Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,100

me.”

“Really. Well, I know what happened to Nick and your daughter. I was there.”

Abby’s breath left her; she felt as if she’d been blindsided. “Tell me,” she said, and her need to know, that had haunted her for months, was as searingly hot as it had been when it had been fresh. Nothing else mattered; nothing else was in her mind. Shaking, she dropped her cell phone onto a side table and gripped her arms above her elbows.

“It wasn’t my fault.” Sondra was maddeningly cool.

“What wasn’t? Screwing my husband? Involving my daughter in your dirty affair? Driving her off a cliff? Which?”

“I don’t particularly care for your—”

“Oh, my God! It was you, wasn’t it?” Abby was struck by a fresh realization. “Those times on the phone, when I thought it was Lindsey, it was you pretending to be her.” Abby didn’t know how she knew; she just did, that the phone calls she had believed in and treasured for the hope they brought her had been a prank just as Jake had suggested. There had never been a chance of finding Lindsey alive, never a moment when Abby might have saved her. “How could you be so cruel?”

If Sondra heard Abby or cared, she didn’t respond. She was intent on her search through the contents of her purse, muttering to herself. Then, suddenly, her hands stilled, and she looked up and smiled unnervingly.

Abby’s heart stalled; a tendril of fear hooked her spine. “You should go now,” she said.

But Sondra remained where she was, blandly smiling, as if the upturned corners of her mouth were secured by a series of tiny hidden stitches. “I wanted Nick to tell you about us,” she said. “I hated always having to sneak around. That’s partly why I came today. I want Nick’s jacket, but I also thought you, of all people, deserved to know the truth. I mean, we both loved him, right?—and he’s dead now.”

She lifted one hand in a vague gesture, kept the other hidden inside the purse. Abby looked there as if she might see through its leather walls. Something was going on, something worse than seemed apparent.

“Of course, you had him longer than me. I didn’t even know who he was until the Helix Belle case came to trial.”

Abby remembered Hank telling her how obsessed Sondra had been with the case.

“When I saw him the first time in action in the courtroom, I was amazed. Mesmerized. He had such a—a—” She looked away, and, bringing her fingertips to her mouth, she apologized. She said she could scarcely speak of him without losing her composure.

A fresh wave of panic broke in Abby’s mind. Her ears were ringing and she wondered if she was in some kind of shock. Otherwise, wouldn’t she do something? Pick up her phone and call 911? But she had a sense that Sondra could go off at the slightest provocation. She looked relaxed enough, sitting there on the sofa. She might have been a neighbor who had dropped in for a short visit, but there was a kind of tension in her posture, a certain hyper alert quality about her that struck Abby as unnatural. And there was her hand tucked into her purse.

Abby was awfully afraid of what might be hidden there; she didn’t want to think about it, the possibility that Sondra had brought a gun into the house. It couldn’t be. People—ordinary people—didn’t do that.

Sondra said, “I was there for him every day of that trial, every day court was in session, but you—you,” she repeated with sharp disgust, “only managed to come for the closing arguments. Nick said you had no interest in his career, that you mainly saw him as a paycheck.”

“He wouldn’t have said that.” Abby defended herself without thinking.

“Did you even know the man?” Sondra set her purse aside, and Abby’s worry over it eased a bit. She eyed her cell phone.

“I tried to save him when those bastards accused him of stealing the settlement money. I did everything I could. I went to everyone I knew—the mayor, the district attorney. I called the governor. Nick didn’t want me intervening on his behalf, but somebody had to.” She scooted to the edge of the sofa, bracing her elbows on her knees. “Judge Payne fired me over it.”

Hank had said Sondra quit her job. Had he lied or was Sondra lying now? Abby looked at her. She fiddled with her bracelets.

“People never want to face the truth,” she said. “Have you