Sins of the Storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

to a stuffed lamb, she’d found several slips of paper. One contained a safe-deposit box number, and she’d wondered. She knew her brother had found a key taped under the kitchen table. But they’d never known what lock the key opened.
    Until now.
    With only the soft light of the bedside lamp, Camille poured everything out on paper, documenting her first impressions of Bayou d’Espere fourteen years after leaving.
    When she glanced up again, the clock told her over an hour had passed. Dropping the pencil, she opened and closed her fingers—and saw the envelope.
    Small and white, it lay on the floor just inside the door. And before she went to it, slid her hand inside her T-shirt to preserve possible fingerprints and carefully broke the seal, the sight of her name typed on the front told her the contents would be like all the others.
    She opened the envelope anyway, and read the five words:
     
    Stop while you still can.
     
    Headlights slanted across the rain-slicked highway. For almost two hours Jack had walked the grounds of Whispering Oaks, searching and inspecting. He’d moved his car and circled back, stood in the shadows. Waiting.
    For the man he’d chased into the woods to sneak back, Jack told himself. For answers.
    For her.
    Now he took the substandard road with the same brutal deliberation he’d once taken the skies over Iraq, navigating a sharp curve with life-and-death precision.
    The simple cross on the far side of the road served a stark reminder that not everyone had the same ability. Once pristine white, now it was weathered, faded. The riot of day-lilies didn’t seem to care. They kept right on blooming—
    He crushed the memory and crossed a defunct drawbridge, accelerated. As a kid—
    He crushed that memory, too. Because to remember anything from his childhood was to remember her. Camille. And to remember was to see her as she’d been then, with freckles and pigtails and jeans rolled up to her ankles, following him and Gabe around the swamp.
    Those memories, of the girl she’d been, were not how he needed to think of Camille. He needed to remember her the way she’d been tonight, the woman who’d slipped back into the town under the cover of darkness, who’d chosen to visit Whispering Oaks at night, who’d gone to great effort to conceal her car.
    It didn’t take great deductive reasoning to realize she’d not wanted to be found—especially by him.
    Jack took another wicked curve, but the images, the questions, persisted with every mile he destroyed. She shouldn’t have been at Whispering Oaks. She shouldn’t have been the one to take the bait. He’d floated the rumors himself, about the boxes in a locked room at the plantation—but he’d never specified what they might contain.
    He’d been much more interested in who would come looking.
    But he’d never expected her.
    Now, Christ…now.
    She wanted him to trust her. She’d stood there as if not a freaking day had passed and asked him to trust her, despite the fact she’d refused to tell him one word about what she was doing there in the middle of the night. Or where she’d been.
    Once that wouldn’t have mattered. But she’d been a kid then, and he’d loved her like the little sister he never had.
    The woman he’d found tonight—tall, dressed in black with rain-slicked hair and secret-clouded eyes—was a stranger.
    For fourteen years they’d looked for her, and for fourteen years Marcel Lambert had gloated. She’d been the only link between him and a murder the coroner had labeled suicide, and with her out of the way, Lambert had basked in the small fortune he’d amassed as a renowned restaurateur.
    Poor little Camille, he’d pretended to lament. Think her recklessness finally caught up with her?
    Jack clenched his hands on the steering wheel.
    Any word on poor Cami? I heard they found a body in the Everglades.
    On a hard turn right, he accelerated toward his house, but Lambert’s words stayed with him.
    You’d think