Page 39 of Threat of Danger
“Was that why you didn’t come back for your father’s funeral?”
How would he know that? And why didn’t his tone hold a single note of judgment?Shejudged herself.
“Fuck the little bastard,” Derek said under his breath, so Zelda wouldn’t hear.
Jess didn’t argue with him.
Thecookieshad done her in. When she’d first moved to LA, she shared a computer with her aunt. Aunt Linda liked to keep up with what was going on in Vermont, in particular with the area where her family lived. The search engines put cookies on the computer, and Jess and her aunt were shown story after story from the local papers, including theTaylorville Times.
Jess had tried to avoid them, but as soon as she turned on the computer, there they were on the home page. Avoiding the headlines was impossible.
About two years after Jess moved, a high school girl disappeared. Madison Hale. Jess had been on tenterhooks for weeks, scanning the headlines on purpose at that point and Googling the missing person case, but Madison was never found.
Two years after that, just over the county line, another girl went missing: Crystal Gneiss, a nineteen-year-old waitress at a small diner. She left work one night, never to be seen again.
Then nothing for twenty-seven months.
Then a seventeen-year-old went missing from a high school football game. Bailey Rook. Bailey had been in trouble at school a lot. She was just about to be suspended again. She didn’t get along with her parents, who were overly conservative and controlling. Everyone assumed that Bailey had run off.
Eighteen months after that, Mariana Allen went missing. High school dropout, working on her GED.
Four girls. Different school districts. Different police jurisdictions. Nobody noticed the link but Jess, for whom each disappearance brought back all the trauma of her past.
First, she called the Taylorville police. The deputy sheriff, Gordon Muller, talked to her on the phone, gave her a bunch of platitudes, then brushed her off. After the third contact, he wouldn’t take her calls.
Desperate, Jess had contacted Maxwell at theTaylorville Times. And, oh how he listened. He promised a full feature article. Except, then Bailey Rook reappeared. She’d run away with a boy she’d met on the Internet, but the romance fizzled.
When Maxwell’s article was finally published, it had a drastically different slant from what he’d promised. He’d painted Jess as suffering from PTSD, paranoid, delusional, desperate for attention, wanting to reinsert herself into the limelight again.
The article had devastated her. She’d been on a movie shoot in Hong Kong at the time. Her mother had called. She was mad at Jess for talking to Maxwell, for stirring up the past. They’d had a fight.
Her father had died that weekend. Maxwell contacted Jess, wanting a video interview for the paper’s website. They should sit down when she came back for the funeral, he’d said.
Jess hadn’t come back.
“You OK?” Derek asked as Zelda checked her pattern and then counted her stitches, lost in the task at hand.
“I’m fine.” Jess meant to leave it at that. She had no idea why she added, “I know who I am in LA. I don’t know who I am here.”
Derek held her gaze. “You’re the strongest woman I know. Wherever you go, that goes with you, Jess.”
God, she wanted to believe him. But the trip home had knocked her sideways in more ways than one. The past stilllivedhere. She hadn’t fully understood that when she’d decided to come back.
She didn’t want to think about any of this tonight. As Eliot ended his call and returned to the living room, Jess pushed to her feet.
“Since we’re going to have a line in front of the bathroom before bedtime, I’m going to grab a shower now.”
She looked back from the top of the stairs. Zelda was no longer focused on her knitting. She was watching the men who went back to discussing book plots. Jess didn’t blame her.
The scene in the living room really was captivating: both men powerfully built, in their prime, incredibly handsome in different ways. Derek was a rugged kind of man. He had a roughness to him, something about him spelled soldier. Eliot too was obviously a physical guy, but more in a Gen X way. He climbed cliffs as a sport. Jess had a feeling that Derek would only climb a cliff if he needed to reach an enemy. But, really, she was pretty sure Derek would just blow up the damn cliff.
She thought about that while she showered. She thought abouthim. Only because he was a massive pain-in-the-ass inconvenience.
Damn his stupid furnace. How many days is he going to stay here?
She wanted to spend time with Eliot, butnotwith Derek. And definitely not with the two of them together.
Derek would have to write during the day, wouldn’t he? Weren’t authors always on tight deadlines and tearing their hair out over whether they could finish the book on time, working around the clock, drinking too much coffee and too much wine, all blurry-eyed? Why couldn’t he be one of those writers, in a wrinkled shirt and with a potbelly from sitting all day? Did he have to be so attractive,andwith time on his hands?
