Loreth Anne White - The Drowned Girls

OTHER TITLES BY LORETH ANNE WHITE

In the Barren Ground

In the Waning Light

A Dark Lure

The Slow Burn of Silence

Wild Country

Manhunter

Cold Case Affair

Shadow Soldiers

The Heart of a Mercenary

A Sultans Ransom

Rules of Re-Engagement

Seducing the Mercenary

The Heart of a Renegade

Sahara Kings

The Sheiks Command

Sheiks Revenge

Surgeon Sheiks Rescue

Guarding the Princess

Sheiks Captive, in Desert Knights with Linda Conrad

Romantic Suspense

Melting the Ice

Safe Passage

The Sheik Who Loved Me

Breaking Free

Her 24-Hour Protector

The Missing Colton

The Perfect Outsider

Saving Christmas, in the Covert Christmas anthology

Letters to Ellie, a novella in SEAL of My Dreams anthology

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright 2017 by Cheakamus House Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781503941212

ISBN-10: 1503941213

Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

This one is for Marlinthank you for sparking Angies Victoria to life and for being a beta reader extraordinaire.

CONTENTS

JANE DOE

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are you, for I know you not at all?

DAY ONE

We all lie.

We all guard secretssometimes terrible onesa side to us so dark, so shameful, that we quickly avert our own eyes from the shadow we might glimpse in the mirror.

Instead we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls. And on the surface of our lives, we work industriously to shape the public story of our selves. We say, Look, world, this is me. We craft posts on social media ... See this wonderful lunch Im eating at this trendy restaurant with my besties, see my sexy shoes, my cute puppy, boyfriend, tight ass in a bikini. See my gloriously perfect life... see what a fucking fabulous time Im having drunk and at this party with my boobs swelling out of my sparkly tank top. Just look at those hot guys draped all over me. Arent you jealous...

And then you wait to see how many people LIKE this fabricated version of yourself, your mood hinging on the number of clicks. Comments. Who commented.

But darkness has a way of seeping through the cracks. It seeks the light...

And then the narrative groans to a slow stop. Or the end comes violent and sudden... and the truth is there, written all over you, ugly under harsh fluorescent-white light. And there is nothing more that you can do to hide it from the detectives who will come looking.

Im in a hospital bed...

I can hear the machines.

Theyre helping me breathe, trying to keep me alive. I can hear nurses whispering, two cops talking, but I cant respond. I cant move or feel anything at all. Im unable to tell them what happened. Im not dead. Not yet. But I can feel myself floating away on silvery threads.

A doctor comes in, argues quietly with the cops. Their words drift through me in fragments. Sexual assault... gathering of forensic evidence... hospital policy... ethics... informed consent in absence of next of kin...

They dont know who I am, I realize. They havent found my mom.

Im sorry, Mom. I am so, so sorry. I never wanted you to find out... And they will find out. As much as I want to protect you from this, from the shame that I know you will feel, the hurt, I do want them to learn what happened. I need them to learn the whole story. Find who did this. In order to save the others. Especially Lara.

He said Lara would be next. He wants us all. I need to warn Lara...

I slide away for a moment, and then I hear machines again, sucking and exhaling and beeping. I realize I will not make Christmas. I think about the tiny tree in our apartment living room, and I wonder if my mom will find the gift Ive already bought. Its under my bed, in my room. I so wanted to see the look in her eyes when she unwrapped it.

At first, theyll say I just went to worklike I do every Saturday night, for my shift at the Blue Badger Bakery down by the water on the west side, where we prep for the big Sunday brunch influx. Always long lineups no matter the weather. One of the more popular brunch venues in a city fast becoming known as the brunch capital, the Badger bakes all its own breads and pastries. Even makes its own bacon.

Like most humans, a creature of habit, I routinely catch the 6:07 p.m. bus from Fairfield on Saturdays. The route takes me through the city and over the blue iron bridge to an area which is now a mix of scrappy dockyard industry and trendy gentrificationa millennials holy grail of tiny, boxy, colorful, pet-friendly, loft-style condo complexes overlooking the Gorge and Inner Harbor and latticed with biking and jogging trails and boardwalks and boathouses storing kayaks and outrigger canoes and stand-up paddleboards.

But I never made it to work. Id had a sense of being followed, of being watched for the past week or so. The new man on the bus last week seemed off yet vaguely familiar, but then this was Victorianot a big city. We all move within six degrees of separation from one another. Id probably just seen him around town. And hed worn a dark wool hat, the collar of his jacket turned up against the December cold.

But it was him. Hed been stalking me, studying the habits of his prey, riding the same bus. Planning his trap. Hed found his choke pointthe small, dark alley through which I take a shortcut.

My mind goes back, trying to replay the events, sort them into chronological order. Memories slice through me like sharp shards of a broken mirror... it was a windy night. Brittle with cold and thick with fog.

It had started to snow...

CHAPTER 1

There is none righteous, no, not one.

Romans 3:10

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9

Angie Pallorino looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of her parents living room. A sweep of manicured lawn rolled down to a pebbly beach, where her dad kept his boat in a small boathouse, and from where a dock jutted out into the waters of Haro Strait. But it was dark out. She couldnt see the beachjust her own distorted reflection and glimpses of whitecaps on the black, wind-whipped water.

Down the center of the strait ran the US-Canada border, and during daylight, the hazy-blue mountains of San Juan Island were visible over the ocean. Behind them, on a clear day, Mount Baker rose stark and volcanic white against the sky.

It was cold. Bitterly so for December on the island. For the past nine days an arctic outflow had been pouring air down from the north, and it had brought crystal clear skies and temperatures well below freezing. But now a fat, wet Pacific front was blustering in, and the precipitation was clashing with the frozen air and coming down as snow.

Flakes flecked with ice ticked against the windows.

Angie hated snowthe way it smelled. The subtly metallic scent unsettled her on a deeply profound level. It was a sensation shed never quite been able to articulate, but it was there. Always when it snowed. Worse around Christmas. She rubbed her arms, her thoughts boomeranging back to her failure on a sweltering evening last Julyher inability to save the life of a three-year-old toddler. How her focus on trying to resuscitate the little girl might have also cost the life of her partner.