No Limits by Alison Kent Page B

wouldn’t be enough time to go through even half the documents boxed up in Bear’s attic, Terrill had carried al l he could find to the trunk of his patrol car last night. His father would never miss them. He would never even know they were gone.
    Bear wouldn’t be able to climb the stairs or haul himself through the narrow opening into the top of the house if the place were on fire and his life at stake. He was too wide, too old, too dependent on the cane he swore was a decorative accessory like the cigars he never smoked, his only vice being his nightcap.
    Well, the scotch, and Lorna Savoy. Why the old man was still keeping company with that woman was beyond Terrill’s grasp. She was young enough to be Bear’s daughter, though his relationship with her had never been paternal. It was strictly business, with sex thrown in for good measure—a fact that made Terril question Lorna’s motives more than Bear’s.
    What either of them got out of their association—and such a long-running one at that
    —was something he’d never understand. He remembered Lorna being at the house off and on when he was in high school, and more than a few times when he came home on leave.
    He’d chalked that up to the secretarial work she’d done for Bear, work that had started out as a part-time job during a vocational program her senior year. She’d stayed on with him at the courthouse after graduation, had never done more than a few hours at South Louisiana Community College in Lafayette that Terrill could remember. Yet, for some reason, she and Bear had never parted ways. Terrill knew that her real estate business kept her plenty busy even in the small town of Bayou Allain, and that his father had helped her get started.
    She handled a lot of seasonal rentals, folks wanting to tour the swamps before hunting season, others taken in by the bald cypress, the alligators, and the snowy egrets that made the bayou their home.
    Her brokerage also held the contracts for a lot of the storefront leases in the small town, and she was the Realtor anyone wanting to sell looked to. She was a pro when it came to turning over private property.
    And then Terrill got to wondering what was at the root of Bear and Lorna living in each other’s back pockets the last few days and if it had anything to do with his father being such an asshole last night.
    Not that he really cared; he was just curious. All he had time to care about right now was his wife. He would’ve thought Bear would’ve felt the same. Today had been shot to hell as far as making any headway in finding Lisa. He hadn’t even made it to Bear’s for the promised meeting this morning with the P.I. The car that had gone off the bridge and the subsequent search for the driver had eaten up all of his day.
    He was only taking the break now to do something with the boxes in his trunk. Keeping them in his patrol car as long as he had wasn’t smart, but last night he’d grabbed them without thinking things through.
    It had been close on midnight when he’d made it home, and he didn’t want to be seen that late carting the boxes inside. He had neighbors who’d been friends of the judge since before Terril had been born, and he wouldn’t put it past any of them to slip that tidbit of info to Bear.
    He’d thought about transferring them to his personal vehicle, but the Jeep didn’t have enough hidden storage space to accommodate his haul, and it made no more sense to keep them there than in his patrol car.
    What he needed was privacy and space to dig through the contents of them all. With his father stopping by unannounced the way he often did before going to Red’s in the evenings, laying them out in the spare bedroom wouldn’t work. He’d finally thought of a solution when he’d seen his father and Lorna out on the town at lunch and had wondered how long Paschelle Sonnier had been holding down the fort. She lived right across the street from Terril , and her cottage had a detached