“He’s there.”
“What?”
“Jonah.”
Her stomach fell, and her hand gripped the phone harder.
“He’s there, Mariya. In Sherwood. Or at the very least he’s on his way. Doc has been tracing him and found out he tracked your movements and headed for you.”
“When?”
It was all she could manage.
“Earlier today. Don’t try to leave the area. You don’t want him following you and separating you from them. Get in the house, hunker down, and wait for me. I transferred Leah to Paul in Atlanta. He’ll get her to Texas, and I’m on my way to Virginia. I’ll get there as fast as I can. If you see him, call the police.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven Now
“I can’t believe I didn’t put it together when you first started talking about it,” Sam says. We’re in the evidence room of the Sherriff’s Office in Sherwood poring over the files. “But I remember that night. It was chilly that day, but not too cold. I went out to ride my bike. I was going through the different neighborhoods, and I saw a girl playing with a ball in the front yard.”
“Me,” I nod. “I remember that now. I was playing, and I lost control of the ball. You were riding your bike, and I thought you were going to hit it. I was worried you were going to fall. But you stopped and picked it up and brought it to me.”
“I rode around for a little bit longer and then headed home for dinner. But I wasn’t there very long when my dad got a call. He told my mom there was a disturbance at the Griffin house. He had to be talking about your grandparents. She asked him if everything was all right. He kind of shrugged her off like he didn’t know what was going on, but he was gone for the rest of the night. The next day when he got home, they talked about the accident. I didn’t know what happened, but later on the news, I saw the story about the crash and that somebody died. Dad was really shaken up about it. It really got to him. I had no idea the two things had anything to do with each other. They wouldn’t talk about it in front of me,” he tells me.
Looking at the reports and evidence boxes spread out on the table in front of me is like looking at a brutal scrapbook. Vaults locked tight in the back of my mind crack open. Memories I never wanted to experience again seep out into my consciousness.
“My mother came outside and grabbed me. It scared me at first; then I thought she might be playing. I tried to wriggle away from her so we could play tag, but she held me tight and ran for the house, shouting for my father. I dropped my ball. I remember being so worried about it. It was rolling down the sidewalk again, and I didn’t want it to get away. I tried to get out of her arms again, and she told me to stop. She yelled at me. It was the first time in my life I can remember her really raising her voice at me. She sounded so angry, and I didn’t know what I had done. Dad went and got my ball, and we went inside. He locked all the doors, and she put me down but told me I had to stay right there and not to move. She ran around the house, pulling all the blinds down and checking the windows. It was like a bad storm was coming.”
“It was,” Sam says. “Just not like you might have thought. The first call my father took to the house was when they noticed Jonah outside. There really wasn’t anything he could do about it, though, because he didn’t get near the house, and technically he had the right to visit his parents just as much as Ian did. The notes in here say the brothers had been estranged for several years, and that tension made it so Ian didn’t want Jonah around.”
“Of course they were estranged,” I note. “After what he did, my father wouldn’t want anything to do with Jonah.”
“Well, Jonah clearly didn’t get the message because before my father could even get home, he had broken into the house, and your father was chasing him. That must have been the criminal activity the newspapers didn’t want to report on,” Sam says. “Since Jonah died in the wreck, they couldn’t speculate on what he was doing at the house.”
“Doesn’t need any speculation,” I say. “The day he came to the house was the anniversary of the day he raped my mother. He was there because he believed it was the anniversary of the day he conceived his child with my mother. This was the first time he’s tried to come for me. Jonah was there that night to claim me back.”
“But your father chased him away, and it started raining. There really was a storm coming. I remember that now. There was a horrible thunderstorm that night that started just after my father left the house. It would have gotten to its worst when they were driving. Your father must have got in his car and was chasing his brother before the storm made Jonah lose control. He crashed into the ravine off the side of the back road.”
“No, Sam. It wasn’t an accident. Look at the accident report. There’s no evidence here of a second car skidding on the road. My father might have gone after him, but he wasn’t chasing him when the car went off the road. The articles talk about a chase earlier, not that the car was involved in the wreck. And they never mention my father because there were no criminal charges. Jonah planned that. He planned, if he couldn’t get his hands on me, what he was going to do next. That body was already in the car,”
