Page 55 of The Pretender

“I understand that. I’m not trying to paint my parents as saints, but they weren’t ogres either.” Damon looked up at her, and with both men watching her, she seemed to grow more nervous. She shifted around as the words rushed out of her. “I know the rich-people stereotypes. Trust me, I went to school with a bunch of them. They’re hanging off the branches of my family tree. But my parents didn’t really live that life.”

Damon winced. “They owned five houses.”

“Okay, yes. I don’t deny how lucky I was, how lucky they were, when it came to finances. I’m not looking to play the victim here. But if my mom had her way my dad would have turned it all in and she would have gone back to being an interior designer. That’s how she met my dad. She helped him buy a couch.”

“That is a strangely romantic story,” Damon said as he spun his chair fully around to face the two of them.

Frustration pulsed off Gabby. Her desperation to convince them played in every word. Harris understood her devotion to her family. With his background, he didn’t suffer from the same issue, but he could recognize it in others. His worry was that it clouded her judgment here.

“My parents weren’t perfect. Believe me. But they did love Kramer. He got money when they died. More than I did.” There was not a hint of anger in her voice. If that fact hurt her, she hid it well.

“Hedidn’t fake a kidnapping,” Damon said.

The skin tightened around her mouth. “Neither. Did. I.”

Her response didn’t leave a lot of room for debate. Harris believed her. He also knew there was something else going on, possibly a bigger piece that she kept hidden. The digging. The secrets. Hell, even the undying support for the family that didn’t back her with equal fervor. Something wasn’t right.

“Male, probably in his late twenties.” The desk chair squeaked as Damon turned back to the screen. “That leaves us with Craig, Ted, someone hired by your uncle to cause trouble or some random attacker.”

Harris knew Damon skipped a step. “You can’t tell a person’s age by the hoodie.”

“The reveal had more dramatic effect with the age, so I added it.”

Gabby stepped closer to the screen. “Where are those cameras?”

“Outside,” Harris said.

She snorted. “That’s not helpful.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

She turned away from him and squinted at the screen. “Okay, then what about the day someone messed with the library?”

Damon shook his head. “I checked that this morning. Same hoodie.”

She asked the right questions. Harris liked that about her. She pushed and poked at the facts until she understood them. Harris was starting to think she had an equal ability to bend those facts when needed. He believed her comments about Kramer. That was how she saw things as a kid growing up in the house, but who knew how Kramer saw it.

But the second after Harris thought about Kramer, his mind circled back to Tabitha. This all started and ended with her. Gabby, the woman who insisted she didn’t feel anything, granted a lot of devotion for the people she knew. But Tabitha was her ultimate soft spot.

Then it hit him... if Gabby were going to lie for anyone, she would lie for Tabitha.

“The person sneaks in at night,” Gabby said, as if trying to put the pieces together in her head.

“And knows exactly where to go.” To the place Tabitha spent the most time. Again, Tabitha. Apparently more than one of the Wright daughters kept secrets. Harris wanted to know if they were the same secrets. “Whatever Tabitha hid she likely kept it in the library, and the person who killed her doesn’t want it found.”

“What’s ‘it’?” Damon asked.

Harris tried to reason it through—the kidnapping, the seclusion, the murder. He couldn’t see how they were related, not with a decade in between, but there was one person in the room who might. “Gabby?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

But that voice. Harris heard the bobble. He saw how her hands shook as she rubbed them together. “For the record, this would be a good time to talk about why you were digging.”

Her eyes closed just for a second before reopening. “It’s not my secret to tell.”

Damon watched her now. “What does that mean?”

“She’s protecting Tabitha. The rock and shovel were never aboutyouand the kidnapping, right?” He had no idea what it was about, but the same word kept screaming in his head—protection. At first he’d thought the shovel incident was Gabby covering up her secrets. Now he was convinced she was keeping someone else’s.

---