CHAPTER NINE
Amelia laid her cell phone on the coffee table and curled into a ball on her couch.
She had punted her work responsibilities to her assistant–turned–business partner Veronica, just as Amelia had every day for the last week.
Or has it been a week and a half?
She hadn’t done a good job of keeping track.
Events and Occasions was a small but successful operation.
Veronica would keep the trains running.
The last item on Amelia’s to-do list was a conversation with Jonathan’s parents.
They were distraught.
No parent should ever bury a child.
But they worried over her , as though they could handle their grief better than Amelia.
That only made her feel worse.
She wasn’t sure how much worse she could feel at the moment and decided to call them later.
The doorbell rang. Seriously?
She couldn’t escape from the world.
Mental exhaustion pulled her eyelids shut.
Why hadn’t she hung a No Soliciting sign on the front door?
Or she could have taped a piece of cardboard with “No” written in giant letters over the doorbell to warn away visitors.
Either would have been loud and clear: Stay away.
But she hadn’t—too tired, too devastated, too everything.
The doorbell rang again.
“Go away.”
Then her cell phone rang.
Would this nightmare of a day ever end?
A loud, thumping knock banged on her door.
Good God. Come on. Couldn’t the world leave her to mope in peace?
“Fine. Coming!”
Amelia wrapped the fluffy blanket around her shoulders and, clad in her pajamas in the middle of the afternoon, dragged herself toward the door.
She glanced out the peephole, and her heart stopped, frozen with dread that cemented in her veins with a sick, nauseating despair.
Police cruiser lights twirled behind Agents Fitzgerald and Bennet.
Hailey had been found.
Amelia opened the door, dizzy with a wave of grief.
But the churning in her stomach worsened when she saw behind the two men.
H alf a dozen police vehicles lined her condominium parking lot.
“Wh-What’s going on?”
Fitzgerald’s and Bennett’s jaws were locked in the same no-nonsense position.
Their hard stares locked on her as though she were a criminal.
“This is a warrant to search the premises, your vehicle, and all electronic devices.”
That didn’t make sense.
“What? Mine?”
“You can come outside.” Fitzgerald gave her bare feet and pajamas a once-over.
“Or we can assign an officer to stand with you inside.”
“Inside… my condo?” They wanted to look in her house?
“Why?”
Fitzgerald beckoned to a female officer who was about Amelia’s age and barked, “Stay with her.”
“Ma’am,” the other woman greeted Amelia professionally as she stepped inside.
Amelia stumbled back.
Bennett held up the search warrant.
She couldn’t focus, much less read the document.
She backed up until she hit the wall.
Law enforcement streamed into her house.
“This is about… my sister?” Of course it was.
Do I need a lawyer? But she was the victim —one of the victims. “Why would I know anything about Hailey and Jonathan?”
?The agents entering her condo wore matching uniforms of khaki pants and white polo shirts.
They never looked Amelia in the eye as they tromped into her small space with their bags and containers as though they were going to find evidence.
Amelia found Bennet and Fitzgerald in her kitchen.
She focused her wobbly attention on the nicer of the two.
“I don’t understand.”
“Read the warrant,” Bennett answered for Fitzgerald.
“Or get an attorney to read it,” Fitzgerald suggested.
An attorney. God. She knew hundreds of attorneys.
Some days, everyone in the DC metro area seemed to be one, but she didn’t know what kinds of lawyers they were.
Her business had a CPA who was also an attorney.
Her neighbor two doors down might have been one also.
A solid percentage of her clients were attorneys.
Instinctively, she thought of calling Hailey.
Hailey always knew what to do.
It had been that way since they were kids.
But a punch slammed Amelia in the gut.
She couldn’t call Hailey.
The group of agents moved through her space with practiced efficiency, as if they knew where her makeshift home office was situated and where her bedroom was.
Someone snagged her laptop.
Another bagged her cell phone.
“Um, can I make a phone call first?”
The officer assigned as the babysitter shook her head.
“I can take you to get dressed and call you an Uber.”
“They’re taking my car?”
“It will take a while to search it. They won’t impound it unless they need a more thorough review, but they’ll take your phone—”
This was too much.
They were treating her like a criminal, like Jonathan’s murderer.
Her despair boiled into fury.
Amelia stormed into her kitchen, tears falling down her cheeks.
She didn’t understand.
“Why is this happening?”
Was she in trouble?
They thought she was hiding Hailey?
Or had killed Jonathan?
That didn’t make sense.
Before that day, the closest Amelia had been to getting in trouble was looking the other way when a client crammed more people than had RSVPed into an event hall.
Amelia’s level of trouble was upsetting the fire marshal.
This was not the fire marshal.
This was far beyond code violations.
This was needing a criminal attorney.
Bennett approached her with an expression that turned her stomach.
“What?” she asked.
They couldn’t have found anything.
There was nothing to find.
She had nothing to do with this.
“What’s wrong?”
“Amelia Stone, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jonathan and Hailey Dumont—”
“ Hailey? ” Her knees buckled.
The female officer caught her before Amelia’s limp noodle legs let her hit the floor.
“You found my sister—” Bile churned into her throat.
“She’s dead?”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you…”
The officer holding Amelia on her feet managed to turn her around.
The cold snap of a handcuff bit her wrist.
They were arresting her.
She didn’t know what reason they had to be in her condo or what they had found.
She’d told them everything—more than that, she knew she hadn’t done anything to hurt her family.
Questions tornadoed through her mind.
The second handcuff secured her other wrist.
Tears poured down her cheeks.
“You found Hailey?”
“Do you understand these rights?”
Amelia understood nothing, neither the words they were saying nor their line of questioning throughout the investigation.
They hadn’t specified that Hailey had been found.
No one said Hailey wasn’t alive.
But they’d said murder .
Agent Fitzgerald took a pair of shoes from the pile of abandoned footwear by her front door and dropped them at her feet.
“Slip these on.”
Amelia obeyed and awkwardly shoved her feet into them like sandals.
Then Fitzgerald nodded to the officer at Amelia’s side.
“Grab her a coat.”
After a moment, one was draped over her shoulders.
They tugged her along.
She was like a zombie.
Amelia moved as though she weren’t in control of her body, as if she were watching herself in a movie.
They shuffled her toward an oversized unmarked Suburban in a parking lot filled with spectators and flashing lights.
Her stomach sloshed with every step.
Bile teased the back of her throat as though she would retch.
“Watch your head,” the officer said, all but lifting Amelia into the back of the blacked-out vehicle that swallowed her whole.
The back seat of her idling prison was warm and new-car scented.
Heat wrapped around her as she lost control, sobbing as the officer buckled her into place, hands caught behind her back.
She needed to ask for a lawyer.
She needed to make a phone call.
But the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth.
She wanted to talk to Camden.
Did anyone here know him?
Could she call him? He wasn’t a lawyer.
All she needed to do was demand a lawyer—they would sort out this nightmare—but when she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out was, “Is Hailey really dead?”