And chillingly, this wasn’t all it said.
It ended with, Your Uncle will always look out for you.
It ended with a distinctive -R.
This was chilling because Mom was an only child and Dad had one sibling.
A sister.
And her husband’s name was William.
Even with that mysterious initial, my uncle could only be…
“Corey,” I whispered, pulling the card away and seeing a black and white 8 x 10 of a very attractive, mature—what seemed from the gray shading in the photo—blonde lady.
I didn’t understand.
I shuffled through the papers.
More pictures and a report.
This report read like a detective’s report.
A detective’s report—I flipped forward to see—at its end was signed again simply “-R.”
A detective’s report on a woman named Susan Shepherd.
The woman my father was unfaithful to my mother with.
Mom officially engaged to, and happily ensconced with Duncan, in the days after Christmas, I had hired a PI to find out who she was.
I had not done this out of malice or spite or misguided curiosity, because I might occasionally dabble in the first two, my curiosity was never misguided.
I’d done it because I knew my father. And knowing him, I knew he would never, not ever, cheat on my mother with just anybody.
Whoever she was, she’d meant something to him.
Whoever she was, they’d connected, and not just physically.
And Mom was now ecstatically happy with Bowie.
I needed…
And I could not emphasize this enough…
I needed Dad to be happy too.
However, even though I paid my PI far too much money, he’d been coming up with zilch.
It was, apparently, the secret of the ages.
Until whoever this R was who sent this.
Whoever that was being someone who did the bidding of a dead man.
And whoever that was was very good at what he did. Because I didn’t hire a hack.
And this mystery detective had found her.
Not only found her…
I sifted through the pile…
I had everything on her.
Name. Address. Email. Cell. Education. Social.
She was wealthy (I had bank records).
She’d moved to Phoenix from Indiana a few years ago.
And she was infamous, but not of her own doing.
She’d been, some years ago, kidnapped by a serial killer.
She’d barely survived his final rampage.
I’d heard of this guy, in the peripherals of living life, like you learn of people like this.
Everyone had.
Dennis Lowe.
My God.
My God.
My phone rang.
Staring at all that was now strewn across my pristine desk, I reached for my cell, not even looking at it, and I took the call.
I put it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Are you gonna hold my coat hostage, or what?”
I shook my head a little, still staring down at the emotional carnage on my desk. “Sorry?”
“Chloe?”
Susan Shepherd.
She wasn’t as beautiful as Mom, but she was very pretty.
Very pretty.
And she’d been kidnapped by a serial killer.
God, Dad.
Such a sweet sucker for the damsel in distress.
“Chloe.”
“Yes?” I whispered.
Nothing on the phone until, “Babe, you okay?”
I laughed. Laughed and laughed.
But nothing was funny.
“Chloe.” That was sharp.
“Sure,” I stated fake-breezily, but I couldn’t quite wring out the depths of sarcasm infused in that one word. “I’m fine. Parfait.”
Perfect.
I’d had that once.
A perfect life.
“What?”
“Perfect,” I whispered, concentrating.
Concentrating very hard at not coming apart at the seams.
“Where are you?”
“Sorry?”
“Where…are…you?”
“In my office.”
“In Phoenix?”
“Of course.”
“Fuck,” he clipped.
His intense frustration brought me fully into the conversation.
A conversation I was having with Judge Oakley.
“Why are you being rude?” I snapped.
“Because you’re two hours away, and not at Duncan’s, which I can get to in fifteen minutes.”
Why was he saying this?
“If you want your coat so bad, Judge, I’ll see to it that you get it.”
Though, he’d have to wait because I’d brought it home with me, and I would not admit to anyone but myself that was far from an oversight when I’d packed to come back to Phoenix on New Year’s.
What could I say?
It smelled like him.
“I don’t give a fuck about my coat, Chloe.”
“Is that not why you called?” I asked.
“It was, until you sounded a second away from bursting into tears.”
Oh no.
He already knew far too much.
“Now, we’re talking about something else,” he concluded.
“I’m fine,” I declared.
“You are now. A second ago, you were losing it.”
God damn it.
“I was fine then too,” I lied.
Poorly.
Even I could hear how hollow that sounded.
Usually, I was a virtuoso with a little white lie. I’d been honing my craft since before I could form coherent sentences.
Case in point, I remembered stealing a donut when Dad wasn’t looking. I was two. When he turned around and asked who did it, regardless of the fact I held the purloined donut in my toddler fingers, I pointed at Matt, who I wasn’t sure had teeth yet.
Or perhaps that wasn’t a memory and just that Dad and Mom told that story to everybody.
Judge seemed to leach me of this genius, which was tremendously annoying.
“I see,” he said disbelievingly. “So what you mean is that you had time to pull your act together, and I use the word ‘act’ purposefully.”