Second Honeymoon

Chapter 73

I DROVE. SARAH READ.

“Hey!” I must have called out a half dozen times when Sarah’s voice would trail off. She was so engrossed she didn’t realize she’d stopped reading aloud.

The date of the first entry was August 9, 1990, right as Olivia began her prison sentence for murdering her husband. Only she wasn’t the one who killed him. It was Ned. She took the fall for her seven-year-old son. Or so she claimed.

Would she lie to her own diary?

There was no denying the unsettling, slightly disconcerting nature of what Sarah and I were doing—and, yes, what nurse Emily Barrows had done before us. This was the ultimate invasion of privacy, and the fact that Olivia was dead hardly mitigated that fact.

Still.

If there was one iota of information in this little brown leather-bound book that could help us catch Ned Sinclair before he killed again, then that justified our actions. It didn’t get more Machiavellian than that.

And, oddly, having met Olivia Sinclair, I had the feeling she’d completely understand.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Sarah, interrupting herself midsentence.

I glanced over at her from behind the wheel. She looked disgusted. “What is it?” I asked.

“Nora was molested by her father,” she said. “Repeatedly.”

The rest was like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It all fit together easily.

Ned had known about the incest, taking matters into his own little hands. The fact that Olivia knew nothing about what her husband had been doing—until it was too late—surely accelerated her decision to take the fall for Ned. It was her last act of motherhood.

Sarah continued to read. In gut-wrenching detail, Olivia described the guilt she felt, the pain of learning that her children would be sent off to an orphanage.

It only got worse. A year later, she learned that Ned and Nora had been separated, sent to two different state-run foster care facilities.

Sarah suddenly closed the book, snapping it shut.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Taking a break. I can’t read any more right now,” she said. “What a terrible story.”

For someone so intent on bringing down Ned Sinclair, that was saying a lot. Not that I could blame her. Olivia’s diary described a nightmare come to life—for all the Sinclairs.

No matter where you stood on nature versus nurture, it was all but impossible to think that this hadn’t permanently scarred both Ned and Nora.

I glanced over at Sarah, who was holding Olivia’s diary like I hold the refrigerator door when I’m trying to lose a few pounds. Sure enough, she opened it again.

“That was a quick break,” I said.

“Can’t help it,” she said. “I need to get through this, to read everything. Probably a couple of times.”

I understood. She was really intent on bringing down Ned Sinclair. She had total focus on her goal. So much so that everything else seemed inconsequential. For example, where the hell were we heading? South, yes, but certainly not to my house. At least not on Sarah’s watch.

I kept driving while she kept reading, both of us unsure of what lay ahead. Then, about ten miles and twenty pages later, everything changed.

“Holy shit,” muttered Sarah, her head still buried in the diary.

“What is it?” I asked.

As I turned to look, she held up the page she was reading. I saw it immediately.

The key to everything.