Page 88 of Not a Word

“When we get out, when they’ve cured us,” and at that, she grinned and rolled her eyes, “and they send us back out into the world, I’d like to keep in touch.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice.”

“We could hang out.”

“Sure.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “Let’s.”

As Alicia smiled, she was already thinking about what she would do with this new information. How she could get her revenge on one Catherine Chartwell.

She could go to the police with what she knew.

But where was the fun in that?

Thirty

Dalton Crane was unsettled. Someone had talked. There were only so many people it could be. And at first, Crane was pretty sure who it was.

Catherine Chartwell, standing in that hotel parking lot, had told him she’d received, in the last few weeks, several calls to her cell phone from a blocked ID.

They’d been short and to the point, these calls. As best as Catherine could recall—not easy, because she was dumbstruck when she received them—they went something like this:

“You think you got away with it, but the chickens are coming home to roost.”

“You’re gonna pay for what you did, you miserable cunt.”

“You better keep looking over your shoulder because we’re coming for you.”

Catherine told Crane she hadn’t said a word when she received the first call. She was too stunned, and besides, the caller didn’t stay on the line. On the second call, Catherine demanded to know who she was—the caller’s voice was definitely female—and what she wanted.

But again, the call ended.

The third call went pretty much the same way. Catherine pleading with her tormentor, asking what she wanted, why she was doing this to her. But her anonymous caller had nothing more to say.

What was there to do, really? Maybe the threats would fall off. The caller would have her fun and move on. After all, if she really had something, some proof, why wasn’t she going to the police with it? Plenty of nutcases out there made threats, but they never followed through. The news was full of them. Politicians, other public figures, got death threats all the time but almost nothing ever came of them.

Catherine couldn’t call the police. She couldn’t talk to Brent about it. It would dredge up so much old baggage. Was her caller someone who really knew something, or was she only guessing? Trying to rattle her? Well, with everything that had happened over the past few days, she was rattled all right.

“I should think it’s fairly obvious,” Crane said.

“Really?”

“Leah Kennard made those calls. Your husband confessed to her what the two of you had done and—”

“The three of us,” Catherine reminded him.

Crane sighed. “Brent told her everything. But unbeknownst to him, she started harassing you. Who knows what her plan was, exactly. What she hoped to achieve. Maybe she was looking for leverage, blackmail. A way to force you out so she could have Brent for herself. And then Brent found out what she had done, how she could expose both of you, and he killed her. And then himself.”

Catherine said, “No.”

“And why not?”

“I’ve had another call since it happened.”

It had come Friday night, when she was getting ready for bed at the hotel. Short and sweet.

“You were lucky. Next time we’ll get it right.”

“Oh,” Crane said.