The Vicar's Daughter. Betty Neels

long ago. She had been in the dark that night, hidden away. She reached out and clutched his arm.

      “Don’t leave me!” She had said the same thing that night but she had been too late. “You need me to open the house door, too.”

      “I won’t leave you here,” he assured her. “But you have to be careful. We don’t know what we’re going to find inside.”

      Her stomach muscles tightened with fear and dread. “You think she’s dead?”

      “It would have been on the news,” he said, “if the judge had been killed or even if she’d gone missing.”

      She shook her head. “She had taken a leave of absence from work.”

      “Brenda Foster?” he asked, obviously incredulous.

      He wasn’t the only one who had been surprised. Brenda had taken only a couple weeks off after having Ethan.

      “I think she was writing her memoirs or some kind of book,” Sharon said. “She told me that I would have to do some proofreading for her when she was ready. But she hadn’t asked me to look at anything yet.”

      “How long had she been off work?” he asked.

      “Her leave started two weeks ago,” Sharon said, “so nobody at the courts would have been alarmed that they hadn’t heard from her.”

      “Would anyone else?”

      “Are you asking me about her boyfriends or lovers?” Irritation eased some of her fear. He had kissed her, but now he was questioning her about another woman’s social life. Of course, he had only kissed Sharon to prove the point that she couldn’t be the mother of his child and not because he had actually been attracted or interested in her enough to want to kiss her.

      “I’m asking if anyone would have reported her missing if they hadn’t heard from her.”

      Guilt clutched her at the realization that she had been so petty as to be jealous of another woman—a woman she had always respected. But Sharon was one of very few who’d actually been close to the judge. “I don’t know....”

      She didn’t know who would report her missing, either. With the hours she worked, she had little time to socialize. Not that she had ever socialized much. She had been more focused on school and studying and work than on making friends.

      “Probably me,” she said. As Ethan’s primary caregiver, she was closer to his mother than anyone else. “But she told me to go to you if I didn’t hear from her—and to trust no one else.”

      “Not even the police?”

      She shrugged and then shivered. “No one but you.”

      Parker turned back toward the mansion. He cursed and reluctantly admitted, “I should have let Logan send backup with me.”

      “But there’s no hit out on Brenda,” she reminded him. “There is no reason to think anyone’s trying to kill her.”

      “There isn’t,” he agreed. “But I know that someone’s trying to kill us.”

      “They don’t know that we would come here,” she said. “And you made sure we weren’t followed.”

      “So I could leave you out here....”

      “You need me to open the door,” she reminded him. So she got that far with him—to the massive double front doors. After she pressed her index finger to the security panel, they opened slowly and creepily as if a ghost played butler for them.

      Parker stepped over the threshold first, his gun drawn. He’d turned on a flashlight that was attached to the barrel, which he swung in every direction he turned, as if ready to confront a threat. But the house was eerily quiet. He must have thought so, too, because he asked, “Doesn’t she have any live-in staff?”

      “No.” She wanted Sharon on call 24/7 but she hadn’t wanted her to live with her. “She prefers her privacy, so she just has a cleaning service.”

      But that had obviously been canceled because as they crossed the foyer, it was clear that no one had been in to straighten up. Brenda’s stilettos had been abandoned on the marble floor and her coat lay a little farther inside the house at the foot of the double stairwell leading to the second story. Parker lifted his foot to the first step, but Sharon grasped his arm.

      “She won’t be up there.”

      “But it’s late and all the lights are off.”

      Brenda wouldn’t have been in bed yet, though, unless she had company, and in that case, there would have been lights on. “She would be working,” she said, and she started across the expansive living room toward the double doors that led to the den.

      But Parker caught her arm, jerking her aside before she could reach for the door handles. He swung the beam of the flashlight around the doors.

      “What are you looking for?” she asked.

      “Trip wires—anything that could trigger a bomb.”

      She shuddered.

      “It’s clear,” he said.

      But she didn’t reach for the handle again, so he had to turn it. He pushed open the doors and swung the beam around the room. It glanced off books and papers. But they weren’t on the bookshelf or the desk. They were strewn across the floor.

      “Someone’s ransacked the room,” he said.

      She shook her head. “No. Her chambers often look like this.” Each of the books was open to a specific page. But as she stepped inside the room with Parker, she noted that these books were ripped apart.

      “Someone was looking for something,” he said. “Can you tell if anything’s missing?”

      “Her laptop.” It wasn’t on the desk or the floor in front of it.

      “She must have taken it with her,” Parker said. “She must have taken off.”

      Sharon stepped carefully over the books and papers to move around to the back of the big mahogany desk. If Brenda had taken the laptop, she would have put it in the case that she usually dropped behind her chair.

      But she didn’t find the bag behind the desk. She found something else instead—something she wished she had never seen. As she gave in to the fear and hysteria overwhelming her, screams burned her throat.