Read Into the Dark for Free Online Page B

had been hoping to surprise her, meet her at school, take her out for cupcakes at
     Molly’s, which Maya now liked much better than Magnolia Bakery. But it was too late
     now. She would be home from school any minute, and Brenna had blown it as usual. She
     sighed. “Where did the day go?”
    Trent shrugged. “Same place it always goes.”
    And yes, that was exactly where it had gone—the same place. After saying good-bye
     to Ludlow, Brenna had returned to her office, checked her e-mails, dealt with a large
     list of potential clients—business had actually picked up too much since the Neff case—while trying not to lapse into the past. And that, as ever,
     had been easier said than done. A woman searching for a long-lost brother, for instance,
     was named Rachel Fleischer, which had brought to mind Brenna’s eighth grade English
     teacher, Rosemary Fleischer, which had whisked Brenna into third period English, February
     11, 1983—the dry heat from the radiator, the smell of chalk dust, and Miss Fleischer
     detailing the “lethal allure of Desdemona.”
    An e-mailed photograph—of a boy named Jordan Michaels who’d gone missing in the spring
     of 2004—was taken in front of the sign for Niagara Falls. And of course that had flung
     Brenna back, for the second time today, to the Maid of the Mist on October 30. Those biting winds, that hail. . .
    The day had gone where it always went—in and out of wormholes, with Brenna swallowed
     up by memories, then snapping herself back to reality . Back and forth, back and forth. She turned to Trent. “So how did your meeting with
     Mrs. Shelby go?”
    “Fine.” Trent picked at a fingernail.
    “You don’t look like it went fine.”
    “It did, but . . .”
    “But what?”
    He sighed. “Ever get . . . you know . . . emotionally invested in a client?”
    She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
    “Never mind,” Trent said. “So are we officially on with Errol? Did you get the rest
     of the Lula Belle videos?”
    Brenna didn’t reply—flashing instead on her last meeting with Annette Shelby. Poor,
     fragile Annette in her hotel room at the St. Regis on September 30—the room she’d
     reserved for her and her missing Larry—for the big reunion, the second honeymoon—only
     to find out, via Brenna, that Larry had wanted to stay missing. Annette, with that
     sad, searching look in her eyes, Johnnie Walker Black mingling with the scent of expensive
     perfume.
    Annette slips an envelope out of her Prada bag and hands it to Brenna. “Your check,”
     she says. “You’ll see I included a little extra for that yummy assistant of yours.”
    “Yummy? Trent?”
    “Come on. Don’t play dumb. Those pecs!” Annette grabs another bottle out of the open
     minibar, twists off the top, and downs it in one gulp. “God, he’s a delicacy.”
    Brenna cringed. “Trent?”
    He was back at his desk now, Lula Belle on his screen in all her spread-eagle, loose-jawed
     glory. “Yeah?”
    She cleared her throat. “By emotionally invested, you don’t mean . . . Uh . . .”
    He stared at her.
    She tried again. “You and Annette . . . You’re not . . . I mean, Annette is a very
     fragile woman, and after what she went through with Larry, I’d hate to see her get
     hurt again.”
    “Why would she get hurt?”
    “ Trent ,” said Brenna. But then she noticed his bulletin board.
    For the six years that he’d been working for her, Trent had covered the board with
     pictures of himself—on the beach, at clubs, in front of random parked sports cars
     he’d passed on the way home from those places—always shirtless or close to it, always
     next to some gorgeous, scantily clad babe with a deer-in-the-headlights look in her
     eyes. Now, all those pictures were gone. They’d been replaced by photographs of Annette’s
     cat, Persephone. “Mrs. Shelby says it’s okay I haven’t found her,” Trent was saying.
     “She says we can keep looking—long as it