Survival of the Fritters by Ginger Bolton

Author:Ginger Bolton [Bolton, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The man in the picture was definitely Randy. As far as I could tell, the car was identical to the one that had rushed out of the Fallingbrook River valley the evening that Matthias disappeared.

Lois must have found this picture on her drive last night while she was copying files. She must have heard Brent and me coming up the stairs, and had quickly loaded the photo we already knew about, the one in which the sunset reflecting on the car’s windshield hid the driver.

Maybe Lois meant to close the photo file, but she’d only minimized it. If I had noticed the tiny icon indicating that another picture was open, ready to be enlarged for viewing, I would have dismissed it as one of the others that we’d examined. But this picture was dated three days later, and it wasn’t one of the photos that I’d copied to my hard drive.

Lois must have known that the car in both pictures was the same car. She’d told me she wasn’t sure after all these years, but comparing the two pictures must have convinced her.

I’d been wrong about her. She wasn’t as sweet and honest as she’d appeared. Defeated, I slumped down in my chair.

She should have shown Brent this photo linking Randy to the getaway car.

She wanted to prove that Randy wasn’t guilty of murder, but hiding a clue pointing to guilt wasn’t the same as unearthing evidence to show that someone was innocent. On the other hand, maybe she had hoped that Brent would find the incriminating photo, and she wouldn’t have to betray her great-nephew by being the one who showed the picture to the police.

I’d promised to try to help clear Randy’s name. It was looking more and more difficult.

Brent had said he would take Lois’s thumb drive to the police department. If the investigators were thorough, they would look carefully at all of the pictures on her drive, and I wouldn’t have to tell them about this one.

Thunder boomed, close. I jumped. Afraid that a bolt of lightning might take out my computer and everything on it, I saved the telltale photo on my hard drive, and then powered off the computer and unplugged it.

A zigzag of white tore through the sky beyond the houses across the street. Thunder crashed and rolled. Rain poured down the window. Alec had tried to show me the beauty of extreme storms when viewed from the shelter of our sunroom, but I still found them scary.

I could almost hear him assuring me that I’d be fine if I stayed inside.

Alec.

He would also tell me that I shouldn’t trust law enforcement to discover the photo I’d just saved. He would say I had to tell them about it.

What I really wanted to do was crawl into bed and burrow my head under pillows.

I didn’t want to keep bothering Brent, but I had to tell him about the Jiersons and Honey, and now I also had to tell him about the picture of Randy smiling in front of his packed car only three days after Matthias went missing.

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