Read The Other Daniel - A Camille Grisham Novella for Free Online Page A

to be that aggressive.”
    “Trust me, he’s that aggressive.”
    “What did he do?” Paul asked. His tone made
Camille grateful that Jacob was nowhere in the vicinity.
    “The same thing he did in the coffee shop.
Only this time he wasn’t so quick to take no for an answer.”
    “Did he threaten you?”
    “No dad, it wasn’t anything like that.” She
turned to Meredith. “But you need to know that your client is a
certified creep.”
    “I don’t know what to say about that. I’ve
never known him to be that way.” She paused to blow out a deep
breath. “I’m just happy to know that you’ve seen him.”
    Camille’s eyes narrowed. “After hearing
everything I just told you, how could you possibly be happy?”
    Meredith waited a long beat before
answering. “Because he’s been missing for almost three weeks.”
    Unsure that she heard the words correctly,
Camille turned to her father for clarification.
    “That’s why she’s here,” he concurred.
    Camille felt something tighten in her chest;
the instinct that she had felt before but suddenly wanted to
ignore. “The Jacob Deaver I saw looked pretty damn alive and well,
so maybe you should explain what you mean by missing.”
    Meredith looked at Paul. “Do you mind if I
sit?”
    “Absolutely,” Paul replied as he pointed her
to the couch. Camille sat down next to her.
    “Jacob has been working on a book about
Daniel Sykes for the past few months. He-”
    “Wait,” Camille
interrupted. “ Jacob is the one working on the Sykes biography?”
    Meredith eyed her quizzically. “Yes. If you
met with him I figured you would have known that.”
    “He told me that someone else was writing
the Sykes book.”
    “Someone else? Who?”
    “He didn’t offer a name. He only said it was
a friend.”
    “Well that’s certainly news to me.”
    “And is it also news to you that the book is
scheduled to be released in the next few months? Because your guy
seemed pretty confident that it would be.”
    “I can assure you that isn’t true.”
    Camille let out an exasperated sigh. “And
Jacob’s author friend?”
    “As far as I know he doesn’t exist. Not as
Sykes’ biographer anyway.”
    “So he was lying to me the entire time.”
    “I’m really confused,” Meredith confessed.
“The entire purpose of him coming out here was to tell you about
his work on Sykes’ book and to ask you to be a part of it. Why
would he claim that someone else was writing it?”
    “I don’t have an answer for that. All he
said was that the book was going to be filled with inflammatory
information about myself and the FBI and he wanted to write a book
about me as a means of counteracting that. It all sounded perfectly
noble. Unfortunately I had a difficult time believing it. Now I
know I had good reason.”
    “It just doesn’t sound right. None of it
does.”
    Camille noted the hint of panic that came
across Meredith’s face as she rose from the couch and began pacing
the room.
    “Why don’t we go back to what it was that
brought you here?”
    Meredith stopped pacing long enough to
collect her thoughts. “The last time I spoke to Jacob was the day
after he arrived here. That was nineteen days ago. He told me that
he had conducted a couple of internet searches and came up with
this address as your last known residence.”
    “A couple of internet searches?” a wide-eyed
Paul cut in. “Please tell me it’s not that easy for a stranger to
find out where I live.”
    “I’m sorry to tell you dad, but it’s that
easy,” Camille replied.
    Meredith continued. “He said that he had
seen you and your father loading some moving boxes into your car.
He was going to approach you then but he didn’t feel it was the
right time. He said he would wait a day or so and get back to me
with an update. That was the last time I heard from him. I must
have called his cell phone fifty times since. He never answered.
When I called the hotel he was staying in, the clerk told me he