Where There's a Will
Page 30
Quickly, she reached for the mouse and paused Dylan’s reading. She sat, still, silent.
Nothing.
She stood from the chair and looked out the loft window. There weren’t any cars in the parking bay. Was she going mad?
She took the back stairs slowly, her pulse loud in her ears. She turned the lights on in each room at the end of the second floor. All clear.
She stopped by the landing outside Sarah’s bedroom, straining to hear. Where had the sound come from? It had sounded dense, like a bowling ball lowered to floorboards… Had it come from outside the house? The south veranda?
As she took the second set of stairs down to the kitchen, she was glad that she’d left the first-floor lights on. Just as she started toward the back door, the doorbell rang out through the house. Beth pivoted in the middle of the kitchen, her heartbeat firing against her ribcage. Her eyes grew wide as she stared down the hallway. On the north veranda, the sensor light had come on.
She moved down the hallway toward the yellow light glowing through the glass panes of the door. Carefully, she opened the front door. She spied through the gap the chain allowed, and instantly, her breathing calmed at the sight that greeted her.
She unlatched the chain and pulled the door open wide. On top of the lid of the original toilet letterbox was a single yellow Post-it fluttering in the evening breeze.
Beth.
She looked across the veranda. “I know you’re here,” she laughed.
Still, Dylan didn’t make herself known.
Beth looked back down at the toilet. Where on earth had Dylan found it? When Dylan had gone hunting behind the service station for it the year before, she’d come home and told Beth that it was gone. But this was definitely the original. Pressure cleaned, perhaps, but definitely the original.
Beth scanned the veranda again. “If a letterbox toilet is your idea of a first anniversary present,” she called out, “you’re really going to have to lift your game…”
Not a word.
Biting her lip, she bent to lift the lid.
She gasped. The inside of the bowl was lined with blue velvet. At the base sat a red ring box, splayed opened, the diamond glittering beneath the porch light.
Bella Books, Inc.
Women. Books. Even Better Together.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Phone: 800-729-4992
www.bellabooks.com