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“Yes. It won’t take long. I just need some more clothes and a few personal items.”
“Okay. Hang back while we check things out.”
She looked at her house, which looked the same to her. She saw nothing to indicate any trouble. The two-story white clapboard house was almost twenty years old and a little outdated, but she’d fallen in love with its giant porch, black shutters, and large overhanging eaves. The pool in the back had been another selling point. It was the first home she’d ever owned. She’d spent half her savings updating the interior and making it a peaceful retreat. Her heart was sad that she might have to move out and find something new. But this trouble wasn’t going to go away overnight.
If the people who’d bugged her house had been watching, they knew she had taken her research with her. There was no reason for them to search again. But if they had killed Lawrence Medford, then someone could be waiting for her to come home.
Both OZ operatives stepped out of the car, and though they were discreet, she noted they’d both pulled their guns. Tension zipping up her spine, she held her breath as they went up onto the porch.
Eve peered through the window of her front door and said something to Gideon. He nodded, and then they held their guns up at the ready. Something was definitely happening.
Opening the door, she whispered, “What’s wrong?”
“Stay there,” Eve said.
Gideon turned the doorknob, and she was about to call out and tell him she had the key when she realized the door easily swung open. Someone had broken into her house again.
Her heart pounding, Aubrey ran forward. There were no sounds, nothing to indicate danger. Using her phone’s
flashlight to brighten the darkness, she went up the steps. Her foot had barely touched the front porch when she noted that whoever had broken in this time had left her a message. An unmistakable one.
Stunned, she stopped at the front door and took in the devastation. Everything was destroyed. Sofa and chairs were upside down, ripped to shreds. The legs of her chairs had been broken and sawed off. Even her throw pillows were in tiny pieces, with foam and feathers floating in the air from the breeze of the open door.
Eve appeared at the entryway of the living room. “I told you to stay in the car.”
Ignoring Eve’s ire, Aubrey said, “Is every room like this?”
“Yes. Your clothes have been shredded, too.”
She told herself these were material things that could be replaced, but she did have a few sentimental items she never wanted to lose. Even without asking, she knew they’d been destroyed, too. Why would the photos of her parents and her beloved doll collection escape the wrath?
Gideon appeared beside Eve. “All clear.” He sent a sympathetic glance toward Aubrey. “I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re going to find anything to save.”
“She’ll deal,” Eve said. She sent Aubrey a telling look. “Won’t you?”
The words and look were exactly what she needed. Anger replaced shock and sorrow. “Yes, I’ll deal.”
They didn’t stop her as she went from room to room. Nothing had been spared. Even the hand towels in the guest bathroom had been shredded. Whoever had come through here had one agenda—total destruction. They had succeeded.
She saved her bedroom for last. What had once been a place of solace and comfort was now a garbage dump. Sheets, pillowcases, curtains were all shredded and piled on top of a ripped-open mattress. The four-poster bed that she’d purchased right after she’d gotten her first paycheck from the one and only TV show she’d gotten a part in, had been sawed in two.
She turned and noted that her clothes from both the closet and her drawers were all in a pile in the middle of the floor. They were torn and ripped, and on top of that pile were her dolls. Her dad had given her one each year for her birthday. He’d gifted her the last one the week before he died. All twenty-one of them had been decapitated, their body parts broken and cracked.
Refusing to give in to the grief of that one sight, Aubrey straightened her shoulders. In an instant she reversed any indecision about continuing the project. No way were they going to stop her. Nothing and no one was going to defeat her. The perverted bastards would not win.
If they thought they could keep her from making her film, they were wrong.
Gideon stood at the bedroom door. “Your car…” he said.
She didn’t even wince. “I’m assuming it’s totaled?”
“That’d be my guess. Bastards took a sledgehammer to it.”
If she didn’t cry about her dolls, she refused to shed a tear over her ten-year-old Mazda RX-7. Yes she’d loved it but so what? Everything else she’d loved was gone, too.
“We’ll get someone in here to clean this mess up. Doubt they left fingerprints but you never know.”
“What about my gun?”