"Reeeaaallly," I said, my thoughts tripping along the same lines as hers.

  "We could have a look at the scene of the original crime. Maybe you're right and somehow something like a little bullet hole just got overlooked." She paused. "Or covered up."

  "You're sure they're gone?" I asked, glancing at the clock above my fireplace. I had to pick the twins up from their after-school daycare soon.

  "Positive. Robert said they had to be out yesterday. And when Lillian called earlier, it was from the RV." I heard shifting on the other end. "Can you meet me there?"

  "I guess I could call my mom to pick up the twins," I said.

  "Thank you!" Dana sounded more hopeful than she had the entire day. "They left a key under the mat for the cleaner, in case you get there first. I'll leave as soon as I sweep up all this popcorn and tear Jerome away from SpongeBob. I think I've created a monster."

  * * *

  I drove slowly, my eyes darting to the rearview mirror the entire way, watching for black sedans as I ignored the tailgating and blaring horns. Even though my pace had been cautious, I still pulled up to Ricky's childhood home before Dana, her Tesla noticeably absent as I parked on the street. Twilight was settling in, casting long shadows across the windows, which contorted with each gust of wind.

  I considered waiting in the minivan, but after my recent run-in (no pun intended) with Colt the Ricci Goon, I felt safer outside of the car. And this was an empty house on a well-lit suburban street, after all. It was perfectly safe. Dana could catch up when she arrived. Besides, daylight was fading, and if the utilities had already been shut off, we'd need that.

  I got out and immediately felt the chill of the evening wind kick up. I made my way to the front door, finding it locked as I'd expected. A worn welcome mat still lay just outside the door, and as promised, a silver key lay underneath. I slipped it into the door handle and quickly went inside. The air there was just as cool as outside, if not colder, and I felt a shiver run up my back.

  Totally due to the cold. Had nothing to do with the fact I was visiting a place where a woman had died.

  I shook that feeling off as I looked around for a light switch. This was also where Ricky had grown up. Lots of happy childhood memories had been had here. This was no haunted house.

  I hoped.

  I spied a switch on the wall leading to a sunken living room and flipped it. Nothing happened. Apparently the utilities had, in fact, been shut off already. I activated the flashlight app on my phone, sweeping it across the living room. It was empty except for a couple of wooden packing crates beneath the far window.

  I moved through the room and into a short hallway, my footsteps on the old hardwood floors eerily loud in the utter silence. A creaking floorboard sent a shiver up my spine before I realized I'd just stepped in the wrong spot. Outside, a car passed by, its stereo blaring, before the neighborhood fell into silence again. Funny, the house had seemed cozy in the daylight, with Robert, Dana, and Ricky there. Now, in the dark, alone, I found myself hoping Dana would get her monkey under control and join me as soon as possible.

  I reached the doorway of what I assumed to be the master bedroom and paused there, willing the space to give up its secrets. Had Beth slept here? Had she sensed the danger she was in on the night of her death?

  Had she known her killer?

  I shivered, trying not to imagine her terror as she faced her own death, hoping she'd been unconscious or even gone by the time the house burned around her.

  While the fire had been centered around the bedroom, I had no idea if that was where Beth had actually died. I stepped into the room and swept my flashlight along the walls. White crown molding, dark wood floors, and double paned windows suggested the room had been remodeled in the not too distant past. Wallpaper in a modern neutral textured pattern shone back at me, the calming tones doing nothing to cheer the cool space. If there had even been evidence of a gunshot in this room, it had long ago been covered—either intentionally or unintentionally. I stepped back out into the hallway, wood boards creaking underneath my feet again as I passed another bedroom, void of furniture, and a final third bedroom at the end of the hallway.

  The blue, baseball themed wallpaper here suggested this had been a child's bedroom. Ricky's. I stepped inside, and it might have been my imagination, but it felt slightly warmer there at the back of the house. The players in little white uniforms on the walls were frozen in their stances, mirrored doors covered a closet along one wall, and an old glass dome light sat in the middle of the popcorn ceiling. It reminded me a lot of my childhood bedroom, if you swapped out the baseball players for pink paint and boy band posters.

