Don't Make a Sound (Sawyer Brooks #1)(60)

Something wasn’t right, but Aria nodded. “Fine. We’ll talk about it later. You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m good.”

“And what about the baby?”

Harper stiffened. “The baby is good too.”

Aria continued to scrutinize her. Harper might look like a wreck, but she also appeared to be less tense. Her mouth wasn’t pinched. She wasn’t exactly glowing, but she looked . . . satisfied.

“For the first time in my life, I’m doing something for me,” Harper added.

Aria stepped forward and hugged her sister. Sawyer wasn’t the only one who seemed to have a difficult time showing affection. Harper and Sawyer were as different as they were alike. All three of them had never had their emotional needs met, leaving them to grow up in a world full of fear. But it wasn’t the physical, observable signs of problems that worried Aria. It was the things she couldn’t see inside her sisters.

Aria watched Harper run off. Despite the inspiring speech about finally doing something for herself, Aria wasn’t falling for it. Something wasn’t adding up. But right now, Aria felt the need to focus on Sawyer. If Sawyer wasn’t back by the end of the week, she was going to River Rock to bring her home.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sawyer pulled up in front of her uncle’s house for the second time, glad to see that his truck was still in the driveway. On the way there she’d been thinking about what she wanted to say to him. Instead of using verbal darts, she decided she would use a kinder, gentler approach. She wondered if she could pull it off. It was clear that all the built-up anger she’d been harboring inside for so long hurt her more than it hurt him, but she couldn’t seem to turn it off.

Her therapist often reminded her of something Martin Luther King Jr. had once said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate . . . only love can do that.”

As she walked up the path leading to the door, she repeated those words over and over, but she still felt the anger bubbling inside.

Uncle Theo didn’t come to the door after she knocked. He’d probably seen her drive up and was hiding, hoping she would go away. She reached for the doorknob, surprised when it turned and she was able to open the door and walk inside. “Uncle Theo. I know you’re here. I didn’t come back to yell at you. I just want to talk.”

Silence.

She exhaled as she walked across the living area to the kitchen. The picture she’d ripped to pieces was still scattered across the linoleum. “I need you to tell me what you know,” she said, walking slowly, afraid she might scare him into sneaking out the window. “You said something about the parties you threw not being your idea. Whose idea were they, Uncle Theo? I need to know.” She stopped beneath the doorframe leading into his bedroom.

Her stomach clenched.

Uncle Theo hung from the ceiling fan by a thick cord. His face was swollen, eyes bulging from their sockets. His feet dangled a few feet from the ground. It was easy to surmise that he’d pushed the mattress aside and used the bins Sawyer had pulled from the closet earlier to reach the ceiling fan before kicking them aside.

A dull ache settled in her chest as she walked toward him and placed her fingertips around his wrist to see if there was any chance she could save him. There was no pulse.

She felt hollow inside. Not because he was dead, but because she didn’t care that he was dead. He was everything wrong with the world. Mostly, he was a coward. He could have helped her by telling her what he knew, but instead he’d taken the easy way out.

She walked outside and called 9-1-1.



Sawyer sat on the front stoop of Uncle Theo’s house, answering Chief Schneider’s questions. She’d already told him about her early-morning visit and finding the bin filled with child pornography. She’d also told the chief she had returned to Uncle Theo’s house because she still had so many questions that only her uncle could answer.

The emergency lights from the chief’s police vehicle had been left on. Sawyer turned a few inches to her left to shield her eyes from the swirling glare.

The chief was five foot nine with a bulging gut. He’d grown another chin since she’d seen him last. He still had kind glass-green eyes beneath crinkled eyelids. His hair was mostly silver and gray like his mustache, and she wondered how many more years he had before retirement. He looked weighed down by his belt with its heavy flashlight, security holster and pistol, magazine clip, and baton.

“So what was your uncle’s state of mind when you left the first time?” the chief asked her.

“When Uncle Theo let me inside, he looked beat up by life. And then when I found his stash of pornography, he freaked out.” Sawyer decided to leave out the part about accusing Uncle Theo of murder, since she had a feeling the chief wouldn’t appreciate her overstepping any boundaries when it came to his investigation.

“Freaked out?”

“Got a crazed look in his eyes,” Sawyer said. “Uncle Theo looked suddenly possessed. He told me the devil was close and that I’d better run.”

The chief made a note on his little pad of paper he’d pulled from his shirt pocket. “I’m still not clear on why you returned since you’d already had your say.”

Aspen came out of the house then, glanced from Sawyer to the chief, and said, “We’ve got him bagged up and ready to go.”