Blow Up by Ellen Crosby

Author:Ellen Crosby [Crosby, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2023-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

I heard every car that drove down S Street for the rest of the night, bolting upright in bed and listening to make sure the driver wasn’t slowing down in front of my house. After the sound of the engine receded – which it always did – I would resume breathing and try to talk myself into going back to sleep. Nobody had followed me to or from Meridian Hill Park.

No one was stalking me. I was making myself crazy for no good reason.

At five, I finally gave up and went downstairs to make a pot of coffee. I took a notebook and pen from a desk in a living-room alcove that I’d turned into a small office, got a mug of coffee, and threw myself into an oversized armchair in front of a bay window that had a perfect view of the street below.

In the middle of the first page of the notebook, I wrote Everett Townsend’s name and drew a circle around it. Then I started adding the names of everyone who had been involved with Townsend the day he died, putting them in random places on the page and drawing circles around their names as well until it looked as if I’d drawn a page of thought bubbles. Jack. Me. Diana Townsend. The guy who showed up at the hospital. The EMTs. Javi. The Professor. I chewed the tip of my pen for a moment and added Vicki Russell and my brother Tommy. Then I drew lines connecting each person to everyone they knew until what I had – which was a mind map – resembled a spider web. I stared at it, looking for connections I hadn’t yet considered as well as who might have more information about the identity of the man who had died in the Emergency Room at George Washington University Hospital three days ago.

The first and easiest person to reach out to was Tommy. He could find out who else had been in the ER that night and when Townsend’s body left the morgue for the funeral home – and which funeral home it was. Someone or more than one person took care of Townsend, or the Professor, before he was cremated. I added ‘funeral home’ to my spider web and connected it to Tommy, Diana, Townsend, and the Professor.

Then there was Vicki.

She didn’t know I’d seen her and Townsend together the morning he disappeared. If I confronted her and started asking questions, a lot of things would unravel. The least of it was that I’d blow the surprise Quill and I had been keeping for more than a year, and everything would go downhill from there. Far more important was that I’d be the one who outed her affair with Townsend. It would destroy Quill and I couldn’t do that. But I did wonder whether Vicki had known what Townsend had intended to do.

Next was Diana Townsend. Her husband couldn’t have pulled off his disappearing act by himself. He had to have help.

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