“I’m meeting with Hope and Naomi tomorrow to begin our discussion about Austin Brady’s disappearance. We’re having lunch. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like.”
He nodded slowly. “I can do that. In fact, after you told me about your project, I did some digging on my own. I may have an angle we can discuss that, as far as I know, hasn’t been looked at to this point.”
I raised a brow. “Really? What’d you find?”
He pulled my body against his. “Tomorrow is soon enough to get into the specifics. Tonight is Valentine’s Day. What do you say we simply lose ourselves in the music?”
Next From A Cat in the Attic
Next From Kathi Daley Books
Preview
Dreams aren’t real, or at least that was what I’d been trying to tell myself for the past few weeks as the dreams that had been occupying my nights began to seem very real. I supposed the dreams had actually begun this past December after my dad had been in town, but they’d increased in velocity and intensity over the course of the past few weeks to the point where I wondered if it was even safe to go to bed.
“Tess, wake up.”
I could feel someone pulling me forward. Not knowing who’d grabbed me in the dark, I fought to get away. Strong arms held me down as I struggled to free myself from my unseen captor.
“Tess, it’s Tony. Wake up, sweetheart.”
I felt a weight on my body that pinned me to the mattress until my urge to fight began to dissipate. I opened my eyes. “Tony?”
“It’s okay.” My boyfriend, Tony Marconi, said as he reached over and turned the bedside light on. “You were having another dream.”
I took several deep breaths and then nodded as I waited for my tears to cease, and my heart rate to slow. While the dreams had become more frequent as of late, they were always the same. I was a little girl, sleeping in my childhood room. My father would come into the room to tuck me in, although, in reality, it had always been my mother who’d performed this chore. I’d feel safe and warm and oh so happy in my dreams, but then as quickly as he’d entered my dreams, my father would be pulled from my arms. I’d reach for him, but just as my fingers were about to touch his arm, he’d burst into flames and perish in the raging inferno.
I supposed having the dreams was understandable. For years, I’d believed my dad, Grant Thomas, a truck driver, had died in a fiery crash. When the incident first occurred, I’d had dreams similar to the dreams I was having now, but over time, the pain and fear had faded, and the dreams became nothing but a memory. Of course, looking back, the fact that Tony and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of something neither of us understood was probably the outcome of a series of events that had been set into place years earlier.
My dad died when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I was nosing around in the attic of the house my brother, Mike, and I lived in with our mother and found a letter I believed to be encrypted. That letter had been stashed in a book that had been stored with some items my dad had tucked away before he died. Believing the letter could somehow provide an answer to the questions I’d been dealing with since his death, I decided to try to break the code. After dozens of failed attempts, I realized I had no choice but to enlist Tony’s help. As it turned out, the letter hadn’t been encrypted at all, but our search had led us to uncover some anomalies in my father’s death, which is what I’d suspected all along. We decided to keep our search to ourselves as we continued to dig. It took thirteen years, but eventually, Tony found a photo of my dad that had been taken three years after his reported death. That photo seemed to prove what I’d instinctively known. My dad hadn’t died in a fiery crash as I’d been told but was very much alive.
Once we found that first photo, Tony and I continued to dig. We found additional photos and proof that my dad was alive and kicking. He was no longer using the name Grant Thomas, and we found evidence that he hadn’t used that name before meeting and marrying my mother. This caused me to question the real identity and job description of a man who seemed to be so much more than just my father.
As time went by, additional clues began to pile up. The more we learned, the bigger the threat we seemed to pose, and eventually, unidentified men started coming around to warn us away. Of course, that only made me want to find the answers we sought even more desperately than I had in the beginning, which led to my first face-to-face meeting with my father more than a year after Tony had found that first photo. The meeting had been brief. Mike had been in the hospital, and my dad had shown up outside the building to check on Mike’s status and to warn me to give up my search for the answers I sought. He’d told me that there were men who were piggybacking on Tony’s search who wanted him dead and posed a threat not just to him, but to Mike, my mom, and me as well.
After that sixty-second encounter at the hospital, I did as he asked and stopped looking for answers. At least for a while. Then this past Christmas, two years after Tony had found the original photo of my dad alive, Star Moonwalker, a woman, who at the time, I believed to be my half-sister, wandered into my life. As it turned out, Star and I weren’t related, but it had been my father who’d been traveling with her mother when she was born, and it had been my father who’d dropped her off at a church after her mother had been shot and killed days after her birth. As odd as the whole thing sounds, things got even odder the more we dug.
While Star Moonwalker might not have been my half-sister, we were connected. It turned out that the reason my father had been traveling with her mother was because he’d been helping her escape from a billionaire named Layton Henderson. According to what we’d uncovered, Star’s mother, Ivana Kowalski, had worked for Layton Henderson for several years before becoming pregnant with Star. About eight months before she became pregnant and ran away, she was transferred from her job in his import/export business to his facility in Hungary, which presently deals with artificial intelligence, but at that time, dealt with the manipulation of human intelligence utilizing a variety of methods. We knew that Ivana became pregnant and left the facility, and assumed she’d left without permission. She came to the United States using the alias Polly Davis. Once in the country, she traveled with my father, who, interestingly, had been Henderson’s head of security before running off with Ivana.
A lot had happened since the time Ivana had run away from Henderson, but at this point, both Ivana and her daughter were dead.
After we discovered the background relating to the woman who seemed to have been connected to whatever was going on with my father, Tony and I widened the parameters of our search. Eventually, Tony received an email containing the name Darwin Norlander. As it turned out, Darwin Norlander had been an associate of Layton Henderson until eight months before the email had been sent, at which time the two had gone their separate ways. We began to suspect that Norlander might have been the man behind Star’s death but needed proof. I supposed, based on the way things worked out, we’d never get that proof, but given the fact that Norlander was looking for my father and would most likely have killed Tony if given the chance, Mike, Tony, and I all felt that Norlander was the killer we’d been looking for.
Our research eventually led to a showdown at Tony’s home just before Christmas. Norlander had shown up at his house, needing Tony’s help finding my father. I’m sure once Tony did as was asked of him, Norlander planned to kill him, but my dad showed up at the eleventh hour and saved the day. Of course, as soon as Norlander was good and dead, my dad disappeared, and the dreams I’d been having started showing up almost every night. At this point, I didn’t know where my dad was or how his activities from the past might continue to affect us, but based on the dreams that seemed to serve as some sort of a warning, I doubted whatever was destined to happen, had completely played itself out.