For an instant she thought that someone, anyone, could be looking up at her, her entire body silhouetted by the soft glow of interior light. For an instant her blood ran cold and she took a step backward.
God, she could use a drink.
Swallowing back her fear, mentally chastising herself for being a paranoid ninny, she thought she heard voices rising from the floor below. Oddly it was comforting to hear Tate talking to the delivery person.
Tonight she wasn’t alone.
But he’s a virtual stranger to you, Kara. A man with his own purpose. A reporter who wants your story, the son of a man who died saving you. You cannot trust him; not fully. Don’t drop your guard.
Uneasily she walked back to his desk and the papers strewn upon it. Again she eyed the list of people connected to the tragedy of her family. She noticed arrows and smaller notes scribbled in the margins, words and phrases she couldn’t quite read, but Jonas’s name had been circled several times, and arrows connected it with Lacey Higgins and Donner.
Lacey.
Kara traced the name on the paper with the tip of an index finger.
What about Lacey?
A girl no longer, she reminded herself, though she still remembered Lacey as she had been then, a seventeen-year-old in the virginal white dress, her most famous quote about Jonas still burning in Kara’s memory:
“He said, ‘If I ever find out you were fucking someone else, I’ll take an axe to him first and you next. That way you can watch him die before you go to hell.’ ”
Kara’s skin crawled. Did Jonas really utter that ugly, blood-chilling threat? Or had Lacey been lying? At the time everyone believed the calm, wide-eyed girl who’d sat so still and straight in the witness box.
Biting her lip while still tracing the letters of Lacey’s name, Kara tried to recall her brother as he had been before the night all the members of her family were so brutally slaughtered. He’d been a hothead, for sure. Angry. Even Natalie, his own mother, had said he was a mixture of “piss and vinegar sprinkled with way too many raging teenage hormones.”
Kara had definitely seen Jonas with the sword earlier that day. She remembered spying on him through the open door to his room. In jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, he swung the old, heavy weapon easily. An athlete by nature, he’d practiced his martial arts moves for as long as Kara could remember. So there he was slashing through the air, spinning, and hopping onto the unmade bed in his bare feet. From atop the mattress he jabbed determinedly, his face twisted in a seething fury as if he were slaying an invisible enemy.
An angry, troubled teen who a jury had decided was an enraged killer, an eighteen-year-old hyped up on adrenaline and testosterone who had sliced his own brothers, father, and stepmother to ribbons. As she had a thousand times before, Kara thought back to that night, to the jagged pieces of that horrid blood-soaked puzzle that, try as she might, she couldn’t force together.
Why had Marlie woken her? Had she been afraid the killer would come looking for her younger sister? How did she know? Was Marlie somehow a part of the attack? Why had she disappeared? What happened to her?
Was there an intruder, as Jonas had insisted?
If so, who?
Why hadn’t the police found him? Wouldn’t there be something, a trace of hair or skin or blood that DNA testing could have proven did not belong to a member of they? She remembered the smeared blood on the walls, the fire hissing and glowing red,, its flames reflecting on the dark pools of blood, several Christmas stockings on the floor as the machete had sliced through the mantel and sent the red-and-green socks flying.
But most of all she remembered her brothers, blood-soaked and still, mouths gaping open, eyes fixed as they’d fallen, their bodies splayed garishly over Mama’s Persian carpet. Only Jonas had moved, been alive, able to focus on her in a moment of heart-stopping clarity. She’d been rooted to the floorboards of the hallway, her heart hammering, terror gripping her as her mind screamed, No, no, no!
Blood-spattered and weak, he’d risen slowly up on an elbow. “Get help . . . Run!” he’d rasped weakly just as a blast of frigid wind had ripped into the room, sending the flames in the grate crackling as a huge, shadowy figure loomed in the doorway.
“Find anything interesting?” Tate’s voice startled her.
She jumped, coffee sloshing from her cup onto the desk and legal pad as the horrid memory withered and died. “Crap!” Frantically she searched for something to wipe up the mess.
“Got it!” Tate snapped paper towels from a spindle, crossed the room in three long strides and dabbed quickly at sodden, stained paper.