She was not going to stand here while this woman abused her for a crime she had been wrongfully accused of.
She drew herself taller and glared back at the woman.
“Shut up!” she screamed. “Just shut your mouth. You know nothing about what’s happened. Nothing! And if you did, you wouldn’t be speaking like this. What gives you the right to say those things to another person, another human being, when you don’t even have all the facts? Go away. I don’t have to listen to this and you shouldn’t be saying it.”
She slammed the door in her face.
Peeking through the window, she saw the woman stand, indecisive, for a moment, and Cassie thought that she looked ashamed.
She turned away and walked to the garden gate before heading down the road.
Even though she’d had her say in return, Cassie felt shattered by the woman’s accusations. Her words had cut deep. This was what everyone in the village thought of her.
As the woman disappeared from sight, Cassie started weeping with humiliation. This episode had brought her to rock bottom, and she knew there was nowhere lower she could go. Her self-esteem was ruined, she felt mired in confusion and shame. She was a victim—first of Ryan, and now of Trish, and together, the couple had annihilated her own future.
There was no hope in anything.
Cassie wanted to lie sprawled on the floor and simply let the hours pass by until the inevitable happened.
Somehow, she found the strength to get up and totter to the master bedroom.
There, she checked all the drawers and the filing cabinet. She felt under the mattress and looked under the bed and pounded the pillows.
She was running out of places to look, and she was starting to realize that of course Trish would not have left the recorder behind. Even if it had been hidden well, she must have guessed that a desperate search would uncover it.
Faced with the certain prospect of failure, it took all of her will power to hold herself together. She reached deep inside herself and to her surprise, Cassie found a steely core that she’d never known was there.
Abandoning the search would mean giving up. She wasn’t going to do it. No matter that the horrors she’d been through had left her at her lowest ebb, that she was emotionally shattered and drained of strength and feeling entirely broken.
She was not going to let Trish win. Even if she didn’t find the recorder perhaps there might be something—anything—that she could use to prove her innocence.
Drawing a deep breath, Cassie resumed her search. She checked the wardrobes, looking in Trish’s empty suitcases and under her clothes. She went through the coat hangers, checking the pockets of every jacket, because after all, that was where Trish had concealed the recorder in the first place.
There was nothing to find.
Cassie opened Ryan’s cupboard and did the same.
Her search uncovered nothing except a folded note and a business card in the back pocket of a pair of his jeans.
Curious, Cassie opened the note.
She recognized the writing.
“Hello handsome,” the note read. “Thought I’d surprise you by reminding you I’m thinking about you. Give me a call when you find this and let’s meet up. Dinner, drinks, pink hair, pink champagne, and you know what!”
She guessed the note was Harriet’s. During their affair, the cleaner must have hidden a note for Ryan. Had he found it, read it, and put it back in his pants? Or had he never seen it at all? She didn’t know.
The business card was the standard card for Maids of Devon, with an office number and an email, but on the back of the card, Harriet had scribbled her cell phone number.
Cassie looked down at it and her mind started to race.
She had one friend in this village; one person who understood what she’d been through, and who would most likely believe her innocence.
How could she use this information?
Cassie remembered the magician shuffling his cards in the town square, and his expert use of misdirection.
Dylan’s matter-of-fact acceptance of his mother’s intent to poison his rabbit and the preemptive action he’d taken.
The angry, aggressive stance of the detective as he’d bemoaned the lack of concrete evidence to convict her.
The confession she’d made so innocently, shouting out her anger at her betrayal, not knowing that every word would be used against her.
Cassie felt the threads of a plan start spinning together. It relied on many factors she couldn’t control or predict—first and most importantly, that Harriet would answer her phone and would agree to help.
It was a long shot, a desperate stab in the dark, but it was all she had, and her only hope of escaping.
Cassie picked up her cell phone and dialed.
CHAPTER FORTY
It was late afternoon when Trish finally returned.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Cassie heard the snick of the door latch, the rattle as it closed.
She felt sick with nerves. All the decisions she made now, the variables she couldn’t control—they would decide her fate. Her plan was flimsy, born of last-minute desperation. There were a thousand reasons why it might not work.
Misdirection, she thought. You can do it.
Once again, she felt that steely resilience inside her, an inner strength she hadn’t thought she possessed, giving her the courage she needed to see this through.
Trish’s heels clicked along the wooden floor.
“Hello, kids,” she called.
Then, with a sharpness in her voice, “Dylan? Madison? Are you here?”
A moment later, Trish was at the kitchen door.
She looked as immaculately made up as if she’d stepped out of the house a minute ago. She was dressed to the nines in a tailored black suit and a string of pearls.
“Where are the children?” she snapped at Cassie. “Did they stay at Nadine’s place? What’s going on? I want them home, and you out of here.”
She rummaged in her purse for her cell phone.
“Don’t bother calling Nadine,” Cassie said. “She brought the
