contemplate on what malicious feelings Lacey still harbored against Charlie.
He’d gotten turned around a couple of times and for a few moments, he’d thought he’d lost them for good. He didn’t hear the echo of footfalls ahead of him.
Then he heard a gunshot on the other side of a door.
Shep hit the door at a run and burst into a huge hotel kitchen. Lacey was raising the gun, aiming... He rushed forward, thinking only of stopping her at all costs. Before he could reach her, Charlie swung a large cast iron skillet, catching the wrist of Lacey’s gun hand. The gun went flying as Lacey shoved Charlie into a table, and Charlie went down in a shower of pots and pans.
Lacey saw him and went scrambling toward something on the floor. The gun.
He ran at her full bore, slammed into her and took them both to the floor. She grabbed the gun, tried to raise it. He shoved her harder to the floor and twisted the weapon from her grip, putting all of his weight on her to hold her down.
Behind them, he heard Charlie getting to her feet.
“Why?” she asked as she came over to Lacey. “Why stalk me if you were really after Greg?”
“You worked with him. I thought you knew,” Lacey said.
“I didn’t know,” Charlie said, sounding close to tears.
“You locked her out,” Lacey spat.
“The back door was open,” Shep said. “Greg came in after he killed your sister. He would have killed Charlie, too, if that policeman hadn’t come to the front when he did. Where were you? Hiding somewhere?”
Lacey made a sound like wounded animal and began to cry.
“You were the one who cut my hair,” Charlie said. “It was you. The doll—”
Lacey cut off her tears with a laugh as brittle as glass and just as sharp. “I cut your hair.” She chuckled. “When I told Cara... It was her idea to cut the doll’s hair. She always wondered about the doll her mother kept on the top shelf in her room and wouldn’t let her touch.” Lacey laughed. “My little sister.”
Two security officers came running in, guns drawn. Shep handed Lacey over to them and turned to find Charlie still holding the huge cast iron skillet. He took it from her and set it on one of the metal tables.
They could hear Lacey’s laughter echoing through the hotel. Charlie’s eyes filled as she stepped into his arms.
EPILOGUE
THAT FOLLOWING SUMMER, the wedding was small and held in a meadow alive with wildflowers. Shep would have married Charlie sooner, but by the time everything with Lacey was sorted out, he had to get back to school, back to his students, back to teaching. Charlie had needed time to come to grips with the past and look for another job closer to Stevensville, where he was.
The winter had been long, the spring even longer. It had been a time of healing. Shep talked to Charlie every day as she began to stitch her past and present together. She knew now that she wasn’t responsible for Lindy’s death. So many people were involved in what happened that night—Lacey at the forefront. Shep and Charlie told the police everything that Lacey had confessed to them.
But it was a letter that Greg had slipped under Charlie’s hotel room door just before he’d gone downstairs to get married that helped tie up loose ends. He’d been determined to tell her what he’d done. He’d been in love with Lindy. He’d been twenty-four to Lindy’s seventeen. He’d wanted her to run away with him—just as Lacey had found out. What he hadn’t known was that the young woman who came to him that night and broke things off wasn’t Lindy but her identical twin.
Shep often wondered about Greg’s last few minutes of life as he lay mortally wounded on the floor at his wedding. His expression had been one of shock, according to Lacey. He really must have thought he was seeing a ghost—until he realized the mistake he’d made.
What Greg must have thought in those last few minutes as he stared at Lacey! Like Charlie had, he must have thought Lindy had returned from the grave for justice.
In the letter, he told Charlie that he’d wanted to make it up to her—what he’d done to her stepsister and that was why he’d gone to so much trouble to hire her—along with the fact that she was very talented. But the more he was around her, the more guilt he’d felt.