“Until you said it, I had no idea I sat so long. I would have said a minute or two.” Emily pressed her eyes with her fingers. “It doesn’t make sense. How—”

Ava opened her mouth, but Zander held up a finger. “Emily, what scenarios ran through your head to answer how the pocket watch got there?”

She wouldn’t look at them. “I don’t know.”

“Who could have left it there?”

“I don’t know!”

Frustrated, Zander sat back. Ava slowly shook her head as they stared at each other.

Emily cleared her throat. “My aunts, I guess, my sister . . . my father’s killer . . . ,” she whispered, looking lost.

“Madison could have left it?” Ava asked.

“No. I meant Tara when I said ‘sister’—although I guess Madison could have found it somewhere.”

“Why do you say Tara over Madison? Madison’s a good friend of Lindsay. It makes sense that she could have left something behind in Lindsay’s house, and you said Tara hasn’t been around in years.”

“She was there.” Emily’s hands trembled.

Zander kept his questions calm and steady, but inside he wanted to drag the answers out of her. “Who was where?”

This watch could indicate who killed the Fitches.

Emily finally met his gaze. “Tara was there the night my father was killed,” she whispered. “She told everyone—even the police—that she had spent the night at a friend’s. But I saw her with someone else just beyond the yard in the woods.” Her shoulders slumped. “Oh God. That’s the second thing I’ve hidden from the police.”

He tried to pull her back to the present. “You think Tara has something to do with the pocket watch being at the Fitch home?”

“I don’t know.” Emily stood and threw up her hands, pacing the small room. “I don’t know anything! Everything is a mess!”

“Where is the pocket watch now?” Ava asked.

“At the mansion.”

“How about you and I go get it?”

Zander started to say he’d come along, but a look from Ava stopped him.

Am I still being too nice?

“I’ll stay here and talk to the sheriff,” he said instead, not knowing if Greer was even in the building. It didn’t matter. He wanted to review everything that Emily had just told them and figure out the implication of the appearance of a watch that had been missing for decades.

“Let’s go,” said Ava.

24

Outside, Emily drew deep breaths. Her nerves still quaked from the session, but there was a small sense of relief that she’d told someone she’d seen Tara at her father’s murder scene. Even if it made no sense to the FBI agents, it was good to have off her chest.

The pocket watch.

That was also a weight off her shoulders and conscience. She didn’t know why she hadn’t told the police about the watch. All she’d known was that she had been confused and afraid when she picked it up in the Fitch backyard. What was I afraid of?

Afraid of suggesting one of her relatives had been involved in a double murder?

The very idea that one of her family had been involved was ridiculous.

Finding the watch that morning had opened a door to painful memories, overwhelming her. According to Ava’s cell phone report, she’d been overwhelmed for nearly twenty minutes.

“I’ll drive,” Ava said as they strode through the county lot.

“Actually, I’d like to.”

Ava wrinkled her nose. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I’m feeling better, and I’d welcome the distraction of concentrating on the road,” Emily admitted. Anything to get her present thoughts out of her head.

“Fine by me. I’ll make some calls while you drive.”

Emily guided her Honda down the narrow two-lane road. Ava was on her phone, making calls and frowning at various emails. Emily’s earlier stress started to drain away. But the pocket watch kept pulling her attention.

“I’m going to take Emily with me,” her father told her mother. “You’re too sick to look after her, and I don’t want to her to catch anything from Madison.”

Ten-year-old Emily hid behind the door, crossing her fingers. Her mother was in bed, and Madison was sound asleep beside her. Her sister’s cheeks were flushed, and sweat plastered her hair to her forehead as she clutched a big empty bowl in her sleep. She had thrown up twice.

“Emily will be fine here. She can watch TV,” her mother suggested.

“No, she needs to get out of the house. She’s been stuck here all week while you’ve been sick.”

“That isn’t a meeting for children.”

“She’ll be quiet and read her book. I’m not concerned.”

