Spooky Business (The Spectral Files #3) - S.E. Harmon Page 0,32

she said crisply. “Both of you. Don't bring a thing.”

No danger there. I was pretty sure none of the six dishes we'd mastered would go with her roast. “We won't,” we singsonged.

“And Daniel? Please call me later. Alone,” she stressed.

He sighed. “I will. Mom, we’ve got to go.”

“All right, dear.”

He ended the call and glanced over at me. “That went well, huh?”

“Yes,” I murmured as I pulled over on the shoulder. “I suppose she could have shot me in the face.”

He made an exasperated noise and it was clear he was done with the both of us.

I couldn’t help but wonder what his mother had to say about me. Probably several warnings why I wasn’t right for him. Maybe even a firm suggestion to get rid of me as soon as possible.

Well, good luck with that. I looked at his profile, the strong line of his jaw and those firm, kissable lips I knew as well as I knew my own. He was mine, and whatever we had to do to make it work, we would. As if he could feel the weight of my regard, he glanced over and sent me a faint smile. I didn’t give a damn what his mother said.

This time, I wasn't going anywhere.

Chapter 8

The next morning, I was up with the crows… and by crows, I meant Danny, who was extra noisy while getting dressed. He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to pick up his Uncle Charlie and get started on roof repair. Blearily, I watched as he zipped his jeans and pulled on an old shirt. The whistling as he pulled on his boots made me briefly doubt our love for one another. I informed him that I didn’t want to see his face again unless it was accompanied by a mug of coffee, and he agreed to my terms.

I decided to let him live.

Left alone—fucking finally—my eyes drifted shut again. God realized I was about to get some fitful sleep and routed a call to my phone, waking me right back up. It’s required by law that you groan the word “whyyy” into a pillow when someone calls at the butt crack of dawn on a Saturday. So I did.

When I finally stopped suffocating myself and glanced at the phone, a familiar face was on the screen. I put it on speaker and buried my face back in the pillow. “Chevy, my love. What can I do for you so early in the morning?”

“I think a better question is, what have I done for you?” I could hear the smile in her voice. She liked to complain, but there was nothing she loved better than accomplishing a Sisyphean task. “I think I know where Thomas Kane’s wife went.”

“Do tell,” I murmured.

“Well, first I had to clear my mind of any preconceived notions I had of Kane killing her, which was hard to do,” she said pointedly. “Just so you know.”

“Understandable.”

“You also know you can never go wrong following the money. So, I tried to think like a woman who was planning an escape, and that led me to wonder how she socked away cash without Kane noticing.”

“There was no activity on her bank account or any of her credit cards after the eighth of August, the year she disappeared.”

“Exactly. That brought me back to the notion that he chopped her up and buried her in the backyard.”

“Once again, understandable.”

“So, I combed through the records of her florist shop—”

“There was no activity on the business account,” I said with a yawn, nuzzling my pillow some more. God, it was too damn early for all this talking and conjecturing. “I already checked those.”

“Can I finish?”

“Sorry, go ahead.”

“There wasn’t any activity on the corporate card, no. But I searched for all large transactions for that entire year. In July, a few weeks before she disappeared, there was a huge invoice marked paid from a company in Delaney Shores. Over five grand. When I did a keyword search for that city, I found over twenty invoices over two years. Some little, some big.”

“What was the name on the invoices?”

“A corporation named Blue Heron Inc.”

“Maybe they were just suppliers.”

“Exactly what I thought, but I did a little digging, and Blue Heron Incorporated doesn’t exist.”

“Hmmm. Delaney Shores.” The name of the city teased at the edges of my brain. I was almost a hundred percent certain I’d heard the name before. Then, it clicked. “Hey, isn’t that where—”

“Valerie Carr lives, Delilah’s old college roommate,” she hurried to say,