I won’t tell the police where I spent the night. It will get Nick in trouble. I’ll say I slept in my car. They won’t care. As long as they find me.
I thought I would feel sick at the idea of facing the police and maybe going to jail, but strangely enough, it feels like a great weight off my shoulders. I don’t want to run away. I want to tell everybody what I did and why I did it. Derek deserved it. He was a horrible person. A monster. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me.
I look out the window—the area around the motel appears to be cleared away. I can leave now—finally. I grab my bag and exit my room one last time. As I lock the door behind me, I see that room 202 has cracked open again. Greta is watching me leave. But as soon as I turn to look at her, she shuts the door tight.
“Bye, Greta,” I say.
The stairs creak threateningly as I make my way down to the first floor. My bag strap bites into my shoulder. I consider leaving it in the lobby while I bring the car around, but Nick isn’t down here and I don’t want to leave it unattended.
The ceiling is still leaking, the same way it was when I came in. Why does the water look so red? I still don’t get it. But it’s none of my concern. I drop my keys on the desk.
I push the door open to escape the motel. The cold air hits me in the face, but at least it’s not snowing. I forgot to zip up my coat, and the wind slips between the folds of my open jacket. At least the roads should be clear by now, especially once I get on the highway. I should be home in two hours. And then I’ll turn myself in.
As I rifle through my purse, looking for my keys, I hear footsteps. I look up and see a figure approaching me. It’s so dark here, it’s hard to see who it is. I squint out into the blackness.
“Hello?” I say.
A raspy voice spits out, “How could you do that?”
And then a second later the knife buries itself in my abdomen, between the open folds of my coat. I stare at it for a moment, watching the crimson stain spread across my shirt. And then everything goes black.
Chapter 16
CLAUDIA
One Day Earlier
Every time I ask Deputy Scott Dwyer a question he has one of three answers:
I don’t know.
I can’t say.
Why don’t you go home and I’ll call you when we know something?
I find the third one especially maddening. If your baby sister were missing after her husband was found in a pool of blood in their kitchen, would you just go home and chill until the incompetent deputy got his head out of his ass? No, I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the police chief is out of town on vacation and won’t be back until Monday. God knows how badly Scotty will muck everything up by then.
“Mrs. Delaney,” Scotty says to me as we stand in the freezing rain outside my sister’s house. His freckles have faded from when he was in high school and he’s bulked up enough to fill out his blue uniform—he used to be passably cute when Quinn was dating him, but now he’s grown into someone the housewives love to ogle. “You should go home. We’re handling this.”
“Handling this?” I stare at him. “The same way you handled it when you came here a few hours ago, after getting a call from a neighbor that they heard screaming. And instead of looking inside the house, you just walked away? Handle it kind of like that?”
Scotty’s cheeks are pink. It could be because of the cold, but it could also be because he knows he royally screwed up. He was here. He was at this house, when my sister was still here and possibly in terrible danger. And he didn’t even check it out.
I was the one who discovered the body in the kitchen. It was much later. Too late.
I knew something was wrong when I spoke to her on the phone.
“She looked fine when I came to the door,” he says. “She said the neighbor just heard a movie.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. My sister opened the door for the police officer, and God knows if there was somebody pointing a gun at her head while she gave all the right answers. If Scott had only stepped inside…
“You’re sure you don’t know who those messages were from?” Scott asks.
“If I did, don’t you think I would tell you?” I snap at him.
That’s yet another piece in the puzzle. Besides Derek’s iPhone, he also had a burner phone in his pocket. Scott claimed that just prior to his death, he was texting with another woman. Planning to meet her for a rendezvous at his house while he believed Quinn to be at work.
“She could be a witness,” Scott points out.
“Or she could have killed my sister.” I glare at him. “You’re examining that possibility, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” he says. “We’re examining every possibility.”
There is one thing on Quinn’s side here, and that’s the fact that I’m pretty sure Scott is still in love with her. It’s been a decade since they dated in high school, but he still hasn’t gotten married. Doesn’t even have a serious girlfriend, from what I’ve heard. I remember the year after Quinn left for college, Scotty looked like a sad puppy dog every time I saw him. I stopped going into his father’s store because every time I did, he would be there sweeping the floor or working the cash register, and he would ask me about Quinn in that hopeful voice.
He was almost obsessed with her.
Another officer is calling to Scott from inside the house. He glances behind him, then back at me. He tries to blink away the frozen raindrops on his pale eyelashes. “I’ve got to go, Claudia.”
“You’ll call me if you find out anything?”
“I will. I promise.” He pauses. I’m sure it’s a lie. “And you’ll call me if you hear from Quinn?”
“Of course,” I say.
But that’s also a lie.
As he walks away, I reach into my purse and pull out my phone for the hundredth time. I select Quinn’s number from my favorites list. I let it ring.
And ring.
And ring.
Pick up, dammit. Please, Quinn. It’s me. It’s your sister.
“Hi! You’ve reached Quinn’s phone! Please leave a message at the beep.”
