TO DIE FOR (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 8) Read online

  “What?” Peter said, jumping up.

  She held her shirt up in front of her breasts, then pointed. “There was someone out there. He was looking in at us. He was watching us.”

  Peter rushed to the window and pulled the thin curtain aside.

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “But he was there,” she said, her voice shaking. “I swear, Peter. I am not making this up. There was someone out there, watching us having sex.”

  Chapter 22

  I swung my minivan around in the cul-de-sac and parked in the driveway. I sat for a few seconds, staring at the mansion in front of me, taking a few deep breaths to prepare. I had gotten myself quite worked up on my way there, thinking of all the things I wanted—no needed—to say. I had been up most of the night, thinking about it, and made the decision this morning.

  I walked to the back, got Owen out in his car seat, and carried him up toward the front door with the frosted glass and beautifully carved-in palm trees. I stared at the doorbell for a few seconds, gathering my courage, then pressed it. Shortly after, the door swung open, and Kim’s face appeared.

  I lifted Owen, who was still sleeping in his car seat.

  “Kim. Meet your grandson, Owen. Owen, this is your grandmother.”

  Kim stared at me with huge eyes. She didn’t even look down at the baby, and then she tried to close the door on me. I placed my hand on it and pushed it back open, then stepped inside the big hall.

  “Eva Rae Thomas,” she said. “You can’t just…you can’t just…”

  Finally, her eyes landed on the child, and something seemed to happen. She couldn’t lift her eyes to look at me and just stood there, nostrils flaring.

  “He’s your grandson, for crying out loud,” I said. “Amy has run away, and we can’t find her. I can’t take care of him forever. I have an infant of my own, remember?”

  Kim looked at Owen, and it was obvious she was struggling. She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “No. We can’t.”

  “Why on earth not? Give me one good reason. You have a big house. You don’t even work.”

  Kim shook her head. “I’m sorry, but…”

  “Okay, so you’re angry with Amy, but why take it out on the baby? He needs you. He needs a family right now. If Amy never comes back, then…”

  “No,” Kim said, holding a hand to her chest. She was biting back her tears. “I am sorry. We can’t. Phil is going to…” she paused, breathed, then said, “I need you to leave now.”

  “Come on, Kim, how can you be so…?”

  She pointed a finger at me, her lips quivering as she spoke. “You don’t know anything about me. Now leave, please.”

  I exhaled. I had really hoped to convince her to take care of her grandson and appeal to her better side. Now, it just seemed like she didn’t have one.

  “Okay, can you at least tell me who the father is? Maybe he can take care of Owen.”

  Her eyes grew dark. “We don’t know who he is. Amy wouldn’t tell us. Now, please, leave.”

  I looked into her eyes, scrutinizing them, trying to find some sense to what she was saying and doing. I couldn’t for the life of me understand her motives. The kid was the cutest thing in the world, and he was all she had left of her daughter right now. Why wouldn’t she want him?

  “Kim, come on, can’t we at least…?”

  She shook her head. “Please, leave before I call the police.”

  I looked down at Owen, feeling sorry for him. By the time the door closed behind me, and I walked down the driveway, he was wailing loudly.

  I couldn’t blame him. I was beginning to wonder when it was my turn to scream.

  Chapter 23

  THEN:

  “Guess what I did over the weekend?”

  Jeff’s eyes gleamed as he looked at Lynn. She felt her heart drop. He was so happy at this moment, but it wouldn’t last long. She had something to say to him that wouldn’t be pleasant for either of them. But it had to be done.

  “Jeff,” she said.

  His smile grew stiff as he realized how serious she was.

  “Yes? What’s up, Doc? What’s with the face?”

  Lynn sighed. Her feelings for him were so hard to deny. She had talked to her supervisor about it, and he had told her to monitor it closely and refer Jeff to another therapist if she wasn’t able to keep them at bay. It was all about the patient and making sure he got the help he needed. She was now wondering if she had let it go too far already.

  She looked down at her notepad. “So…my mom called yesterday.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Y-your mom?”

  “Yes, my mother. And she had an interesting story to tell me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She told me she had met one of my friends. That he came to her house and that he said we worked together.”

  “A-and?” Jeff asked, his voice trembling.

  “And her description of this person sounded a lot like you.”

  Jeff’s eyes grew wide, and then he looked at the floor. A long silence followed.

  “Jeff? Can you look at me, please?”

  He didn’t. His eyes remained glued to the floor.

  She sighed. “Jeff, you can’t do that. You can’t visit my mother.”

  “I…I am sorry. I just…well…I just like you so much, and I…” He stopped, then shook his head. “No, I am not gonna say that.”

  Lynn narrowed her eyes. “Now, you kind of have to, don’t you?”

  He lifted his gaze, and his eyes met hers again. The look in them made her soften up and lean back with a compassionate sigh.

  “I’m kind of obsessing over you,” he said, fiddling with his fingers. “I’ve been driving past your house and stalking you on Facebook. I don’t know why I do these things; it’s just…I think about you a lot.”

