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He had no answer for that. “What else is in there?”
Noelle had been staring off behind him for a second, obviously attempting to work out that puzzle. At his question, she gave her head a small shake and then removed a folded envelope from the small compartment and unfolded it. She pulled out a short stack of photos. “Oh my God,” she breathed, dropping them like they’d burned her skin.
Evan picked one up, bringing it closer to his face. His own hand was shaking too. That was definitely his home theater, the way it had looked many years ago, when he was a teenager. Before and after Noelle’s mother was shot. Bile moved up his throat at what became clear. He wanted to shut his eyes, to throw away the horrific evidence of what had been caught on film.
The photo was from behind the couch, near the doorway, he estimated. A man could be seen sitting in front of the screen, his hand on his genitals. A small portion of the screen showed in the upper corner. The edge of a cage and what looked like something unidentifiably bloody behind the bars. “Oh Jesus,” he gasped, dropping the photo as well.
It was his father. He was sure of it. The photo had been taken from behind. It had to have been Noelle’s mother who’d taken it. There was no intimacy happening. His father hadn’t known she was there.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Sinclair estate was far more massive than she’d pictured it. And she’d pictured it often, because she’d imagined her mother’s death again and again. She’d seen her as the news articles and live reports had described her: a vindictive, jilted lover, obsessed with the man who had recently broken her heart.
It hadn’t made sense as far as the woman Noelle had known her to be, even though the story had never wavered.
Evan took her hand, leading her through the back gate that had required a code typed into its lock. The same way their cages had required a numerical code so long ago. She shoved that memory aside. Her nervous system was already clashing and clanging. She hardly needed to create more anxiety.
Evan released a breath when the gate clicked open, apparently relieved that the security code hadn’t been changed. He’d told her he hadn’t been to the house in months and security was changed semiregularly, so they’d gotten lucky. Whatever else Evan’s father considered his son, a threat wasn’t one of them.
Noelle’s head turned in each direction as they made their way through the manicured gardens, hurrying around a corner when theysaw the back of a gardener, a pair of shears in his hand as he clipped at a bush.
“Are you sure your dad’s out of town?” she whispered as they walked along a pathway beneath the eave of the house.
“He was yesterday,” Evan said. “He texted me from New York. He’s been there for a week.”
Her speeding heart rate decreased slightly. New York was across the country. That made her feel a little more secure, whereas even the gun tucked into a holster at Evan’s waist had not. On the chance that Mr.Sinclair did see them on the security cameras she didn’t have to assume were everywhere on this property—she could see one placed at the corner of the roof, and there’d been another one on the gate—he couldn’t do much about it. He could call the police, she supposed, but Evan was his son and could easily come up with a reason for being here. She, however, was a different story, and she tried her best to stay slightly behind Evan, hiding her face from view of any cameras.
But what she really hoped was that the man was in some meeting on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper and would be none the wiser.
Evan typed another code into a keypad next to a pair of french doors, and those clicked open too. Noelle followed him inside, stepping into a luxurious home office with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves that featured a library ladder that she could see moved on a rail around the entirety of the room, a gargantuan wood desk, and oil paintings she could only assume were originals, lit by gallery lights.
If she wasn’t so damn nervous and upset, she’d have taken a moment to appreciate the room. As it was, she felt a lump of bile in her throat and swallowed it down heavily. This was the room from which Leonard Sinclair had stepped, raising his gun and shooting her mother on the path they’d just walked.
There was a photo of the man himself above a marble fireplace. She stared, her heart thumping swiftly. He was smiling, his teeth white and capped. He was tanned, and though he was no longer in the primeof his life—physically speaking anyway—he was still very attractive. Noelle could admit that, even though to her he was a demon. She saw Evan in him—kind, protective, loving Evan—and it made her feel disoriented and confused. It made her feel like there might be some good in the man smiling down at her. But, no, Evan was not inhim. And the only part of this man recognizable in Evan was his genetics.
Evan went directly to the large desk, pulled out the high-backed black leather chair, and opened the drawer on the right. She came to stand next to him as he riffled through the files, exhaling a breath of frustration before turning the other way and going through the drawer on the left.
After a moment he shut that one too. “Nothing here,” he said, pushing backward on the chair and getting up. She followed him to the other side of the room, where he stepped up to a bookshelf and pulled one of the titles halfway out. “I used to hide in that cabinet over there when I was a little boy,” he said, nodding his head backward and then walking to another book on a different shelf and pulling that one halfway out too. “I’d spy on him through the crack. I wanted to know what my father did in here instead of paying attention to me.” He turned to yet another shelf and pulled a third book halfway out and finally one more near the bottom. Noelle heard a small click, and then one of the shelves began to swing outward. “He never even knew I was here,” Evan murmured.
In front of them was a secret room. “Wow,” she said. Evan clicked on a light inside the door, and they both went in. There were file cabinets to their left, a table in the middle of the room, and a large oil painting on the far wall.
Evan moved directly to one of the built-in wooden file cabinets and pulled open the top drawer. Noelle thought she heard a noise and turned back, peering out into the office. Nothing. She released a breath. She tiptoed quickly across the room and turned the lock on the frenchdoors that led to the garden. She didn’t know where the second door led, but she locked that one too and then returned to the hidden room.
“She worked for him,” Evan said. Noelle turned and hurried to his side, where he was looking down at a piece of paper he’d pulled from a file.
“What?” she breathed. He handed her what she could see was a contract. “Oh my God,” she murmured, bringing the hand not holding the piece of paper to her mouth. “He hired her to do housecleaning work.”
Evan shut his eyes momentarily and nodded as Noelle tried to make sense of everything they’d learned. He pointed at the date. “It was summer. I never saw her here because I was with my mom. She took a job and didn’t tell your dad because—”
“She wanted to surprise him with a trip to Hawaii for their anniversary,” Noelle said.Oh God.She’d havehadto take an extra job.A secret job.They did fine at that point, but nowhere near fine enough to afford a Hawaiian vacation. She felt a sob rising in her chest again and tried desperately to hold it back. They needed answers. She could lose it later. “Do you think they really had an affair?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “But probably not. My father covered up the fact that he employed her. He must have paid her in cash. The only reason to lie about that was to distort her reason for being in his home. He made her sound like a jilted lover, when she was really just doing housecleaning.”
“To try to explain her sneaking around his property? And therefore ... justify him shooting her.”
Evan looked about as ill as she felt. “Yes. The photos we, and your father, found show what she’d first walked in on. My father sexually aroused as he watched something awful. Something that looked very real to your mother, though maybe she questioned it. Maybe she came back to see if she could get more proof that it wasn’t just a horror movie he was watching.”
She nodded. “The pictures she’d already printed were also grainy and unclear. Because she’d come up behind him unsuspectingly and was nervous. She needed photos that were more convincing.”
