Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,44
childhood she had?”
Lisette sighed. “A happier one than you.”
“Well, yeah,” Josie said. “That’s always been my assumption, but how do I really know for sure? I never even bothered to ask her.”
“Shannon and Christian are good people,” Lisette said.
“I’m not suggesting they aren’t. Trinity… we all know she’s ambitious… but Gram, she’s even more closed-off and isolated than I am.”
Lisette laughed. “I’m glad you realize that about yourself. Like I said, growth.”
“I’m serious, Gram. In all the time I’ve known her, Trinity’s never had a boyfriend. Never even dated anyone. Today I find out she was seeing an FBI agent for the last few months. She never even told me.”
“Maybe it’s not serious,” Lisette argued. “Maybe she didn’t want to start telling people until she knew it was going somewhere.”
“It’s not just that. Trinity literally has no friends. None. What kind of person has zero friends?”
Lisette reached across the table and covered Josie’s hands with one of her own. The warmth and familiarity of her grandmother’s touch soothed some of Josie’s frayed nerves. “She has you, Josie.”
Guilt from her last exchange with Trinity washed over her. “I don’t think I count as a friend.”
“Don’t you? It was your name she wrote on her door just before she was taken. That’s what Shannon and Christian told me.”
“Not my name,” Josie said. “She wrote Vanessa.”
“Because she was trying to tell you something, dear. Point you in a direction. It would have been far quicker to write Josie than Vanessa, wouldn’t it? There’s something she wants you to see, Josie. What does Trinity know about you?”
Josie swallowed, her mouth dry. “She knows how I take my coffee. She knows my favorite restaurant, what my house looks like, who all my friends are, my boyfriend. She knows my romantic history, mostly because she was there after Ray died and when Luke and I broke up—as a reporter, not as my sister. She knows that I have—that I’ve had—a drinking problem. She knows that I value my career…”
“She knows that you’re exceptional at what you do, Josie. She knows you’ll follow the trail. She knows you’ve solved cases before by following the most unlikely clues. She trusts you to find her.”
Josie fought to keep her voice from cracking. “I don’t think I can.”
“Nonsense. Think, Josie. Why Vanessa? What is she trying to tell you?”
Josie shook her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t, Gram.”
“What does the name Vanessa evoke, Josie?”
“I don’t know. The abduction? Our family? The past?”
“Which of those is most relevant here?” Lisette prodded.
“Gram, I don’t know. The abduction, I guess.”
“Because she was being abducted? Too easy. What else does the name Vanessa evoke?”
Josie felt like she was playing a game for which she didn’t even know the rules. “The past?”
“She’s pointing you in a direction, Josie. Toward the past. Probably quite far back.”
“But we didn’t even know each other far back in the past.”
Lisette frowned. Trying a different tack, she said, “Do you have inside jokes? I know you’ve only been officially sisters for three years now, but surely you’ve developed some ways of communicating with one another that are unique to the two of you. Lots of friends have a shorthand of sorts.”
“What did you say?”
“Shorthand,” Lisette repeated. “An abbreviated way of communicating with one another that only the two of you understand.”
“We don’t, but Gram, when I was small, before you took the job at the jewelry store, you were a secretary, weren’t you?”
Lisette’s eyes widened. She pulled her hand away from Josie and wrapped both palms around her coffee mug. “Josie, are you okay?”
Something had been niggling at the back of Josie’s mind since she, Gretchen, and Mettner had interviewed Jaime Pestrak. “This is important, Gram.”
“We’re talking about Trinity, dear.”
“I know. This is about Trinity. How many years did you work as a secretary?”
Lisette shrugged. “Oh, decades. I started while I was still in high school. That was back in the fifties.”
“Before computers,” Josie said.
Lisette laughed. “Before any technology, really, unless you count typewriters.”
“You used shorthand to take notes, didn’t you? To transcribe meetings?”
“Why yes, we did,” Lisette said. “It took weeks to learn it. There were two systems at the time: Gregg and Pitman. I learned Gregg. I used it all the way up until the late nineties. They still taught it in a lot of high schools then, too. The ones out here in rural Pennsylvania, at least. Then came lots of new technology. Shorthand went out of fashion.”