you so.”
She released his hand and brushed herself off. Sean could barely believe they’d made it undetected. He took Jones by the arm and led her around the building, via the alley he’d been in earlier. His bag of rescued garbage still sat right where he’d left it, near the front corner of the building. Her Jeep was just beyond it, parked by the curb. There were plenty of other vehicles parked the same way up and down the street, so he figured the cops wouldn’t have had any reason to note her plate number. He looked at some of the cars more closely. The dark sedan in front of the building hadn’t been there before he’d gone inside. It was, he assumed, what the cops had driven here, and it was empty. He strained his eyes for a closer look. Yep. Crown Victoria.
Quickly he led Jones to the Jeep, opened the driver’s door. Hell, she hadn’t even locked it, and the keys were dangling from the switch.
He glanced back at her. “Go on, get in and get the hell out of here.”
She nodded, but she didn’t get in. She gripped his eyes with hers instead. Big, brown and scared right now. It almost knocked the wind out of him. He had never seen Julie Jones look like that. Never.
“You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” she asked him.
Shit, for a second he thought she was going to thank him for helping her out. He was an idiot. “Not until I know what’s going on, Jones. But believe me, I will find out.”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“But it does have something to do with you, doesn’t it?”
She pursed her lips, then turned away and got into her Jeep. He closed the door as she started it up. Then he yanked the door open again. “Put on your seat belt, Jones.”
Pursing her lips, she pulled the belt around her, yanked her door closed and popped the clutch. The Jeep jerked, nearly stalled, but managed to take off. He heard her grinding gears and winced. Poor freaking car. If the transmission survived long enough for the kid to get her license, it would be a miracle.
When her taillights were out of sight, Sean jogged into the alley, grabbed his bag of garbage and then ran a block to where he’d left his car. He didn’t relax until he got home, safe and sound. And even then, the questions kept going round and round in his mind. What was Julie Jones hiding? And what did she have to do with the murder of Harry Blackwood?
Julie pounded the steering wheel with a fist. She hadn’t found the documents. There hadn’t been anything there with her name on it, but that didn’t mean a thing. Any one of those dozens of folders and reams of papers could have been the one she was looking for, but she hadn’t had time to check them out.
What if the police found the truth in that mess? What if they found out about Dawn?
God, if it hadn’t been for that bastard MacKenzie showing up, she could have scooped them all up, thrown them into a trash bag from Harry’s kitchen and carried them home.
If it hadn’t been for MacKenzie showing up, I’d have been caught there, red-handed, an inner voice whispered. I never would have found that fire escape in time to avoid the police, much less had the gumption to go down it in the dark.
Oh, God, the police. She imagined them—the two officers, and that bitch Detective Jackson—were gathering up the papers and documents and videotapes one by one, even now. They would probably sit in a roomful of cops and go over all of them. If they found out the truth, her life would be destroyed. They would take Dawn away from her. Track down her birth mother’s relatives—the very same people Lizzie had been compelled to run away from all those years ago—and hand her over to them.
Dawn.
Shivering all over, Julie kept steering the Jeep with one hand, dipping into her jacket pocket with the other. She pulled out the two photographs she had found on the floor, both of them taken in a place so jarringly familiar that the sight of them had almost floored her. They’d been taken at Young Believers’ compound.
She looked at them now, tried to make out the faces in the group shots. And finally she realized why one of those faces seemed so familiar. The young man with the three-piece suit and the automatic rifle was Harry Blackwood.
“He was there,” she whispered. Not as one of the inmates, though. Those who lived at the place didn’t wear suits but plain, functional clothes more suited to working in the greenhouses and gardens. No, Harry must have been one of Mordecai’s visiting dignitaries. The men who brought large sums of money in exchange for some of Mordecai’s crops.
Julie lowered the photos toward her pocket, glanced up at the road and saw the glowing orange eyes and red-brown coat in her headlights’ beam. Startled, the deer froze in the middle of the road. Equally startled, Julie jerked the wheel hard to the left and jammed her foot on the brake. The Jeep’s rear end skidded right, so she jerked the wheel right, overcorrected, and sent it skidding the other way. Her body jerked hard against the car’s motions, but the seat belt kept her from being whipped across the seat. She thought she was going into the brush at the side of the road for sure, but somehow she pulled out of the skid, and the back end’s fishtailing slowed and finally stopped. She forgot about the clutch, and the car bucked and then stalled.
She sat there, the car at a cockeyed angle on the shoulder, watching the deer bound merrily away into the woods, and she thought how right her daughter was about her driving skills. Damn deer anyway. Thank God she hadn’t wrecked Dawnie’s sixteenth-birthday present or she would never have heard the end of it, even though her insurance would have covered the damage.
She told herself it didn’t matter. She hadn’t wrecked the Jeep, or hit the deer or anything else. She hadn’t been hurt, and she supposed that might have turned out differently if Sean hadn’t reminded her to buckle up. Though she would be damned before she admitted that to him.
Pulling herself together, she pushed down the clutch, restarted the engine, pulled back onto the pavement and drove slowly the rest of the way home, her full attention on the road the entire time. She pulled the Jeep into the garage, closed the door and crept into the house as quietly as she could. She checked all the locks, shut off all the lights. God, it was 3:30 a.m. She had to get up again in a little more than three hours.
She tiptoed up the stairs and paused outside her daughter’s bedroom door to peek inside. Dawn was lying in the bed, exactly the way she had been before. She hadn’t so much as moved in her sleep.
What had at first seemed reassuring changed in an instant as Julie stared in at the bed and realized what she was seeing.
She pushed the door open further and stepped inside. “Dawn?”
Dawn said nothing. Julie moved closer to the bed, reached down to touch Dawn’s shoulder. “Dawnie?”
Still nothing. She pulled the covers back.
Pillows lay beneath them, lined up to resemble the form of a sleeping sixteen-year-old covered in blankets. Lifting her head, Julie saw the curtains floating on a breeze coming in through the open window.
“Oh my God,” Julie whispered. “Dawn!”
Chapter Four
Dawn crouched in the bushes on the front lawn as the Jeep’s headlights
