Run to You Part Three: Third Charm. Clara Kensie

closely, Heath was in the background in almost every picture, either standing behind a tree or huddling in a car.

      For someone constantly on the lookout for suspicious people, I’d been so blind. Blinded by love—I was a living cliché.

      The binder held photos of the rest of my family too. Mom and Jillian shopping for Homecoming dresses. Logan looking under the hood of our getaway car in the pouring rain while our mother paced behind him. Only one picture of my dad—he stood on the driveway with his hands in his pockets. It was the only time he’d stepped outside the house in Twelve Lakes, as he’d waited for me to return home from jogging with Tristan, so he could shake his hand again.

      With every turn of the page, my heart hurt a little bit more.

      The hardest pages to see were the photos of the alleged victims, the people the APR had accused my parents of blackmailing and murdering. Underneath each photo was their name, along with the location, date, and manner of death. Heart attack. Car accident. Heart attack. Fire. Falling down stairs. Heart attack.

      Tristan sipped in a long breath when I turned the page to photos of two men. “My dad’s partners.”

      The location listed was Kitteridge, Virginia. My hometown.

      The date was the day Dennis Connelly came to our house eight years ago.

      Their manner of death: Stabbing.

      Those were the only deaths that didn’t match the rest.

      A brick grew in my throat. Calling the fog in a bit closer, I dragged my sight from the words to the pictures of the two men. Both photos were simple headshots against a plain backdrop, perhaps taken by the APR for their ID badges. The men stared accusingly back at me, the elder man hefty and wizened, the younger man thin and determined.

      “That guy?” Tristan said, pointing to the younger man. “He was Kellan’s brother-in-law, but they were more like real brothers. I guess Kellan didn’t want to just apprehend your parents. He wanted revenge.” Hands curling into fists, he muttered, “So he took it out on you. Defenseless you.”

      My despair, and the fog, lifted as I realized I didn’t recognize either of those men. I’d never seen them before.

      “Ha!” I cried. “I would have remembered three men coming to my house that day. But there was just one. Your father.” I shoved the binder off my lap and onto his, as if it was contaminated.

      He licked his lips. “My dad was purposely distracting you.”

      Narrowing my eyes at him, I slid the binder back onto my legs and resumed flipping the pages. It didn’t matter what Tristan said; I had absolutely no memory of three men in my yard. I remembered only one: the man who’d tried to kidnap me. The man who’d sliced me open.

      I vaguely recognized a few of the people in the photos—was that the man who’d sold us our getaway car when we left Montana? The binder said he’d died when he cracked his head open after slipping on motor oil. And the hook-nosed waitress from a Georgia diner a few years ago. She’d died of a heart attack.

      I had to stop this. I had to stop looking at these photos. There were too many, and they weren’t helping me prove Tristan was lying. I thumbed through the rest of them as quickly as I could, barely glancing at them—

      Wait.

      Was that...

      Yes. That last photo. The date in the corner showed it had been added to the binder this past Thursday night.

      Dr. Fielding. The college professor.

      I stared at his picture, the same portrait from his website. Even the words “In Memoriam” were printed on top. But it was the words printed on the bottom that made my breath catch.

      I ripped the page from the file. Shoved the binder to the floor. Jumped to my feet and waved the page over my head like a trophy. “I knew it!” I said, my voice screechy and frantic. “You’re lying. And I can prove it.”

      Chapter Forty-One

      “I’m not lying,” Tristan said.

      “Yes you are! This,” I said, waving the photo in his face, “is Dr. Fielding.”

      “The college professor?”

      I stabbed the words under his portrait with my finger. “He died in Hebron, Iowa, on November twenty-third. My family moved to Twelve Lakes, Illinois, in August. We never went further than ten minutes away from our house. And Iowa was at least two hundred miles away. There’s no way my mom could have killed him. She’s not that powerful.”

      Tristan’s face went white.

      “I knew you were lying.” I ran my finger down the professor’s portrait. Dr. Fielding had rescued my family after all.

      Tristan scrambled to gather the papers that had scattered on the floor and began to read them again. Elated, I held Dr. Fielding’s photo in front of me. I could have kissed it. A hysterical giggle escaped from behind my lips.

      They were innocent.

      My parents were innocent.

      They had never blackmailed anyone.

      They’d never killed anyone.

      They’d never lied to me.

      I turned to Tristan with my hands on my hips and snarled. “Now let my parents go, you disgusting, pathetic liar.”

      But instead of being intimidated, he just gave me another one of his sad, sympathetic looks. “You didn’t read the notes on the next page. It says here Dr. Fielding was in Twelve Lakes on November twenty-second.”

      “That can’t be true. He didn’t know who we were. We left all of our personal information out of that email, and Logan made it untraceable. How would he know to come to Twelve Lakes?”

      He referenced the notes again. “Because your parents called him and told him to come.”

      “But...how would my parents know about him back then?”

      He shrugged. “Maybe when Jillian was piggybacking he was able to see inside her mind. Or maybe your parents didn’t trust her, so your father still watched her.”

      If that was true, then my parents had mistrusted the wrong daughter.

      “It says here your mother arranged to meet him at the coffee shop in the town square,” Tristan said. “The security cameras show him getting there at 10:54 a.m. He waited for two hours, and when no one showed up, he left.”

      “See? My parents never met him. So they couldn’t have killed him.”

      He read the notes. “Your mom came in at 11:06, bought a cup of coffee to go, then went home. She never spoke to him, but she was close enough to plant an aneurysm in his brain. Aneurysms don’t necessarily kill right away. She probably chose that method so he wouldn’t die until he got home.”

      I stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

      “Sorry, Tessa. For a minute there, I really thought the APR might be wrong about your parents.”

      I sat down hard on the cot. “This file is fake. It has to be.” I grabbed it from him and flipped through the pages, almost tearing them from the binder.

      “My parents donated to charities,” I said. “They gave money to anyone who needed it. Once when we were on the run, driving through Massachusetts, we were at a motel and the manager was kicking out a woman and her two little kids because she couldn’t afford to pay. My parents gave her enough cash to stay in a different motel, a better motel, for a month. If they were killers, they wouldn’t have done that. They wouldn’t.”

      “That doesn’t mean anything,” Tristan said.

      I tried again. “What about the police detective and the FBI agent we asked for help?” I said.