“She later admitted that she chose me as the person to find the planted evidence because I was the newest detective involved in the case—the hungriest. It nearly ended my career altogether. It was only due to a flawless reputation up until that point and a few key people vouching for me that I was even able to keep my badge, but the career goals I had were instantly out of reach. It’s all part of my official police record.”
“That’s why you can’t be a part of anything I do from here on out.”
Pete nodded.
“That’s why you didn’t want to call the police.”
He hesitated, but nodded again. “Remember how I said the police hate coincidences and patterns?”
Sadie nodded, remembering that she’d already considered Pete’s personal connection to that statement.
“They’ll be calling me in tomorrow, and I’ll have to go through the whole thing all over again. They’ll look for connections to that case—and they’ll look hard.”
“Connections?” Sadie asked. “Are there connections?”
“Me,” Pete said. “The Farmington case involved a psychic, and this one has had ghosts mentioned.”
“No one believes any of this is based on ghosts.”
“I’m starting to,” Pete admitted, holding her gaze. “I don’t know how else to explain how someone got inside the house.”
Sadie didn’t know what to say. He was open to the possibility of something spectral?
“When I went to Montana to take Terry Michaels’s statement, she told me that she would haunt me for the rest of my life.” He stopped and groaned, shaking his head and running his fingers through his hair. “Listen to me. I’m losing it.”
Sadie stepped forward and placed her hands on his upper arms. When he met her eyes with a hesitant expression, she smiled. “Someone’s playing a game with us. And I’m going to find out who it is, okay? I know you had nothing to do with Mrs. Wapple’s injuries, and I know you’re an excellent detective. I don’t doubt that while your choices in Farmington may have been flawed, your motive wasn’t. And that woman
is
in jail, so the process seemed to have worked out okay in the end as far as finding the killer goes. This is going to be okay, all right? And I’ll back you up no matter where tomorrow takes us.”
Pete held her eyes before pulling her into an embrace, melting against her for nearly a minute before he pulled back, looking a little embarrassed, but relieved all the same. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a single key. “To Heather and Jared’s,” he said. He placed the key in Sadie’s hand and closed her fingers around it. “Well, we’d better get to bed. Tomorrow will come whether we’re well rested or not, and it’s sure to be a long day.”
Sadie agreed. They shared a quick kiss, and Pete passed through the connecting door to his room, closing the door on his side. Sadie climbed into the second bed of the night, but sleep didn’t come easily. The ramifications of what Pete was up against reverberated in her head, and yet there was also a glowing ember of hope and gratitude that he had told her. That was a big deal, and it buoyed her confidence in their relationship to know that he trusted her.
Sleeping was a bit of a joke, but Sadie managed a couple of hours between two and seven. As expected, her muscles were tight and sore when she got out of bed, so she took another ibuprofen and did her best to ignore the discomfort. Once they were all dressed and ready, she and Pete took the boys to breakfast at the hotel café, and then she left them at the hotel for a day of swimming and pay-per-view movies. They’d agreed to allow Kalan to miss school so that Pete could have the peace of mind of keeping all three of the boys in his line of sight all day. He didn’t ask Sadie where she was going after kissing her good-bye in the hotel room, just wished her luck and told her to be careful.
Sadie asked the front desk to call her a cab that could take her to the closest rental car agency. By nine thirty she was driving off the lot in a nondescript gray Ford even though she planned to take the T as much as possible. As she’d anticipated, the roads were slick, but most of the morning traffic had cleared, and she had always been a good driver, so she wasn’t too concerned.
She drove straight to Heather and Jared’s house. It took her nearly fifteen minutes to walk around the yard and through the house, taking in all the details and assuring herself that no one was there and nothing was out of place. It was hard to believe all that had happened there last night. After inspecting the house, she stopped at the end of the hallway where the kitchen and living room joined it. The hallway was about fifteen feet long, with one door at the end—where Pete had stayed—and two on the right—the bathroom and the boys’ room. The room she’d been staying in was directly across from the boys’ room.
She walked slowly up and down the hallway, stopping when she was between her doorway and the doorway of the boys’ room, both of which were partially ajar. She looked between the two doors, then reached for the door of her room and pulled it closed as fast as she could.
BAM! Definitely the same sound she’d heard last night.
She reached for the boys’ door and pulled it shut too.
BAM!
But how could someone pull both doors closed and not be caught? Pete’s room was six feet away. And Sadie had been even closer.
She opened both doors before closing them just until the latch-thingy rested on the doorjamb. She grabbed the doorknob of her bedroom door and pulled quick—BAM—then reached for the boys’ door and pulled it closed too—BAM. The sound was the same whether the door was partially open or mostly closed.
She thought back to last night. What was the time line? She’d shot up in bed at the first banging door; the other bang had followed almost immediately. She closed the doors most of the way again and played it out again. Pull door shut—BAM—time to sit up in bed. Pull other door shut—BAM. She turned and hurried for the back door through which she’d make her escape. By the time she’d made it to the backyard, she was pretty certain both she and Pete would have been in the hall. Cutting it close.
She left the back door open, then headed into the living room and opened the front door as well, like they’d been when they were all awakened last night. After returning to the hallway, she reset the doors, crouched down, and stretched out her arms so that she was touching both doorknobs.
One, two, three.
BAM, BAM, run to the . . . front door—it was closer than the back door, and she didn’t have to navigate around a table—down the steps, through the open gate, and to the sidewalk. She stopped and turned back to the house, taking a deep breath in order to recover from the impromptu workout. How long did that take? Five seconds? Six?