  Lynn smiled. “It’s okay, Jeff. It’s normal. It’s called transference. It will pass. It has nothing to do with love, what you’re feeling for me. It’s some unresolved emotions from your past and possibly childhood that we might need to dig into. There could be some unresolved issues you might benefit from looking at more closely. That’s all it is. Just try and dial down on the craziness, okay? No going past my house; no going to any of my family members. No looking at my Facebook profile. It can’t happen again, or I’ll have to refer you to another therapist.”

  He nodded while tears were springing to his eyes. He wiped them away with a swift movement.

  “Do you feel it too?”

  Lynn swallowed. She looked down at her notepad, taking a few deep breaths. “What I feel is irrelevant. This is about you.”

  That made his face light up, and his lips curl into a smirk. “So, you do, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  “You know your lower lip slightly vibrates when you’re lying, right? Just like it is right now.”

  She lifted her eyes and looked into his. “Jeff. It can never happen. Do you understand that?”

  His shoulders slumped, and he leaned back.

  “Okay. I hear you. Forgive me, Doc.”

  Chapter 24

  I’m gonna die in here, aren’t I? This is it for me. I’m gonna rot away in this hellhole and never see sunlight again.

  Sarah Abbey lifted her head in the darkness. The chains rattled behind her as she pulled them in an attempt to stretch her arms. She missed seeing sunlight; she missed feeling the fresh air on her face. She wondered how long she had been trapped in this place and realized she didn’t even know if it was day or night. She had completely lost track of time. All she could do was wait for her kidnapper to show up. It seemed like an eternity went by between the visits. Not that Sarah looked forward to them, since she was terrified of what her kidnapper wanted—if this person wanted to hurt her or maybe even kill her, but it was the only break in the everlasting darkness.

  Sarah let her hands run across the floors, feeling her way around, trying to find the toilet bucket in the back corner.
Her hands swept across the dirty tile floors, touching sand and dust and trying to avoid the dead roach she had accidentally touched the day before when looking for the bucket. She had tried to memorize where it was so that it wouldn’t happen again. As her fingers searched through the wilderness, the chains were clanking loudly behind her, and she suddenly felt something between her fingers, something that definitely wasn’t dirt or dust—or a roach. She grabbed it between her fingers and held it up, feeling it from the flat bottom to the pointy top.

  A nail. Definitely a nail.

  Sarah burst into laughter as she felt it again and again, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining things. Panting in excitement and forgetting all about her quest to make it to the toilet bucket, she returned to her spot. She tried to poke the pointy end of the nail into the chains, fiddling with it, feeling them, and hoping she could find some kind of opening, a keyhole maybe where the chains were locked together or something, anything. There had to be some way of opening them.

  Right?

  Desperately, she poked the nail into the chain, but she couldn’t find an opening. Sarah could hear her own loud breathing in her head and her pulse as it pounded in her ears. The hope she had made her suddenly frantic and caused her to sob uncontrollably when she didn’t succeed in her quest. She pulled the chains in anger and growled loudly in despair, then slumped to the floor, nail still clutched in her hand.

  Then she cried. Salty tears rolled down her face as she felt how weak she was from the lack of enough food to feed her poor body and from being kept in the same position so long while not moving much. Her brain felt foggy, and it was hard to think clearly.

  I’ll never get out of this place!

  Sarah took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Panicking didn’t help anything. It only made her more confused and desperate, and then she couldn’t think straight.

  Sarah sat back, head leaned against the wall, as she had done so many times before, but this time with the nail tightly clutched between her hands. She felt the tip of it with her thumb, poking the skin.

  That’s when she heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Approaching footsteps that soon stopped outside it, and then there was the well-known fumbling behind it before it opened slowly, and the light once again blinded Sarah. As she regained her sight, she looked into the face of her kidnapper, who was smiling broadly and wearing the look of a madman.

  Chapter 25

  I fed Owen his bottle and put him down for his nap, then took a deep breath, realizing that I had succeeded in putting down both babies, and the house was completely quiet since all the rest of the children were in school.

  A small piece of unexpected heaven.

  I left the babies in their cribs, walking away as quietly as possible, then hurried down the stairs, poured myself a cup of coffee, and just took in the silence, enjoying it for as long as it would last. I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy and her parents. What had gone so wrong between them? Could it just be the embarrassment of her becoming pregnant at only fifteen? Was that enough to entirely cut your ties to your own daughter and grandson? Could anyone really be that cruel?

  I shook my head and sipped my cup, praying under my breath for Amy and that she was somewhere safe. I had driven by the abandoned house she had been hiding in earlier, but she wasn’t there. Christine didn’t know where she was either, she said. In the beginning, I thought she knew but just wouldn’t tell me, so I had been angry with her for keeping it from me, but I knew now that she was telling the truth. It was like Amy had vanished. Matt and his colleagues had put out a search for her, but still with no luck. I had also written in the local Facebook group for people living in Cocoa Beach and told them to look out for her, but still no news.

  How far could a fifteen-year-old girl go with no money or even a phone?

  A thought entered my mind, and I spoke it out into the silence of the kitchen.

  “The father. She could be hiding with him. If only I could find out who he is.”

