Page 43 of Witness To Murder
Isla—Alyssa—stood so still, her coal-black hair hanging around her shoulders, her pale skin a sharp contrast to the black tee and slacks. Leah felt at once thankful she was alive and furious that she was.
“Remember what I said,” he warned. “Caution is essential.”
Leah nodded as she reached for her door.
She and Owen emerged from the car simultaneously. Even from across the street, Leah noted the change in the other woman’s demeanor. She hadn’t expected Leah to have someone with her.
Still, she waited while they crossed the street. Leah had worried that she would take off. The fact that she stayed put sent Leah’s pulse racing.
“Who’s he?” Alyssa asked as Leah neared the gate.
“He’s a private investigator I hired,” Leah said, anger suddenly igniting inside her. “I didn’t really have a choice, since you set me up the way you did.”
Surprise or something on that order flitted across the other woman’s face. “I didn’t set you up. I didn’t do anything but get dragged into a situation that had nothing to do with me.”
Leah scoffed. “I’m the one who was dragged into the situation. The police suspected me of murder!” She shook her head, worked to tamp down her anger before she scared this…this person off. “He’s Owen,” she said with a jerk of her head toward the man beside her. “He’s helping me.” She glanced up at him. “He’s a friend.”
Alyssa scrutinized him through a narrowed gaze. “Are you sure you can trust him?”
Leah laughed. “You’re asking me about trust? Seriously? We’re friends for three years. Roommates! And the whole time, you were lying. Your name isn’t even Isla Morris. You stole a dead woman’s identity.”
Alyssa looked away then. “We were friends, Isla and I.” She met Leah’s gaze. “I was part of the janitorial team at the university. I was assigned to the library and the student center. But it was in the library where Isla spent a lot of time studying, and that’s where we met. I helped her study sometimes. Eventually, I came to the apartment and helped aswell. We were…” She met Leah’s gaze again. “We were more than friends.”
“Did you kill her too?” Leah demanded, ignoring the softer feelings that attempted to emerge.
“No.” Alyssa’s eyes were bright with emotion. “I loved her. But she had serious issues. Maybe her mother was in denial, but I believe Isla was bipolar. Rather than get the help she needed, she and her mother pretended the problem wasn’t real. She wanted Isla to stay focused on school—to ignore her needs. Those last few months, Isla was miserable. She didn’t want her life anymore. I tried to help, but it wasn’t enough. I found her at the lake house. She had taken a whole bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. The next thing I knew, her mother had cremated her and gone into solitude.”
“Did you kill her mother?” Leah demanded.
Alyssa rolled her eyes. “No. She took the same way out her daughter did. OD’d on her own medicine.”
“So you, Alyssa Jones, put her mother in the freezer and stole the daughter’s life.”
She shook her head. “Maybe that was part of it, but mostly I wanted tofinishher life. I wanted to keep her alive, and the only way to do that was to become her and to become the good person she was. Isla kept to herself —because of the disease, I think—so I made new friends for both of us, and I helped you because it was something Isla would have done.” She shrugged. “Her mother never closed up her apartment or anything. Never ended her enrollment at the university. As far as I know, she never even notified anyone. They had no other close family other than that scumbag brother. It was just the two of them. There had to be a reason that happened.”
Leah turned away, couldn’t bear to look at her.
“How did you become acquainted with Raymond Douglas?” Owen asked, speaking for the first time.
Alyssa glared at Owen as if he were her enemy. Leah wanted to be furious with her. To hate her. But how could she, after hearing that story? Then again, maybe this woman was a master manipulator. A liar. A cheat. How could Leah believe anything she said?
Alyssa shrugged. “He was freshly divorced and hanging out at the same clubs as me and my friends. He was quite wealthy, had the right personality. I was drawn to him.”
“You were drawn to him, or to his money?” Leah snapped. Those flashes of anger just wouldn’t be tamped down.
Her former roommate looked at her, pain in her expression. “I guess I was his type and he was mine. He flirted and I flirted back. But—” she looked at Leah as she told her the rest “—the chemistry fizzled quickly. We saw each other from time to time to blow off steam. But that was it.” She drew in a deep breath. “Until a few weeks ago. He said he needed to disappear. He wouldn’t say why. But he had a plan, he just needed a witness to…” Another big breath. “To his murder. Then he would disappear and never be bothered again. He gave me five thousand dollars. I needed the money. The funds Isla left in her account were running out, and I was getting desperate. I was never able to access the mother’s money.”
“He wanted a reliable witness,” Owen said, “to his fake murder. Did he ask for Leah by name?”
Alyssa looked away a long moment, then nodded. “He’d looked into the backgrounds of my closest friends, and he thought the problem Leah had that summer after her high school graduation would be useful. It would lend credibility to what he needed the police to believe.”
Leah’s breath caught. “You told him?” She had shared her deepest secrets with this woman. How could she? Right. Of course. She did whatever was most beneficial to her.
“No,” she argued, her fingers curling around the slats of the gate as if they were prison bars, “he found out about it through the background search. I never said a word.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Leah argued. “You still betrayed me.”
Her dark eyes shone with emotion. “I did. I’m sorry.”
