Page 21 of Look Deeper
He also had the low-level hum in his gut of a man who was walking into something much more.
He got out of the car.
The property was still, but clearly still inhabited. Old but well kept, the grounds were neat and maintained. Firewood was stacked neatly along the tree line. A detached garage was visible farther back, the door down. A wide front porch with a rocking chair worn smooth from years of use.
Patrick was halfway up the path when the front door opened and he promptly forgot to breathe.
The woman looking back at him was wearing a flannel that was several sizes too large for her and holding a book with her finger marking the page, her expression a mix of surprise and caution, as if she’d heard a car approach and hadn’t expected to find him.
Deep green eyes regarded him. Dark hair pulled back away from her face.
Patrick's brain connected threads.
The café. The diner window. The campground. The notebook. Morgan Sullivan. Not a guy, but the woman who’d been commandeering his thoughts. Frank Sullivan's… granddaughter?
He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted the notebook.
“I think this might be yours,” he said.
9
COME ON IN
MORGAN
Ten Minutes Earlier
Morgan put the book down.It was a good story, but she was too distracted.
She didn't make mistakes. In her line of work, mistakes had consequences. A missed detail at a scene. A question not asked. Not looking beyond the obvious.
Or, in this case, visiting a crime scene she had no business visiting and then leaving her notebook there for someone else to find.
And not some generic, pocket flip pad that anyone could pick up in the dollar store, but one with the ME’s seal on the cover and her name on the inside.
She'd told herself that was the source of her unease, even if it felt like there was more to it than that. Like dropping her notebook was only one in a series of events that was going to change things.
Maybe she was just being overly dramatic. She’d felt unsettled from the moment she’d left Philly.
She could count on one hand the times she'd felt this particular thing—the sense of standing at the edge of something that was about to change the shape of what came next.
When she was seven, her mom took her to visit her family in Philadelphia. She’d had to dress up, then sit for hours while people she’d never met stared at her and spoke in hushed, unfamiliar language that she now knew was Italian. The next thing she knew, they were living in Philly and she had a stepfather.
And then there was the summer she turned fourteen. Morgan had wandered away from the family gathering and found herself in a small clearing. The grass was flattened, marked by flecks of red, with a vague coppery scent lingering in the air.
She'd stood there and stared at it for a long time. Not horrified. Not frightened. Interested.
Until her mother appeared with one of her uncles and hurriedly pulled her away, using phrases like “overactive imagination” and a “penchant for drama” when Morgan started asking questions. She'd let it go, because she was fourteen and she didn't have a framework yet for the thing she'd recognized.
She'd spent the next twelve years building one.
And now… this.
What did she do? Should she go back into town and hope to cross paths with the blue-eyed man again and ask for her notebook back? Or did she do nothing and hope it didn’t come back to bite her on the ass?
She made a fresh pot of coffee, just to have something to do with her hands. She checked her phone, half-expecting to see a text from her supervisor, wanting to know why someone had reported her notebook left at a crime scene. She walked out to the clearing twice, and around the perimeter three times, before she picked up the book she’d been reading.
When she heard the car on the gravel, her stomach tightened.
