The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3), Rebecca Rane [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

trucker. It was a stupid decision on her part. And normally, she wasn’t that stupid. Likely the trucker wasn’t going to really do anything. He was messing with her, she reasoned. But he could have.

She drove a moment or two on the highway, but she felt anxiety pushing in from all sides. She knew what was coming. She fought to stay present. She was driving. Pay attention to that. Keep your mind here. These were the things she told herself, the mental exercises she did to fight the flashbacks. It was PTSD, and it was mostly under control, but it was there, and the trucker had triggered it.

The next exit had a McDonald’s. She could get a coffee in the drive-thru. She could pull herself together.

Kendra focused on her breathing and not on the past. She wasn’t a kid. She wasn’t trapped. She pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and put her car in park.

She felt the air change. She heard his voice. She saw his slender outline. Her wrist ached with the memories of pain stored in her bones.

“No, that is the past. You were in a scrape just now. But you got out. You got out then too. You’re safe.”

Kendra reassured herself that she was okay.

She slipped off a Chuck Taylor and deliberately rubbed the bottom of her foot on the rough surface of her Jeep’s floor mat.

“I’m here.”

She had learned that grounding herself in her own physical reality was key in these moments. She needed to reassure her senses where she was.

She looked down at her knees. Both legs of her jeans had ripped, and her blood, seeping through, was visible.

“Way to stick the landing, Dillon.” Kendra grabbed a tissue from the glove box. She dabbed the blood off her scraped knees. “Things you didn’t think you had to tell yourself: Do not get in a truck with a stranger.”

The trucker had been eavesdropping on her conversation with Eugene. He had no special knowledge of Sincere. He’d tricked her for his own amusement.

Asshole, she thought.

She was okay now. She started up the engine of the Jeep and pulled into the drive-thru. She chucked the idea of a coffee and realized this was a good time for hamburgers and fries. She often forgot to eat and let herself get swept away in work.

It was time to take care of herself better and not rely on Kyle or Shoop or anyone else. And in this particular moment, a burger was the reward for not getting raped and murdered at the Easy On Truck stop.

On her trip back into Port Lawrence, Kendra’s phone rang. It was Gillian.

“Yeah, look, I’m out of town, this profiling seminar—”

“Cool, that is so up your alley, I think—”

“Yeah, no, Dad is why I’m calling. He just checked himself out of River Park?”

“What? He has at least another week out there.”

“Yeah, can you go over there, to the house? I got a text from him that he’s, uh, engaged.”

“What in the actual? I’ve been driving, so my alerts are off.”

“When you turn them on, it’ll be so much fun,” Gillian said.

“I’m headed to the house.”

“Good, yeah, and you know, ask where he’s registered.”

“I can’t even with him right now!”

“I appreciate you doing this. I know you’re just as busy as I am.”

“It’s okay. I’m just glad they had two of us because no one else would ever understand them.”

“Right?”

“I’ll call you after I figure out what he’s up to and, uh, unravel it.”

“‘Kay, I called Mom.”

“Ugh, I’m sure she’ll be very helpful.”

Stephanie Dillon would either ignore this completely or make it fifty-times worse. There was no middle ground.

All thoughts of Kendra’s near-miss at the truck stop disappeared. She focused on getting to her dad’s house without crashing her car. She also put in a call to her dad’s doctor.

“Um, did you let my Dad check out of the care facility?”

“Well, since you’re not his legal guardian, I can’t legally tell you what happened. However, I will say, Big Don is a terrible, terrible patient. The issue we checked him in for has improved somewhat, but, well, that’s all I can say right now.”

“Thank you.”

Kendra took I-75 to the Port Lawrence downtown exit. She had wanted to stop into the office but instead whizzed by and continued on to her Dad’s.

Kendra cleaned up her scrapped knees as she drove. She wondered if she could just pass the ripped jeans off as the latest fashion. She doubted her dad would notice. Stephanie would notice for sure, but Don? He could care less about her clothes.

Downtown’s businesses and industrial areas morphed, within a few blocks of the city center, into bungalows and Victorians. Everything from gigantic mansions to tiny cottages filled Port Lawrence’s oldest neighborhoods.

The sidewalks were lined with mature trees. The homes were all historic, but many of them were in dire need of fixing up. Everything fifth house had boarded windows. There was a completely diverse mix of residents, which kept their families in the neighborhood. That said, it wasn’t really set up for an aging diabetic with one foot. Who now, it appeared, was losing his grip.

Big Don wasn’t leaving this neighborhood, though, regardless of the upkeep his house required. Kendra could hear him say it.

Kendra didn’t need to knock. No one did when they came to the Dillon house. Her entire life, friends, assistants, union bosses, city council members, neighbors, and family announced themselves and walked right in. That was her Dad’s way. He wanted people to come in. Her mother, she probably would have liked a little more formality, but Don’s circle and his knack for making a person feel as though they were inside that circle served Stephanie’s political ambitions quite nicely.

Kendra believed that the open door and the cacophony of sounds and conversation it brought had helped hone her ability to interview just about anyone about anything. A mix of people talking about all types of things was the language of her youth.

On the flip side, she relished her privacy