  A creak cut through the silence from somewhere behind me in the house.

  I froze, all memories of happy younger me vanishing as my heart leapt into my throat. My entire body listened for more noise, but only the quiet hum of a neighbor's dryer next door filled the air.

  Just the house settling. Old wood. Old houses made sounds.

  I let out a long breath, sucking in another equally long one before backtracking out of the baseball bedroom and into the hallway again.

  I stood in the silence, the light growing dimmer by the second as evening fell, and I tried to let the house talk to me. Beth had been alone when the fire had started. Well, at least until her killer had arrived. But she'd been a young mother with a rare evening to herself. Where would she have spent it?

  I turned to the right, eyeing a bathroom where I could see the outline of an old claw foot tub in the shadows. A relaxing bubble bath would be high on my list of me-time activities.

  I stepped into the room, my hand automatically reaching for the light switch before remembering there wouldn't be any help from it. Instead, I swept my flashlight along the walls, revealing a pedestal sink, built-in medicine cabinet, and the gorgeous claw foot tub. Above it was a small window, still bearing a cheery yellow curtain on a rod and framed in a thick wooden molding.

  I slowly moved my flashlight beam across the wood that looked original to the home—darker than the newer white molding I'd seen around the doors and windows in bedrooms. I had to admit, as an HGTV fan, I had an appreciation for the way Robert had preserved the history of the house in this room. Though as my light slowly traveled upward, to a corner of the window frame nearly tucked behind the curtain, I realized something else was preserved there as well.

  A tiny round hole.

  I sucked in a breath, my entire body suddenly buzzing with anticipation. Okay, it could just be a natural flaw in the wood. Or a remainder from shenanigans Ricky pulled in the bathroom as a kid. Even the work of termites or other pests.

  Or it could be a bullet hole.

  I looked around the bathroom for something to give me a boost to get a better look. The sides of the tub were curved, and even if I weren't worried about damaging the beautiful feature, I wasn't sure I could balance on them. I'd seen wood crates in the living room. I turned to go grab one in hopes they were sturdy enough to hold my weight.

  When a sound stopped me.

  A floorboard creaking in the hallway.

  Just the house settling, my voice of reason told my inner chicken. Just the house settling. I repeated the mantra in my head over and over as I stepped into the hallway, my eyes trying their darndest to adjust to the darkness that had enveloped the home.

  Though, as I turned toward the front of the house, I realized that I should possibly listen to my inner chicken more often. Because standing framed in the hallway was a tall, shadowy figure.

  I was not alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I screamed, the sound shattering the silence.

  "Whoa, whoa! Calm down now," came a deep, male voice.

  I lifted my phone up, illuminating the figure, who promptly shielded his eyes with a hand to ward off the bight glare.

  "Officer Willis!" I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling my heart beat out a samba.

  The older man blinked at me as I lowered my light. "You okay there, Mrs. Springer?" he asked, his tone calm and concerned in a fatherly way.

  I let out a shaky breath. "Yeah. You scared me. I didn't think anyone was here."

  "Neither did I," he said, still squinting against the light as he ran his hand over his close-cropped white hair. He took a step toward me, the floorboards groaning in protest beneath his heavy black boots. "What are you doing here?"

  "I…uh, I'm meeting Dana." I pointed the light at the floor, out of his eyes. It created a shadow of his bulky frame, clad in police blue. "But I got here first, so I came inside."

  "I can see that." He took another step closer. "What I meant was what are you doing creeping around in the dark."

  "Electricity is off," I said, flipping a switch in the hallway to illustrate my point. "Had to use my flashlight app." I paused. "Which probably looked suspicious to the neighbors, didn't it? Is that why you're here?" I glanced toward the front window, wondering if the neighbor doing laundry had assumed an intruder was next door. "I promise I'm not here to steal anything. Not much to steal." I gave a feeble laugh.