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and headed back inside. She set her phone to stopwatch mode and returned it to her pocket, keeping her thumb over the button that would start the count. She took a deep breath, let it out, crouched slightly and then . . . pushed the stopwatch button. BAM, BAM, run to the sidewalk. She pulled the phone out of her pocket. Seven seconds. With another seven seconds she could be halfway to the corner.
She reset the stopwatch and was heading back inside for another try so she could analyze the combined data when she sensed someone watching her. She looked over her shoulder and saw a man standing on the sidewalk across the street. She felt her cheeks flame as he quickly looked away and continued on his way with his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
She ducked her head and hurried up the sidewalk, trying to imagine what he thought she was doing. Just before crossing the threshold, she glanced over her shoulder to see if the man was still watching her. He wasn’t; he was heading up the sidewalk to the house on the corner.
Something in his posture and movements made her embarrassment disappear. Was he the person she’d seen lurking in the alley last night? Was he connected to this? She almost laughed—of course he was connected! She’d done this too many times to be lulled with the assumption of coincidence. After entering the house and closing the front door behind her, she called Pete.
“Hey,” Pete said when he answered the phone.
She headed to the kitchen so she could shut the back door. “Hi, sweetie. Could I talk to Kalan?”
He was silent, and she could feel him fighting his desire to ask why. However, they both knew that would break the agreement they’d made. “Sure,” Pete said after a few seconds. A moment later, a timid voice said, “Hello?”
“Hey, Kalan,” Sadie said as sweetly and brightly as she possibly could without sounding drunk. “It’s Aunt Sadie. I have a question for you; do you think you could help me?”
“Okay,” Kalan said. He sounded more comfortable now that he recognized her voice.
Sadie pulled open the front drapes, giving her a good view of the other houses. “Who lives in the brown house on the corner across the street?”
“Um . . . by my house?”
“Yes,” Sadie said. “Mrs. Wapple lives right across the street, and then on one side there’s a white house. Two houses down the street on that same side is a brown house on the corner. It has a chain-link fence around the front and . . .” She scanned for something that would make this house stand out to a six-year-old. “There’s a blue mailbox stand out front, but no mailbox on it.”
“That’s Mr. Forsberk’s house.”
“The one whose dog got run over?”
“Yeah,” Kalan said. “His dog’s name was Bark.”
“Bark the dog?” Sadie asked.
“Yeah, Mom thought it was funny.”
“It is funny,” Sadie said, smiling about it. “Maybe he’ll get a cat and name it Meow.”
“And a bird named Chirp.”
Sadie laughed. In her mind she was considering why Mr. Forsberk would be outside at midnight. And then her thoughts went even further—could he be the person slamming doors and breaking in? But why? Sadie hadn’t even met him.
Kalan’s laugh was so cute that Sadie hated to change the subject, but there was work to do. “Kalan, when did Mr. Forsberk’s dog die?”
“Um, it was the day Mom had to go to school.”
Sadie frowned, and yet the fact that Kalan remembered it at all meant that it might not have been as long ago as she’d originally assumed. She turned and hurried into the kitchen, heading for the calendar Heather kept by the phone. She used her finger to scan backward along the dates, stopping when she read
PTC 3:20.
Having been a schoolteacher for more than twenty years, Sadie knew education acronyms almost as well as she knew the properties of baking soda.
“Parent-Teacher Conference?” Sadie asked, moving her finger so she could read the date and calculate how long ago it had been. “Two weeks ago yesterday.”
“I guess,” Kalan said. “She took us to McDonald’s on the way home.”
“Did she go to the school to talk about you with your teacher in a special meeting? Did you give her some papers you’d done, and maybe some pictures you colored?”
“Yes,” Kalan said, sounding impressed that Sadie knew this. “And Mrs. Call talked to her about tests. I’m ahead of abrage.”
“I have no doubt you’re above
average,
” Sadie said.
“And I got chocolate milk at McDonald’s, too!”
“Maybe Grandpa will take you there for lunch today.”
“Really?”
“You should ask him,” Sadie said, feeling conspiratorial but needing to get off the phone now that she had the information she needed.
“Okay.” She could tell from the way his voice was suddenly muted that he’d abandoned the phone entirely. She could hear him begging Pete for lunch at McDonald’s and smiled as she heard the other boys join in the chorus.
Pete came on the line. “Thanks a lot,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, come on, as long as you find one with a PlayPlace, it’s good physical entertainment for the price of a hamburger.”
He grunted and they both went quiet. There were so many things they couldn’t ask and wouldn’t answer.
“So,” Pete finally said. “I got a text from Heather right after you left. She headed for the airport after I texted Jared about going to the hotel, and she caught a red-eye flight. She lands at 11:14. The boys and I are picking her up.”
“Oh,” Sadie said, but it was a loaded one-word answer. “She texted you instead of calling? Does that mean she’s mad and didn’t want to talk?”
“That’s exactly what I thought.”
“I’m so sorry I’m not there to help explain,” Sadie said, wondering if maybe that was a better place for her to be than here.
“A detective also called me; they want me to come in. I explained about Heather, and they said I could wait until she was back.”
“Did they say what they wanted to talk to you about?”
“They weren’t specific,” Pete said. After a moment, he said, “Please be careful today, Sadie. Okay?”
“You’ve told me to be careful several times,” Sadie said, unable to smile for all the wishing he were here. “I haven’t forgotten.”
Pete let out a breath. “That’s good.”
“Call me when you finish with the police,” Sadie said. “Assuming we don’t run into one another at the police station.” But she hadn’t heard from the police about her follow-up interview yet. Apparently Pete was the priority today.