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One Nine

By Sara Davison

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Chapter One

Brooke Turner lay on her back staring up at her fingers, dripping red in the glow of the dying sun. What…? A splotch of blood landed on her cheek, warm and sticky, and she rolled onto her side and maneuvered herself to a sitting position.
The world spun around her, and she drew in several breaths of frosty air to keep from throwing up. What was happening? Why was she lying outside? Had she tripped and fallen, hit her head on something? Although her brain felt thick and fuzzy, her head didn’t hurt, so where had the blood come from?
Something hard and cold pressed against her palm, and she instinctively closed her fingers around it. Slowly, Brooke raised the object in front of her face. For a few seconds, she could only gape at the knife, its blade slick with more blood. Then, with a sharp cry, she flung it into a nearby patch of grass.
Had someone stabbed her? She turned onto her hands and knees before staggering to her feet. Her body didn’t hurt either, and although she patted herself down—leaving scarlet fingerprints smeared across her pale blue T-shirt and jeans—she couldn’t detect a wound. So, whose blood was she covered in?
Behind her breastbone, her heart thudded so wildly she had to work to take short, shallow breaths. She was in her own backyard, a few feet from the edge of the forest that ran behind the houses on her side of the street.
Stay calm. Assess the situation. Work the problem. The advice she’d gleaned from the cop shows she and her best friend, Lenora Chambers, watched obsessively flashed through her mind. Brooke’s stomach clenched. Had her backyard become a crime scene? If so, what crime had happened here? Who was the victim, and was the perpetrator still on the premises? When she shot a look toward her rental house, she couldn’t detect any activity behind the sheer white curtains.
Brooke scanned the edge of the forest. Nothing moved between the trees either. Only a low, moaning wind disturbed the stillness of the quiet neighborhood, shaking loose the occasional red or orange leaf from the nearly bare branches. Mesmerized by the dance, she followed a brilliant crimson maple leaf as it twirled lower and lower and eventually came to land on the forest floor next to…
Her stomach lurched. Was that—?” She forced herself to stumble toward the pale white hand extending beyond the trunk of the massive oak that had cast shade across Brooke’s lawn all summer.
When she reached the other side of the tree, she dropped to her knees beside the still body. A woman with long, light-brown hair, lying on her stomach, her face turned toward the tree, one arm beneath her and the other splayed awkwardly over her head.
Stay calm. Assess… Brooke slashed a hand through the air, dismissing the advice. This wasn’t fiction. A real person was dead or dying in front of her. Grasping the woman’s slender shoulder, she gently turned her over onto her back. The woman’s arm flopped onto the exposed roots of the oak tree.
Brooke lost the battle with her stomach. Spinning around on the toes of her sneakers, she emptied its contents beneath the closest raspberry bush. For several long seconds, she held her palm against the cool, rough bark of the oak. Then she slowly pivoted again to gaze into the open, vacant, green eyes of the woman.
Lenora.
**
After swiping her hands over the grass to clean off a little of the blood, Brooke reached into her back pocket. Empty. Where was her phone? A memory shrouded in wisps of fog drifted into her mind. She’d left it in the living room while she worked on dinner. Did Lenora have hers on her?
Drawing on the tiny amount of courage she was clinging to, Brooke stuck her hand into the pocket of her friend’s hoodie. Her fingers closed around the device, and she tugged it out. The sight of her friend’s phone, covered in stickers of puppies and kittens, threatened to send her back to the bushes, but she drew in a light, steadying breath. She had to get help. Brooke’s fingers trembled so badly it took her three tries to punch in the number, but the call finally went through.
A woman answered after the third ring. “911. What is the nature of your emergency?”
Brooke stumbled through a description of what she had found, attempting to keep hysteria out of her voice and provide the woman with all the information she needed.
“Did you see anyone else on the property?”
“No. Although I haven’t gone into the house.”
“Don’t do that until the police arrive, okay? They are on their way.” The woman’s calm, cool voice did help ease a little of the screaming in Brooke’s head, the thundering in her ears.
“Okay.” Her legs trembled violently enough that Brooke doubted she could make it that far anyway. Plus, she had no desire to encounter anyone who might be armed with another blade or a gun. She scrutinized the patch of grass where she had tossed the knife. Should she grab it in case whoever had done this to Lenora came back? If she did, her fingerprints would be all over the murder weapon.
Brooke pressed her lips together. They were already all over it, weren’t they? Of course, the CSI team would be able to differentiate between hers and the killer’s once she’d provided them with a sample.
Although…
Why had she blacked out in the backyard? Had she been drugged? She did have a vague recollection of feeling a little lightheaded in the kitchen when she was cooking dinner for Lenora. No memory of anything after that, though.
How did she get outside? And why was she covered in Lenora’s blood and lying next to the knife? The killer had to know she would pick it up.
She pressed her eyes shut. Whoever had done this was trying to frame Brooke for it, and she had played right into his hands. Worst part was, she knew this story. It was exactly the way it had happened in—
