“Why not just kill me?” Livvy asked. “I was a witness.”
The doctor looked her straight in the eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe she couldn’t kill a child. Maybe she decided to take her chances that no one would believe you if you told anyone what you’d seen.”
Ethan considered that. Yeah, that was possible. And Chloe could have possibly disposed of the body and cleaned up the blood after Livvy left. That way, if Livvy did indeed lead the police back to the house, there’d be no proof that a murder had happened.
“So, how the hell did the knife end up with my ex-mother-in-law?” he demanded.
Franklin looked genuinely surprised by the question. “I guess Chloe must have sent it to her.”
Ethan couldn’t think of a reason for Chloe to do that unless she wanted to muddy the waters of the investigation into Zadie’s death.
“Did Chloe kill Zadie, too?” Livvy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Franklin admitted. “Probably,” he amended. “I found that file in the storage room off Chloe’s office. The file folder was sticking up a little, as if someone had recently pulled it out. Zadie could have done that.”
Yeah. And it could have given Chloe motive to hire Hank to kill her.Could have. But again, Ethan didn’t intend to take Franklin’s word for it.
“Why did Chloe keep this file since it supposedly incriminates her for murder?” Ethan asked.
“From what I can tell, it was some kind of insurance. Chloe paid Hank some hush money but then told him if he came back for more that his blackmail note and what he said on the recording could make him an accessory after the fact for murder. He’d be arrested, too.”
So, Chloe and Hank had made a pact to hide the truth. To hide a murder. And Livvy had become collateral damage. Heck, so had Zadie and Sunny.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t believe this was the first time my sister killed someone in a jealous rage,” Franklin went on. “Look into the death of a woman named Ivy Milbrath. I think she had something to do with that.”
Anthony’s mother. Oh, they would look more all right. But first, Ethan had to stop all of this from crushing Livvy. He could feel the panic and dread coming off her in hot waves.
Franklin must have noticed it, too. “I’m sorry for the damage my sister did,” he repeated, heading back to his car. “So very sorry.”
Ethan didn’t waste any time. He eased Livvy back inside, shut the door, locked it and reengaged the security. He’d barely turned toward her before she all but collapsed into his arms.
Chapter Fifteen
Livvy sat at the kitchen counter, listening to the phone conversation that Grace was having with the lab. It was the second time the sheriff had been on the line with them since she’d arrived at Ethan’s house about an hour earlier.
An arrival brought on by Ethan’s call to let her know what had happened.
And what had happened was a lot.
Livvy was still reeling from everything that Franklin had told them, and it felt as if she was mentally wading through thick, sticky mud. There were so many thoughts coming at her. Broken bits of memories, too, and it was hard to sort everything out. But sorting and dealing were going to have to happen.
And fast.
Because if everything Franklin had told them turned out to be true, then what had happened twenty-eight years ago could be the reason Chloe and Zadie were dead.
That was why Grace was on the phone, trying to get info on the lab from the file she’d had a courier pick up. She was especially interested to learn if the recordings were the real deal or something that had been faked with AI or spliced together from other recordings. Because knowing that could determine if Franklin had put it together to cast blame on his sister while also trying to make himself look innocent of murder.
Before the lab courier had picked up the file, Ethan had made copies of everything, and he was now seated across from her, listening to one of the recordings through an earbud. He’d likelychosen to review it that way so he could spare Livvy having to hear Chloe plotting murder.
Drawing in a long breath, Livvy forced her attention back to the laptop in front of her, the one with what seemed to be an endless search for a woman named Belinda Anderson. There were over two hundred possibilities in the databases, and so far none of them were panning out to have possibly been her mother.
Herdeadmother.
Who Chloe had supposedly killed.
As sickening as that possibility was, Livvy wished she could remember. Not just fragments but the entire hellish ordeal. That way she would know what was true. That way she would know if she was this Belinda Anderson’s daughter.
She glanced up and saw that Ethan was looking at her. Studying her. No doubt checking to see if she was on the verge of falling apart. Again. That’d happened right after Franklin had left. Her legs had simply given way. Her breath had vanished. And her heart had felt ready to beat right out of her chest.
