Silver Falls - Anne Stuart [91]
David hadn’t gotten very far in subduing her daughter’s natural liveliness, Rachel thought. Thank God. Her clothes were still intact and there’d be no need for school uniforms. Never again.
She scooped up the toiletries, the teen magazines, the Nintendo DS and the handful of games, then headed for the bureau. The brushes, ponytail holders, the barrettes that David had given her…
No, she’d leave them behind. They were solid silver, and valuable, but Sophie didn’t like to wear them. In fact, Rachel would be happy if Sophie never wore barrettes again. Too many memories.
She’d been a fool not to listen to Caleb’s warnings. He really had been trying to save her. It just turned out that he was trying to save her from himself. So now, when all danger was past, she decided to listen.
The depths of her idiocy knew no bounds.
When she finished the second suitcase was filled to the brim, while her own was half empty. It didn’t matter. As soon as they got to a major city she’d buy more things for herself, bright, comfortable clothes, clothes that made her feel like herself. She’d eat like a pig, gain back the ten pounds David had talked her into losing, and she wouldn’t give a flying fuck.
There was no phone book near the phone in the kitchen. David didn’t like telephones—the only other one in the house was in his study. He didn’t realize the extent that Rachel and Sophie depended on their cell phones, and he probably never would. He was almost as much of a Luddite as his father.
And she could hear Caleb’s low, sexy voice, using that word with affectionate mockery. A murderer’s voice, beguiling, charming, seductive. And she didn’t want to be thinking about that.
She was going to have to rent a car. Not that that should be a problem—she had money and credit on her own. She didn’t touch the allowance David gave her to run his perfect household.
She wouldn’t have to think about that anymore. She wouldn’t have to think about allowances, and lightbulbs, and vegetarian meals and washing three times before David would have sex with her and then pretending she liked it. She and Sophie were going to be free. And she threw back her head and laughed out loud at the very idea.
The phone book had to be in his office. The door to his office was locked, which was odd in itself, but she knew where he kept his keys, tucked behind the King James version of the Bible. As an English professor, David said only the King James would do, and he assumed his boneheaded wife wouldn’t touch it.
That was his mistake. His wife was neither boneheaded nor incurious. Her father had been a proponent of some new translation, which always seemed to be full of dire warnings, and one day she’d pulled out the King James to see if it was as bad. She’d fallen in love with the music of the words, reading it for an afternoon, and when she went to put it back she noticed the keys.
She’d meant to say something to David about them, but she’d forgotten all about it. Until she’d come up against an unexpectedly locked door.
For some reason she felt nervous, edgy, like Bluebeard’s wife, as she fumbled with the keys. Would she find seven dead wives inside? No, that was ridiculous. It was David’s brother who killed women.
She opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief. It looked as it always did, neat and orderly.
She moved over to the desk, pulling the leather chair back and sitting in it. The phone book lay on its side beneath the utilitarian telephone, and she took it out, pushing the neat pile of papers out of the way.
And then froze. They were newspaper clippings, all referring to one thing. A string of murders.
Tessa’s was the fourth from the top, and she looked into her sweet, cheerful face and wanted to weep. Her