“Ma’am?”
The dispatcher’s raised voice called Brooke back from the terrifying path her mind had started along. “Yes?”
“Are you sure the woman is dead?”
Brooke’s gaze traveled across her friend’s body. Lenora’s white hoodie was soaked with blood, more blood than Brooke had ever seen in real life. Although she halted her perusal at her friend’s chest, willing it to rise and fall, the sweatshirt didn’t move. And that vacant stare…
To be sure, she scrambled to her knees and pressed her fingers to Lenora’s neck. Nothing. Her friend’s skin was cold but still soft, if slightly shriveled. Whatever had happened here had taken place less than two hours earlier.
Sinking to the ground again, Brooke held the phone to her ear. “Yes.” Even on that one little syllable, her voice broke.
“All right. Stay where you are and remain on the line with me. Help is on the way, okay?”
“Okay.” Brooke lost track of time as she sat, back against the bark of the oak, her hand resting on one of Lenora’s red Converse high-tops with silver-bling heart on the side. Brooke had picked those shoes up for Lenora in the mall one day, knowing her friend would love them.
Who could have done this to Lenora, an animal lover who had started up the shelter where Brooke had been volunteering since she moved to town? A Sunday school teacher who put together like a hundred shoeboxes to send to children in other countries every Christmas?
Lenora was so beautiful and compelling that Brooke’s boyfriend of six months, Carter Moore, had broken up with Brooke because, as he’d confessed in an email three weeks ago, he had fallen for her best friend. Brooke and Carter had exchanged a few heated emails that night, and she hadn’t contacted him since.
Lenora had phoned Brooke an hour later, after Carter called her to tell her how he felt. Her best friend since the day five years ago when Brooke had shown up at the shelter asking how she could help had been horrified and furious at the situation. Lenora was adamant in her insistence that she would never consider getting involved with a man Brooke had dated, a man who could treat her that way.
Despite Brooke’s hurt and humiliation over Carter’s betrayal, that phone call had preserved her friendship with Lenora.
Her fingers tightened around the red shoe. Who could have taken a knife and heartlessly driven it over and over who knew how many times into her friend’s body?
Brooke’s chest tightened. She didn’t have to count the wounds to know there would be twelve of them.
Her stomach roiled again, and Brooke shoved away the thought. She would have to deal with her friend’s brutal death another time. Right now, fictional situation or not, she did need to stay calm, to assess, to work the problem.
In the distance, a siren wailed, disturbing the silence of what Brooke had previously believed was a safe family neighborhood. A tight ball formed in her gut. If whoever had killed Lenora had gone to the trouble of drugging Brooke and dragging her out here to leave close to the body, they had likely been thorough about removing any fingerprints from the knife before dropping it next to her. And they’d smeared Lenora’s blood on Brooke’s clothes. What else had they done to make her look guilty? Planted evidence in the house? In her car?
Brooke knew enough about crime scene investigation and police procedure to know that she was in trouble. She had motive—if the police searched her computer and phone, which they would, and discovered the furious emails that had passed between her and Carter after he dumped her.
She had plenty of opportunity, since Lenora was at her house all the time and the two of them had made plans over text to get together for dinner at Brooke’s place that evening. And she had the means—that bloody knife still lying in the grass.
Should Brooke try to dispose of it? She shook her head. Nothing would make her look guiltier than that.
Except maybe running.
The wailing of the sirens grew louder as that thought introduced itself in her head. If she stayed, she would absolutely be arrested. Could she trust the justice system to exonerate her, to believe her crazy story, and to pursue the true killer until he or she was behind bars?
She shook her head again. No. Not enough to stake her freedom on it. She could easily end up behind bars for the rest of her life over this.
Besides, she had a fairly good idea who had done it. Turning Zane Phillips in to the police after she’d ended their brief relationship and he had turned violent had nearly destroyed her world. Now it had ended her best friend’s life. Even from behind bars, he must have sent someone to do this. If she accused him again without enough proof that he was guilty, he would kill Brooke too. She knew that with absolute certainty. Given the scene playing out around her, she knew exactly how he would do it.
Running had saved her five years ago, and it might be her only hope now.
The wailing of the sirens grew louder. The police and ambulance attendants—or maybe just the coroner—would be here in seconds. If she was going to do this, she needed to do it immediately.
Brooke hit the disconnect button on the phone and then slid a hand beneath her T-shirt so she could grasp the device with the cloth and rub off the fingerprints and blood. Then, still gripping the phone in the material, she leaned closer to slide it into Lenora’s pocket. She should do the same with the blade. Did she have time?
An emergency vehicle let out one last, lamenting wail as it approached the house. Too late to go for the knife and still hope to get away.
Bending forward, Brooke pressed a kiss to Lenora’s forehead, gray and cold in the lengthening shadows of the trees. “Goodbye, Len. I love you. And I’m so, so sorry.”
After scrambling to her feet, Brooke fled into the thick, heavy darkness of the forest.

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