  "You still haven't told me why you are here," he said, and this time I thought I heard an edge in his voice.

  I licked my lips. "I didn't break in. The Montgomerys had a key under the mat." For the first time, I noticed that Officer Willis had his service revolver out of its holster, held in his right hand tightly against his leg. Which made sense if he'd suspected an intruder lurking in the empty house.

  But clearly he'd seen that was not the case. And yet, the gun was still in his hand.

  "You know what," I said, feeling that cold chill hit me again. "I think I'll just go wait in the car for Dana."

  I made a move toward the front door.

  But Officer Willis blocked my path, his large frame stepping forward in the narrow hallway.

  And the gun in his hand lifted to face me.

  "I don't think that's a good idea," he said, his voice suddenly void of any fatherly tone.

  I licked my lips again, a niggle of fear jumping into my belly. "Wh-why not?"

  Willis drew in a long breath, letting it out through his nose. "Because I'm afraid you know too much."

  If only. In that moment my brain felt like it was struggling to know anything. Like why the police officer had a gun pointed at me. Why he was here at the house where Beth had died. And how I had missed that he'd been at the center of everything from the very beginning…

  "You." The one word echoed in the empty house as I breathed it out.

  Willis's stony cop face broke into a slow smile. One that held zero humor and enough menace to make goose bumps erupt on my arms.

  "See. I knew you were too close to the truth."

  "You knew Beth," I said, pieces falling into place in my head, even though the big picture as a whole was still fuzzy.

  Willis nodded. "I did know her."

  "You met her the night you responded to her call about her brother."

  "That fateful night." He shook his head. "Yeah, I met her then. She was so scared. So alone. Small and vulnerable. Poor little thing was terrified of her own brother."

  "You said you stayed with her that night. Until her husband got home," I said, picturing how it had played out in my mind.

  He nodded again, his jowls bobbing up and down, though I noticed the gun was steady and unmoving. "She was so upset that night. About everything. Her brother with his hand out, her fear he'd fallen in with a bad crowd. And her husband, who was hardly any better with the way he neglected her and spent all his time with his crooked business partners."

  "Neglected…" It hit me. "You were Beth's secret lover?"

  Willis chuckled deep in his throat. "You make it sound like we were in some soap opera or something."

  "But it's true, isn't it?" I asked, my eyes darting to the front door. Where I sincerely hoped Dana would burst in any minute. Or the nosey neighbor. Or heck, even Robert or Lillian, having remembered some little thing they'd left behind. Anyone. Anyone except the murderer I now feared I was standing with in the same home where he'd already killed one woman. "You were the man Beth was seeing?" I repeated.

  "Beth and I became friends, yes," Willis admitted. "She was…she was so beautiful." He got a far off look in his eyes, focusing on a point just beyond me that seemed to exist in some memory. "Young, sweet, curvy on all the right places, if you know what I mean?" He chuckled, and I cringed at the lecherous tone of it.

  "And those big blue eyes," he went on. "They would just turn on you, and something inside you would melt, you know? She was just…beautiful." He shook his head, as if shaking himself back to the present. "She was beautiful, and she knew it. Knew how to work any man, that one. I was a goner from the first." He gave a self-deprecating smile.

  "But she was married," I pointed out. Not that now felt like the time to admonish anyone for infidelity, but if I could keep him talking, I could keep up hope that someone would show up.

  "Yes, she was married," Willis said, some of the edge back in his voice. "But it was far from happily."

  Another car swept past and was gone. What was keeping Dana, anyway? Had Jerome wanted to finish watching his SpongeBob episode or something? I'd just have to teach her a thing or two about parenting. Assuming I got the chance. And I didn't have a good feeling about that. While the shaking of my voice betrayed my frazzled nerves, the gun was steady as a boulder in Willis's hand. He'd probably shot people before. Lots of them. To him, killing someone probably meant just a little paperwork. Probably falsified paperwork.

