Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
In front of them was a secret room. “Wow,” she said. Evan clicked on a light inside the door, and they both went in. There were file cabinets to their left, a table in the middle of the room, and a large oil painting on the far wall.
Evan moved directly to one of the built-in wooden file cabinets and pulled open the top drawer. Noelle thought she heard a noise and turned back, peering out into the office. Nothing. She released a breath. She tiptoed quickly across the room and turned the lock on the french doors that led to the garden. She didn’t know where the second door led, but she locked that one too and then returned to the hidden room.
“She worked for him,” Evan said. Noelle turned and hurried to his side, where he was looking down at a piece of paper he’d pulled from a file.
“What?” she breathed. He handed her what she could see was a contract. “Oh my God,” she murmured, bringing the hand not holding the piece of paper to her mouth. “He hired her to do housecleaning work.”
Evan shut his eyes momentarily and nodded as Noelle tried to make sense of everything they’d learned. He pointed at the date. “It was summer. I never saw her here because I was with my mom. She took a job and didn’t tell your dad because—”
“She wanted to surprise him with a trip to Hawaii for their anniversary,” Noelle said. Oh God. She’d have had to take an extra job. A secret job. They did fine at that point, but nowhere near fine enough to afford a Hawaiian vacation. She felt a sob rising in her chest again and tried desperately to hold it back. They needed answers. She could lose it later. “Do you think they really had an affair?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “But probably not. My father covered up the fact that he employed her. He must have paid her in cash. The only reason to lie about that was to distort her reason for being in his home. He made her sound like a jilted lover, when she was really just doing housecleaning.”
“To try to explain her sneaking around his property? And therefore . . . justify him shooting her.”
Evan looked about as ill as she felt. “Yes. The photos we, and your father, found show what she’d first walked in on. My father sexually aroused as he watched something awful. Something that looked very real to your mother, though maybe she questioned it. Maybe she came back to see if she could get more proof that it wasn’t just a horror movie he was watching.”
She nodded. “The pictures she’d already printed were also grainy and unclear. Because she’d come up behind him unsuspectingly and was nervous. She needed photos that were more convincing.”
“But he discovered her,” Evan said.
“And shot her—on purpose—before she could leave with the proof or tell anyone else.”
“Yes,” Evan said. She heard the horror in his voice too. Their emotions were unraveling right along with the truth. “If she got shot outside, maybe he was the one who surprised her and not the other way around. Maybe he took her camera and destroyed that film. Maybe he even went so far as to take a suggestive photo of himself and put that new roll of film in there.”
“But he didn’t know that she had more pictures at home, hidden in one of her books,” she said. “Photos that my father would find years and years later.”
She was barely holding back a scream. Her father had been ruined by the thought of his wife having an affair. Because it hadn’t made sense.
Because it hadn’t been true.
Noelle felt sadness and rage and injustice rise up inside her the same way it must have done for him. It’d festered like an open sore, made worse by the fact that her mother’s death had become a media sensation. Her father had been laughed at, cringed over. And yet he’d loved his wife unendingly, a love that came to feel like a humiliating curse. It’d wrecked him. Noelle had watched it happen in real time. Little had he known then that there was something dark and malignant beneath the story that was a lie.
She felt weak. She took a few steps back, leaning against the edge of the table for support.
She pictured her father the moment he found the itinerary and the photos and understood the terrible truth, or at least part of it. He must have taken them to Dow, and when he broke into the site, they realized that whatever reason she’d been at the Sinclair home, it wasn’t because she was stalking her lover. She’d seen something. She’d snapped photos. It was the reason she was murdered. He’d been stripped of his life and, more cruelly, his trust in the woman who had owned his heart. And left with nothing. He’d trusted in the justice system once before and been screwed, and so this time, instead of turning to the police, he’d taken matters into his own hands, part of his soul so twisted he’d done the unthinkable and set his sights on an innocent in retribution for what had been done to him.