All the Little Raindrops(104)

“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.

How long had he stewed, allowing the open wound to become a gaping sore that he fell into, melding with the rot? Becoming it. Morphing into the very monster he despised.

Planning his revenge.

Her eyes lifted to Evan as he watched her. His wheels were turning, too, as the picture became clear. He turned away, folding the contract and putting it in his back pocket. The drawer closed with a small click. “We should try to find the files from the case,” Evan said, his voice scratchy. He cleared his throat as he moved to another drawer. “His lawyer might have returned them—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The case presented was all lies. They must have known, but even if they didn’t, they looked the other way.” Uninterested in the truth. Only there for the money. “There’s nothing to be done. Trying your father again would be double jeopardy.”

She clamped a hand over her mouth. It was all too much. Too much. Evan stepped forward, wrapping his arms around her, whispering calming words against her hair.

Us, she reminded herself. We are the cure. We are the answer to the sickness that wants to spread.

He stepped back after a moment, their pained eyes meeting. “My dad,” he said. “He wasn’t surprised by your presence in that motel room that day in Mexico.” He blew out a breath, looking over her shoulder, back in time. “His reactions . . . have always felt off.”