Laurie Breton - Point Of Departure

This wasn’t adding up. “Why would they focus on you?”

“Are you kidding? The husband’s always the first person they look at. And I don’t have an alibi for the time in question. If only I’d known she was going to disappear—” He choked back a laugh. “I could have managed to manufacture one.”

“Oh, Sam.”

Darkly, he said, “Good thing Mom never lived to see this day.”

Their mother had died far too young. Johnny Winslow had seen to that, and Mia still hated him for it. But Mom’s death had nothing to do with this situation. Bringing it up was Sam’s way of redirecting Mia’s attention.

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.

“Damn right, I’m feeling sorry for myself! Yesterday, my life was rolling along the way it always does. Stale and boring and comfortably predictable. Now my wife is missing, she might have been involved in a homicide, and I can’t even tell the cops the truth for fear of tying a noose around my neck.”

“You don’t think her disappearance has anything to do with your fight?”

“I don’t know what the hell to think.”

“What was the fight about?”

He lifted clear blue eyes to hers. “Please. Allow me a little dignity. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.”

“When was any fight ever pretty? But why keep it from the cops, if you don’t have anything to hide?” She gave her brother a long, considering look. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

“For God’s sake, Mia. Don’t you know me better than that?”

She’d thought she did. But something wasn’t adding up here. Were there problems in the relationship? Issues she wasn’t aware of? She’d always believed that Kaye and Sam’s marriage was solid. Neither of them had given her any reason to believe anything else.

But now, he’d planted a seed of doubt. She wanted to prod, wanted to shake him if that’s what it took to get the truth out of him. But she knew her brother too well to push. If he’d thought it was any of her business, he would have told her. It would be pointless to pry. Instead, she asked, “Have you told Gracie yet?”

Sam shook his head. “She’s upstairs. I suppose I have to tell her something, don’t I?”

“Do you want me to do it?”

The ambivalence in his eyes told her he wanted to say yes. But to his credit, he shook his head again. “She’s my daughter. It’s my job. But thanks for offering.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Or, for that matter, what to do.” He rose from the chair, walked to the bar and poured himself a refill. This time, he didn’t bother with ice. “I have a job I need to get to tomorrow morning. Classes to teach. Exams to grade. The semester won’t grind to a halt because my wife has disappeared.”

For the first time, the enormity of the situation landed squarely on top of her. Mia set down her untouched glass. “I think you should tell the police about the fight,” she said. “Better they should hear it from you than from some loudmouthed neighbor.”

“How the hell do you propose I do that? Call Abrams up and tell her I forgot one tiny detail? That’ll go over big.”

“Abrams won’t be happy no matter how she hears it. But if she has to find out from someone else, it’ll make you look as if you’re trying to hide something. And they’ll waste precious time trying to prove that you had something to do with Kaye’s disappearance. Time they could spend on finding out what really happened. We don’t know who this dead man is. Or where Kaye is. If somebody’s taken her…” Mia paused, her own words sounding implausible “…there might not be much time.”

Gracie Lee Winslow was fat.

Kaye kept telling her it was all in her head, but Gracie knew the truth. She saw it every time she looked in the mirror. She was chunky. Hideous. In response to this catastrophe, Gracie had tried every diet under creation: Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, low-carb, grapefruit, watermelon, vegetarian and plain old starvation. She’d even tried that crazy Bible diet, the one where you only ate foods that were mentioned in the Bible. She’d joined an online chapter of Weight Watchers, had bought a totally gay workout video and exercised until she grew so weak she nearly passed out. She’d even given laxatives a try. But nothing she’d attempted had managed to change the reflection gazing back at her from the mirror. All she could see were her chipmunk cheeks, her pudgy belly that curved out instead of in, and the thunder thighs that rubbed together when she walked. Gracie hated her oversize nose, hated her frizzy hair, hated her snooty private school with its cliques of skinny girls with their perfect hair and their perfect faces and their perfect bodies and their perfect lives. She hated that her mom was dead, hated that her dad barely noticed she was alive. Hated everything about her wretched life.

Most of all, she hated her stepmother.

If Kaye had been a nicer person, Gracie might have been willing to tolerate her. But there was something about the woman that set her teeth on edge. Not that she didn’t understand why her dad had married Kaye. Like those perfect girls at school, her stepmother was drop-dead gorgeous. The woman exuded sex like a cloud of perfume. Pheromones. What man could resist? Even though it was beyond gross to imagine her dad having sex with Kaye, Gracie understood that he was a man, and men were all alike. They all wanted the same thing, and any woman who looked like Kaye Winslow would always have men groveling at her feet.

It made Gracie want to hurl.

For the last two years and seven months, her stepmother had been destroying her life. Like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Kaye tiptoed around the house, silently following Gracie from room to room, spying on her. Watching. Listening. Judging. Kaye had snooped in her bedroom while she was at school; she’d pawed through Gracie’s backpack, looking for God only knew what. She’d even gone through the call list on Gracie’s cell phone to find out who she’d been talking to. The bitch undoubtedly would have read all her e-mails, too, if Gracie hadn’t password protected her computer.

It was infuriating. At fifteen, she was entitled to her privacy. But Kaye was determined to know every move her stepdaughter made. Determined to turn over every rock and uncover every last one of Gracie’s secrets.

But if Kaye thought she held the upper hand, she had another thing coming, because Gracie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Her darling stepmother had more than her share, and the secrets Kaye held would blow her marriage right out of the water if Dad ever found out about them. Thanks to the floor register in her bedroom, Gracie had a front-row seat to everything that went on downstairs. All she had to do was roll back the Oriental carpet and lie on the floor, and she could see and hear everything through that register. Kaye was so damn stupid she didn’t even notice. Which meant that Gracie had accumulated a lot of dirt on her stepmother. A lot of dirt.

None of which meant diddly-squat compared to what she’d just heard. This was some serious shit.

When the cops had first come to the door, she’d freaked, afraid they were here about her. Afraid they knew what she’d done. But that hadn’t been it at all. Something had happened today, something bad. Kaye was missing, and a man was dead. There was talk of a gun. Murder. And Gracie had the sick feeling that she might have been the one to set all this in motion.

He was only supposed to follow Kaye. Find out where she went, who she saw, what she did when she was away from the house. Gracie’s directions to him had been very clear: Be discreet. Whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re following her.