I grit my teeth. I didn’t expect her to answer, but I’d been hoping. I’m not sure if she even has her phone anymore. If she had it, she would have picked up by now. Even so, I leave another message.
“Quinn, it’s Claudia.” I grip my phone tighter with my freezing hand. “Please call me back if you get this. Please. Whatever happened, we’re going to figure it out. I promise you. Just… call me back. I love you.”
I hang up the phone. I stare down at the screen, willing it to ring. But of course, it doesn’t.
Right now, Quinn’s husband is dead. Murdered. Quinn is gone and so is her car.
In my mind, there are two possibilities:
The first is that whoever killed Derek also did something to Quinn. When Scotty showed up at her house, there was somebody hiding behind the door with a gun, ready to shoot her if she said the wrong words. And she’s currently tied up in a trunk or in some underground dungeon without access to her phone.
The second possibility is that Quinn is the one who killed Derek.
It’s hard to imagine the second possibility. No, Quinn and Derek did not have an ideal marriage. She complained about him a lot, to the point where I wasn’t sure why she stuck around. But my sister isn’t the murdering type. Even when she was a teenager, she couldn’t even bear to smash a beetle she found crawling in her bed—she would make me capture it and set it free. Hell, she didn’t even like throwing the ball at people during dodgeball when we were kids. I can’t picture her stabbing her own husband in cold blood and leaving him bleeding to death in the middle of her kitchen. The same kitchen she and I spent hours flipping through magazines together in our attempt to make it into The Perfect Kitchen. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Maybe Quinn wasn’t that crazy about Derek, but she had a good life. The idea that she would stab him to death... I just can’t imagine it.
So by process of elimination, that means she’s being held captive somewhere. And we’ve got to find her.
I'm going to find you, Quinn. I triple dipper promise with a cherry on top.
My phone rings and my heart leaps. But then I pull it out of my purse and my face falls when I see the name on the screen. Rob. I jab at the green button to answer the call.
“Claudia.” His voice is tight. “Are you coming home?”
I glance over at Scott, who is lingering in the entranceway of the Alexander household. “Not yet.”
“The police are handling it. You should come home.”
“Everyone here is incompetent.”
“Claudia, you’re a masseuse! Can you please leave this to the police?”
I may be a masseuse, but I was majoring in criminal justice in college. I might have gone to law school if I had finished. If my parents hadn’t lost control of their car that afternoon at the end of my freshman year.
“I want to find my sister,” I insist. I’m not going to sit around and let the police screw this up any more than they already have.
At first, I think Rob is going to say something insensitive, but then he redeems himself by instead saying, “Do you want me to meet you over there?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, Claudia. The rain is coming down hard, and it’s turning to snow. All you’ve got is the Chevy. If you’re going to stay, at least let me pick you up in my truck.”
Rob and I have been married for almost six years now. Things have gotten kind of stale between us lately, and he’s always working—always running out to unclog a toilet somewhere. Sometimes I think Rob and I don’t care much for each other anymore. But then he goes and says something like that.
I glance up at my sister’s house. The doorstep is slick with ice. Rob is right. It’s really coming down.
I see the outline of Scott Dwyer in the window. He’s talking to another officer, and it seems to me he is far too calm considering he’s investigating a murder. I still can’t figure out what he was thinking. He heard screaming coming from my sister’s house. Why didn’t he go inside and investigate? What kind of police officer doesn’t investigate screaming? It’s strange.
But either way, there’s nothing we can do about it now.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll come home.”
Chapter 17
Rob isn’t a wealthy entrepreneur like Derek, so our house is much more modest than the one I just came from. Two stories, three bedrooms, two of which aren’t much bigger than Quinn’s walk-in closet. It was a fixer-upper when we bought it three years ago, and we haven’t entirely fixed it up. The outside still needs a good coat of paint. The porch is still unfinished, and six months ago I put my foot right through a floorboard.
Rob is handy, and he always swears he’s in the middle of fixing it all. Every Sunday, he gets out his tool belt and acts like he’s doing something important, but meanwhile, the front of our house still looks like something out of a gothic horror novel.
I’m dripping wet when I walk into the house through the garage entrance. Standing in the freezing rain for hours will do that to you. But on the drive home, the rain turned into snow—Rob was right. The roads became incredibly slippery, and I had to focus all my attention on getting home safely.
When I get into the living room, I’m pleased to find that Rob has cranked the heat way up. Usually it annoys me when he does that, but now I’m grateful for it.
Rob is sitting on our secondhand sofa, reading the newspaper, although it’s probably just the sports page. He might be the only person under the age of fifty who still reads a paper newspaper. And he isn’t even forty yet, although he could easily pass for ten years older since he started losing his hair a few years ago.
When he sees me, he tosses the newspaper aside, his fingers coated in a layer of ink. Rob’s fingers are always either covered in ink from the paper or covered in grime from his job. I feel like I need to hose him down before he can kiss me hello.
“So what’s going on?” he asks. “Do the police have any leads?”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “They’re trying to trace her phone. But somehow they can’t do it. Something about the weather. They said the storm is messing everything up.”
