A Neighbor’s Lie (A Chloe Fine Psychological Suspense Mystery—Book 2)

PROLOGUE

Working as a nanny was not the life that Kim Wielding had envisioned for herself, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Which was a little surprising, considering in her early twenties she’d had a career she wanted to pursue in Washington, DC, firing along the campaign trails and writing speeches for underdog candidates. And she’d almost landed it.

Almost.

Life just worked out in funny ways sometimes.

Now, at the age of thirty-six, those dreams of working in DC were long gone. She’d replaced them with another dream: of writing the great American novel in her downtime as a nanny. She’d sort of fallen into the job after a promising candidate she had worked for had been miserably defeated. That was all it had taken for her to sit on the sidelines for a while. And while on those sidelines, a very easy means of employment had landed in her lap. She hadn’t even considered watching kids in any capacity, but it had fit.

Kim reflected back on her first job as a nanny as she sat at the kitchen island inside the home of Bill and Sandra Carver. It was hard to believe it had been a little over ten years ago. It was a stretch of time that had somehow blurred those memories of working in DC, of writing speeches with hope and just a smidge on untruth.

Her laptop sat in front of her. She had hit the forty-thousand-word mark on her book. She figured she was about halfway through it. Maybe she’d finish it up in another six months or so. It all depended on the direction the lives of the three Carver children took. The oldest child, Zack, was in ninth grade this year and seriously eyeing football as a pastime. The middle child, Declan, played soccer. And if the youngest, Madeline, stuck with gymnastics, Kim was going to be running around in a frenzy for the next few months.

She closed the lid of her laptop and looked around the kitchen. She was thawing chicken for dinner. The counters had already been wiped down, the dishes were done, and the fourth load of laundry was currently churning away in the washing machine. Until the kids got home, her day was done. It was how she’d been able to work on her book for the last forty-five minutes.

She glanced at the clock and saw that the day had managed to sneak away from her—something that she was starting to understand happened to nannies quite a bit. She’d need to leave to pick the kids up from school in fifteen minutes…and that was no small feat, seeing as how the Carver kids were aged in crude stairstep fashion, the youngest in elementary school, the middle child in middle school, and the oldest in high school. All told, it was just over an hour’s worth of travel and traffic time to pick them all up from school and return home with them. It sounded worse than it was, though, as Kim had recently discovered how wonderful audiobooks could be to kill time in the car.

She got up and checked the chicken, nearly defrosted in the sink. She then swapped the laundry into the dryer and got all of the spices out that she would need to complete dinner. As she was setting the paprika down on the counter, someone knocked on the front door.

It was a fairly common occurrence in the Carver household. Sandra Carver was an Amazon junkie and Bill Carver always had schematics and blueprints being FedEx’d to their home. Kim grabbed her purse, figuring she’d go ahead and leave for school pick-ups after bringing the packages inside.

She opened the door, her eyes instantly going to the floor of the porch in search of an Amazon box. That’s why it took her brain a full second to understand that there was the shape of a person standing in front of her. When she looked up to see their face, her line of sight was blocked by—something.

Whatever it was, it smashed into her head. It connected right between her eyes, along the top of the bridge of her nose. The cracking noise inside of her head was deafening but she barely had time to register it before the sensation of falling overruled everything.

When she hit the Carvers’ hardwood floors, the back of her head struck hard. She felt blood rushing out of her nose as she tried scrambling backward.

The person from the porch came inside. They shut the door causally behind them. Kim tried to scream but there was too much blood in her nose, cascading down into her throat and mouth. She coughed, almost gagging, as the person took one large step forward.

They lifted that blunt object again—a pipe, Kim thought vaguely as pain swept through her mind like a hurricane—and that was the last thing she saw.

Before that final blow, her mind went to a strange place indeed. Kim Wielding died wondering what would happen to that chicken, still defrosting in the Carvers’ sink.