Hunted by Alex Knight

Author:Alex Knight [Knight, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, crime, General
ISBN: 9781409193654
Google: _NU7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-06-25T23:58:42.658235+00:00

44

‘You saw the messages.’

It wasn’t a question. It was what needed to be said. An uneasy silence had fallen following the hysteria of a few minutes ago. Jake had been stupid. He had wanted to protect her from seeing the Facebook messages, but he should have known that curiosity would have led her to read them. And now he looked guilty for not talking about it before now.

Molly hesitated for a moment, then nodded. Her eyes didn’t meet his. She was sitting on the rocking chair on the deck, her knees bunched up under her chin, an old throw from the couch wrapped across her shoulders.

It was cold, but Jake felt a twinge of relief every time he saw a little cloud of her breath. It had been close, too close. They couldn’t afford to let that happen again.

‘I didn’t write them,’ he said after a minute.

She didn’t say anything. She was looking away from him, out at the ocean, the slate-gray waves roiling away beneath a sky the color of ashes. The sun was setting behind the clouds, but the only way you could tell was a slightly lighter patch of gray where the sky met the waves.

‘You don’t believe me.’ Again, a statement, not a question.

Molly took an intake of breath and then winced, massaging her throat with her right hand.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe. Those things y—Those things I read …’

‘They were horrible, I know.’

She glanced up at him now, but looked away just as quickly.

‘Molly, you remember what I said before? Somebody went to a lot of trouble to frame me for this. The messages are part of that. It’s not difficult to fake this kind of stuff; you know that, right?’

She seemed to be thinking it over. Wondering if she could believe him? After what felt like an hour, she spoke.

‘This girl in my math class, Samantha Howard, nearly got expelled because someone snagged her phone when she wasn’t paying attention at lunch. They, uh … they posted something they shouldn’t on the school Facebook page under her name.’

‘Really? What did they post?’

She hesitated. ‘They posted “Mr Robinson fucks farm an-­imals.”’

Something about the cold, neutral way she said it made Jake issue an involuntary snort. He saw the corner of Molly’s mouth curl upwards in response. It was the closest he had seen to a smile since yesterday.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, straightening his face. ‘Who’s Mr Robinson?’

‘He’s the principal. He kind of deserves verbal abuse.’

‘So what happened to Samantha Howard?’

‘Her parents had to come in for a meeting. I guess somehow they talked the school out of kicking her out. Her dad is some kind of lawyer and there was talk that he threatened to sue them or something.’

‘You know who really posted it?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I have my suspicions.’

That chilled the moment of good humor for Jake. They all had their suspicions.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘So, that was a fairly low-tech incidence of identity theft. Somebody physically got hold

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