Taking the answers with her.
I back away from the door, glance at the envelope, then drop it onto the floor.
I take the stairs two at time.
I stop at Ashley’s door, my hand on the knob, and close my eyes. Please, no.
My breath shudders as I swing the door in.
The shade is pulled, but the morning light cascades into an empty room. No wrapping paper from yesterday’s gifts. No ponies cast about on the floor. Her stuffed animals are piled up on her bed, as if wondering, too, what happened.
My gaze falls on a teddy bear. Black, with a white star on its chest, the fur not yet rubbed off, the eye still intact.
Gomer.
My knees buckle and I crawl to the bed, yank it from the pile. Press it to my face.
No. No…no…
I’m shaking now, the world coming at me in splinters.
The wound.
The missing swing set.
My empty bed.
Eve on the porch with Silas.
And, on my daughter’s shelf, a picture of my mother and father, grinning in a cruise line photo frame. They look happy, not a hint of my mother’s stroke in her eyes, her smile.
She’s dead, and you can’t bring her back.
No.
I close my eyes and cling to the only fragment of all of this that makes any sense.
The only thing that offers the slimmest filament of hope.
Oh, God, please.
Let the watch work.
The epic series continues with Rembrandt Stone in two months. Turn the page to check out a sneak peek of book two. Join us in April for the next installment.
Chapter 1 - Sneak Peak
Just try and outrun your demons, I dare you.
I sit in my daughter’s upstairs bedroom, in my half-remodeled craftsman, the morning bright against the window, holding a black teddy bear in my shaking hands. Gomer, a throwaway gift to my then four-year-old daughter, almost an afterthought I picked up from a drugstore as I raced home from work on a long-ago birthday.
A white star is embedded in the toy’s fur, and this version of Gomer still has both eyes. They stare at me, black, glassy.
Shocked.
It’s all wrong.
Please, God, let me wake up.
It’s a fear that stalks every man, at least the ones like me, middle aged, married, a father of one, trying to frame his life into something that resembles success. A fear that, despite his heroic attempts, and as much as he tries to live in the light, his mistakes will find him.
And the price of those mistakes will cost him everything.
The voice that confirms it is seven years old, a deafening memory deep inside my head. “But daddy, you’re a detective. You know how to find things.”
Overnight my life has imploded.
My house is now a war zone, the product of fury and panic, the drawers opened, dumped out, my office bearing the wreckage of my disbelief. I spent the past hour digging through my belongings—our belongings—to find anything that might give me answers.
My seven-year-old daughter, Ashley, has vanished. No, that’s not accurate. She’s been murdered. Two years ago.
My beautiful wife, Eve, has left me. She wants a divorce from the man I’ve become.
A man I don’t know.
And I haven’t a clue how to get them back.
But I’ve jumped too far ahead. Ironically, I’ll have to rewind time, return to the moment when the demons knocked on my door in the form of my ex-partner, a box of cold cases and a gift—an old watch bequeathed by my boss, Chief of Police, John Booker.
No, maybe I’ll start later that night, when, after shaking awake from a nightmare, I stumbled downstairs to my office, the one with the less-than-inspirational leather chair my wife gave me when I left the force three years ago, and began to work on my unfinished novel.
Eve found me in the middle of the night as I sat there, barely dressed, trying to find words to add to my unfinished manuscript. She dragged out the cold cases and pulled the first one, the coffee-shop bombings of 1997, the one where we first met.
The catalyst for this entire nightmare.
That’s when I put on the watch.
I couldn’t believe Booker left me his prized possession. I don’t remember a day he didn’t wear it. An old watch with a worn leather wristband and a face like a vintage clock, the gears visible through the glass.
The hands didn’t move, stuck on the five and the three, even when I wound it. On the back two words etched into the steel: Be Stalwart.
I hope so because this morning, when I realized what the watch had cost me, I threw it against the wall, snatched it off the floor and threw it again when it refused to work.
And you might think, calm down, Rembrandt, just get another watch.
But it’s this watch that has somehow loosed the demons.
And I must find a way to send them back.
Now, as I sit in the wreckage of my life, I wiggle the dial again, shaking the watch, pressing it to my head. Please, please—
I don’t really know what I’m asking for, because the truth is, well, unbelievable.
I dreamed—or did?—travel back in time. Solved the coffee shop bombing case. Woke up and everything…everything…
Oh, God—
“Rem?” A knock sounds on my open door—I didn’t close it after Eve left, just an hour ago after handing me divorce papers. I remember dropping the packet on my rush up the stairs to Ashley’s room to confirm Eve’s wretched words.
“Ashley was murdered, remember? Two years ago.”
I don’t remember much after that.
“Rembrandt?” The voice makes me look up and probably it’s a good thing the law just walked into the room because this is a crime scene.
My life has been stolen.
“Burke,” I say, and I’m not even a little embarrassed that I’ve been crying. That my house looks vandalized. That I want to shake him for answers.
Andrew Burke was my partner for the better part of twenty years. A tall, bald, dark-skinned detective
