Vicious Valentine by Patti Benning (best fiction novels to read txt) 📗

She retreated to her bed to slip her feet into the slippers she kept beneath it, then made her way quietly into the hall, padding down the stairs silently. The house was new enough that none of the steps creaked. Her attempts at stealth proved to have been unnecessary when she heard a low voice coming from the kitchen. It seemed that Vanessa was awake after all.

She stepped into the room and Vanessa looked around immediately even though Hannah was certain she hadn’t made much, if any, noise. Her friend was on the phone, but she gave Hannah a weak smile anyway. “Caroline,” she mouthed.

“Invite her over,” Hannah said quietly. Vanessa nodded.

While Vanessa spoke to Caroline, Hannah began pulling the ingredients out to make waffles. A quick check of the fridge showed her that she still had some bacon, along with plenty of eggs. Vanessa ended the call just as she started making the waffle batter.

“Caroline’s on her way,” she said.

“Does she know what happened?”

Vanessa nodded. She seemed better this morning, but not by much. “I told her all about it. She woke me up early this morning with a phone call. I guess she didn’t see the missed calls and messages until she got up.”

“She must have been worried.”

“She was frantic,” Vanessa said. She gave Hannah a slightly amused look, though she still looked like a ghost of her own self. “She felt just as guilty as you did for not answering my calls earlier. I hope both of you know it’s not either of your faults for being on dates and not answering my calls. Neither of you could have known what was going to happen.”

“I know we couldn’t have known, but I still feel bad,” Hannah said. “Nothing you say is going to change that. I should have been there for you when you needed me.”

Caroline arrived just as Hannah finished making breakfast. She slid the plate of waffles out of the oven, where she had put it to keep them warm, and placed it on the kitchen island along with a plate of bacon. The eggs were still on the stove, and she put them on individual plates before passing them out. Caroline thanked her for the food, but merely picked at her plate as she turned to Vanessa. Vanessa, on the other hand, ate with relish, and Hannah realized that her friend probably hadn’t had a meal the night before. She felt another surge of guilt for not trying to get her to eat something before she went to bed.

“I am so sorry,” Caroline began, but Vanessa pointed her fork at her in a halfhearted attempt at intimidation.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “Seriously, you two, stop apologizing and help me figure out what I’m going to do now. I’m the one with the dead boyfriend here.”

“Do the police have any leads?” Caroline asked.

Hannah, who had completely forgotten that she was supposed to remind Vanessa about her visit to the police station, glanced at the clock and was relieved to see that it was barely past eight-thirty. Thankfully, Vanessa remembered her commitment as well.

“Not yet, but I have to talk to them at ten and I’m hoping they might have some more information.”

“They’re going to catch the person responsible for this,” Caroline said, her voice certain. “Whoever killed him won’t get away with it.”

“I hope so,” Vanessa said. “Rory… I know we’d only been dating for a little while, but he was a good guy. He didn’t deserve this. And…” She trailed off, staring at her plate silently for a moment. “This is going to sound horrible, but while I was trying to sleep, I realized how lucky I was that I wasn’t there.”

“That doesn’t sound horrible at all,” Caroline said. “I’m glad you weren’t there too; you could have been killed too.”

“But maybe if I was, whoever killed him wouldn’t have attacked at all.”

Hannah shook her head, inserting herself into the conversation. “You can’t think like that. It’s not fair to yourself. There are too many variables; it’s impossible to know what would have happened if things were different.”

Vanessa bit her lip, staring down at the plate in front of her as if the food she had been inhaling moments before had turned to unappetizing sludge.

“But... what if it was my fault? What if... what if it was Corbin?”

Caroline frowned. “Do you think he’d really do something like that? Kill the person you’re seeing?”

Vanessa shrugged, then shook her head. “I just don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of something like that before, but with how creepy and stalker-ish he got toward the end of our relationship, it makes me doubt everything I thought I knew about him.”

Caroline, who was opening the restaurant this morning, stayed until Hannah and Vanessa left to go to the police department. Hannah waited in the lobby while Vanessa gave her statement and went over everything that happened the night before, then she took her friend to the apartment so Vanessa could pick up her motorbike. Afterward, they returned to Hannah’s house.

“Are you sure you don’t mind if I stay here for a couple of days?”

“Of course not,” Hannah said. “Make yourself at home. And feel free to invite Caroline over again this evening if you’d like. I’ll have to leave in a couple of hours to get to the restaurant for my shift, and I don’t want you to be alone more than you have to.”

Even though Vanessa assured her she was fine spending some time at the house by herself, Hannah felt bad when she had to leave her friend to go to work that afternoon. It wasn’t a very busy day, so Hannah took the time to walk around the dining area while Caroline finished her shift in the kitchen. Two of the new employees, Nadia and Shayne, were working that day, and while she didn’t want to put them on edge by hovering, she liked to see the progress