Page 50

The back door to Jamison’s cabin eases open, and Karla steps inside. She shuts the door behind her and then stands just inside, listening and looking. She doesn’t see me. I’m in the back closet, door opened just enough that I can see her.

In three days, I’ve come full circle, hiding in a closet, holding my breath as I watch and listen.

Karla takes a moment and then leans to see into the front room, where I’ve left my laptop playing a TV show at low volume. She nods, satisfied, and then creeps past my hiding spot. As I watch her go, my heart sinks.

I wanted to be wrong. I so badly wanted to be wrong.

I’d reflected earlier that this is the problem with Isabella’s murder: so many suspects I don’t want to be guilty.

Tiana, Jamison, Justice… Even with Colt, I’d held out hope that, for Isabella’s sake, he cared enough never to do this.

I kept hoping that the killer would be a stranger.

Huh, she was murdered by some screenwriter I never met, who blamed her for “ruining his vision” with her script doctoring.

Yep, that’s the solution I wanted. If it had to be someone I’ve met, then maybe Bess. No offense, Bess, but I don’t know you, and that makes it easier for you to be a killer.

Karla, though…? Karla never even made it to my list of serious suspects until I heard Jamison’s story, and even t hen, I told myself I was wrong.

She was a committed employee, who’d given her professional life to the family and sacrificed, I’m sure, most of her personal life, too.

No marriage. No kids. Just the job. Always the job.

I liked you, Karla. Not in the warm way I liked Tiana and Jamison and Justice. Warm wasn’t your word, but I liked you for that, not in spite of it.

Before the scandal, I’d seen Isabella as my role model.

After it, though? After it, I looked to Karla, even if I never quite realized it until now.

Efficient and capable are not sexy adjectives, but they were what I needed post-scandal, and Karla embodied those traits.

Her strength was not exactly warm and fuzzy, but it was kind.

That’s what I remember from that night when Karla took charge.

She’d been kind when I needed kindness. Not platitudes but genuine compassion.

Maybe I’m still wrong.

That’s the refrain that thuds through my head as I watch her walk toward the main room. Maybe my theory is faulty and…

And Jamison murdered his mother? Shoved her during a fight, and when she was knocked out, he saw his chance to murder her?

No. I don’t care if I only knew Jamison for a few months as a child. Nothing I knew of him then and nothing anyone else has said of him since would allow him to be that person. His story makes perfect sense. He thought Isabella was dead, and he did what he’d been raised to do. Call Karla.

He called Karla, and she’s the one who saw her chance, and I don’t know why, but motive doesn’t matter at this moment.

I’m watching Karla sneak into Jamison’s cottage, intent on that front room.

She thinks Jamison is in there a lone, and I don’t know what she plans, but she isn’t sneaking up to surprise him.

She’s creeping through the house, cell phone in her hand–

She twists against the wall, and my gaze falls to her hand, and what I see there is not a cell phone.

Karla has a gun.

Holy shit. Karla has a gun.

Even as my stomach convulses, I inwardly snarl at myself for my stupidity. I’m hiding in this damned closet, waiting for her to arrive, my gut telling me she will come for him, and yet it failed to foresee that damned gun in her hand?

Did I think Karla – fifty-something Karla, who probably doesn’t even have time for spin classes – was going to confront a twenty-three-year-old action-movie star without a weapon?

I did not foresee this because I didn’t want to foresee it. I wanted to believe Karla cared enough for these kids that she only came to talk to Jamison, to persuade him.

I’d planned to step from this closet and confront her myself. Now, seeing that gun, I realize my terrible mistake. I take a deep breath and ease back into the closet. I need to warn Marco and stay here–

Molly hears Karla, then. I’d put her into the bedroom with a chew toy, and she’d been quiet, but now there is clearly someone else in the building, and she wants out. Between puppy yips, Karla’s shoes squeak as she halts.

She knows something is wrong, and if there was any doubt, it evaporates when Molly begins flinging herself against the door, yowling.

