Page 37 of Hidden With You

She shook her head. “Maybe I trust you.” The words ran through him, making him want. Making him unsure what he should do. The way she made him feel reminded him of Sandra, and he didn’t want to be reminded. He was afraid, he realized. Afraid that if he let Zelda in, he’d be pushing Sandra out.

Pushing her out and stopping the search for her killer.

And that had been his whole life for so long. How could he stop now?

“I would do anything to get them back, you know.”

“I know,” she said as if this strange segue didn’t confuse her at all. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“No,” he said. But then he began talking anyway. “They were driving. A little country road with a drop-off. Not as dangerous as this one, but there had still been accidents. From the forensic examination, we know that someone pushed them off the road. And that someone else stopped. Sandra probably thought they were trying to help. They weren’t.”

His voice sounded cold. Flat. Like he was presenting a paper.

“You mean they were in a turnaround on the side of the road?”

“Yes. Like this one. It had a drop-off, too. A harsh one.” He looked through the windshield at the lights of the Valley below. He couldn’t see how it dropped from this angle, but he knew that it did. A car could go careening over. A person could fall to their death. A spurned lover could be lost for months in the thick underbrush, battered and broken from banging on rock after rock on the way down.

It was a fall that very few could survive.

He swallowed, forcing down the memories and the anger. Who did that? What kind of monster would do the to an innocent woman and a little girl?

“They were killed in the fall?” Zelda’s soft voice drew him back.

“No.” He cleared his throat. “No, they were injured. They were killed by the man who climbed down. A man they probably assumed was trying to help.”

Her hand went to her mouth, and thankfully, she didn’t ask for specifics. He didn’t want to think about the knife that had been used on his wife and daughter. He didn’t want to remember the image of the bodies that he’d seen at the morgue, or the crime scene pictures that he demanded the police show him. He didn’t want that in his head. But it was always there anyway.

“Why would someone want them dead?”

“Specifically? I don’t know. Generally, I was a spy. And that’s not a safe business for the people I love.” He turned and looked at her directly. “That’s why I don’t love anymore.”

She nodded slowly. “I get that.” She reached over and took his hand and squeezed just a little. He expected her to say soft words, trying to ease the pain that was already etched in him, notched into his bones and flowing in his blood. Everyone wanted to try to take the edge off pain, but no one ever managed.

But that’s not what she said. Instead, she said, very softly, “I could try to help you figure it out. Help you get closure.”

He turned to her, his interest piqued simply from the oddity of her comment. “How on earth could you do that?”

“I don’t know. But I write thrillers. I plot books. I have to think like bad guys and spies and victims. I could look over the files with you. Maybe I would see something you didn’t.”

He swallowed the knot in his throat. “It’s a sweet offer. It truly is. I appreciate that you would even make it. But this is real life. And it’s often stranger than fiction, or haven’t you heard?”

“Okay,” she said. “I mean, I’ll buy that. But you’re going to be with me for a while now. And what else are we going to do? I mean, I can think of ways to have fun, but you’re old and creaky and don’t seem to be interested, whereas I’m young and energetic. And I’d hate to wear you out with my enthusiasm. So I’ll just stop bugging you about the whole sex thing. We can solve a mystery instead.”

He laughed. “Minx.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I like that word,” she said, and made him laugh again. He was never this easy around anyone, and he liked that lately he kept catching himself smiling.

“So you’re telling me that my choices are either endless sex with you or reverse engineering my family’s death?” He managed to say the words with a note of humor. Zelda was like a tonic, and he squeezed her hand.

“Or we could just throw a party,” she said. “But you’re not going to let me do that because one of the guests might have gotten compromised by the bad guy, then come in and kill me in the middle of, oh, I don’t know, an orgy.”

“You’re throwing that kind of party?”

“Well, of course. All the cool kids do.”

“Hmm. Investigate a murder, have endless sex, or watch you get murdered at your own party. You do know how to give a guy some choices.”

She turned toward him and smiled, all bright and sweet and innocent.