The Girl Who Wouldn't Stay Dead by Cassie Miles

Author:Cassie Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-08-13T19:12:59+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Connor emerged from the closet, shoebox in hand. Unlike the kitchen and the office, the clutter in the bedroom wasn’t too bad, and the closet—where dozens of shoeboxes were stacked—looked like it had barely been touched. He placed the box labeled Doc Martens on the bed beside her and lifted the lid. Inside was the locked metal container that held her Beretta M9.

“Not the first place I’d go looking,” he said, “but if I was searching, I might dig through the boxes. I’m surprised the intruder didn’t discover the gun.”

“I think I know why,” Emily said. “By the time the intruder got to the closet, she’d already found what she was looking for.”

“She? As in Kate Sylvester?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Emily had everybody’s attention—Wellborn, Beverly, the ambulance driver and two plainclothes officers. “Explain,” Connor said.

“When Kate and I were talking in Aspen, she mentioned Jamison’s habit of leaving cute little personal notes on the backs of photographs.”

“He did that when we were in college,” Connor said. “He’d take a photo on a first date, make a note and send it to his latest girlfriend. Women thought it was sweet.”

“Jamison was good at courtship. In the long term? Not so much.” She pointed to the wall opposite her bed, where twenty or more framed snapshots were clustered in groups. “Tell me what you see.”

The first thing he noticed was that his smiling face appeared in two photos: a group shot on a ski slope in Aspen and a touristy pose on a bridge in Central Park. He recognized several other people: friends in New York, people she’d worked with and artists whose work she’d displayed. Noticeably absent were photos of family events, like birthdays or Christmas. Emily had no siblings and her relationship with her uncle wasn’t something she talked about. Her in-laws and Jamison had also been deleted from her life.

“Do you get it?” she asked. “Anything odd?”

Connor studied the photos more intently, trying to decipher her meaning. He figured that Emily had taken most of these pictures, and the composition showed her natural artistic sensibility in terms of balance and light. Each shot captured a glimpse into the character of the subject, whether it was beauty, humor, joy or poignant sadness.

Beverly was the one who spotted the anomaly. “This group of three photos on the far end seems lopsided. Was something removed?”

“There was a fourth picture,” Emily said. “It was a friend of mine feeding a banana to a blue iguana.”

“In the Cayman Islands,” Connor said. He remembered that group trip very well, especially the sunrise morning when he and Emily had got up early and walked along the beach. “Your friend Liz Perry was fascinated by the iguanas and earned herself the nickname of Lizzie Lizard.”

“The Caymans,” Wellborn said. “I have a bad idea about where this is headed.”

“While we were there,” Emily said, “Jamison had me open an account in this strange little bank with a small lobby and a floor-to-ceiling safe. I signed a bunch of documents and let them take my photo and fingerprints.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.