AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, thank God.” She didn’t realize she was panting until she leaned against the doorjamb, gulping in air. She put a hand over her mouth to keep from waking him up. Seeing her there, all frazzled and ready to hug the crap out of him, would scare him. She didn’t want that... but she was tempted.
Once her vision stopped blurring and her heartbeat settled, she conducted a quick scan of the bed. Fuzz and Buzzcuddled next to him. Neither lifted a head to greet her. Little did they know they’d missed a chance for a nighttime escape through that hall window.
The room looked as picked up as a kid’s room could look. She stepped over a block village he’d built then half knocked over with his remote-controlled monster truck and checked the lock on his window. This one worked fine.
Cold air still poured in the house. Rushing down the hall she beat back the panic that rose up, trying to overrun her. It got as far as her throat and stuck there. She slammed the window shut and locked it. She wiggled the metal fitting a few times to see if it—maybe, somehow—had come loose, but no. If anything, it stuck a bit and she needed to give it a good shove to close the window.
The logical explanation for the window issue was seven years old and asleep a few doors down the hall. More than once he’d opened windows on the second floor so he could drop things out of them. The screens generally blocked him and caused tantrums that ranged from low-key to apocalyptic.
Nathan got some sort of rush from dropping different things and figuring out which one would land first. Harris joked about their budding physicist. She’d thought Nathan had moved on and forgotten about the windows, but maybe not.
A thought kept nudging into her head. The one about how the window had not been open hours earlier when the house wound down. Even if she’d somehow missed the chill or the blowing curtain, Harris would have noticed. Surely at least one of them had their head far enough into the parenting game to prevent a safety lapse.
She glanced into the yard. The motion sensors would sometimes flood the yard with light, but not now. The usual lights on the porch and at the door to the separate home office burned. A few other solar lights outlined a path around the grass and small waterfall feature Harris had installed. The night plunged the rest of the yard into shadows.
She thought about going downstairs, but the coolness seemed to be centered around the window and nowhere else. Her mind went back to Nathan. To a horrifying vision of what could have happened.
She slipped into his room and stared at him again, amazed at how trusting he looked. She shut his door and slid down with her back against it. Anyone coming in would have to go through her. The rest of the world seemed to be falling apart, but she would keep him safe.
Just a few minutes. She’d sit and watch... not think about the window or why it was open. The problem is that with everything else going on, she didn’t even feel comfortable asking Harris if he’d opened it for some reason. Perhaps he’d realized the storm window didn’t fit correctly or he’d been fixing something.
Those answers sounded reasonable. But if he didn’t touch the window it became one more reason for him to believe she was losing her mind. To decide that she’d opened it. That she’d made up the story about it being open. Argue that she saw something that wasn’t there.
Yeah, asking Harris might be objectively reasonable but little in her life was turning out toactuallybe reasonable these days.
Chapter Thirty-One
Elisa didn’t realize an hour had passed until she lifted her head and spied the clock next to Nathan’s bed. She stood up, ignoring the ache in her lower back and the way her knee felt funny, and approached him. A bare foot hung out from under the covers and his arms were spread out at his sides. She opened the door and the cats abandoned him, likely in favor of food.
He slept with the comfort of feeling safe and secure. She’d fought hard for that. Envied it a bit. Mostly she worried about what his life would look like if Josh really had done something wrong, as she suspected, and then got caught.
Nathan would forever be the killer’s nephew. She hated that for him... but not enough to cover for Josh. She’d rather move and change names than let Josh continue to hurt women.
She tucked him back in bed and gave him a kiss before heading downstairs. She made tea, careful not to clang glasses or make any other noise. The tea box promised she’d drink a warm cup and fall off to sleep, but she doubted it.
She glanced across the kitchen and into the family room.The cats had traded Nathan’s bed for the couch and snuggled there together. Her laptop also sat there. She’d sent the saved file with the messages between Abby and Concerned to herself. Also saved it in three other places and made a copy and put it in their safety deposit box at the bank. Just in case Abby’s laptop disappeared without warning.
With the way things had been going, she needed a fail-safe system with multiple backups. If Josh really did kill women who crossed him, then she couldn’t be too careful.
She retrieved the computer and opened the file. She skipped the first few pages because she’d read them about forty times. She’d read the entire file over and over, but concentrated on the beginning, thinking that’s where the clues about Concerned’s identity were mostly likely to be.
This time, she skipped to the middle. Read a few emails then paged ahead again. She stopped on an exchange that made the blood drain from her head.
ABBY:But why get engaged to these women if he only ended up hurting them? He could just date and never get serious.
CONCERNED:he likes the kill
ABBY:Fuck off.
Exactly two days passed without a word then Abby initiated contact again. Concerned responded almost immediately.
ABBY:He’s not a serial killer.
CONCERNED:no but he gets bored and when he does he ends the relationship by removing the woman—permanently
ABBY:I don’t get it.
CONCERNED:he gets so much attention, so much love and support, when the women die–then he can be the good guy who loves hard and has had very bad luck
