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Special bag. The one she kept in the closet in the sitting room off the bedroom so the contents wouldn’t get mixed in with regular laundry. The same closet where she put Abby’s possessions because she knew Harris wouldn’t go hunting.
Shit.
She shot off the bed. “I’ll look—”
Harris stepped into the doorway separating the two parts of the primary bedroom suite, holding the RISD sweatshirt. Abby’s prized and faded sweatshirt.
He frowned. “What’s this?”
“It’s—”
He answered his own question. “Abby’s.”
The man didn’t know where she kept his sweaters but he recognized his brother’s fiancée’s shirt.Great.
“She wore it all the time. Josh used to give her crap about never washing it.” Harris continued to hold it in front of him. “Why do you have it?”
Because I snooped through your brother’s housedidn’t seem like the right response. “I found it at Josh’s house.”
“When?”
She tried to stall because therightway to walk him through this refused to come to her. “What?”
Harris disappeared for a second then came back into view, now holding Abby’s missing duffel bag by the strap. “And this?”
“I can explain.” But she didn’t. She stood there, rubbing her hand up and down the outside of her thigh. Building up friction with her robe but not getting a single spark of creativity when it came to launching into this explanation.
“This is the stuff that was in the storage locker—the one you never mentioned to me until tonight, by the way. The same one you insisted was empty.”
The room tilted. She grabbed onto the edge of the dresser to keep from floundering around. “It was empty. Rachel was there. She saw it, too.”
“On this visit, maybe.”
He thought she’d moved the items then blamed Josh. Forget that doing so made zero sense. That’s where his mind had jumped. He all but said the words and tagged her as the “bad guy” in this scenario.
“No, you don’t get it.” She risked a few steps. Standing in front of him, she slipped the sweatshirt out of his fingers and threw it on the end of the bed. “I found the shirt in Josh’s house like a week ago. The days are blurring together, but it’s why I started asking all those questions that made him angry and defensive. I didn’t even know about the storage locker then.”
“Wait.” Harris shook his head. “When were you in his house and why were you searching?”
“It’s not like that.” When Harris started to interrupt, Elisa talked over him. “The point is he’d hidden Abby’s things. That tipped me off that there was a problem. I started searching for her. Doing Internet searches. Asking him about her. I even called the police and asked if she’d used her bank account and—”
“What?”
The conversation now was as awkward as she’d anticipated. There wasn’t a good way of accusing a relative of killing the women he supposedly loved. “The detective wasn’t inclined to answer my question. Not the guy you used to know, Burroughs. He retired. This was a new one.”
Harris just stared at her.
She figured she better get it all out. “I realized while I was on the phone that I’d been so lost in my own mess that I wasn’t looking for Abby or asking the right questions about where she could be and why.”
“You decided Josh was guilty of something then went looking for evidence to prove it?” Harris sounded stunned. “Do you hear how that sounds?”
She refused to feel guilty. She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t go looking for ways to doubt Josh, but her actions put her under a microscope and left her feeling sneaky and raw. “I was trying to find the vacuum cleaner and found those things instead.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Excuse me?”
The dad voice. She hated when he turned that on her. “I’m serious.”
“You never said anything about any of this. And calling the police? That could lead to trouble.”