Being locked in a room is foreign enough, but to have someone inside the house ignoring her?

That is a mistake, and the puppy yowls her confusion and c oncern, telling Karla, beyond any doubt, that no one is in the front room watching TV.

I need to get out of here. Now.

I ease open the closet door and tiptoe to the back one. I twist the knob just as Karla’s shoes squeak again. She’s coming back my way.

I throw open the back door and run. I tear through the small yard, my gaze fixed on the woods twenty feet away–

“Stop, Lucy.”

In the movie version, I’d lunge for the forest and somehow reach it despite it being at least ten feet away. Or I’d dodge and weave until I was safely in the trees. In reality, I know that if I even try that, she’ll shoot me in the back.

So I turn, hands raised. Karla stands there, and I hope – I still hope – that I won’t see a gun in her hand. Maybe it really was her cell phone, or maybe she’s hiding the gun, hoping not to need to resort to that.

The gun is there. Right there. Pointing straight at me.

Karla came to kill me.

The thought barely settles, ice cold in my stomach, before it’s steamrolled by the truth, one even worse.

Karla didn’t know I was here. She couldn’t have come for me.

Karla came to kill Jamison.

“Suicide?” I say, and my voice is eerily calm.

Her brows shoot up. “You think I’m going to kill myself, Lucy?”

“Of course not. You came to shoot Jamison. You were just going to make it look like suicide. He has a history of it, after all. You’d shoot him and tell the police you came to talk to him because you knew he’d killed Isabella.

You were coming to help Jamie turn himself in, and you a rrived to discover he’d found another solution to his problem. ”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. I see by the flicker of consternation that I’m right – or close enough to it.

“Where is he?” she says.

Now I’m the one lifting my brows. “You really think I’d tell you?”

“Yes, because you have a choice to make, Lucy. Two solutions to this problem. One, I can shoot you and frame him. You came to beg for his help, and – being Isabella’s actual killer – he shot you.

Two, I finish this, and we say Jamie took his own life.

He would eventually, anyway, especially with Isabella gone. This only speeds up the inevitable.”

Especially with Isabella gone.

Those words thunder in my ears. She says them offhandedly, stating a simple fact. As if Jamison’s mother died of some tragic accident or natural cause.

“You murdered Isabella,” I say, barely able to force the words out. “She trusted you and–”

“Isabella never trusted me. She tolerated me, for Colt’s sake.

I spent my life working for that man, and who did he turn to?

Who did he rely on? A woman too wrapped up in herself and her career to take proper care of him.

That summer, he was having a midlife crisis, and she barely noticed.

All she cared about was her silly show.”

The hairs on my neck rise. “Is Colt actually correct? That someone set him up that summer? With me?” I step toward her. “You hired me. You didn’t stop the scandal because you didn’t want to. You wanted Colt’s name in the papers again, and you wanted Isabella gone, and you thought that would do it.”

“Long-suffering Isabella,” Karla says. “That’s the only decent role she ever played.

But she couldn’t even stick with that one.

Hooks up with a musician half her age and intends to divorce Colt to marry him.

That was bad enough. Then she brings you to New York and plans to drag Colt down by reopening the past.”

“Going public with me,” I murmur. “You didn’t plan to kill Isabella, but when Jamie called you after the accident, you saw an opportunity.

Kill her. Put Jamie in your debt. Frame me to reignite that old scandal and remind the world just how irresistible Colt Gordon is.

Fourteen years later, I’m still so obsessed with him that I murder my so-called rival.

Except you knew, even with the planted evidence, it was hardly an airtight case.

So you hired a guy to stalk me.” I meet her gaze. “You hired him to kill me.”

Her lips stretch in a humorless smile. “You have quite the imagination there. Perhaps you could have been a screenwriter after all. If someone was following you, Lucy, might I suggest it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that you are a wanted fugitive.”