He won, so Emily accompanied her father on the long drive to Portland, ecstatic over the one-on-one time with him. He stopped for ice cream and told stupid jokes. They played the game where one of them told a story for thirty seconds and then the other person picked up the thread and continued for another thirty seconds. Emily timed the segments with his pocket watch, proud to hold the heirloom. Both ridiculously twisted the story, giving the other person the most bizarre lead-ins possible.

The meeting was dull. Twenty men sat in a room and listened to a speaker drone on and on. Emily sat at the back and ignored them, her head buried in her book about a boy at a school for wizards. After it was over, her father spoke earnestly with a few other men.

Hoping he was ready to leave, Emily approached and tucked herself under his arm. He held her against his side but kept talking. The men listened. Some frowning, some nodding. Some looked like soldiers because their hair was so short she saw skin. Several crossed their arms as they listened, and she studied their tattoos, fascinated by the colors and shapes. Bored, she dug out his pocket watch and played with the little hinged door, loving the feel of the smooth glass.

She had felt the same smoothness that morning at the Fitches’.

She shook the memory away and turned on the car’s music, seeking more diversions. The ocean appeared on Ava’s side of the car, its gray water blending seamlessly with the misty gray of the sky. On a blue summer day, it would take her breath away. Today it was bleak and dismal, but she let it hold her attention, still needing a distraction, any distraction.

“Who runs in this rain?” she muttered out loud, spotting a jogger ahead on the shoulder of the road. There wasn’t enough chocolate in Oregon to tempt her to do that.

She listened to Ava’s phone conversation with her husband-to-be. Their dog had brought a squirrel into the house, and it had promptly disappeared. Ava’s choking laughter only added to his frustration, judging by the curses coming out of the phone.

Emily stole quick glances to her right, absorbed by the glimpse into the agent’s real life.

As they started to pass, Emily saw the jogger stop and raise his arm toward her car.

Does he want a ride?

A flash. A deafening crack. Ava’s window shattered and she shrieked.

Bits of glass and warm blood hit Emily as she wrenched the steering wheel to the left and stomped on the brake. The car spun across the wet road, and Emily’s side of the vehicle slammed into two huge firs.

Her head hit the door as white filled her vision.

And then black.

25

“Mason?” Zander answered his cell, wondering why Ava’s fiancé would call him.

“Where is Ava?” Mason yelled in his ear.

“She left a few minutes ago. What hap—”

“Call 911! Tell them she’s been in a car accident. I was on the phone with her when it happened, but I don’t know where she is! She’s not answering me, and I can’t pinpoint her phone’s location!”

“Hang on.” Zander gestured at Sheriff Greer, who’d joined him a minute ago. “Call 911. There’s been a car accident somewhere between here and Bartonville. Emily just left five minutes ago. They can’t have driven far.”

“I heard gunfire and then a crash!” Mason panted as if he were running.

“Gunfire?” Zander repeated. Adrenaline raced through his veins as he looked at Greer, who was already on the phone. The sheriff’s eyebrows shot up, and he spoke rapidly into his phone. Zander darted out the door and jogged down the hallway.

Someone shot at their car? Are they injured?

“What is going on out there?” Mason hollered at him.

A car door slammed in the background of the call. “We’re on a case—”

“I fucking know that! Who would shoot at Ava?”

Zander shoved open the department’s doors, running as he spoke. “I think—”

“I’m headed your way.” An engine started on Mason’s end. “Go find her! Call me back.”

The call ended with a beep in his ear.

“I’m on it.” Zander yanked open his SUV door.

It was twenty minutes before Zander found the wreck, and he’d pushed his temper to its limits during the wasted time. He’d followed what he believed was the most direct route, but Emily had taken a back road used primarily by locals. A call to Sheriff Greer got him on the right road. The only thing the sheriff knew about the accident from the first responders was that two people were severely injured. No deaths. Yet.