the glory bestowed upon Abel. As a physician in a popular field, Grayson could hardly be deemed a failure himself. However, if his portrait of Culver Bryant was accurate, the man’s disappearance and possible murder were even more puzzling than she’d originally thought. Who would want to kill someone like Culver? If he hadn’t been killed but merely abducted, why hadn’t there been demands for ransom? If he had run off on his own, what could explain the abandonment