AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But that’s something I can check.
Gibson went inside to her office. She could hear the kids playing with Silva in the backyard. She picked up her iPad that she had used to take pictures of the items at Stormfield.
Gibson sat down and scrolled through picture after picture of the mansion’s interior. The thing was, there wasn’t millions of dollars’ worth of assets there. She had gotten particulars on the Formula cabin cruiser. Brand-new, it would go for well over a million. But this model was four years old, so it would be worth far less. And if the millions were the ones Langhorne had already spent on purchasing Stormfield and theboat, he couldn’t imagine how Clarisse intended to get her hands on those proceeds. She would have to prove that she was Harry Langhorne’s daughter. And if she had killed her father, that would not exactly be smart. Plus, even if the place was sold and millions resulted from that sale, it could be argued by the government that the monies Langhorne had used to buy the place were stolen from a criminal organization. In that case she might not realize a penny. And while Harry Langhorne might well have been a Class A asshole, as Marshal Beckett had said, that didn’t give anyone the right to murder him.
Yet how many times have you dreamed about killingyourex?
Her small attic had an access door in the middle of the upstairs hall. She pulled on the cord and a set of stairs dropped down. She clambered up and turned on the light. There was no room to stand, so she stepped across the loose plywood boards set over the ceiling joists until she reached the pile of cardboard boxes.
She opened one and pulled out her yearbooks from Temple. She went over all four of them. There was no Francine or Doug Parker, not that she had expected to find those names. Next she went through all the photos of the students. The problem was, the only pictures she had of Francine and Doug Langhorne were from when they were children.
As they were leaving the cafe, she had asked Beckett if he had any photos of them as teenagers, but he had told her no. As a routine, he said, they did not take pictures of their protectees, in case they fell into the wrong hands. That meant Gibson really had no idea what Francine or Doug looked like now.
She stopped at one page in her junior yearbook, which showed Mickey Rogers onstage in the role of Eliza Doolittle fromMy Fair Lady.She smiled and ran her fingers over the images. The cockney accent had been really hard for the Jersey girl to master, but she had worked her butt off to nail it. The camera angle showed the audience, and also some of the crew in the wings.
She heard her kids screaming and playing in the backyard. She took the yearbook with her, left the attic, and walked over to a window where she could see Tommy and Darby running in circles, using their arms as plane wings, while Silva clapped and danced around them.
She glanced down at her far younger self on the page as she beamed out at the audience.
I thought I was going to be the next great thing on Broadway, even though my pipes weren’t the best and my acting chops, though decent, were not exactly Tony Award level. Now I’m approaching forty, divorced with two little kids, and I’m embroiled in something I can’t even begin to understand.
But whoever said life was predictable?
She put the yearbook down and hurried outside to be with her kids.
CHAPTER30
CLARISSE HAD MANAGED TO TRACEthe van that had been used to abduct her mother. It had been rented. The identity used to lease it had been stolen. She found that out on her own. The rental company could do nothing to help her. They apparently spent every dollar of their budget on ads demonstrating how amazing their customer service was, and none on their actual customer service. All she got were recorded voices sending her from one voice mail to another until the system just spit her out.
Clarisse looked at her computer screen.
The vehicle had been picked up in Asheville, North Carolina, driven to Greenville, South Carolina, used for a felony abduction of one Agnes Leland, and then abandoned somewhere in between. No leads, no clues, no nothing. The interesting thing now? How would communication to her occur?
True to her habit, she had started a new notebook. On its cover she had writtenRECOVERY OF MOMMY.
Short and to the point but with a lot of work ahead and not much to go on.
She hacked into what she needed to hack into and watched Hoodie rent the van in Asheville, which was only about an hour or so across the state line from Greenville. The world was all connected now. What that actually meant was that there was no more privacy, ever. She zoomed in on the figure, but the person’s face was never pointed toward the camera.
Using an app, she calculated the height of the person at over six feet, but that included shoes. The clothes were bulky, so an educated guess on the weight and build was likely to be well off. The ID used to rent the car was in the name of Daryl Oxblood of The Plains, Virginia. The DMV records in Virginia showed therewasa Daryl Oxblood of The Plains, Virginia. The credit card used was also in Oxblood’s name.
She sat back and thought about this.
Do I go to The Plains, Virginia, or do I wait for them to contact me? Or maybe they already have.
And there would be only one way to do it.
She used a burner phone to call the facility in Greenville.
The manager said in a cowed voice, “You’re not going to have me fired, are you? I really need this job.”
“How good are the firewalls on your computer network?”
“I don’t know anything about firewalls. But we have a guy. He’s a cousin of someone who works here and he gave us a good deal to—”
She hung up on the woman and checked the email she had given the facility in case of emergency. She had provided a phone number, too, which they had called when her mother went missing. But she felt sure the first contact would not be by phone. If ever.
And there it was.