Rob’s brow crinkles. “How are you doing?”
I take a shaky breath, shivering under my damp clothing. “I can’t believe this is all happening. I only just spoke to her this afternoon. I knew something was wrong…”
Knew it better than the damn cop.
He comes over to me and massages my shoulder. I let him do it for a second, but then I jerk away when I remember his ink-stained fingers.
“Can you wash your hands please?” I say.
Rob blinks at me. For a moment, I think this is going to be the start of another fight. But then he goes over to the sink and washes his hands. He soaps them up and everything. He’s on his best behavior.
“Good thing you went over there to check on her,” he says as he rinses off the black tinged soap.
“Yeah,” I murmur.
When I close my eyes, I can still see the scene that greeted me when I stepped into the Alexander household hours earlier. I shudder. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.
“Claudia?” I open my eyes. Rob has finished washing his hands and is staring at me. “Are you okay?”
“I…” I shiver, and I’m not sure if it’s from the cold. “Maybe I’ll go upstairs and take a shower. Is the hot water working?”
He nods. “Should be.”
Part of me wishes I had stayed at the crime scene. Maybe I’m just a masseuse, but nobody knows my sister like I do. If anyone could find her, it’s me.
But Scotty promised to call me if they find any new information. I’m terrified the new information will be finding Quinn in a ditch somewhere. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight.
I climb the stairs to the master bedroom—the only one of our three bedrooms that isn’t pint-sized. When we bought the house, we imagined the other two bedrooms would be for our kids, but no kids have come along yet. So right now, we’ve got two guestrooms. Not that we get many guests. I told Quinn if she ever left Derek, she could have her pick.
The bed is still made from this morning with the green floral printed bedspread. I make the bed every day after I wake up in the morning. Even though nobody sees our bedroom besides me and Rob, my mother always made us make our beds, and I can’t leave the bedroom with the bed still unmade. I just can’t. And I would die of shock if Rob ever made the bed.
While I’m stripping off my wet clothing, my phone rings. Again, my heart leaps, hoping it’s some sort of news about the case or maybe Quinn herself calling. But instead, the name on the screen is Lori Marshall.
I only have Lori’s phone number programmed into my phone because I gave her a massage a few times. But I stopped taking her calls after Quinn told me she was pretty sure Lori was having an affair with Derek. She’s exactly his type. Blond with legs longer than the Empire State Building. He loves blondes. That’s why Quinn started coloring her hair.
Why would Lori be calling now?
I consider letting it go to voicemail, but curiosity gets the better of me. So I answer the phone. “Lori?”
“Hi, Claudia.” I can tell from the hushed tone of her voice that she knows what happened. I didn’t see any reporters around, so I assume it isn’t on the news yet, but it must have spread through word-of-mouth. “I… I heard the news. Is it true?”
“Is what true?” I ask drily.
“You know, about…” Her voice breaks. “Derek. That he’s been... killed.”
I consider denying the whole thing, but she’ll know the truth soon enough. “Yes. It’s true.”
Lori lets out a strangled sob. “Oh, how awful! How could Quinn do something like that?”
“Excuse me,” I hiss into the phone. “But my sister is missing, and I don’t appreciate your assumptions.”
/>
“Your sister killed her husband then ran away! What other conclusion can you draw?”
“You know…” I lower myself onto my bed. “The police have a reason to suspect Derek was meeting another woman this afternoon.”
“He… he was?”
“That’s right.” I clear my throat. “Tell me, Lori, are you still sleeping with Derek?”
“Claudia! What are you saying?”
“I think you know what I’m saying.”
“Well, that’s just preposterous!” She’s trying to sound indignant, but I can hear the tremor in her voice. “I think the police should focus their energy on locating Quinn.”
“Actually,” I say, “I don’t care what you think, Lori. Expect to be hearing from the police.”
I hang up the phone and drop it down onto the center of the bed. Back when I was a kid, we used to have a real phone. A landline. And when you were mad at someone, you could slam it down. It’s just not the same with a cell phone.
As much as I dislike that woman, I don’t genuinely think she knows what happened to my sister. She’s just a busybody. She’s the sort of person who would take pleasure seeing Quinn on trial for what happened to Derek. And she wouldn’t be the only one. Derek was eminently likable. As well as rich and powerful.
The phone rings again. If it’s another one of Derek’s mistresses, I swear I’m going to lose it. But when I look over at the screen, I see a name I didn’t expect.
It’s Quinn.
Chapter 18
I scoop up the phone, my hands shaking so badly I can barely swipe to answer. Don’t hang up, Quinn! I just need to get my fingers working again.
Finally, the call connects. I gasp into the phone, “Quinn?”
I expect to hear my sister’s high, sweet voice. Instead, I hear a much deeper voice. “Hello?”
My breath catches in my throat. It’s a man. A man is calling on Quinn’s phone. Does that mean he’s kidnapped her? And he’s going to demand ransom?
“Who is this?” I manage.
Do Not Disturb: An addictive psychological thriller Page 9