Lie To Me: a gripping thriller with a shocking twist!. J.T. Ellison

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       THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING WIFE

      Now

      Dialing 9-1-1 felt holy, prophetic. He’d only done it once before, the night they’d found the baby dead, and the whole event replayed itself in minute splashes of memory. Pick up the phone the police arrived depress the buttons they looked right through you, as if they knew you were responsible it rang, once, twice, three times there will have to be an autopsy, I’m sorry.

      “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

      My baby is dead.

      Ivy was staring at him. He cleared his throat. “My wife is missing.”

      A slight exhalation from the operator, as if she were relieved it wasn’t a real emergency.

      “Is your address 460 Third Avenue South, Franklin?”

      “Yes, that’s it.”

      “What’s your name, sir?”

      “Ethan. Ethan Montclair.”

      “What’s your wife’s name, sir?”

      “Sutton Montclair.”

      “How old is she?”

      “Thirty-eight. No, thirty-seven. Oh, her birthday...”

      “Height, weight, hair color?”

      “Five-eleven, strawberry blonde, maybe 140, 150? I don’t know exactly. She hasn’t been working out. She’s very pretty.”

      “When did you see her last?”

      “Monday night.”

      “Yesterday?”

      “Yes, that’s right.”

      “Is there any reason to assume she’s in danger, sir? Has she been receiving strange phone calls or threats?”

      “Um, not that I know of. There was a reporter who was hassling her—she’s a writer, we’re both writers. But it wasn’t physical.”

      “And why do you think she’s missing?”

      “She left a note, told me not to look for her. Normally I’d respect her wishes. But I, we, lost our baby recently. It’s not probable, but she could have tried to hurt herself.”

      A pause, then a kinder, gentler operator emerged. “I see. I understand. The police will be there shortly, sir.”

      “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

      He hung up. Ivy raised a brow. “They’re sending someone.”

      “Good. Now, let’s see if we can get into her computer while we’re waiting.”

      Ethan followed Ivy to Sutton’s office. “Do you know her password?”

      “I can guess.”

      “I couldn’t.”

      Ivy gave him another strange, appraising look.

      “Why does everyone suddenly seem to know my wife better than I do? First her mother, then the weird sisters, now you. What the bloody hell is going on around here?”

      “God, you talked to Siobhan? Sutton won’t like that one bit.”

      “She came for her allowance. It was poorly timed.”

      Ivy sat at Sutton’s desk, opened the laptop, touched the trackpad. The screen saver disappeared and the password page came up.

      Ivy stared at it for a moment, caught her lip in her teeth, then typed in a few letters and hit Return. The password dock shimmied but didn’t let them in. She tried again. Same result.

      “Do it too many times and you’ll just lock us out. Doesn’t she keep it written down somewhere?”

      Ivy tapped her finger on the return key. “Of course she does. It’s in her notebook, on the last page. I don’t see it here on her desk.”

      “I didn’t know that. She keeps the old ones in the closet, in chronological order. Maybe it’s in one of them.” He pulled open the doors and went rummaging. It only took a moment to find the most recent notebook—Sutton’s organizational system put the local library’s Dewey decimal system to shame.

      He flipped it open to the last page. Sure enough, there was the list, written in pencil.

      He swallowed hard when he saw Sutton’s master password. He leaned over Ivy’s shoulder and typed it in. When he hit Return, the black screen fragmented away, and they were faced with Sutton’s home page.

      “Open sesame. What was it?”

      “The password? ‘I love Ethan Montclair.’” His voice broke, and pain bloomed in his chest, bright and hard. Would these be the last words he heard from his wife?

      “How perfectly adorable.”

      “Email first,” Ethan said gruffly.

      Ivy hovered over the mail icon, clicked it. Ethan gestured, and Ivy stood, let him take over the chair.

      The first five messages were all from this morning, from the weird sisters, from Jess. All asking if Sutton was all right. All after Ethan being in touch to see what they knew.

      Then there was an array of the kinds of email Ethan himself received—used to receive—editors and publicists and marketing folk, all with terribly good news or don’t-worry-about-it news. Sutton had received a starred review from Publishers Weekly for her latest book that was due out in a month. Nice that she hadn’t mentioned that to him. A familiar seething anger started inside him, made up of equal parts jealousy, pride, and his own unique brand of self-loathing. His wife, the writer, was getting serious accolades for her bodice rippers, while Ethan, the author whose work actually mattered, whose literary contributions would be remembered, sat on his hands unable to write a fucking word.

      And then there were the nasty-grams. His animus melted in the face of them. He hadn’t realized; she hadn’t told him. They were still coming in, no longer hundreds a day as they were in the beginning, but still too many. He counted twenty over the past week alone. She had them all saved to a folder, a filter labeling them. Hate mail from her previously loyal readers. He opened her СКАЧАТЬ