Someone Must Die Read Online Free

beside her. After giving the driver her mother’s address, she leaned back, the wool from her sweater stinging her like a hair shirt. She had spent the last few hours focused on getting to Miami, afraid if she thought about Ethan she might break down, but now she was almost home. She pulled up the photo on her phone of Ethan and her mother, taken a few minutes before he disappeared.
    Ethan resting happily in the crook of his grandmother’s arm, a crowd of carnival-goers behind them.
    The first and only photo of the two together.
    She was struck by the resemblance between grandmother and grandson. The same large, fudge-brown eyes, the same dimples as they smiled, the same heart-shaped faces.
    Before this weekend, Mama hadn’t known this beautiful, delightful child, but Aubrey had. She’d enjoyed Ethan several times a year ever since he was a baby, taking him to Central Park, boating on the lake, visiting the animals at the zoo, and even teaching him how to ice-skate a few weeks ago.
    Where was her nephew now?
    A dark memory surfaced.
    When Aubrey was eight years old, a boy named Jimmy Ryce had gone missing a few miles from her house in Coconut Grove. Jimmy had been nine, and she could still recall the photo of him on the newscasts and in the newspapers—a grinning child in a baseball cap, gripping a bat. Mama had tried to keep the news of his disappearance from her, but it had been everywhere. Aubrey hadn’t been allowed to go anywhere by herself, even to school or on her bicycle to her friend Meagan’s house.
    She’d been angry about the tighter restrictions, but then three months later, the news that they had discovered Jimmy’s ruined body had changed her. For years afterward, she would glance over her shoulder to see whether anyone was following her, and if a stranger looked her way, her heart would speed up in fright.
    Had Ethan ever learned to be wary of strangers?
    The taxi continued in thick traffic down Le Jeune Road, past used-car dealerships, Latin American restaurants, and billboards in Spanish advertising health care and surgical procedures. The busy commercial streets felt alien until they crossed US 1 into the lush, dark forest of Coconut Grove. The driver turned onto a narrow street, palm fronds and overgrown banyan-tree branches brushing against the sides of the taxi. As her childhood home came into view, the vise around Aubrey’s chest eased.
    In the early-afternoon light, the house appeared just as it always had, like someplace where Sleeping Beauty might have comfortably slept for a hundred years, hidden away from the world. Vines grew over the faded, salmon-colored stucco walls, mildew darkened the once-red gabled roof, and magenta bougainvillea overhung the arched windows. Aubrey had left ten years earlier when she’d gone to college, and had come back only two or three times a year to visit her mother, yet she still thought of this place as home.
    But her home was no longer a cloister.
    Dozens of cars and news vans were parked helter-skelter on the torn-up lawn, blocking the driveway and much of the road, and a crowd of reporters stood at the edge of the property. The tightness in her chest returned.
    Twenty-four hours after Ethan’s disappearance and the vultures were already circling. They knew, just as she did, that with every passing hour, the odds of getting Ethan home safely diminished.
    She paid the driver and stepped into the heat, anxious to get to her mother, concerned about what the stress of Ethan’s disappearance might be doing to her. Aubrey had seen her mother debilitated from vertigo several times—most recently two years ago when she’d been sued by the parents of a little boy who had died while under her care. Aubrey could only imagine how Mama was coping with the disappearance of her own grandson.
    She made her way through the reporters, trying to avoid eye contact with them. She hoped her mother had called Jonathan and asked him to stay at the house and protect her from