Unknown: I saw you at the reunion. Don’t think you’re some sort of chameleon. You make yourself so damn flashy that everyone knows when you’re coming or going.
Unknown: I won’t ever forget the night you tried to force yourself on me. Will you?
“What the fuck?” I asked.
He pointed to the screen. “I don’t know why you gave out my personal information to your fucking sister, but as far as I’m concerned--.”
I held up my hand. “Now wait a fucking second. Your email is public record on the company’s website.”
“She’d have to have an account in order to message me here!”
I shook my head. “No, she wouldn’t. She’d only have to have your email and a messaging service that can convert between public and private software. And I’m telling you, my sister doesn’t know shit-all about technology. This isn’t her.”
“Then how does this person know about the family reunion, huh? How do they know such personal details about my childhood if it isn’t her!”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Maybe you run your mouth off to the wrong people. Ever think of that?”
He growled as he closed the distance between us. “Keep your sister on a leash.”
I held my head high and gave his growl right back. “Stay out of our family’s lives and I won’t have to.”
And as he backed toward my office door with steam practically spewing from his ears, I couldn’t deny that most of the evidence pointed toward her. I mean, the person behind the messages even used JoJo’s nickname. They knew sensitive information that hadn’t ever been offered up for public consumption.
But, even if this were my sister, why the hell would she do something like that?
Why would she even care?
21
Rebecca
After tossingand turning for nights on end, I finally decided to do something about it. I threw the covers off my body, followed the most insane hunch of my life, and started poking around.
And what I found put a few more pieces together.
“There had to have been an accident,” I murmured.
My sister had been pretty tight-lipped about the scar along her back. But my knee-jerk reaction was that she had gotten it in a car accident she had been in. Back when I was a freshman in high school, there had been a lot of chaos around it. Maggie had called Mom and Dad in the middle of the night crying about it. All of us had rushed to the hospital to make sure she was all right. However, by the time we had gotten there, the doctors said they had taken a look at her and declared her fine.
That scar on her back told a much different story, though.
“There has to be news about it somewhere,” I murmured to myself.
I took to my personal phone while I brewed coffee at three in the morning. Not much sneaked by in the small town where I grew up without some sort of mention in the local newspaper, which meant a car accident probably would’ve been front and center. I plugged in every combination of words I could come up with, from “car crash Maggie Loren 2011” all the way down to “Joseph Ryker Maggie Loren car accident.”
But after over an hour of searching, I had come up with nothing.
“What am I missing?” I whispered to myself.
I racked my brain, trying to pull details from that fuzzy night. I had fallen asleep practically the second we had gotten to the hospital, especially after the doctors told me my sister was okay. I didn’t care about anything else after that, and she lent me her shoulder for me to use for a nap while we sorted things out with the police that evening. But that was all I remembered.
Until the caffeine finally kicked in.
“Oh, shit,” I hissed.
Finally, the magical phrase of “Loren Ryker midnight accident summer 2011” revealed what I had been looking for. It hadn’t made it into the papers, but a blog had been written about the incident. I found it weird that the newspapers hadn’t run anything on it. Then again, Joseph’s parents had been just about as stuck up as he was. They probably paid to keep it out of the newspapers, probably so their golden boy didn’t have a shred of bad press, even as a child.
However, this blog had everything I had been looking for.
