She wished Evan hadn’t said trust no one in the note he had left her. He should have written trust no one, except Isabel. Perhaps he wrote the note before Isabel came to Paradise Valley, which would mean he put the note in the safe deposit box as soon as they’d moved to town.
It was possible, she thought, that Isabel honestly didn’t know anything about Evan’s safe deposit box, or its contents, until she told her.
“The storage unit just had some boxes of old files. That’s where I found the book.”
“What kind of files?”
Emily could lie and say they were from Evan’s private investigation cases, but hadn’t there been enough lies already? She yearned to trust her closest friend again, and she hated the suspicion that stood between them. With trepidation, she hoped she was doing the right thing.
“They were copies of CIA files. They looked like they were documents from Evan’s old assignments.”
“Are you kidding me?” Isabel’s eyes widened and her voice rose. “He’s not supposed to keep those documents.”
“It’s kind of a moot point now, isn’t it?”
“I guess, but I’d like to get a look at them.”
“What was that?” Emily’s head snapped toward the direction of her front door. She had heard the sound of the wooden floors creak in her 1920’s bungalow, followed by the faint sound of a door clicking shut.
Isabel reached into her purse for her gun and Emily followed her closely down the hall and to the front of the house. Emily had tucked her weapon in the nightstand next to her bed before the girls came over and was glad Isabel’s was close by.
The front door was unlocked. Emily had recalled locking it after the girls arrived, but Camille could have left it unlocked when she went home. Camille had said the door was ajar when she arrived, but Isabel insisted she hadn’t left it open.
Could someone have been hiding in her house while she and her friends had dinner? Staying to listen to their conversations? Isabel had done a quick search through the house and gave her an all clear, but maybe the person was clever enough to avoid being found.
“You don’t think…?” Emily wondered if someone heard her talking with Isabel? Emily shivered at the creepy feeling that spread over her body.
“Think what?” Isabel put the safety on her firearm.
“That someone was here and overheard our discussion about Evan.”
CHAPTER 4
Saturday morning, Emily woke up thinking about the address book. She had lain in bed the previous evening, scouring it, looking for anything else that might make sense to her. Nothing did. It seemed to be a jumble of cryptic names and phone numbers, sometimes followed by other numbers that made no sense at all. She assumed it must have been some kind of code that Evan would have understood, but likely no one else.
For safekeeping, she had tucked it under her pillow, sleeping with her phone and gun on the night table and her purse nearby. Someone had been searching for something in her house, likely the gun from the safe deposit box, and they weren’t going to stop until they found it. If someone had been in her house Thursday night while she talked with Isabel about the book and the boxes in the storage unit, it was possible they’d be after that information, as well.
Emily had half expected an intruder on Friday, keeping her guard up throughout the day, but it had been a quiet day. She’d spoken with Colin on the phone a couple of times, received a few texts with photos attached from Maggie and Molly, and got a call from Isabel asking when she could get a peak at the contents of the storage unit.
After hitting the shooting range in the afternoon, a kickboxing class in the early evening, and receiving a reminder call from Camille about the brunch for her brother Peter, she’d stuck a frozen meal in the microwave and watched a romantic comedy on the television before heading to bed. Nestled under the covers, she stayed up late studying the black book.
The bright morning sunlight streaming in her bedroom window told Emily she’d better drag herself out of bed and get ready for Camille’s brunch or she’d be late and have to make her apologies. She hated making apologies.
A quick shower, a dollop of hair mousse, a few blasts of hot air on her loosely tousled curls, and a dab of make-up was all she