Page 14 of Jett in Jeopardy

I shook. “I haven’t brought anyone into this house.”

Since the break-in and fire at our old place, I’d been careful about who I let into our house. If I met anyone when I was out, I opted to go back to their place rather than let a virtual stranger into the house I shared with Grier and Sawyer.

“Show them to Sawyer, but I really don’t think he would have taken those.”

I didn’t think so, either.

“I came up to tell you Sawyer made a frozen lasagna. Do you want some, or did you eat already?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t eaten, so yeah, I’ll have some. Thanks.”

Grier and I went downstairs, and I brought the phone with me to show Sawyer. He was in the kitchen, cutting the lasagna into pieces in the pan and dishing them onto plates.

“Show him,” Grier said, grabbing flatware from the drawer.

I showed Sawyer the pictures on my phone. “Did you take these? Maybe as a joke.”

He took the phone from me, his gaze narrowing as he focused on the picture, as if trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at. When he lifted his gaze to meet mine, he looked at me like I sprouted a second head. “These aren’t funny. They’re weird. Where did they come from?”

I explained to him about finding the phone that I thought had vanished and found the pictures of me asleep on it.

“You should call the police,” Sawyer said, handing me back my phone.

“And tell them what? Two months ago, someone took a couple of pictures of me asleep?”

“If Grier and I didn’t take those pictures, then who did?”

Unease gnawed at my insides, but whether from the photos or the prospect of involving the police, I couldn’t say for certain.

The three of us took our plates out to the living room. Sawyer and Grier sat on the sofa while I took the chair in the corner. We didn’t eat together often. Between school and work, our schedules rarely lined up, but the few times we did, things felt awkward now that Grier and Sawyer were together.

Admittedly, it was probably more on me than them. They didn’t act all that differently in front of me, including meals when we were all home, hanging out in the living room and watching TV or playing video games just like we always did. But there was a part of me that wondered if they would prefer I wasn’t there. If they would rather that they were on their own instead of having me, their own personal third wheel, hanging around, unable to take a hint.

“I still think you should go to the police,” Sawyer said, before shoveling in a mouthful of food.

“Even if I go to the police, I doubt they’ll take me seriously,” I said. “They’d barely done anything when Grieractuallysaw someone in our house, after he fell down the stairs and wound up with a broken arm and a concussion.”

“Those pictures were taken a month before what that happened to Grier. That means whoever broke in was in this house at least once before.”

Sawyer’s reasonable assumption sent a chill crawling up my spine.

“Even if the guy had been in here more than once, police caught him robbing another house a few blocks away,” Grier said, reasonably. “They arrested him.”

Sawyer opened his mouth as if to argue, but Grier cut him off. “You said yourself, you believed whoever the police arrested had to be the same person who broke into our place. That it would be a pretty strange coincidence if there were two separate intruders breaking into a house in a neighborhood this size or even a small town like Saltwater Cove.”

“Ididbelieve that.” Sawyer nodded, thoughtfully.

“You don’t now?” I asked.

“There was something about the break in here compared to the guy they caught robbing the house that never completely sat right,” Sawyer said.

“Like?” Grier prompted, a frown tightening his features.

Sawyer shrugged. “The MO was different. They arrested the guy who was actively robbing that house. The homeowner arrived home while he was trying to haul their TV out to his van. Whoever broke into our place nevertookanything.”

“The police thought I surprised him when I got home,” Grier said.

“You probably did,” Sawyer said. “But I was also already home, and it wasn’t a secret that I was home. I was working in the study. There were lights on. My car was in the driveway. If this guy hoped to rob us, why do it when I was home?”

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