Page 110 of Sunburned

“Does Cody know this?”

Did he? I wasn’t sure. He’d spent even less time than I had with her back then, and she was an entirely different person now. It wasn’t just the physical alterations; she’d transformed her whole personality. Gone was the surly, drugged-out Australian trailer park girl, replaced by a bubbly, sober American Barbie.

It wasn’t until I saw the scar—which I now realized she intentionally kept covered—that I put two and two together. Cody had seen it, obviously. But he hadn’t been there the night of the fire, hadn’t kept pressure on her wound until the paramedics arrived. He was aware she’d been injured that night, but he might well not have known exactly what wounds she sustained, certainly hadn’t seen the damage.

Sure, it was possible that she and Cody had reconnected after all these years and kept her true identity from Tyson. But it was more probable that she’d targeted Cody to get close to Tyson to exact her revenge. In which case, half a million was definitely not her end goal. She would have increased her demand when she and Tyson met, and she told him about the keys in the lining of Ian’s shoe. Because even though the keys found with the foot hadn’t been in the news, she knew about them. She’d been the one to tell me, all those years ago. She probably didn’t even know whether the keys were still with the shoe, but she knew Tyson well enough to know he’d respond to the threat, however vague it was.

Or had she decided to scrap the whole blackmail scheme in favor of inflicting the ultimate vengeance?

Either way, it was a shockingly risky plan for a single mom. Icouldn’t imagine putting my children’s fate on the line for—well, anything.

Wait a minute…. Her son was my boys’ age, thin with dark hair, from what I remembered of the picture she showed me.Could he be Ian’s son?

Holy hell.

I hadn’t noticed that Andie—Jennifer—was pregnant when I ran into her at Goodwill, the last time I ever saw her—but she’d been in baggy sweats, and I’d ended up in an ambulance, so I might have missed it. Her kidmustbe Ian’s son, which would explain why Jennifer was still set on revenge all these years later.

“She wants revenge,” I said, my confidence growing. “It has to be her. Andie was her name back then.” I closed my eyes, attempting to pull her full name from the depths of my memory, but too much time had gone by. “If you look up the police records around Ian’s disappearance—”

But I seemed to have lost the officers’ attention. Trudeau scribbled in her notebook as Lambert pushed a clear plastic evidence bag across the table to me.

“Are you guys listening?” I asked desperately. “I’m telling you, I’m almost certain Jennifer killed Tyson.”

Lambert raised his formidable brow. “Ms. Collet, I must remind you that you are a suspect in this case, not a detective.” I blanched, alarm bells ringing in my head as I realized they didn’t believe me. He tapped the document inside the evidence bag. “What is this?”

I turned my attention to the bag, my heart going to my throat as I saw what it was. “It’s a DNA test showing that Tyson is Benjamin and Alexander’s father.”

“Yes,” Lambert agreed. “And do you know where we found this?”

“I’m guessing Tyson’s lawyer gave it to you?”

“There was a copy with the will he sent over, but no. This”—he tapped it—“is the copy we found in your suitcase this morning.”

Shit.How had I missed that? I gaped at him, my head spinning. “I don’t know where that paper came from. I’ve never seen it before. It’s not mine, I swear.”

“Ms. Collet, it was found hidden in your suitcase.”

I wanted to protest, but when I tried to speak, nothing came out.

“You were using it to get money out of your children’s biological father. And when he wouldn’t give it to you, you murdered him.”

“No!” I choked out. “Someone is trying to set me up! And whoever it is pushed me off the boat last night, nearly killing me.”

“You say this, but you were the one who turned off the cameras before you went overboard,” he said.

“No,” I protested, “I didn’t. I swear.” My brain spun back to watching Jennifer enter my room on the security camera. “It has to be Jennifer. She came in my room last night when I wasn’t there. There’s footage of her entering my room on the security cameras. She must have planted that in my suitcase.”

I just needed to prove it before they came up with enough “evidence” to arrest me. The thought made me go weak with fear.

“Yes, Jennifer told us you asked to speak to her last night, but when she went to your room, you weren’t there.”

“That’s not true!”

Panic rose in my chest. The idea of being a suspect had been abstract before. There was always a voice in the back of my head reassuring me that everything would be fine in the end because I was innocent; there would never be any evidence I’d murdered Tyson because I hadn’t. But if someone—Jennifer, or Andie—was actively plotting against me, that changed everything.

This was a high-profile murder case on an island with a murder rate of zero, where high net worth tourists came to feel safe. These guys were under enormous pressure to tie this up, and I was a convenient scapegoat. A suspect to throw in jail to placate the masses who would be demanding answers. Even if they never had enough evidence to convict me, I could spend months—years—in jail while they figured that out. I couldn’t let that happen.

I rose, trembling. “Am I free to go?”

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