the floodlights did not come on as she climbed the steps.
She looked at the kitchen through a large window over the sink. Papers covered the table. A bag of old tennis shoes was in one of the chairs. Notes were pinned to the refrigerator with colorful magnets. Dishes were stacked in the sink. Paul would call it borderline hoarding, but Claire felt the warmth of a lived-in space.
There was no window in the back door. There were two deadbolt locks. A large dog door was cut into the bottom. Claire quietly lifted a heavy Adirondack chair and blocked the dog door. Paul’s detective report stated that Lydia had two Labs, but that information had been recorded two months ago. Claire couldn’t imagine Lydia keeping an overly territorial breed like a shepherd or a pitbull, but any dog’s barking might alert Rick, and he would want to know what the hell a strange woman was doing on his girlfriend’s back deck with a collapsible shovel.
Claire hefted the shovel in her hands. It was aluminum, but sturdy. She checked Rick’s house for signs of life before walking back down the stairs. The ground was damp as she crawled under the deck. She had to keep her head and shoulders bent so she wouldn’t scrape the joists overhead. Claire shuddered as she broke through a spiderweb. She hated spiders. She shuddered again, then she chided herself for being squeamish when her sister’s life was at stake.
The area beneath the deck was predictably dark. There was a flashlight in the Tesla, but Claire didn’t want to go back. She had to keep moving forward. Momentum was the only thing that was keeping her from collapsing into the fear and grief that bubbled under every surface she touched.
She scooted as far as she could go under the back steps. Narrow slats of light cut through the open risers. She ran her bare hand along the tight space below the bottom tread. The dirt had an indentation. This had to be the spot. Claire angled the shovel into the cramped space and picked out a spoonful of dirt.
She worked slowly, quietly, as she moved more dirt out from underneath the step. Finally, she was able to get the tip of the shovel deeper into the ground. She felt the clink of metal on metal. Claire dropped the shovel and used her hands. She tried not to think about spiders and snakes or anything else that might be hiding in the soil. Her fingers found the edge of a plastic bag. Claire let herself experience the momentary elation of actually completing a task. She yanked out the bag. Dirt flew up around her. She coughed, then sneezed, then coughed again.
The gun was in her hands.
Back in the car, Lydia had told her the weapon was buried under the stairs, but now Claire realized that she hadn’t really believed that she would find it. The thought of her sister owning a gun was shocking. What was Lydia doing with such an awful thing?
What was Claire going to do with it?
Claire tested the weight of the revolver. She could feel the cold metal through the plastic Ziploc bag.
She hated guns. Paul knew this, which meant that he would not be expecting Claire to pull one out of her purse and shoot him in the face.
That was the plan.
She felt it snap into her head like a slide loading into a projector.
The plan had been there all along, propelling her toward Lydia’s home, all the while niggling in the back of her brain while she let herself get wrapped up in the horrors of what her husband had done.
“Proactive interference,” Paul would have explained. “It’s when previously acquired information inhibits our ability to process new information.”
The new information could not be any clearer. Paul was a cold-blooded murderer. Claire was an idiot if she thought that he was going to let Lydia walk away. She knew too much. She was expendable. She might as well have a timer over her head counting down the minutes she had left.
So this was Claire’s next step: She was going to retrieve the USB drive from Adam Quinn—either by asking for it or by threatening him with the gun she now held in her hands. Claire had seen what a tennis racket could do to a knee. She could not imagine the damage a bullet could do.
Lydia was right about seeking out as much information as possible. Claire had to find out why the