“Not there!” Emma told her.
She wrapped her cold fingers around Sydney’s wrist and pulled her down to her knees on the gravel.
Then Emma pointed up under the car, near the left front wheel. “Look up there!”
Sydney scrunched down and squinted up at the car.
A long metal tube, not much bigger around than a straw, snaked beneath the wheel well. In the dim light, Sydney could see that it had been sliced clean through.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A brake line,” Emma declared.
“And I checked the one on the other side. It’s cut, too,” Emma declared.
Sydney rose slowly to her feet.
“This wasn’t an accident, Sydney,” Emma told her grimly. “Someone cut the brake lines.”
Sydney gazed at her, horrified. She means Jason, she thought.
Not just someone. Jason!
Stunned and frightened, Sydney turned away and hurried back inside the car.
Emma climbed in beside her and slammed the door. “You see, don’t you?” she asked. “You believe me now? Jason is trying to kill me.”
Sydney’s heart pounded in her chest. She twisted a curl of dark hair around her finger and squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s not true!” she cried. “It can’t be true!”
“Think about it!” Emma insisted. “We find a pile of money. You tell Jason about it. Then he conveniently bumps into me and knocks me down the stairs. So he ‘fixes’ my car to make up for it.”
She laughed bitterly. “He fixed it, all right. Jason fixed it so well, we almost died!”
Sydney wanted to scream at Emma. Scream that she was wrong. Totally wrong.
But she couldn’t say the words. Because maybe, just maybe, Emma was right.
“Jason called me just before I drove over to your house,” she said slowly.
“When I told him you were going to drive us to the mall, he sounded … weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“First, he wanted to know why we were taking your car instead of mine. And then he tried to talk me out of going with you.”
Emma punched the steering wheel. “I knew it! I just knew it!”
“If that’s really what happened, then he was trying to keep me out of this car,” Sydney went on. “Trying to protect me.”
Emma laughed bitterly. “Don’t kid yourself, Syd. A guy who is that greedy won’t share the money with anyone, not even his girlfriend. After he kills me, he’ll decide he wants all the money for himself.”
“You mean you really think he’d try to … kill me next?” Sydney whispered.
Emma nodded “Count on it.”
Sydney stared out the windshield and saw a car cross the intersection. We could have died there, she thought with a shiver. Did Jason sabotage Emma’s car?
She still didn’t believe it. Not totally. But she had to find out. She couldn’t just pretend that nothing had happened!
“Syd?” Emma’s voice broke into Sydney’s thoughts. “What do you think we should do?”
“I’ll talk to Jason,” Sydney replied. “I’ll just ask him to his face.”
Emma snorted. “Oh, sure! And you think he’ll admit it? He’d just deny the whole thing. Put on an innocent expression and lie through his teeth!”
“Then what can we do?” Sydney demanded.