AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Why did you say that?” Delta questioned her son.
Owen shrugged, then he focused on something. “The knives are back!” he said on a note of discovery.
McCrae’s gaze followed his. He was looking at a knife block near the sink. Delta was gazing at it, too. She’d picked up her wineglass again, and this time she took a sip with a shaking hand.
McCrae stared harder at the knife block. There was a line of seven steak knives slipped into the spots, but one was missing.
“What happened to the new ones?” Owen asked.
McCrae looked at Delta, who was avoiding his gaze.
Oh, shit, he thought, realizing with a sense of betrayal that she’d lied to him.
* * *
Brian drove toward Anne Reade’s house. Or at least she thought it was. It kind of deflated her. Anne, then, was the woman he was throwing her over for?
But there wasn’t a lot of traffic out this way, not all that far from Amanda’s property, actually, so Zora had to cruise past the turnoff Brian had taken above Grimm’s Pond, which set her on a course to Amanda’s. She supposed she could turn around in Amanda’s long drive, which was a good mile farther on, but she didn’t want to wait that long, so she did a U-turn and headed cautiously back to the road where Brian had turned off and almost immediately pulled over and parked, mentally chewing her nails. Should she walk? She had a black windbreaker with a hood that she kept in the car.
She waited a tense thirty seconds, then grabbed the windbreaker, got out of the car, slipped into the coat, and covered her head with the hood. It was coolish, but the windbreaker still was a little on the warm side. She wanted to take it off, but she wanted the cloaked protection more.
Her white Mercedes practically glowed in the tiny sliver of moonlight. She hesitated, wondered if she should drive it farther away. But Brian had already been out of her sight for too long.
She walked rapidly down the road, praying she wouldn’t be seen.
This is stupid. What are you going to do when you find him?
Tear the bitch’s eyes out.
She was a little surprised at how violent she felt, but Brian was hers, and she wasn’t going to give him up without a fight.
The houses were spaced far apart, with long drives that snaked into the inky night. She could see a rooftop on one, and she hurried down the drive. No black Mercedes. She backtracked, jogged down another drive. Again, no car. In fact, neither house showed any kind of light.
Was this Anne’s neighborhood? Maybe she was wrong.
She ran farther down the main road, and by the time she’d found the right drive, with Brian’s car parked, still idling, down a long asphalt drive that then ended in gravel, she was in a full-blown sweat. She shouldn’t have worn the Ann Taylor silk blouse, and the black flats weren’t made for running, either.
In fact, she should’ve just stayed home with her wine. She wasn’t going to give up on Brian, but this kind of nonsense, in the dead of night, ruining her clothes? She could find a hundred better ways to save their marriage. She could—
The hard poke in her back had her whipping around, and she gave an aborted scream. “What the fu—”
The handgun was now aimed right at her face. She lifted her hands in surrender automatically, her mouth an O of surprise.
“Who . . . who are you?” she stuttered, staring at the man dressed all in black, holding her at gunpoint, even as he looked kind of familiar. “Where’s Brian?”
“Inside.”
His voice was gravelly and cold.
“Well, what are you doing? What, what?”
He suddenly leapt forward, and she screamed, the sound reverberating through the quiet night a half second before the gun smashed down on her head, knocking her flat to the ground.
Zora knew no more.
Whistling, her attacker grabbed her by her heels, making sure the black shoes stayed on her feet, and dragged her toward the house.
* * *
