I banged on the back door, cupping my hand to peer in the window. The kitchen was dark, the sink empty of dishes and the counters tidy. I dragged my sleeve over my hand and tried the doorknob, but it was locked. So was the window beside it. I looked around for a pet door I might open and shout through, surprised she didn’t have one. I knocked again, but if she was home, she clearly had no intention of answering. After what I’d just seen, I couldn’t say I blamed her. If I were Patricia, I would have hidden under my bed and called the …
Oh, no.
I let go of the knob, ears alert for the sound of sirens, nearly tripping off the porch stairs in my rush to get back to my van. Patricia would be fine, I told myself as I shut myself inside. By the end of the night, forty-eight hours would have passed since Harris’s disappearance, and the police would be crawling all over this place. The scary man in the suit and his very scary driver wouldn’t be foolish enough to come back. And if I were smart, neither would I.
CHAPTER 18
I was being prodded by instruments of torture. I prayed to every god, in every corner of the globe, my prayers consisting mostly of four-letter words, to please, please, for the love of all that was holy, make it stop.
Peeling open one eye, I waited for the room to come into focus. Delia sat on the edge of my bed, her spiky hair silhouetted against the light streaming into my bedroom from the hallway. She rocked me fervently back and forth, her tiny hand pressing into my right kidney until my bladder threatened to burst. Zach leaned over me with his milky breath, his pudgy finger poking my cheek.
I covered my face with a pillow.
Delia plucked it away from my head. “Wake up, Mommy. Vero says it’s time for dinner.”
“Dinner?” I pushed up on an elbow. What day was it? What time was it? The last thing I remembered was putting my computer to sleep, closing the door to my office, and lumbering to my bedroom like a zombie.
Zach giggled when his wet pacifier found my ear. I shuddered at the memory of Harris’s tongue as I sat up, the events of the previous three days slowly coming back to me. “How long have I been sleeping?”
“All. Day. Long.” Delia rolled her eyes so hard I could see their whites in the dark.
“I know. I get it. It’s a mood.” I sat up and stretched, the muscles in my back and shoulders howling. I was sure it was karma. The pain I was suffering for burying Harris Mickler was directly proportional to my own stupidity.
Maybe Vero had been right about the front-end loader.
I switched on the bedside table lamp, wincing as the light threw my life into stark relief. My captors took my hands and dragged me from my room. The hallway smelled like garlic butter, oregano, and simmering tomatoes, and my stomach growled as I hoisted Zach onto my hip and carried him downstairs.
Something was different. Or maybe everything was different. I looked around the kitchen as I strapped Zach into his high chair. At the clean stretches of countertop where random piles of clutter used to gather. At the vacuum tracks in the living room carpet and the baskets of clean, folded laundry. At the open notebooks and calculator and accounting textbooks where the missing piles of collection notices in the dining room had been yesterday.
A sinking feeling swept over me. “Where are the bills?” I asked Vero.
“I handled them,” she said, serving out bowls of spaghetti and garlic bread.
“What do you mean, you handled them?”
“I paid them.”
“With what?”
She raised an eyebrow as she slid Delia’s plate onto the table. I ran upstairs to my office and threw open my desk drawer. Patricia Mickler’s envelope was gone.
I rushed back down, nearly slipping on the fresh floor polish at the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s the money?” I whispered, darting an anxious glance at the kids. Delia slurped up a long noodle. Zach picked up a handful of pasta and sauce, dropping it onto his tray with a squeal.
Vero sat down in the empty chair beside them. “I started an LLC in your name, opened an account, and used it to pay off your bills.” She tore off a mouthful of garlic bread. “You’re welcome,” she said around her food.
Appetite gone, I sank heavily into my chair. “All of them?”
Vero speared her fork into her spaghetti, as if the answer should have been obvious.
“Don’t you think that’s going to look a little bit suspicious? How am I supposed to explain that to Steven when he asks me where the money came from?” Delia’s eyes lifted from her plate at the sound of her father’s name, and I let my argument drop.