Page 27 of Fight or Flight

No, I can’t. It would cause more trouble for me. Just call!

Karrie

Though Katherine had no children of her own and hadn’t been around that many, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of responsibility toward Karrie. A phone call couldn’t hurt. Maybe she could put this to rest once and for all. Before she changed her mind, she dialed the number Karrie had given her.

“Darby, is this you?” Karrie asked, her voice not more than a whisper. Katherine could detect a deep Southern accent, one similar to hers.

“Yes,” Katherine said, trying to disguise her voice.

“Listen, I can’t talk long. My dad is raging. I found this notebook.” She lowered her voice even further. “They’re about our favorite author. Dad keeps saying he’s going to ruin whoever K.C. Winston is. I don’t know how he got the notebook, but it’s like the first book. He says he wrote it, and someone stole it from him. I thought you could help me figure this out.”

“Okay,” Katherine said, as her heart began to race.

“You know a lot about the books,” Karrie said, “and you were nice to me when I joined the fan page.”

Katherine wasn’t sure how to react, so she asked, “What kind of notebook? Like a journal or something?” She hoped she sounded like a sixteen-year-old, but her thoughts were those of the adult woman she really was.

“No! I swear this spiral is like the first book in the series! I don’t believe Dad wrote it like he said. He’s been acting weird since my grandmother came to visit.”

Was Audrey her grandmother? Should she risk revealing her true identity and ask Karrie?

“Weird, like how?” Doing her best to sound sixteen, Katherine used the wordlikeas they seemed to do, even though it annoyed the hell out of her.

“I found the notebook while I was looking for one of Mom’s sweaters. It was stuffed in a bag in the back of the closet.”

Katherine had all of her notebooks. There was no way Karrie’s dad could have one of her old notebooks. It was impossible.

“Could he, like, have copied them or something?” she asked in her Darby voice.

“I never thought of that. It wasn’t his handwriting, but he might’ve. I guess he could’ve disguised his handwriting, though I’m not sure why he’d do that.”

Neither was she. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Karrie really could be Tracie’s daughter.

“So what is it you want me to do?” Katherine asked.

“I don’t know. I just needed to tell someone.”

“You want to keep this secret just between us?”

“Yes, the other girls would laugh at me,” Karrie said.

“I’ll keep it a secret. Listen, I gotta go. My dad needs his phone back. Talk later.” Katherine ended the call.

Taking a deep breath, then releasing it slowly, Katherine’s gut instinct kicked in. She needed to find out who Karrie’s father was . . . before he found her.

Chapter Seven

Katherine thought it best to privatize her fan page for a while, allowing only the girls she’d been chatting with to stay. She remained unsure about Walter, the male nurse. Maybe she would block him. Something about him seemed a bit off. Could it be possible he was Karrie’s father? She would go online, look at his posts, and try to read between the lines.

While she appreciated all of her readers, Walter was the only male ever to join the fan page. Her books were about teenage girls, and each had a special power. Lark could move objects telekinetically. Adrianna had psychic powers that enabled her to know things before they happened. Harmony possessed strength far beyond normal, and Jayden produced sounds that could be deadly. Katherine’s years at the Burgess Hill School had elevated her imagination far beyond that of other girls her age. Her characters represented powers she herself had wished for. Right now, she could use Adrianna’s psychic abilities.

Katherine could think of no explanation for Karrie’s father claiming he wrote her books, and no way was it humanly possible for him to have possession of one of her notebooks. She’d kept each one in a large plastic bin in her closet. Just for the hell of it, she went to the closet, pulled the storage container out, and scanned the stack of spirals. All of her notebooks were exactly where she’d left them.

Why did Karrie fear her father? She had admitted that he hit her sometimes. Karrie reaching out online to “Darby,” of all people, made no sense. Did Karrie know of their possible connection in real life? Katherine wanted to think this was nothing more than a childish prank, yet there were too many coincidences for this to be a joke. No one knew she’d moved to North Carolina. Not even her former colleagues at theGlobe, nor the couples she and Adam had socialized with. She’d left her life in Boston behind. She’d never contacted anyone.

Wait.

It had been so long ago that she’d almost forgotten. She’d sold her apartment a few months after moving here. All of the transactions had been made through emails and banks. When her apartment was sold, the money was wired to the business account of K.C. Winston, Inc. If someone wanted to find her, and they were technologically gifted, they could have located her. If they were truly hell-bent on destroying her, maybe they could do just that.

---