  I sat by my laptop, then went on Instagram to see if I could find her profile. I found her through Christine’s followers and scrolled through her posts. She hadn’t posted anything new in a long time. The last post was a picture of her in a bathing suit on the beach that was obviously taken before she became pregnant. I read through the comments, then saw one from a boy. He wrote that she was gorgeous. I clicked his profile and looked at his pictures. Lots of them had Amy in them, and in one, they were kissing.

  Bingo!

  He had to be her boyfriend. I could tell he was a kid from the high school since he was wearing a hoodie with the Cocoa Beach High logo on it and had posted pictures of him playing for the lacrosse team. He couldn’t be hard to find. It took me all of three seconds to find out he lived on a side street from Minutemen Causeway, our main road. He wasn’t in Christine’s grade level since I knew most of the kids there. He looked older, too, so probably a year or two above was my guess.

  He had to be Owen’s dad, I thought to myself. Was that where Amy was hiding? It was certainly possible.

  I stared at his face on my screen when an email popped up and took my mind elsewhere. It was from my dad. He was an extremely skilled hacker, and I asked him to help me find the surveillance footage from Park Avenue in Winter Park three years ago when Sarah’s boyfriend, Tommy, was struck by a car.

  He wrote:

  HERE YOU GO. PIECE OF CAKE.

  Piece of cake, yeah, right! I thought to myself. It was three years old; it couldn’t have been easy to obtain. Most traffic cameras deleted footage after as little as twenty-four hours, so it had to have been from a store or maybe even from the police file. Not that I wanted to know. We had an agreement that he didn’t tell me how he got the things for me since it could get me in trouble if his ways weren’t done entirely by the law. I didn’t have to know about it.

  He ended the email:

  SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND.

  I sighed. I had completely forgotten that I had said yes to my dad, grandmother, and half-brother to come down and see the baby this coming weekend. With the house a complete and utter mess and our living situation chaotic, to put it mildly, I wasn’t sure I could manage that. I hadn’t even had my own mother come over. I had been going to her place, so she wouldn’t see and criticize our living situation. If they all came down from Amelia Island, were they expecting to stay with us?

  Probably.

  “If they don’t mind sleeping on the couch and mattresses on the floor of the living room, I guess we could make it work, but Matt is going to kill me,” I mumbled to myself, then opened the file my dad had sent me and poured myself another cup of coffee to keep me going.

  Chapter 26

  “Scott. Come in. Hurry.”

  Scott looked at me with his usual smirk, the same one that always made me weak in the knees.

  “Someone’s excited to see me,” he said.

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  I closed the door behind him, then pulled him to my laptop and poured him a cup of coffee that I handed to him. I waited for a second to make sure the babies were still sound asleep, and when I heard nothing, I looked at him.

  “I came as soon as you called,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  His green eyes sparkled in the light coming from the window. He had very, very nice eyes, and lips, and…

  Stop it, Eva Rae!

  I removed my gaze from his gorgeous face, then looked at the screen instead. His elbow touched mine as he moved closer to be able to look over my shoulder. It was odd to feel him this close to me again. He smelled just like he had back then. I tried hard not to, but I couldn’t help blushing.

  Would you give it up already? You’re getting married, remember?

  Shaking away my own weakness, I focused on the screen in front of me and the video I had just watched.

  “This is surveillance footage from the day that Tommy was killed by a hit and run,” I said.

  Scott looked like he wasn’t sure he
followed me.

  “The guy who dated Sarah when she lived in Winter Park?” I elaborated, trying to get him up to speed. “The guy the brother told us about?”

  “Ah, yes, of course.”

  “Now, I’m going to play it for you. It’s tough stuff, so brace yourself. You’re about to see a man die. Can you handle it?”

  He smiled. “Of course, I can.”

  “Okay, here we go.”

  I pressed the space bar, and the video started to roll. On the screen, we saw the main street, Park Avenue, and I pointed.

  “There. This is Tommy. Now, look at him as he continues to walk down the street.”

  Scott nodded and leaned forward, brushing up against me. It felt like it was almost on purpose. What was he playing at?

  “Anyway, look at him walking down this part of the sidewalk, and then there…he decides to cross the road, then look at the car here.”

  We both watched as Tommy glanced briefly over his shoulder, then decided to cross the street. In the same second, a car came toward him and hit him head-on.

  Scott made a squeal that made me stop the video. I looked at him and saw that his eyes were terrified. I recognized that look. Seeing someone get killed, knowing it was real, could be a lot to handle.

  “Are you okay?”

  He placed his hands on his head, then nodded after a few seconds of silence. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, I knew it was going to happen…but…”

  “It can still be a lot,” I said. “We don’t have to watch more.”

  He grimaced. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine. I just…”

  “Let’s take a closer look first at what went on before he was hit,” I said, then scrolled back in the file and started it again. “See, when I first watched it, I only focused on the hit itself and when the car leaves the scene like the police probably did. But you can only see the front of the car in the corner of the video, and it’s not visible as it drives away—at least not enough to identify it. But then, I went back a few minutes on the timeline and saw something interesting.”