Tasting Fear by Shannon McKenna Page B

this as well.
    “Nancy, hey. You’re not supposed to—”
    “Yes, I know.” She shook coffee grounds off the paper. The page was covered with scribbled handwriting, marked up with small edits, some words crossed out, others scribbled in:
    will come as a shock to you girls, and no doubt you think me Machiavellian and foolish for creating this elaborate system of checks and balances, but after what happened to my father, after what this thing did to my marriage, I feel I cannot be too careful. Just please know this: I made these arrangements not because I do not trust you, but because I love you, and because you love each other. Love, like any precious thing, should be protected by every means possible. The older I get, the more I understand that it is the only thing worth protecting.
    Then a couple of lines, both of which had been savagely crossed out, as if Lucia had been frustrated, searching for the right words:
    The necklaces are the key to
    You must use the necklaces together to discover the secret of
    The writing continued with a new paragraph:
    You are each in your own unique way great lovers of beauty—music, literature, and the visual arts, and so I devised the
    And the page ended. She could hear Lucia’s soft, accented voice echoing in her head.
    “What is that?” Liam picked his way across the rubble.
    “It’s a letter.” Her voice cracked, broke. “To us. From Lucia.”
    She held it up for him. He scanned it rapidly and met her gaze, his mouth grim. “Wow,” he said. “That’s very weird.”
    “A draft,” she whispered. “It’s a first draft of a letter to us.”
    “Right.” He paused, thoughtfully. “But if this is the draft…”
    “Then where the hell is the finished version?” she finished.
    They stared at each other. She wanted to grab his arm, for balance. The ground beneath her was just a thin crust of apparent normality, and beneath it, an abyss of dark, shifting possibilities.
    “Why didn’t we find the finished letter?” she demanded. “Why?”
    He pondered it. “Could she have mailed it to you?”
    “Eight days have gone by. It takes two, four at most, for a letter to get to the city. It was an important letter. She was putting a lot of thought into it. This did not get forgotten, or lost in the mail. No way.”
    He finished the thought. “You think it got lost in some more sinister way.”
    “‘After what this thing did to my marriage’?” she quoted softly. “What thing? What the hell is this thing that she’s talking about?”
    “Maybe it’s what she installed the safe for,” he suggested.
    She glanced up at him, startled. “Safe?”
    His eyes widened. “She didn’t tell you?” Nancy’s blank face answered his question. He whistled silently. “A few weeks ago, she hired me to install a hidden safe. In her closet upstairs. That’s how we met. Sorry I didn’t say something before. I assumed you knew.”
    The woman from the forensics team came into the kitchen and frowned at her. “Miss, I asked you please not to touch anything.”
    “I found something.” Nancy held out the letter. “The investigating officer needs to see it. Please, be on the lookout for more pages.”
    The lady twitched the sheet of paper out of Nancy’s fingers with her own gloved ones. “I’ll bring it to her attention. Since you can’t keep your hands to yourself, could you wait outside until we’re finished?”
    The lady sternly escorted the two of them out onto the stoop, and they looked at each other, feeling abashed as naughty children.
    “I want to look at that safe,” Nancy said fretfully. “Not that I could open it. I don’t have the combination. I don’t imagine you…?”
    He shook his head. “Lucia had to choose the combination herself.”
    Nancy chewed her lip. “I wish I had a copy of that letter. God knows when they’ll let me see it. I wanted to show it to Nell and Vivi.”
    “One second.” Liam went to his truck and pulled a paper from his dashboard.