Home Before Midnight

“Sexy fun! Virginia Kantra writes romantic suspense with a dash of humor, a dollop of intrigue, and a heavy dose of adventure.”—
New York Times
bestselling author Lisa Gardner

“Virginia Kantra’s stories . . . can make a believer out of the most hardened soul.”

—
New York Times
bestselling author Patricia Rice

“An involving, three-dimensional story that is scary, intriguing, and sexy.”—
All About Romance

“Kantra creates powerfully memorable characters.”

—
Midwest Book Review

“Virginia Kantra is an autobuy . . . her books are keepers and her heroes are to die for!”

—
New York Times
bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann

“Spectacularly suspenseful and sexy. Don’t miss it!”

—
Romantic Times

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT

A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / August 2006

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eISBN : 978-1-101-01006-8

BERKLEY SENSATION®
Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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BERKLEY SENSATION and the “B” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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For Michael

I always say I couldn’t do it without you, darling.
Now you know it’s true.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to all the people who took time from their important jobs and busy lives to answer my questions patiently and correctly, especially Lt. A.J. Carter (Ret.), criminal investigation, Durham Police Department; my sister-in-law, retired corrections officer Virginia Grisez (how would I have come up with that plot point without you?); my sister, nurse extraordinaire, Pamela Archbold; financial adviser Fred D. Gunther; estate attorney Kevin Stroud; and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Chapel Hill. Everything I got right is because of their generous help. Everything I got wrong is my own fault.

Thanks to Judith Stanton and all the members of Heart of Carolina—you know who you are!—for your ongoing support.

Thank you, Jean, Drew, and Mark, for living through my deadlines with me.

And deepest thanks to Cindy Hwang, to Damaris Row-land, and to Melissa McClone for helping me make this book the best it could be.

ONE

MARCH 14, 1987

Stokesville, NC—A seventeen-year-old denied admittance to his high school dance stabbed his mother, grandmother, and sister to death on Friday night, authorities said.

The youth, identified Sunday as Billy Ray Dawler, is a sophomore at Jefferson High School. School officials and police said the teen was apparently under the influence of alcohol.

Police were informed of the stabbings early Saturday morning by an anonymous caller. Detectives discovered the bodies of Shirley Dawler, 49, Tammy Dawler, 33, and Tanya Dawler, 15, at the family’s home at 543 White Pine Road. Neighbors report frequent late-night visitors to the modest brick bungalow, but no witnesses for that evening have come forward.

BAILEY Wells shivered. And she thought
she
had issues in high school.

Dropping the microfiche printout on her bed, Bailey lifted her heavy brown hair off her neck. Outside her window, a willow drooped, pale in the moonlight, listless in the heat.

For better or worse, there was no place like home. And nothing hotter or lonelier than a Carolina summer night.

Even with the windows locked and the thermostat lowered to sixty-five degrees, the air gripped the house like a warm, damp fist. The grinding whine of the cicadas swelled the night and buzzed in her blood. She had to be crazy to leave New York—the exciting career opportunities, the sophisticated nightlife, her cozy studio apartment—for this.

Not crazy
. The thought slipped in like a breeze under the windowsill, stirring her mood.
In love
.

Bailey flushed and dropped her hair. No, that wasn’t right, either.

Anyway, she could admit—to herself and the cicadas, at least—the career thing hadn’t gone exactly as planned. She had hoped her job as personal assistant to a bestselling crime writer would give her a break from tweaking other people’s manuscripts and the time and motivation to work on her own. But after two years of working for Paul Ellis, she was no closer to submitting her own novel. Oh, admit it. She wasn’t even writing.

As for her nightlife . . . She had burned out on bars and blind dates. She was sick of guys who were never as young or as tall, as emotionally available or financially stable as their on-line profiles promised. She was tired of drinking bad wine and cheap beer to blur the edges of her evenings, thankful she didn’t generally wake up with anything worse than a headache. Most nights she chose to spend alone in her fourth-floor East Village walk-up, watching
Friends
reruns and throwing shoes at whatever scuttled from beneath the minifridge.

At least the cicadas made a change from cockroaches.

She stared out at the moon-dappled lawn and the fancy new streetlights of the town where she’d once been voted Most Likely to Leave. She hadn’t given up, she told herself. Not yet. She’d just . . . grown up.

Enough to come home.

Paul had broken the news. “I would never insist that you come with us,” he had said, with one of his special looks. “But this new book is a wonderful opportunity for you. And you’re from around there, aren’t you? Stokesville, North Carolina? You probably even remember the Dawler killings. It was quite a scandal at the time.”

Nineteen years ago.

“I was seven,” Bailey said. “Maybe your wife—”

His wife of five years was Helen Stokes Ellis, a wealthy Magnolia-in-exile who preferred her bourbon on the rocks and her relatives at a distance.

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