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Harris’s shoulders fell a little and his smile looked a bit more forced. “Trust me.”
“I do.” But the trust no longer extended to Josh, and that was the problem.
Chapter Five
The doubts—always there but until that moment only lingering in the back of her mind and never pushing to the forefront—started two days ago with a laptop computer. One Elisa had never seen before. Small and seemingly neutral. Athingused for work and email... but it turned out to provide potential clues to unraveling everything.
She hadn’t been snooping that day. Not really. She’d been at Josh’s home hunting for, of all things, a vacuum cleaner. Thinking it had been months since a woman lived in his house, she’d hired a service to come in and give it a thorough cleaning. Then silly worries set in. Did he have cleaning supplies and extra garbage bags? Had he picked up the clutter? Did he have any embarrassing bachelor things that shouldn’t be on display for company?
Call it a mother’s instinct, but she knew there would be mess. A high likelihood of underwear on the floor or some male nonsense. She didn’t want the people sent by the service to get stuck picking up his clothes.
She found the laptop tucked away in the back of Josh’sdownstairs closet. Behind a box of little-used and faded Christmas decorations. Under a duffel bag stuffed with paperbacks Abby had picked up at the used bookstore. She loved to go in and search the shelves for mysteries and romances. She joked about being more of a book collector than a reader, and she took that collecting seriously.
Finding out Abby’s things still had a place in Josh’s home didn’t make sense. He claimed she’d run off, so why keep them? Why hide them...?
Elisa had spied a familiar well-worn college sweatshirt.RISD, Rhode Island School of Design.Abby’s favorite piece of clothing, what she wore around the house on cold days. A valued possession, but she hadn’t taken it with her. No, she’d used it to wrap up and hide the laptop she’d also left behind.
That’s exactly how Elisa smuggled it out of Josh’s closet—bundled up and hidden. She knew Josh and how much he hated being questioned about anything, so she kept “the find” quiet. He’d twist this around and blame her for snooping. Totally divert attention away from the real question about why he had Abby’s things and not her.
Stumbling over the laptop led to two days of teeth-clenching frustration. Every spare moment, every time she was alone, and when Nathan and Harris went to sleep, Elisa tried to figure out the password. She’d searched every memory, every photo and scrap of anything she had from Abby, looking for a clue. Elisa even did Internet searches to figure out Abby’s former addresses and the mascot from her high school, and nothing worked.
This morning Elisa thought of one more possibility. She opened the laptop and stared at the password screen. She sat on the love seat in the small sitting room connected to her bedroom.
After last night’s familial explosion, she didn’t want to wait for a better time to investigate. She’d dropped Nathan off at school and circled back home, skipping her usual coffee stop. The need to open the laptop and peek inside, to find some clue as to Abby’s disappearance, drove Elisa.
She thought about the sequence and finally stopped debating and typed. 05182004. The date Abby’s twin sister died.
Abby had claimed she knew the exact minute it happened. It was as if someone reached inside her and ripped her middle right out. Sliced through her with jagged blades. A sudden shock of intense pain drove her to her knees and kept her there, gasping and struggling to breathe while her sister collapsed on the school’s running track outside. Dead at fifteen.
The cause, a previously undetected heart defect. The result, a loss Abby described as so intense, so shattering, that years later a stray memory would shake her until even her teeth hurt, then throw her into a violent rage, only to leave her empty, shuddering and hiccupping from tears.
The worst day of Abby’s life. That’s what she’d called it and why Elisa skipped over using the numbers as a possible password. It would be a date to forget, not remember.
Elisa stared at her fingers as they hovered over the keys. The thin gold band she never took off blinked back at her. She could walk away right now, hand the laptop over and hope it led the police in the right direction. Not be responsiblefor either condemning Josh or exonerating him. But eleven months ago her sense of stability had been shattered, her control obliterated. She wanted both back. That started now, with this. With Abby.
05182004 . . . worked. Finally.
Yes!
Elisa searched and scrolled. There weren’t a lot of saved files. No photos and the Internet hadn’t been set up. But Abby kept business files, like Excel spreadsheets, on there and what looked like a draft proposal for a small business loan. Those pieces connected her to the area and suggested she wanted to put down more roots here, not take off on some wild excursion.
It could be a lead. A snippet that convinced the police to actively investigate. Then she saw it. The folder marked “unlucky.” She had to reenter the password to access it. A file of saved screenshot messages popped up on the screen. Pieces of what looked like an ongoing chat between Abby and some unknown person that started with a dire warning.
Elisa read the initial message twice before the words sunk in.
CONCERNED:your fiancée isn’t who you think he is
ABBY:Who is this?
CONCERNED:someone who knows the truth
ABBY:Fuck off.
Warnings. About Josh.
Tension yanked and pulled at Elisa as she sat there. Until she knew for sure what was in every message, she might still be wrong. Her life could go on, bumpy but normal. She wouldn’t have to test Harris’s loyalty to her versus his brother.
She shifted on the couch, letting her foot fall to the floor before tucking it up under her again. She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to ease the constant tightness she felt there. Only that last line of the message—so Abby that Elisa could almost hear her voice as she said the words—eased the anxious gnawing inside her.
