Already Gone

By Jaye Ford

The prequel to Jaye Ford's crime thriller Already Dead.

Two months has passed since Miranda Jack's husband Nick was killed in a hit-and-run and she is no closer to understanding why. The police have stopped taking her calls so Jax has gone back to the street where Nick was found in search of her own answers.

Eighty-five year old Irene Newton has been haunted by the death of a man on the road beyond her fence two months ago. The appearance of his wife at her door reawakens painful memories of the daughter she lost and the questions she was told to forget.

Jax is horrified Irene has waited forty years for answers and frightened she could face the same fate. But when the questions surrounding Nick's murder won't let her rest, Jax reaches for Irene's mystery – because finding any answers is better than finding none.

Until the questions become dangerous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jaye Ford
• Release date: Feb 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645367904

Jaye Ford

Jaye Ford is a bestselling Australian author of five chilling suspense novels. Her first thriller, Beyond Fear, won two Davitt Awards for Australian women crime writers (Best Debut and Readers’ Choice) and was the highest selling debut crime novel in Australia in 2011. When she needs a break from the dark stuff, she writes romantic comedy under the name Janette Paul. Her novels have been translated into numerous languages and recorded as audio books. Before writing fiction, she was a news and sport journalist, the first woman to host a live national sport show on Australian TV and ran her own public relations consultancy. She now writes fiction fulltime from her home in Newcastle, NSW, Australia where she loves to turn places she knows and loves into crime scenes. To sign up for Jaye's newsletter, visit her website at www.jayefordauthor.com Email Jaye at: [e-mail] Or connect on social media: www.facebook.com/JayeFordauthor instagram.com/jayeford50

Book preview

Already Gone

Already Gone

A Miranda Jack Novella: Prequel to Already Dead

Jaye Ford

Also by Jaye Ford

Already Dead

Darkest Place

Blood Secret

Scared Yet?

Beyond Fear

For links to buy, go to Jaye Ford’s website

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Copyright © 2021 by Jaye Ford

ISBN 978-0-6453679-0-4 (eBook)

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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Sneak Peak of ALREADY DEAD

1

‘W hy here?’ Jax asked the question under her breath, a whisper of the mantra that was holding her together.

Eight weeks ago, the question had been Why there? They’d been her first words to the cops sitting on her sofa, and she could still feel the frown that had gathered as they’d talked, as though bewilderment and disbelief had been threaded through her forehead like a drawstring.

It was still there, just like the question.

That day, she’d asked it five times, twenty times. As though what they were telling her, the questions they were asking, would make sense if she could understand Why there? As though the ringing in her head would stop if she knew.

This morning, she was standing on the side of a road in the old, leafy suburb of Warruga, forty minutes from home. The first time she’d been there, the tarmac was still stained with his blood. There’d been no tyre marks or skid lines and How was the only answer the police had been able to give her. Someone had driven at speed into her husband.

She turned a slow circle in the street, taking in the short stretch of bushland and unsealed shoulder where his body had been discovered, then the family homes on either side and across the road. The cars parked in driveways, basketball hoops on garages, established trees, pretty gardens, a dog at a fence—and all the other questions started to churn. Why was he here? In his running clothes? Midmorning on a weekday? Without telling her? Without telling anyone?

Or had someone known and they’d found him?

But they were just the start of her questions.

There’d been noise and activity after the hit-and-run. The sounds of a body being discovered, the sirens of an ambulance and police cars, detectives, reporters, news crews. It was why Jax was here again.

She’d spent the last two days working her way along the street, knocking on doors and asking questions. For a journalist, she’d made a terrible start. Coming back had opened the wounds of her grief and anger, and they’d bled into her tone on her earlier attempts. Even to Jax, her questions had sounded like demands, accusations, sometimes desperate pleas. Several residents had recognised her from the TV news reports, which had complicated her spiel with ‘Are you Miranda Jack?’ and ‘I’m not interested in speaking to the media’.

Today she was trying a different tack. She’d tied her blonde hair back, put on make-up, wore her standard interview outfit of trousers and jacket, and practised a more relaxed smile, hoping for the opposite of the images she saw of herself every time Nick’s death was mentioned in the news.

