AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He left Tessa in the living room, remote in hand as she was setting up the movie that only half-finished the night before. That’s why, when he heard her bare feet padding in the kitchen a few moments later while his coffee was still brewing, he was surprised.
“Babe, if you needed anything, I would’ve brought it for you,” he began, turning toward her. Never one to miss an opportunity to touch his wife whenever he could, he’d intended to sweep her up in a hug, nuzzling her close while his coffee finished working.
He paused when he saw the way her teeth were worrying her bottom lip. In her hand, she was holding a phone.
Hisphone.
It had a passcode on it because, more than most, Lucas knew not to trust anyone—except for his wife. She knew his code just like he knew hers, and he had no problem with Tessa going through his phone if she wanted to.
He had nothing to hide from her, and no trouble proving it.
But because Tessa almost trusted him absolutely, she rarely did other than using his phone to order food or do a quick internet search. He couldn’t think of a time she’d answered it on his behalf—most likely because the only people who called his phone apart from her worked at St. Paul’s beneath him and Tessa would never interfere with his career—but as she held it out to him, the screen flashed and he saw that someone was on the line.
“Tessa?”
“Lucas.” That bottom lip was trembling now. “It’s Sly.”
Of course. That made sense. Very few residents of Hamlet had cellphones since the town council still refused to allow any lines being put down inside of the village. Following his lead, Lucas’s sister, Maria, bought a prepaid phone for emergencies. Her partner—fiance, corrected Lucas—had one as well.
He might live two states away, but he did his best to keep his eye on his sister and the man she insisted on marrying. If Sly was calling him, it must have something to do with Maria.
Only… why wasn’t Maria calling him herself?
Good question—and he got the answer to that, any why Tessa was looking at him so forlornly, when he accepted the phone from her, saying, “This is Doctor De Angelis. How can I help you?”
“Lucas.” The sheriff’s voice had an anguished edge that caught Lucas’s attention. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your sister… Maria… she’s— she’s—”
“Mariawhat?” demanded Lucas. “Spit it out. What happened to my sister?”
“She’sgone.”
* * *
It wasthe last week of September in Hamlet, and it was raining.
The raindrops were pelting the windshield of her husband’s candy apple red mustang, therap-tap-tapas they hit the glass only ramping up her nerves.
Tessa hated being in a car when it was raining. Having had to bury her father when she was a child all because he died in a car crash because he hydroplaned and didn’t have his seatbelt on had done that to her. The trauma was real and maybe therapy would’ve helped when she was younger, but she’d gotten to the point where she just checked and rechecked her seatbelt’s fit and tried hard not to hyperventilate when the visibility grew worse.
What made it a hundred times worse was that, three years ago, she was heading down the same highway on a night just like this. It had also been September, an early autumn storm pelting rain down on Jack’s car. Knowing there was a strategically placed nail in the tire, just ready to blow, had her antsy at hell. Add in the rain and what she was leading her husband toward in Lucas’s small town… and it was no surprise that she was inwardly a nervous wreck that night.
It was the same tonight.
Lucas loved to speed. It was a brush with death that invigorated him, and though he often restrained himself when Tessa was seated beside him, nothing got his blood pumping faster than pushing his Mustang past eight, ninety, even a hundred miles per hour.
The rain usually slowed him, if only because he knew intimately every part of Tessa—including her hopes, dreams, and not-so-secret fears. But six hours after Sly’s fateful call, with the exit to Hamlet in sight, Lucas was zipping past the other cars on the highway.
Dayton was six hours away from Hamlet on an average day. Throw in the traffic and the rain, plus the time they took, hurriedly packing and making arrangements to put their normal life on hold in favor of going straight to Hamlet, and Tess was expecting the trip to take even longer.
She should’ve known better. With a determined Lucas sat behind the wheel, his jaw tight and his icy blue eyes narrowed in a way that would frighten her if she didn’t trust him so implicitly… with Lucas desperate to reach Hamlet and do something—anything—about finding his sister… they’d traded the smooth asphalt of the highway to the weathered cobblestones that led into Hamlet in seemingly no time at all.
For the last leg of the drive, Tess kept her hand on Lucas’s thigh. She always could tell when her husband needed that connection, the support that she could offer him without saying a word.
As he approached the gulley, the big black hole in the distance almost hazy in the evening shadows and the dreary drizzle, he coasted the Mustang before taking the sharp right.
Tess’s fingernails dug into the meat of his thigh; if he could feel them through the material of his jeans, he stayed quiet, letting her clutch him tightly. No matter how many times she came back here, the gulley was a looming threat that she couldn’t shake.
“Almost there,” Lucas said, his voice filtering past the noise of the car’s radio. It always seemed to cut in and out as soon as they made it past the gulley—the first of Hamlet’s two natural borders—as though the channels of the town’s communicators and radio lines interfered with the FM stations. “And then we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
