Free Death Threads by Elizabeth Lynn Casey

family. Jackson and Suzanna starred in just about every framed photo, each snapshot documenting various stages of their young lives. In some, they were photographed in posed fashion, in others they were caught in more random, candid moments. But in each and every one they sported genuine happy smiles, a perfect match for the one photo they didn’t grace—the one from their parents’ wedding day. In that picture, it was Colby and Debbie who were all smiles as the promise of a life together stretched before them.
    Tori swallowed over the sudden lump in her throat as she leaned closer to the wedding day photograph. In it, Debbie’s dirty blonde hair was swept into a French braid that emphasized her high cheekbones. And Colby was as handsome as ever, though it was easy to see that the subsequent nine years or so with Debbie had served him well.
    That was what she wanted one day. A good man to share her life with from that day forward . . .
    “Colby? Colby?”
    Debbie’s panicked voice preceded her down the staircase and sent Tori’s pulse racing once again. “Debbie, what’s wrong?”
    “Colby . . . he’s not in his bed . . . he’s not upstairs anywhere.” Debbie rushed through the parlor and into the kitchen, lights flipping on in every room she entered. “With those sleeping pills I gave him he shouldn’t be wandering around. He shouldn’t even be a—”
    A low guttural moan escaped Debbie’s lips as she stopped halfway through the kitchen, her feet moving backward as she bumped into Tori. “Oh no . . . oh no . . .” Her voice trailed off only to return in a shriek as she pointed at the floor in front of them. “Oh no!”
    Stepping around her friend, Tori stared at the knife jutting from the linoleum kitchen floor with a hastily scrawled note beneath its handle. “What is that?”
    “I th-think it’s the letter . . .”
    She strained to hear her friend’s muted words as she dropped to the ground to examine the knife. “Letter?”
    “The death threat.”
    Careful not to touch anything, Tori leaned in as close to the note as possible, her stomach churning violently as her gaze fell on the faint red spatters that dotted the otherwise ordinary white stationery paper. Faint red spatters that mingled with the red waxy scribbles and looked a lot like—
    “Oh my God. Debbie, call the police . . . now.”

Chapter 6

    If there was ever a time she wished she could hit the Pause button on her life, this was it. Sure she’d have opted to use Rewind—or, more accurately, Erase—during her temporary stint as a murder suspect a few months earlier, but Pause would suffice at the moment.
    With Pause, she could mute the incessant whispered chatter of the teenage girls in the young adult section. With Pause, she’d be spared the needling guilt over all the little tasks that needed to be completed before lunch—shelving, returning calls, and planning a theme for the next installment of Toddler Time. And with Pause, she might have half a chance of collecting her thoughts after the roller-coaster ride she’d been on since the frightening discovery at Debbie’s house the night before.
    “Miss Sinclair?”
    From the moment she’d noticed the bloodstains in Debbie’s kitchen, all hell had broken loose. A hell that had included a hysterical friend, a probing police chief, a hurried phone call to Melissa’s home to head off Suzanna and Jackson’s impending return, and the undeniable presence of even more blood than first thought.
    “Miss Sinclair?”
    As grateful as she’d been that Debbie had heeded the chief’s instructions to stay downstairs as he searched the house, seeing the overturned chair and scattered books in their bedroom firsthand hadn’t been a whole lot easier for Tori. The condition of the room had answered questions she hadn’t really wanted to entertain even as she’d stared at the knife-pierced note.
    Regardless of what had happened in the Calhoun home while Debbie and the children were at