“Actually, he told me last night at the going-away party. He promised he’d move heaven and earth to come back to me.”
“Oh, how romantic,” Maggie gushed. “Words like that make my heart melt. No one deserves to be happy more than y’all, after all y’all have been through.”
Emily swore she could hear a quiver of sadness in Maggie’s voice. As sweet and lovely as Maggie was, she had terrible luck with men—one loser after another. Emily hoped Maggie’s luck would change soon—for the better. “So do you, Maggs.”
“I’d better let y’all off the phone and finish packin’, or I won’t be nearly ready when it’s time to come and pick us up.”
CHAPTER 2
“Let’s see…four fifteen, four sixteen, four seventeen,” Emily muttered as she read the numbers on the door to each of the outdoor storage lockers. “Here it is, four eighteen.”
Nervously anticipating what might be behind it, she stood for a moment, staring at the door. Then with a held breath, she shoved the brass key into the padlock and exhaled loudly when it fit perfectly.
She twisted the key and the lock slipped a bit as it released. A wave of excitement poured through her as she unhooked the lock from the metal loop and swung the door open.
Exposed before her was a small storage area, maybe five feet wide and twelve feet deep. She had brought a six-inch pocket flashlight, suspecting there may be no lights. It proved useful toward the back of the unit, because the bright sunshine only illuminated the space closest to the entrance.
Emily stepped in and flashed the narrow beam around. Along one wall were several steel shelving units, three shelves high, each one holding white cardboard banker boxes. She stared at the boxes. What could Evan possibly have been hiding in them?
Several months ago, when she discovered the first clue that he was not who he said he was, she had been devastated. They had been married for five years and she’d thought they were blissfully happy. But months after his death, she began to uncover evidence that he was someone else entirely. Rather than a private investigator, she had eventually learned that he was a CIA operative with a vast array of secrets.
After many tears, and sleepless nights, she had finally gotten control of her emotions and accepted that his lies were to protect her. With Colin’s help, and the aid of her close friends, she was able to move on from her grief, but the mystery of who killed her husband still hung over her. Emily would never be able to completely close the door on that chapter of her life, and fully commit herself to a new relationship, until the mystery of Evan’s murder was solved.
With the flashlight poised in one hand, she pulled the snugly fitting lid off one of the boxes with the other, causing a faint cloud of dust to waft up. She batted at the air to clear the dust and peeked into the box.
Fingering through the old files and papers, she hoped she wouldn’t have to rummage through every single document in each and every box before she would discover anything of value—fortunately, there were only seven of them.
Emily wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find in this storage place, but a bunch of boring-looking file boxes was definitely not it. Unlike Evan’s secret safe deposit box that was filled with fake passports and bundles of cash, along with a suspicious gun, these boxes only seemed to contain files, papers, and old photos.
No matter what lay in the boxes, though, they had to contain something Evan didn’t want anyone else to see. So, for the next two hours, she searched through the boxes, folder by folder, page by page.
Most of the documents looked like photocopies, as if Evan had copied them to keep a set of his own files on his CIA assignments. She wondered why he felt he needed protection—or was he searching for proof of something? Documentation to back up his actions, maybe?
Along with the copied documents, there were photos of locations and people, as if he had snapped the candid shots as his target was meeting with someone, or clandestine pictures showing what his mark was up to.
Emily searched for more photos of the mysterious brunette—the one standing with Evan in the single snapshot kept hidden in his safe deposit box—but she found none. Her identity had plagued Emily since the first time she’d discovered the picture of this woman snuggled in Evan’s