Maybe Quinn wasn’t that crazy about Derek, but she had a good life. The idea that she would stab him to death… I just can’t imagine it.
So by process of elimination, that means she’s being held captive somewhere. And we’ve got to find her.
I'm going to find you, Quinn. I triple dipper promise with a cherry on top.
My phone rings and my heart leaps. But then I pull it out of my purse and my face falls when I see the name on the screen. Rob. I jab at the green button to answer the call.
“Claudia.” His voice is tight. “Are you coming home?”
I glance over at Scott, who is lingering in the entranceway of the Alexander household. “Not yet.”
“The police are handling it. You should come home.”
“Everyone here is incompetent.”
“Claudia, you’re a masseuse! Can you please leave this to the police?”
I may be a masseuse, but I was majoring in criminal justice in college. I might have gone to law school if I had finished. If my parents hadn’t lost control of their car that afternoon at the end of my freshman year.
“I want to find my sister,” I insist. I’m not going to sit around and let the police screw this up any more than they already have.
At first, I think Rob is going to say something insensitive, but then he redeems himself by instead saying, “Do you want me to meet you over there?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, Claudia. The rain is coming down hard, and it’s turning to snow. All you’ve got is the Chevy. If you’re going to stay, at least let me pick you up in my truck.”
Rob and I have been married for almost six years now. Things have gotten kind of stale between us lately, and he’s always working—always running out to unclog a toilet somewhere. Sometimes I think Rob and I don’t care much for each other anymore. But then he goes and says something like that.
I glance up at my sister’s house. The doorstep is slick with ice. Rob is right. It’s really coming down.
I see the outline of Scott Dwyer in the window. He’s talking to another officer, and it seems to me he is far too calm considering he’s investigating a murder. I still can’t figure out what he was thinking. He heard screaming coming from my sister’s house. Why didn’t he go inside and investigate? What kind of police officer doesn’t investigate screaming? It’s strange.
But either way, there’s nothing we can do about it now.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll come home.”
Chapter 17
Rob isn’t a wealthy entrepreneur like Derek, so our house is much more modest than the one I just came from. Two stories, three bedrooms, two of which aren’t much bigger than Quinn’s walk-in closet. It was a fixer-upper when we bought it three years ago, and we haven’t entirely fixed it up. The outside still needs a good coat of paint. The porch is still unfinished, and six months ago I put my foot right through a floorboard.
Rob is handy, and he always swears he’s in the middle of fixing it all. Every Sunday, he gets out his tool belt and acts like he’s doing something important, but meanwhile, the front of our house still looks like something out of a gothic horror novel.
I’m dripping wet when I walk into the house through the garage entrance. Standing in the freezing rain for hours will do that to you. But on the drive home, the rain turned into snow—Rob was right. The roads became incredibly slippery, and I had to focus all my attention on getting home safely.
When I get into the living room, I’m pleased to find that Rob has cranked the heat way up. Usually it annoys me when he does that, but now I’m grateful for it.
Rob is sitting on our secondhand sofa, reading the newspaper, although it’s probably just the sports page. He might be the only person under the age of fifty who still reads a paper newspaper. And he isn’t even forty yet, although he could easily pass for ten years older since he started losing his hair a few years ago.
When he sees me, he tosses the newspaper aside, his fingers coated in a layer of ink. Rob’s fingers are always either covered in ink from the paper or covered in grime from his job. I feel like I need to hose him down before he can kiss me hello.
“So what’s going on?” he asks. “Do the police have any leads?”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “They’re trying to trace her phone. But somehow they can’t do it. Something about the weather. They said the storm is messing everything up.”
Rob’s brow crinkles. “How are you doing?”