By lunchtime, she’d had three no-one-homes, a no-thanks-I’m-not-interested, and a flustered woman with a crying baby and a barking dog who said she’d like to help but was giving birth the morning of the hit-and-run.

Jax ate the lunch she’d brought from home in the park further down the street. Wrapped in a jacket, she watched little kids play on the swings in the cool autumn breeze while obscure pieces of information scrolled through her mind. She’d been curious since birth, spent her career asking interesting people probing questions, and her brain was a collection depot of weird facts: the first playground was designed in 1848, Saturday was the most common day for fatal car accidents, Friday topped the week for non-fatal. Nick died midweek, two and a half weeks after Christmas.

She spoke to three mums sipping takeaway coffees, watching their eyes as they shook their heads in answer to her questions, wondering if one of them or one of their friends were the why Nick had been in the neighbourhood. His phone had been in his bloodied hand, the first four digits of a mobile phone number on the screen. Had he been making a call when he was hit? Did he try to reach someone as he was dying? Was it research? An interview? An affair? A secret child? All Jax knew was that it wasn’t her. Eight weeks since it had happened, she didn’t care if the answer to that mystery cut her wounds to the bone. Because there needed to be a reason her husband was killed. Because not knowing was more than she could bear.

The second house after lunch had a squeaky front gate set in a low sandstone wall that formed the backdrop to prickly roses and a clipped box hedge.

‘Give it a good nudge before you come up,’ a voice called.

It came from somewhere along a tiled verandah that was bordered with more roses and hedge. Jax found its owner in a bright patch of sunlight on the northern corner: an elderly woman with a neat bob of white hair and a bright-red cardigan sitting at a wrought-iron table. As Jax climbed the two steps onto the terrace, she pushed a smile onto her face and said, ‘That looks like a lovely spot to sit on a cool afternoon.’

‘It’s been my cosy corner for more than fifty years. I’d be lost without it. How can I help you, dear?’ She smiled up at Jax with watery eyes and not a hint of suspicion about the stranger who’d walked onto her property.

‘I’ve been speaking with local residents about the man who was killed on your street two months ago.’ Jax made her way to the table as she talked, noticing a tray laid out with the makings of afternoon tea. At least the woman couldn’t shut a door in Jax’s face. ‘I was wondering if you remember …’

‘Oh yes. I was sitting right down there.’ The woman pointed to another table at the opposite end of her verandah. ‘I was having my morning tea when the poor man was found.’ She pressed a gnarled old hand to her chest. ‘It had been a dreadfully hot night, and I was enjoying the cool breeze. I must have been out here for fifteen minutes, and all the time he was lying on the road only a few doors down.’ Her eyes squeezed tight for a moment. ‘Terrible thing,’ she whispered.

‘Yes, it was.’ Jax glanced away, trying to block the image of Nick lying on the road. ‘Do you remember …’

‘It upset me. It still does. I didn’t like to ask when the police came around, they had so much to deal with already. But …’ She reached out, clasped at Jax’s hand where she was holding the strap of her bag. ‘Is that something you’d know about, dear?’

The warmth of her touch, the unexpected intimacy, made Jax hesitate. An urge to push it away was tempered by a sudden longing to kneel by the old woman’s chair and rest her head in her lap. ‘Know about what?’

‘If he was alive then. If I could have done something. If I hadn’t just sat here with my cup of tea that morning.’

Each sentence was punctuated with a squeeze from the woman’s bony grip, and the emphasis, the reminder that someone had driven into Nick and kept going, made the grief and anger in Jax’s chest stir. She kept her mouth closed in case it threw itself at an old woman.

‘I’m eighty-five, but I could have called an ambulance. I could have made him comfortable, talked to him, been there to hear his last words. It might have been a comfort for him in his last …’ She shook her head again. ‘Or for his family to know what he was thinking. Going like that, they must … Oh, my dear, I’ve upset you.’

‘No, it’s okay.’ Jax knuckled away the tear on her cheek, not aware until the woman reacted that her emotion had spilled over. There were so many ways to cry, she’d discovered. Silent and numb was just one of them. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been feeling bad about that.’

Jax turned her hand and closed her fingers around the gnarled ones still gripping hers, comforted that someone had wanted to