“Melissa saw it.” The man’s voice echoed in my head.
I crossed the living room to check the locks on the front windows. In place.
Next I walked straight across the entry hall and into the second bedroom used as an office. My desk and computer sat as I’d left them, the screen saver randomly sifting through pictures. A photo of me and Tom filled the monitor. I stared at it remembering the day five years ago, only three months before his fatal heart attack. Tom had been an outdoorsman, rugged in his way, yet gentle and kind. Laid back. He’d been a counterbalance to my fighter personality. “Just calm down, Joanne,” he’d told me more than once. “Think twice before you rush into things.”
If only I could hear his wisdom on this night.
The picture faded, and a shot of Linda materialized. She was sitting on my back patio, laughing, head thrown back, and perfectly made-up eyes half-closed. One hand in her fashionably blonde-streaked hair. Her nose was scrunched. I could almost hear that laughter now—boisterous and full, with a note of sheer abandonment. Nobody laughed like Linda.
The scene poofed away.
My head pounded.
I touched my mouse, and the file I’d been working on before leaving for Dineen’s blipped onto the monitor. The Bruce Whittley case. A month ago Whittley had skipped out on his wife and two children in Burbank, California, leaving them with a mountain of credit card debt and an overdrawn bank account. His wife’s incensed parents had hired me to find him.
Now I needed to find Melissa.
That might not be so easy. A trail six years cold, maybe a new last name from marriage. And after seeing Baxter kill Linda, being tracked down as a legal witness would be the last thing Melissa would want. She’d be at least a medium-level “fresh” skip. Maybe even a hardcore skip by now if she’d spent those six years running up bills she couldn’t pay. Even if I did find her, she could refuse to talk.
My gaze rose to the wooden clock on the wall. Its gold hands read 8:48. I’d left my sister’s house just fifteen minutes ago.
How could that be?
A shiver racked me from shoulders to toes. Something inside me whispered that my life had changed in those fifteen minutes. As if I’d entered a malevolent cave and did not know what lay before me. In the last few days, I’d already become a pariah in this town. Hooded Man’s stunning information now shoved me into a far darker place—Baxter Jackson’s greatest enemy. Because if anyone could find the runaway teenager after six years, I could.
“If he finds out, he’ll kill you.”
I closed Bruce Whittley’s file on the computer.
Rubbing my arms, I turned aside and focused on the window behind and to the right of my desk. The blinds were drawn. I always shut them after dark. I leaned over the desk, lifted the bottom of the blinds, and peered at the lock. In place.
Did Hooded Man stand alone, a single person who wanted to bring Jackson to justice? Or was he one of a group?
Whatever the answer, he was a coward. Knowing the truth, yet saying nothing all these years. Leaving me to ferret it out alone.
Fine. If I had to go this alone, so be it. When it was all over, everyone would know the truth. This time I wouldn’t let Linda down.
I left the office through its second exit, into the hallway stretching to the master bedroom on the end. High on the wall to my left, just outside the kitchen, Billy Bass the Singing Fish stretched motionless upon his wooden mount. He faced the kitchen and the door leading to the garage, his tail toward me.
I moved to stand before him. “You see anything, Billy?”
His cold glass eyes revealed nothing.
Dineen had given Billy Bass to Tom on what turned out to be my husband’s final Christmas. The thing nearly drove me crazy, but Tom loved it. Billy Bass had a motion-sensor switch. If anyone walked past him, he’d burst into the stupid song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” flipping his tail and raising his head to look you in the eye. Three-year-old Jimmy and Tom had played it over and over that Christmas, laughing for hours. I swore I never wanted to hear the song again.
Once Tom died I couldn’t bear to take Billy Bass off the wall. Once in a while I even turned it on just to hear it sing. It always made me think of Tom. But by now the batteries had died.
Oh, Tom, I need you now.
Turning away from Billy Bass, I walked down the hall to peek into the laundry room, then the second bath on my left. I saw nothing askew. All the same I stepped inside each room to inspect the window locks.
My bedroom remained. I entered the room, which ran the length of the house from front to back. The bed was still neatly made, its magenta comforter meeting a matching dust ruffle. The drawers of my two dressers were shut, scattered framed pictures of me and Tom untouched. Near the window facing the front yard sat an armchair—my favorite place for reading. The novel I was halfway through sat on the chair. A romance.
Why did I torture myself like that?
More important questions nagged me. Once I found Melissa—then what? How to convince her to come forward now, after six years of hiding such a terrible secret?
I checked all my bedroom windows. Still locked.
On dark impulse, I picked up the phone on the nightstand by my bed. Pushed talk. The dial tone hummed in my ear.
The beige-tiled master bathroom looked normal. I lifted aside a window curtain and pressed my face to the glass, peering into the backyard. My two gnarled oak trees bent beneath the deluge like wizened old men. I could barely make out the black wood fence at the rear of my property.
If someone had wanted to approach my house unseen, this was the night to do it. But no way could Hooded Man have come inside without leaving footprints, a trail of water.
Which he easily could have cleaned up.
Another violent shudder possessed my body—both of fear and penetrating cold. I should take a hot shower. But stepping under that nozzle would place me in such a vulnerable position. Naked. Running water masking other sounds.
Time to install a burglar alarm. In the quiet town of Vonita, I’d never before felt unsafe.
As I pulled back from the window I caught sight of my reflection in the glass—a pitiful sight. My chin-length brown hair was plastered to my head, my face looking white and clammy. My dark, frightened eyes appeared sunken, and the lines running from my nose to mouth cut deep. Age fifty-two, nothing. I could have been sixty-five.
I dropped the curtain into place, a needle of despair piercing deep. Linda’s disappearance had been terrible. Tom’s death one year later had aged me. We’d never been able to have children—a crucial loss Linda and I had in common. I’d felt so alone since Tom’s passing. Now this. Suddenly a part of me didn’t want to find Melissa at all. I was just too tired.
Maybe I should move away from this town, start a new life. I could live anywhere in the country, since my work was done from home.
But I’d have to leave Dineen and Jimmy—my only family. And how could I ever live with myself, knowing Baxter Jackson still walked the streets? Linda deserved justice. And if Cherisse had been murdered, so did she. If I did manage to present the Vonita police with evidence of Baxter’s guilt regarding Linda, they’d likely take a second look into Cherisse’s death.
My teeth chattered. I had to warm up. In a flurry of motion I peeled off my clothes and turned on the shower to hot.
As I stepped into the tub, a frisson shook my shoulders. I swiveled my head, focused with sharp eyes on the bathroom door. My bedroom and the whole empty house loomed in my mind, full of shadowed corners and unknowns. I hadn’t checked closets.