  I tried not to dwell on that thought, instead focusing on keeping him talking.

  "How did it start?" I asked, hoping it was a long winded story. "The affair?"

  He scoffed. "Affair. You really have been watching too much Days of Our Lives, honey."

  I refrained from pointing out that I was more of a Bachelorette type of girl. Instead, I clutched the phone in my hands, wondering if I could pull off dialing for help without him noticing.

  "But you did start seeing her," I said, letting my eyes dart down to the phone screen. If I moved my index finger a smidgeon to the left, I could maybe open the phone app.

  "I did. It started just as you said. With that call to her house when her brother showed up asking for money and threatening her. After that, well, a couple days later I thought I should check up on her. Make sure the brother hadn't come back."

  "And see those big blue eyes again?" I surmised.

  He grinned, showing off a row of coffee-stained teeth. "And see those big blue eyes again," he confirmed. "She really was irresistible. And let me tell you, she was happy to see me. Real happy. Suggested we go get coffee the next day."

  "And coffee turned into more," I guessed. I glanced down quickly, seeing the keypad on my phone. I'd opened the app. All I had to do now was dial 9-1-1 without him noticing…

  He nodded. "It did. Eventually. She told me all about her failing marriage and her brother's problems with the law. And her loneliness. Especially her loneliness. I'm a good listener, you know. People feel they can talk to me. Comes with the job." He gestured down to his uniform. "And she needed someone to talk to. I was her shoulder to cry on. And then more. Quiet dinners in out-of-the-way places. Afternoon rendezvous."

  I grimaced. Now who sounded cliché?

  "We fell in love," he finished. "She was going to leave her husband for me. We were going to go to Mexico. Live a tropical dream in Baja."

  I hated to even ask… "What about her son? Ricky?"

  Willis shrugged. "I guess she planned to take him with us. He was a small price to pay to live a life of margaritas on the beach with Beth."

  I felt anger bubble up on Ricky's behalf at being seen as a price to pay. Beth's too. If any man ever talked that way about my kids…

  My kids. Sudden tears backed up behind my eyes as I stared at the barrel of the gun, thinking about the warm, wiggly hugs of my twins. I swallowed them down, forcing emotion from my thoughts. I had to keep a clear head. There would be plenty of time for tears later.

  I hoped.

  "Is that why Beth drained her bank account?" I asked, trying to focus on the present. And not the fear growing with each passing second that I was alone with this man.

  Willis's eyes narrowed at me. "So you know about that too."

  I nodded. "I also know that in the end, she didn't intend to leave Robert for you. That she had a change of heart."

  "He manipulated her!" Willis yelled, sudden anger overtaking his once-jolly features. "He didn't love her! He took her for granted. He didn't deserve her."

  "But she decided to stay with him anyway," I said softly.

  "He made her feel guilty. She said she was breaking up a family." Willis shook his head, the gun wavering momentarily in his shaking hands. "He used that brat as leverage."

  Again I felt my spine straighten, hearing his callous attitude toward the innocent child in all this. "And what? If you couldn't have her, no one could?" I said, unable to keep the bitter note from my voice.

  Willis let out a laugh that was bordering on maniacal. "You women really are all in some romantic fantasy world."

  I pursed my lips, shoving down any offense I might have taken at the comment. "You didn't care that she'd rejected you?"

  "Of course I was angry that she'd change our plans for that drip architect. But if she was stupid enough to go back to him, then good riddance." He chuckled again. "There are other blue eyes in the sea, darlin'."

  "I don't understand," I said, fully meaning it as my eyes darted to the gun. Steady as a rock again. "Then what happened to Beth?"

  "What happened is that I wasn't going to give up thousands of dollars just because she was too weak to leave her stupid husband and snot-nosed kid." He spat the words out, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth as he relived the obvious anger he'd felt at the time.

  "So it was all about the money," I said, again feeling a pang of sympathy for Beth.

  "Of course it was about the money. Do you know how much that was back then?"