Chapter 5 - The Message She Deleted
Nurse Carter stepped between Brooke and the bed.
“You need to leave.”
Brooke held up my phone. “Relax. I’m giving her property back.”
“Put it on the table.”
Brooke did, smiling again.
That calm little smile.
Then she left.
Mom waited until the door clicked shut before whispering, “She knows.”
I stared at my phone.
Nurse Carter picked it up using a glove and handed it to Detective Reed when he returned moments later.
“Do not unlock it yet,” he said. “If she deleted anything, we may still be able to recover it.”
I remembered why Brooke had come to my house the night I was attacked.
A message.
Dad had sent me a message from an unknown number.
COME TO THE OLD CABIN. ALONE. DO NOT TELL BROOKE.
I had read it twice before Brooke walked into my kitchen without knocking.
“How did you get in?” I had asked.
She held up Mom’s spare key.
Then she saw the screen.
I remembered her expression changing.
“What is that?”
“Nothing.”
“Claire.”
“Give me the key.”
She grabbed for the phone. I pulled away.
Then everything became pieces: my shoulder hitting the refrigerator, Brooke screaming that I had taken everything, the back of my head striking the counter, someone else entering through the garage.
Someone male.
I tried to sit up.
Pain shot down my ribs.
“Easy,” Nurse Carter said.
“Man,” I whispered.
Reed leaned in. “There was a man there?”
One blink.
“Do you know him?”
I closed my eyes.
A smell returned before a face did.
Cedar cologne.
A gold college ring.
A voice saying, “She saw the message. We have to move now.”
Brooke had not attacked me alone.
I lifted my hand and wrote one shaky letter on Reed’s notepad.
E.
Then another.
V.
Reed frowned.
“Evan?”
I blinked once.
Evan Ross.
Brooke’s fiancé.
The man Dad had made chief financial officer three months before he vanished.
Reed’s phone rang.
He answered, listened, and his face changed.
“What?” Officer Hale asked.
Reed looked at me.
“Forensics found a second blood type in your kitchen.”
May you like
He paused.
“And it belongs to your father.”
