Page 15 of Strangers She Knows

Rae confounded Kellen with her response. “In a storm? Cool.”

“I know you’re not afraid of storms, but you want to be stuck here?” Kellen asked.

“If I have to be stuck here anyway, I might as well have a good reason.” That sounded reasonable and only a little surly.

“If you’ve seen everything you want, I’ll land now.” Max didn’t wait for an answer, but brought the helicopter down fast enough to make Rae squeal and Kellen put her hand on her stomach. At the last moment, he pulled up and gently set the helicopter on the edge of the yard. He turned to her and grinned. “Like a roller coaster, isn’t it?”

Kellen grinned back. He hadn’t worried about whether the swift descent would cause her brain to hemorrhage or rattle in her skull or any of the things he had worried about and the doctors had assured him wouldn’t happen. He was like a mischievous man-boy, a husband who enjoyed teasing his wife, and she liked that. She liked it a lot. Maybe the run ofKellen’s Brainwas almost over.

“There we have it.” Max gestured across the well-tended lawn. “Morgade Hall.”

6

Seen from on the ground, the mansion was a madness of cupolas and patios and windows and painted wood and white stone and gray slate roof tiles.

Max took off his headset and waited until they had removed theirs before he told them, “It’s anywhere from three to six stories, and is rumored to have over one hundred rooms.” He unbuckled and helped them get down and onto Mother Earth again.

“Wait until I tell Chloe about this place!” Rae put her backpack on the ground and dug around for her phone.

Kellen looked at Max, shook her head and gestured to him.This is your problem.

He went on one knee beside his daughter and caught her hand. “Honey, you don’t have your phone with you.”

Rae stilled, her hand in her backpack, her eyes wild and fixed on Max. “What? Of course I do. I put it in here. What do you mean?Why?”

“There’s no way to connect here on the island,” Max said. “It’s an internet-free zone.”

In an overly-cheerful tone, Kellen said, “Your dad and I thought it would be great forallof us to disconnect.”

Actually, Max and Kellen thought it would be great to make sure Mara didn’t trace them using their phones’ GPS locators.

On their travels, Max and Kellen had carried burn phones. After discussion, they’d allowed Rae to keep her phone—they thought it would make the trip less stressful for Rae—but Max had hired his teenage cousin, Wendy, to hack and disable the GPS. But Wendy had warned them there was always someone out there who was better, and that someone would be Mara. The woman had been illiterate. During her incarceration she had demanded, and received, specialized reading classes. That, added to her brilliance with technology and numbers, meant their burn phones, and Rae’s phone, ultimately had to go.

Rae’s mouth hung open. She looked from Max to Kellen to Max to Kellen, as if trying to comprehend people who had sprouted antennae from their foreheads. Then her mouth snapped shut, and she said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

Ah. Verona’s granddaughter. Plainspoken and impatient. “Your dad and I are stupid people.”

Rae didn’t care whether Kellen smiled and at the same time, stared with pointed intensity. As far as Rae was concerned, she had been robbed. “When did you seize my phone?”

“We put it on a train to Russia,” Kellen confessed. “Mine went to South America. Dad’s went to Newfoundland.”

“We have nophones?”Rae’s voice rose, not even questioning the strangeness of what Kellen had said.

In the distance, they heard a bark.

Her shout had summoned a friend.

From the direction of the house, they saw a blondish-red streak bounding toward them.

Rae forgot her grievance, dropped to her knees and extended her arms. “Luna! Bella Luna, my darling doggie!”

Luna leaped and slammed into Rae, and they rolled in the grass, child and dog ecstatic with joy.

Kellen and Max watched affectionately. Then Kellen moved closer to Max and said quietly, “We do have one form of communication, right?” She nodded at the helicopter, with its powerful radio.

“Yes, I’ve got a special frequency for my law enforcement contact. I’ll be checking in once a week and hoping to hell the first report states they have Mara in custody.”

“What do you think the chances of that is?”

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