Second Honeymoon

Chapter 76

I DIDN’T WANT to overthink it, especially because I couldn’t see any way in which Ned’s interest or even obsession with this one car would get us any closer to him. Sometimes a box of toys is just a box of toys.

Still, I had to go through them all. You never know.

One by one I began pulling them out. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. With any luck, I’d know it when I found it.

But all I was finding was one DeLorean after another, whether it was wooden, plastic, or metal.

Until I reached the bottom.

There, lying facedown, was a small picture frame. Even before I picked it up and turned it over, I knew whose picture I was about to see.

Nora Sinclair.

I wiped away some dust on the glass and stared. She looked every bit as stunning as I remembered. The high cheekbones and full lips. The radiant eyes and sun-kissed skin.

Yep: by far the most beautiful serial killer I’d ever slept with.

“How’s it going?” Sarah yelled up. “Anything?”

Freud would’ve had a field day with the way I suddenly fumbled with the frame, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

“Not yet,” I yelled down, putting the frame back on the bottom of the chest.

Almost immediately, though, I picked it up again.

It wasn’t Nora’s picture I was staring at now. It was the back of the frame, where it opened.

I’m not exactly sure why I did what I did next. Was it my once reading about a guy who discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a painting he bought at a yard sale? Was it the way my grandmother used to add new photos of me to her frames while leaving the old ones behind them?

All I knew was that something made me open the back of that frame.