“Possibly. That would certainly explain why you think you can get away with killing me or framing Jamie, as if there’s no one else here but the three of us.”

She hesitates. It’s only a flicker behind her eyes, but I catch it.

“I didn’t come alone,” I say. “You should know that, though, if you hired the man who held a gun to me yesterday. I mean, he’d have told you, right? Told you that his attempted abduction was foiled by my private eye, who also took his gun.”

I purse my lips. “Unless he failed to disclose that the last time you spoke. Kind of embarrassing, I guess. My hired guy d isarming your hired guy in broad daylight. Tricking him with a fake tourist routine. If he is your guy, you deserve a refund.”

Her expression answers for her. It is ice-cold with rage. Then her hand moves. I see it out of the corner of my eye, just the slightest move.

My brain screams a warning, and I twist so fast, I stumble, and the gun fires.

I don’t know if it’s the twist or the stumble, but one of them saves my life.

The bullet whizzes past, and I’m doing another awkward move, half-scrambling, half-diving for the forest. The whoosh of a silenced shot just as I hit the ground.

“Gen!”

Marco’s shout comes from somewhere in the forest, and Karla wheels, gun raised. I scream a warning, my heart hammering as I lunge in Marco’s direction.

A streak of motion flies from the other side of the house.

Karla is looking the other way, scanning the forest. At the last second, she hears the sound behind her, and my mouth opens to call another warning, but Jamison is already in flight, knocking her flying.

He pins her gun hand, his other hand at her throat.

“You murdering bitch ,” he snarls.

A strangled gurgling from Karla, cut short by Jamison.

“Is this what you did to her, Karla? Is this what you did to my mother?”

I race over to them. Jamison has his knee on Karla’s chest, his hands around her throat as she writhes and wheezes.

“Did you think I was too stupid to figure it out?” he asks. “Or too weak to do anything about it? Too sensitive ?”

He leans his weight onto her. “Am I stronger than you expected? You’re the one who insisted I do that movie w ith Dad. Maybe you’re regretting that now. Maybe you’re regretting a lot of things now.”

“Jamie,” I say.

He startles. Guilt and shame flood his face just like when he was a boy and I caught him destroying that script in his room.

That look vanishes in a second, replaced by hard anger and determination, his jaw setting. He does ease up on her throat, though, and Karla sputters and gasps for air.

“I called her,” he says. “Called her for help. That’s what we’re supposed to do when we run into trouble.

I used to joke I should have her phone number tattooed on my arm.

Call in case of emergency. Or blackout. Or overdose.

” He looks down at Karla. “Or in case my mother falls, and hits her head and isn’t breathing. ”

I glance over as Marco walks from the forest. He’s moving quietly, careful not to interrupt.

I turn back to Jamison. “You thought your mother was dead. So you called Karla.”

He nods, his eyes brimming with tears. “She said I had to get out of there before anyone knew I was at Mom’s hotel that night.

I’m an addict and an alcoholic, and if the police didn’t blame me, the press would.

She said that for Tiana and Dad’s sake, I had to leave.

She’d tidy up and slip back to her room downstairs.

When the hotel staff found Mom, it’d look like an accident. ”

He swipes away tears as he stands. “I shouldn’t have left. I just… I was in shock, and I kept thinking that if I left, maybe I’d wake up in an alley and realize I’d stopped to get a fix and hallucinated the whole thing.”

I put my arms around him, and he falls against my shoulder. When Karla tries to rise, I slam my foot onto her throat.

“Don’t give me an excuse,” I say. “I won’t let Jamie kill you, but I’m happy to do it myself.”

Marco walks over, still quiet, his gaze still on Karla, making sure she’s subdued.

“Would you call 911 for us, please?” I ask.

“Already have. They’re on their way.”

I look at Jamison. “Is that okay? Are you ready for…?”

“Ready to confess?” He meets my gaze. “I’ve been ready since Sunday night, Lucy. I just want this to be over. For all of us.”