Page 84 of Her Dying Secret

Mira sniffled. “Yes. In hindsight, she was right to call but I lost Rosie because of it. April stopped speaking to me altogether. I always knew she thought I was sad because of the way things were with Seth and Rosie, but we were starting to become friends. She fell in love with Rosie in a hot second. She only talked to me twice after Seth took Rosie.”

“You never told her about Ryan?”

Mira looked at her feet. “No. I was too embarrassed. Besides, his whole life, I’d only seen him a couple of times. He was never really mine.”

“When April spoke with you after Seth took Rosie from Hillcrest, it was about Shane Foster, wasn’t it?” asked Josie. “Were you there the night he died?”

Mira shook her head, still not meeting Josie’s gaze. “No. They told me afterward. Seth asked her to bring Shane to the park so she could prove to him that she hadn’t ratted Seth out. Her dating a police officer? The worst possible thing, in Seth’s mind. He thought if April just introduced him as her sister’s boyfriend, they could have a beer on the lake and he could figure out what Shane knew. Things didn’t go so well. Shane pretty much immediately knew that something was off. April was too scared, and she couldn’t hide it. There was some kind of argument. Seth got into his truck to leave but instead, he tried to run both Shane and April down. She managed to get out of the way but Shane didn’t.”

“April was too frightened of Seth to tell,” Josie filled in.

“Seth made her go with him to bury Shane. Right after it happened, she was in such shock that she wasn’t thinking straight. Seth had just tried to kill her, too. She blacked out. She didn’t even know where Seth had taken them. She said that one minute she was standing near the lake while Shane and Seth argued and the next, she was in the pitch-black woods helping Seth roll Shane’s lifeless body into a grave. By the time they got back, she thought she was in too deep. She’d gone too far. She hadn’t tried to get away from Seth at any point during the drive, even when they stopped for gas. Seth convinced her she’d go to prison, lose her teaching license, and worst of all, no one would ever see Rosie again. I heard the same story from them both, and I didn’t tell either.”

A truck roared to life nearby. Mitch leaving with his boat now that his work was done. Josie picked pieces of burnweed from her shirt. Mira’s admission that she’d known about Shane Foster’s fate and not told the authorities would most definitely result in charges.

As if reading Josie’s mind, she said, “I confess. Whatever happens to me now, I don’t care. Rosie is safe.”

“You said you spoke to April twice after she called DHS.”

Mira ran a hand up and down Rosie’s arm. “The second time was when she came to me before I moved here and said she had paid for an online background check on Seth. It said he had a brother—Jon—and she thought if I came to Denton and talked to Jon, I’d be able to find Rosie.”

“Was that when she gave you the brochure?”

Mira’s eyes widened in surprise. “Um, no. Not then. But wait, you found that? Under the drawer?”

“Your cat wasn’t exactly happy about us removing it from the cabinet, but yeah.”

“That’s why it was under there,” Mira said. “My cat doesn’t let anyone in that cabinet where I keep her food.”

Josie shifted her weight again as the throb in her ankle worsened. “April approached you while you were still living in Hillcrest and told you that Seth’s brother lived in Denton, but that’s not when she gave you the brochure?”

“No. All I knew when I moved here was that Seth had a brother named Jon. I found Tranquil Trails and enrolled there. I didn’t know what kind of relationship that Seth had with his brother, if any, and I didn’t want Jon scaring Seth off by telling him I was there, so I didn’t tell anyone I knew Seth. I just became a client and hoped I’d make contact with him at some point. It was the only lead I had to find Rosie.”

“When did April give you the brochure?” Josie asked.

“Not for a long time. About a year after I moved here, she came to the insurance firm where I worked. I don’t know how she found out I worked there but she showed up one day. Acted like she wanted to buy insurance. I pretended to do intake. She never purchased any plans. I had no idea she’d just moved to Newsham.”

The visit to the insurance firm in Denton might have shown up on April’s GPS when Heather conducted her investigation, but it wouldn’t have sent up any red flags. Insurance was something most people bought, and since April hadn’t bought any plans from that office, there would have been no reason to even look into it.

Mira sighed. “April was a mess.”

“In what way?” asked Josie.

“She was consumed with guilt about Shane. She wanted to tell but she didn’t want to go to prison. Also, she wasn’t entirely sure where she and Seth had buried him. It was the middle of the night when they did it and like I said, she had kind of blacked out. But she was convinced it was somewhere on his brother’s property. She wanted to confess everything to the police and tell them to search Tranquil Trails.”

“But there was still the matter of Rosie,” Josie pointed out.

Mira touched the crown of her daughter’s head with a feather-light touch. “Yes. April still wanted to find Rosie, but she was afraid that Seth would kill her if he felt backed into a corner. Neither of us trusted the police to find them. No offense. At that point, I still hadn’t made contact with Seth. I convinced April that us going to the police about Shane would only ruin our lives and any chance we had of finding Rosie. I told her that Seth had help from another woman but I didn’t tell her about Ryan. I begged her to give it more time. We wanted to find a way to get Rosie away from Seth without both of us going to prison. We just didn’t know how.”

From her periphery, Josie saw that Noah and Gretchen had moved within earshot. “That’s when she gave you the brochure with the note?”

“No. A few months later, she left that envelope for me at the firm. She was getting impatient. I think the guilt was eating her alive. It was her way of telling me she was sure that Shane was buried at Tranquil Trails and that we needed to just tell the authorities.”

“She didn’t want to try to find Rosie first anymore,” Josie said.

“I don’t know, but that’s the impression I got. By that time, I had started having regular visits with Seth, Rosie, and Ryan at Tranquil Trails, trying to build trust with them. I was trying to figure out a way to get Rosie from Seth. I had saved money. I was going to sue for custody. I wasn’t there the night Shane died so I was banking on the fact that Seth wouldn’t play that card. But Ryan had become so angry. I was more afraid of him than Seth. Every time Seth would seem open to me taking Rosie off his hands, the next week he’d come back and have changed his mind. Like someone was talking him out of it. Ryan, or that other woman, I don’t know. I tried looking April up so I could tell her my plan, but she’d already been abducted.”

“You had no idea that Ryan had taken her?” Josie said.

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