I followed him, of course. He was checking the kitchen windows and back door. “I told you to go outside.”
“And did you really think I was gonna do that?” I scoffed.
He hesitated for a moment, then grumbled. “No.”
“Well, there you go. How about we move past the part where you try to tell me what to do and skip to the part of you tellin’ me what’s goin’ on?”
He turned to me, scrubbing his face. “Kate broke out of the psych unit sometime between ten p.m. last night and six a.m. this morning. She left a note on her bed that said, ‘Thank you for the vacay. I’m looking forward to my family reunion.’”
I let her words sink in. “So why did you come in here in a panic as soon as you found out?”
“Because I know you’ve been goin’ to see her, Neely Kate. I know she’s toyin’ with you and she’s movin’ on to round two.”
I swallowed the bile that rose in the back of my throat. “That place is locked up tighter than a drum. How did she get out?”
“Obviously she had help.”
My blood ran cold. Did Jed have anything to do with this?
“I need to know the last time you saw her,” Joe said.
I looked up at him, trying to hide my terror, but I must not have done a good job of hiding it because his gaze softened.
“I doubt you’ll be a suspect, but they’ll be searchin’ her contacts with a fine-tooth comb.” When I didn’t answer, he asked, “Was it Sunday?”
“Yeah, I saw her Sunday.” I nearly left it at that, but I needed to be honest with him. At least in this. “But I saw her yesterday too.”
He sucked in a breath. “You saw her yesterday?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
What to tell him? All of it? “I knew she saw my mother, and she was handing out details like they were golden nuggets. But I told her yesterday that I was done. Either she told me everything or I was never comin’ back again.”
Joe stared at me in shock. “What was her reaction?”
“She thought I was bluffin’, but when I started to leave, she told me that she had seen my mother. She said Momma had been scared when she found out who Kate really was, but she wanted to know if I had found out the truth about my father. Kate says she really wanted to know if I’d been given some of the Simmons money. When my mother found out I had no part of it, she was no longer interested in me.”
“Neely Kate,” Joe said empathically, then added, “she could have been lying.”
“She wasn’t. But it’s nothin’ I didn’t already expect.”
“So what happened then?”
A lot of ugliness I was ashamed of. But I wasn’t ready to go there yet. “I left.”
“Did she think you were coming back?”
I hesitated, then said, “No. I knew she was holding back information, so I said we were done.”
Joe’s face paled. “Shit.”
“You think she left because I wasn’t playin’ her game anymore?”
“That’s exactly what I think.” He pushed out a breath. “I need to check the rest of the house.”
“What are you lookin’ for?”
“I don’t know yet, but you heard someone come in your house at one in the morning and it wasn’t Rose.”
“You think it was Kate?”
“Or someone assisting her. She couldn’t do this on her own.” He walked past me and headed up the stairs.
I was right on his heels.
We didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the bedrooms, so we headed to the basement next. Right away Joe noticed the board-covered basement window. “What’s that about?”
“We noticed it broken a couple of weeks ago. We just hadn’t gotten around to fixin’ it yet.”
“How’d it get broken?”
“We don’t know. We just found it that way.”
He stared at me in disbelief. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“It was a broken window, Joe,” I said in exasperation. “There was nothin’ to tell.”
The look on his face suggested otherwise.
We started looking around the unfinished basement, which held the furnace and air conditioner, washer and dryer, shelves with boxes, and the inherited contents of the nursery that used to be in the sunroom off Rose’s bedroom.
“Nothin’ looks off,” I said.
“What about this room?” Joe said, pointing to the space Rose’s father had used as a darkroom. After Rose and I had gotten into a scrape with the crime world a month ago, Jed had turned it into a safe room. How would I explain that?
“Rose’s father’s darkroom. We keep it locked.” I pretended to try to open the door, praying he didn’t challenge me on it. “See. Still locked. And you need a key.”
He frowned. “Why would you keep that room locked?”
Why indeed? “Because of the broken window. We started locking up the valuable stuff down here in case someone was trying to burgle us.”
He put his hands on his hips in frustration. “Again, why didn’t you tell me you had a busted window?” He shook his head. “From now on,” he said forcefully, “you tell me if your windows get broken, you find your front door ajar, or anything out of the ordinary. I know you and Rose have got yourself tangled up in the crime world and you drive me sick with worry on how to protect you.”
“I’m sorry, Joe.” And I truly was, but I wasn’t about to stop our investigations.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you didn’t agree to my request.”
I walked over to him and gave him a hug. “You have to trust me more.”
“I think I trust you too much. Now open that room.”
“What?”
“Open that room.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Or are you hidin’ something from me?”
“Of course not,” I said as though he’d said the silliest thing in the world. “Let me get the key.”
I headed for the stairs, but he walked over to the door and turned the knob, opening the door about three inches. “Well, looky there. The door just magically opened.”
Well, crap.
The first indication that something was off was that the room was completely dark. Jed had made us plug in a night-light so we could see in the room if we had to lock ourselves inside, but the light wouldn’t be strong enough to show under the crack of the door. I knew it could have burnt out, but it was only a couple of weeks old. That was unlikely.
Joe flipped the light switch and nothing happened. “Do you purposely keep it dark in here?”
“No,” I said, my stomach dropping to my toes. “It worked just the other day. And so did the night-light.”
“Night-light?” He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flash flight. He shone the light around the room, then froze as he pointed it to the far-right corner. “Neely Kate. I need you to go upstairs and wait in the front yard.” The tightness in his voice alerted me that he’d found something.
“What’s in there?”
He held up his arm to block me, but I darted underneath his arm and snatched his phone out of his hand.
Propped up against the wall was a man in dress pants and a dress shirt in a sitting position, his legs straight out in front of him. His head sagged to the side and his open, vacant eyes clued me in that he was dead. A handwritten note was pinned to the lapel of his dark suit, which I could read from eight feet away.
A peace offering. Let’s kiss and make up.
your loving sister
I took a step back in horror, my back bumping into Joe’s chest.
“No…”
He grunted a terse response. “Kate.”
Chapter 7
“Do you know him?” Joe asked, holding my arm in a firm grip.
I shook my head and croaked out, “No.”
“Do you have any idea why she would do this?”
I shook my head. “No.”
But then I did.
The blood rushed to my head so quickly I thought I would pass out. No. Now was not the time to panic. I needed to keep a cool head, but my hysteria was rising faster than I could push it down into submission. I broke free of his hold and bolted up the stairs, Joe close behind.
“Neely Kate.”
I didn’t stop until I reached the kitchen, and even that didn’t seem far enough away, not with Joe watching my every move. I stared to hyperventilate.
“Neely Kate,” Joe said with worry in his eyes. “What’s goin’ on?”