If she wasn’t so damn nervous and upset, she’d have taken a moment to appreciate the room. As it was, she felt a lump of bile in her throat and swallowed it down heavily. This was the room from which Leonard Sinclair had stepped, raising his gun and shooting her mother on the path they’d just walked.
There was a photo of the man himself above a marble fireplace. She stared, her heart thumping swiftly. He was smiling, his teeth white and capped. He was tanned, and though he was no longer in the prime of his life—physically speaking anyway—he was still very attractive. Noelle could admit that, even though to her he was a demon. She saw Evan in him—kind, protective, loving Evan—and it made her feel disoriented and confused. It made her feel like there might be some good in the man smiling down at her. But, no, Evan was not in him. And the only part of this man recognizable in Evan was his genetics.
Evan went directly to the large desk, pulled out the high-backed black leather chair, and opened the drawer on the right. She came to stand next to him as he riffled through the files, exhaling a breath of frustration before turning the other way and going through the drawer on the left.
After a moment he shut that one too. “Nothing here,” he said, pushing backward on the chair and getting up. She followed him to the other side of the room, where he stepped up to a bookshelf and pulled one of the titles halfway out. “I used to hide in that cabinet over there when I was a little boy,” he said, nodding his head backward and then walking to another book on a different shelf and pulling that one halfway out too. “I’d spy on him through the crack. I wanted to know what my father did in here instead of paying attention to me.” He turned to yet another shelf and pulled a third book halfway out and finally one more near the bottom. Noelle heard a small click, and then one of the shelves began to swing outward. “He never even knew I was here,” Evan murmured.
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.