Page 177 of Buried Too Deep

“I’m glad.”

She tilted her head. “Who are you?”

“That’s a very good question,” another woman’s voice said. “Who are you?”

Sage wheeled around again to find an older woman watching him warily. She looked to be in her early sixties. Late fifties at the youngest.

Once again, Sage’s mouth opened and closed with no words forthcoming.

These people were like stealth ninjas. He hadn’t heard either woman sneak up behind him. The older woman would be Timothy Caulfield’s wife, Beatrice. Sage had found her name associated with Timothy’s.

Beatrice studied him for a long moment and Sage could see the moment she recognized him. Which was not possible. He did not look like himself. He wore a wig and glasses.

“Who are you?” she repeated, this time in a whisper. Fear was now in her eyes.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” Ashley asked.

Mama? He’d thought Beatrice was Ashley’s grandmother.

“Go in the house, Ash,” Beatrice said. She was firm but not snappish.

“But—” Ashley said.

“Ashley,” Beatrice said again, still patient. “Please. Go wake up your father. Tell him we have company.”

Sage made himself smile. “Please, Ashley. Go inside.”

I’m supposed to kill her. To kill them all.

“O-kaay,” Ashley said on a long-suffering huff of air. “Come on, Toto.”

Sage and Beatrice stood staring at each other until the front door slammed.

“You have her eyes,” Beatrice said stiffly. “And her dimple. So explain, please. Start with your name.”

Sage exhaled, his hand going to his pocket where he kept the gun he’d taken from Joy Thomas. “Alan,” he said. “My name is Alan.”

Merrydale, Louisiana

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1:10 P.M.

Sage’s mother answered on the first ring. “Sage? Are you all right?”

No, he was not. “Is the offer to send me to your friends in Spain still open?”

“What have you done, Sage?”

Sage looked down at Alan’s unconscious PI in disgust. Dave Reavey was a middle-aged man with a beer gut who couldn’t take a punch. Sage had spied the man following him from the Caulfields’ house and his anger had taken control.

His grandfather hadn’t trusted him to do the job. Or maybe the PI had been there to send proof of Sage’s deeds back to Alan so that Alan would have even more to hold over Sage’s head.

Not today. Sage had pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant and walked inside, watching where the PI had parked. The restaurant had two entrances, so he left through the other one. It hadn’t been hard to sneak up on the guy.

Now Sage felt stupid for missing the man following him all these years. Alan’s PI was really bad at his job. Probably gone soft watching me and Lexy all this time.

Sage had knocked the man out and tied him up with the PI’s own ropes—what kind of PI carried ropes in his trunk, for God’s sake? He’d checked the man’s phone to ensure he hadn’t sent anything incriminating to his grandfather.

The PI hadn’t. Not yet. But he’d been planning to. There was video on his phone. Sage deleted it from the phone and from where the PI had backed it up to the cloud.

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