Chapter 13
SOPHIE
I grabbed Nicholas’s arm, my pulse roaring in my ears. I recognized that scream. Not the voice, but the shock of terror. I was all too familiar with fear: from my stalker, from finding a corpse outside my window, from seeing a masked man attack Lily-Ann.
Blurred shapes moved inside the windows of the house. My hand tightened on Nicholas as I heard a man’s voice rising and falling. A woman shouted for an ambulance, and my vision started to darken at the edges.
“Soph,” Nicholas said. “Sophie.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m okay.”
“Did you hear that?” Angela asked from behind us.
Nicholas held me close. “Should I take you home or—”
“Someone must’ve had a heart attack,” I told him. “We should help.”
I dragged him to the front of the house, then stopped at the open door. Frank’s friend George, the erudite man with the bushy white beard, stood in the foyer, murmuring into his phone. His wife, Helene, was bustling upstairs, followed closely by Jane.
And CJ knelt at the base of the staircase beside Frank DeYoung.
Well, beside Frank DeYoung’s body, which was sprawled on the polished concrete floor. One of his pant legs had hiked up to reveal his blue-veined pale calf. His hands were too white and too still, and his neck was bent wrong.
I froze in place as Pax the masseuse crouched beside CJ. I shifted my gaze away, focusing instead on the ice cubes scattered along the stairs from a dropped drink. I didn’t want to acknowledge the ugliness of a broken body, so my gaze fixated on the ice cubes like nothing mattered more.
Karina stood on the second floor, at the top of the stairs, far above Frank, looking pale and unsteady, about three inches from fainting.
Then Helene gathered her into her arms, and my gaze fell to where Frank’s best friend Sunny watched stricken from the other side of the foyer, his sunglasses skewed on his face, grasping one of the mission-style benches for support.
“What happened?” Angela asked, entering behind me and Nicholas.
“Ambulance is on the way,” George announced.
“Is he—breathing?” CJ asked Pax.
Pax felt Frank’s neck for a pulse, then shook his head. He might’ve whispered “no” too quietly for anyone to hear.
Sunny gave three wrenching sobs, then sank onto the wooden bench.
Karina didn’t move. She looked like a statue of a woman suddenly widowed as CJ took Frank’s hand with a tremulous smile, tears on her face while George kept talking to 911 dispatch.
“What happened?” Angela asked again.
“He tripped,” Pax told her.
“No,” Karina said, barely loud enough for me to hear.
“He fell,” Helene said. “Oh, god, Karina, I’m so sorry.”
Karina pointed downstairs toward us. “She pushed him. I saw it. She pushed him.”