Even In Darkness--An American Murder Mystery Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

is also everything good about my Joey. She looks like him and she has his laugh and his ears, and she is what he could have been without the dysfunctional demons that slipped so effortlessly into our lives.
    â€˜I guess Andee’s sound asleep,’ I say, and I can hear the echo of hope in my voice.
    â€˜She is,’ Caro says.
    I would not have let her wake my granddaughter, but there is a part of me that wants the choice, the comfort of knowing I am that important. She has called me ‘Nina’ since she was a baby. A name she came up with herself. I want to hear her say my name, to talk a few minutes, to hear her voice.
    â€˜What are you going to do?’ Caro asks.
    â€˜I honestly don’t know. But stay close to your Sanderson, will you? Are
you
going to the police?’
    She sighs. ‘Just thinking about it makes me hyperventilate. But I don’t think we have a choice.’
    She says
we
.
We
are in this together. It makes me feel a little less lonely, but I’d rather she and Andee were safe out of it.
    â€˜It’s late, Caro. Let’s sleep on it and talk tomorrow. We’re not going to solve it tonight.’
    â€˜OK. Goodnight, Mrs Miller.’
    â€˜Goodnight,’ I say, but her voice is already distant and she hangs up before she hears me tell her to stay safe. She is a long way away, and getting further by the minute.
    And I am so alone.

FIVE
    I do not go to the police. The police come to me. The noise they make, the jackhammer of fists at my front door, brings me awake in pure panic.
    Leo is barking. It’s been said that the roar of a lion can be heard eight miles away in the jungle. In the subdivision, the bark of my Leo can be heard for ten.
    I look out the bedroom window and see nothing but my backyard, the grass waterlogged from the rain that started before I got Leo out for his late night wee wee, where the two of us, dry now, were spattered with the initial onslaught of fat cold drops. I pull jeans over the white boxer shorts I wore to bed, and slide a fisherman’s sweater over my white cotton tee. I run down the stairs, unfastening the baby gate at the bottom that keeps Leo and his youthful habits of destructive chewing and nosiness out of the upstairs rooms of the house. I would pay extra for a Marsha-proof gate.
    I think as I run down the stairs that this house is ridiculously big for me and that I have been living here as a penance. Maybe I’ve been too lazy to move. Maybe I have thought I didn’t deserve to. Maybe I’m letting Carl punish me, for what happened fourteen years ago.
    I see blue lights pulsing. The intermittent throb shines through the green damask curtains in the living room. I don’t like these curtains either. They are overly formal, keep out too much light, gather too much dust.
    Blue lights.
    Leo is frantic, running from the door to me to the window, and the hair stands stiffly in a stripe down his back, fanning out over his lean shepherd rump. He is intense in the way of GSDs on the alert, and he is young enough to be unsure what it is he is supposed to do, but sure he is supposed to do something.
    I love him dearly and wish he would shut up.
    â€˜
Quiet
, Leo.’
    He barks louder.
    I hold his collar – it takes all my strength to keep him close – and with the other hand I open the front door. Now that it is too late, I realize I should have locked him in the bathroom off the hall
before
I opened the door. So far he has been determined to protect me from the garbage pickup men, the black lab one block over and baby strollers with wheels that rattle a certain way on the sidewalk. He does not feel I am in any danger from the occasional copperhead snake that wanders over from the creek across the road, and he’s been known to nose them up in my direction, just like he does with the little grass snakes that like to slither through my yard. His intent is to play, theirs to slide confusedly my way for