Marie Ferrarella - Carrying His Secret

The light coming from beneath Reginald Adair’s door registered in her peripheral vision and had caught her attention a beat after she passed it.

It made her stop in her tracks.

Reginald Adair was supposed to be on his way to the airport if not actually aboard the plane by now. Had he left without remembering to shut off the lights?

That wasn’t like him, she thought. The man was nothing if not extremely precise. He believed in leading by example and that meant following all the rules, no matter how small the rule might seem. That included powering down his computer and turning off the lights when he left the office for the night.

Approaching the closed office door, Elizabeth had knocked lightly at first. Receiving no response, she’d knocked a little louder, and this time she’d called out to him so he could hear her through the door.

“Mr. Adair, it’s Elizabeth. Do you need me to take care of anything for you before I leave the office for the weekend?”

She’d looked down at her watch. “Is everything okay? Your flight is leaving soon. Would you like me to call a cab for you?”

She’d leaned her ear against the door to see if she could hear anything and that was when she felt the door move slightly beneath her cheek.

The door had been left unlocked and open.

If he was there, why wasn’t he answering her? And if he wasn’t there, why had he left all the lights on as well as the door unlocked? Perhaps in his rush to get to the airport, he had forgotten? But the man had never been late for anything in the entire five years she had worked for him.

A wave of uneasiness slipped over her.

Something wasn’t making sense.

Bracing herself, Elizabeth had gingerly pushed opened the door with her fingertips. That it gave so easily should have warned her that something was drastically wrong.

But with her own personal dilemma fresh and foremost on her mind, she had completely missed that sign. That in turn had left her completely unprepared to find Reginald Adair sprawled out on the floor of his office the way that she had.

Elizabeth had been even less prepared to be catapulted from her role as the executive assistant to the president of AdAir Corp, to a person of interest in the very same corporate president’s lethal attack.

An aura of disbelief encircled her. It felt as if the whole world around her had transformed into a surreal setting that made absolutely no sense to her, no matter how hard she tried to put the puzzle pieces together.

The first detective on the scene, a fifteen-year veteran named Otis Kramer, lost no time in firing questions at her.

At first she’d just assumed that the questions were routine, but as they kept coming, Elizabeth began to change her mind.

Her uneasiness intensified.

When the detective, who was married to his job, continued interrogating her, Elizabeth couldn’t keep the nausea tamped down any longer.

“I need to use the ladies’ room,” she’d told the slope-shouldered man in the ill-fitting, off-the-rack charcoal-gray suit. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

There wasn’t an ounce of compassion in the man’s thin, nondescript face. “When we’re done,” he’d snapped back.

“Unless you’re okay with having your shoes ruined, now ,” she’d countered.

She was certain that if she wasn’t allowed access to the bathroom immediately, she was going to throw up right there, at the crime scene. Thankfully, the man’s eyes widened and he nodded his head slightly. With that, Elizabeth quickly turned on her heel and rushed to Reginald Adair’s private bathroom. The disgruntled-looking detective was right behind her.

Entering the spacious restroom, she began to close the door behind her, only to have the detective put his hand in the way, effectively stopping the door from shutting him out.

Her patience just about worn down to a nub, Elizabeth glared at the rumpled older man. “In case you failed to notice, we are on the sixth floor. I’m not about to crawl out the window.”

He glared back at her for another moment or two, then reluctantly released the door.

Just in time as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Rushing over to the toilet, she sank down on her knees in front of the bowl.

The contents of her stomach from the past few hours made a reappearance in recycled form.

After everything she could have possibly eaten spilled out—and then some—Elizabeth pulled herself up to her feet again. Standing before the marble sink, she gave herself a minute to recover, then turned on the faucet and threw cold water on her face. The face looking back at her in the mirror was almost a ghastly shade of white.

White sheets were darker than she currently was.

Get it together, Lizzy , she told her reflection. You look too guilty. That detective will be all over you like a starving dog on a bone.

Elizabeth gave herself a couple of extra minutes to pull herself together before she opened the door. Kramer was standing right in front of it. She barely avoided walking right into him.

Determined to look as if she was in control, Elizabeth told the detective, “I’m sorry about that. I can answer the rest of your questions now.”

Kramer was obviously annoyed that she had managed to put him off, no matter what the reason. He looked far from friendly.

The next minute, he was gesturing at her to stand over to the side as the gurney carrying Reginald Adair moved past them. Instead of paramedics, the gurney was accompanied by two men from the coroner’s office.

Her heart felt like lead in her chest.

Adair hadn’t made it, Elizabeth realized, startled. Somehow, maybe because the man always seemed larger-than-life to her, she’d expected him to recover no matter what the wound.

Tears sprang to her eyes, threatening to fall. She did what she could to hold them back. Tears weren’t going to help the man now.

Nothing was.

Flat brown eyes took inventory of her, moving from top to bottom. “There’s a lot of blood on you,” the detective finally commented.

Completely oblivious to her appearance, Elizabeth looked down at herself for the first time since she’d found Adair on the floor.

The entire bottom portion of her skirt, as well as large sections of her blouse, was stained with blood. Reginald Adair’s blood.

The realization—not to mention the sight of that blood—brought a chill racing up and down her spine.

“I guess it got all over me when I was trying to revive him,” she told the detective numbly.

“You tried to revive him,” the detective echoed. “Even though he was dead?”

The latter part of the question was all but fired at her. The detective continued staring at her, his eyes nearly boring small holes into her.

“He wasn’t dead at the time,” Elizabeth snapped irritably. Too much had happened in too short of a time frame. She wasn’t up to coping with a rude police detective who seemed to have made up his mind that she was guilty of murdering her boss and had condemned her right from the start. “I detected a faint heartbeat and tried to get his heart to beat harder, stronger.” She blew out a breath as she wrapped her arms around herself, feeling suddenly cold, wishing there was someone else in the room, someone familiar she could turn to for moral support as she suffered through this entire ordeal, even just for a moment or two. “I didn’t succeed,” she ended quietly.

Kramer snorted and looked at her pointedly. “Now there’s an understatement.” The comment was accompanied by a dry, humorless laugh. “What were you doing in the building in the first place?” he wanted to know. “I couldn’t help but notice that the entire building was empty except for you two.”