Chapter 13

A knock at my door woke me the next day.

I stirred in bed and immediately regretted it; my right side felt like it was one long, fresh bruise, and my head pounded in sympathy. After a few groans and moans, I said, “Go away. I’m dying.”

“It’s one in the afternoon,” Indira said. “Get up, or I’m taking you to the hospital.”

The room was full of dreary light, and a drizzle trickled down the windows; another coastal day of dirty-laundry clouds and cat-spit rain. I pulled the covers over my head, even though at that point it was mostly to make myself feel better. “Empty threat. You don’t have a car.”

“I’ll ask Fox.”

DRAGON MUST, I thought. Or musk. Whichever was worse.

“I’ll lock the door.”

“Fine,” Indira said. “I guess Keme will have to eat the rest of the lemon-ricotta pancakes by himself.”

I refused to respond to the injustice and outrage and general unfairness of that statement.

“Did I mention they have blueberries?” Indira said.

“One day you’re going to be like me, dying in your bed,” I said, “and then it will be my turn to torture you.”

Her voice was already drifting away as she said, “I’ll whip the mascarpone then.”

After dragging my sorry, grass-and-weed-and-ooze speckled behind back to Hemlock House the night before, I’d showered and gone straight to bed. Not straight to sleep, though. I’d lain there, remembering the hot, foul air of the car rushing past me, remembering the cold blaze of the headlights, and how I’d stood there, frozen. Now I knew how deer felt—there was something paralyzing about all that steel and fiberglass rushing toward you. When I’d finally fallen asleep, my dreams had been formless, shapeless, dark places dripping with fog where I ran, even though I didn’t know what I was running from.

Now, as ancient pipes glugged and clanked, I rinsed off quickly under a spray of hot water and wondered if it had been Cole in the car last night. He’d seen me at the house; that’s what he’d said in the text. And last night, the way he’d acted, and Jodi’s death, and the paternity test he’d burned in the fire pit—well, none of it sat right with me. But did I think that Cole, with his puppyish blend of adorable helplessness, was a killer? That he could kill not only his own brother, but also his grandmother, and then try to kill me?

I wanted to say no, but I still didn’t have an answer by the time I’d dried myself off and gotten dressed.

When I got to the servants’ dining room, Indira had laid out a place for me. Hot, fresh pancakes waited on the plate (lemon-ricotta with blueberry, and a mountain of whipped mascarpone on the side, plus some bonus blueberries for garnish).

There was no Keme in sight.

“Hey,” I said.

“Needs must,” Indira said with a smile. She poured each of us coffee from the carafe. “You had a hard night, I hear.”

I paused with the fork halfway to my mouth. And then I said, “Indira, you know you don’t have to do this, right? Cook stuff for me, and set the table, all that. I mean, I know we’re in a weird position because of how things ended with Vivienne, but you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want—no cooking required. This was your home before it was mine.”

Her eyebrows went up. She touched that white, witch’s lock of hair and brushed it to the side. And then, in a voice I couldn’t decipher, she said, “That’s kind of you. Thank you. I enjoy cooking. And I enjoy doing things for my friends. And—” She stopped and cocked her head, and a funny smile crossed her face. “Why don’t we agree that I’m a grown woman, and I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do?”

“Okay. But you don’t have to.”

“Do you want me to stop cooking?”

“God, no. Please. I’d starve to death. Keme too. And probably Fox, since they steal half our food.”

Indira’s smile looked closer to the real thing this time. “Eat your pancakes before they get cold.”

They were amazing, by the way. And the whipped mascarpone? Chef’s kiss.

“Millie said—” Indira began.

I groaned around a mouthful of fluffy deliciousness.

With a hint of amusement in her voice, Indira continued, “—there was an episode at the Otter Slide.”

“How?” I asked. “How is she always literally the first person in this town to know everything?”

“Have you met Millie?”

“Point taken.” I forked some more pancakes and hesitated. “Where’s Hugo?”

“He went into town to pick up his rental car. He said something about getting some supplies.”

I grimaced and ate the next few bites in silence. And then, as I murdered those pancakes, I told Indira everything: Cole and Jodi, the paternity test, Keme sending the photos to Deputy Bobby, Deputy Bobby’s drunken questioning, the argument with Hugo, and the car that had tried to hit me. The only thing I left out was what had happened when I took Deputy Bobby home. In part because I knew if I told her, I’d spontaneously combust out of sheer humiliation. And in part because Deputy Bobby hadn’t known what he was doing or saying, and whatever he was struggling with, it wasn’t my place to share it.

“You realize Cole might have murdered his grandmother,” Indira said.

“But he’s…he’s not a murderer. I don’t know how else to say it. He’s confused. He’s lost. I mean, you take one look at him, and he’s like a poster child for kids who grow up having everything handed to him. He doesn’t have any purpose in life, doesn’t have any healthy relationships, doesn’t know how to take care of himself.” I almost said what I’d been thinking since that first date with Cole: that I understood, in part, what it was like to have parents whose lives revolved around something other than you. In a lot of ways, Cole and I were different, but I understood that part at least. “He doesn’t care about the money. Honestly, I think he’d be happier if he could convince himself to walk away from all of it.”

Indira nodded, but she said, “That’s the problem, though. Many people know—or believe—they’d be happier without something. But that doesn’t mean they’re ready to let go of it. In fact, those same people will often fight to keep things the way they are, because people are creatures of habit and routine, and change terrifies them. Cole was facing a lot of change. He might have felt like his twin was abandoning him—in more ways than one. That could have prompted an argument. And you told us that Mason and Cole had a history of arguments, fighting, that kind of thing.”

“They didn’t have a history of murdering each other,” I grumbled.

Indira put her chin in her hand.

“Retracted,” I said around a mouthful of blueberry and mascarpone.

“On top of that, it sounds like Jodi was considering changing the trust. For all of Cole’s complaints about money, that might have terrified him—the money was his safety net.” Indira paused as though weighing her next words. “Particularly if he needed it to continue his substance abuse.”

“So, you think he did kill them. And he tried to kill me.”

“I think you shouldn’t close your eyes to the possibility. But about that car last night—could it have been a drunk driver? Or a distracted driver?”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen that before. They drive too slow. Then they speed up. They weave back and forth, or the car drifts, that kind of thing. This wasn’t that. Whoever was driving that car knew exactly what they were doing, and they wanted to kill me.”

Indira’s brow furrowed. In a distracted voice, she asked, “If not Cole, then who?”

“God, any of them. Penny has been acting strange from the beginning. She hated Mason; she made that clear when she attacked him at the Otter Slide. And she wanted something from Mason’s room.”

“The paternity test results.”

I nodded. “Or something she could use for another paternity test—I think that’s why she was looking through his toiletry kit, like she might find hair on his hairbrush, that kind of thing. Let’s say she found it and went to Jodi, and they argued—I mean, Jodi seemed pretty keen on the whole marriage and family thing. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of a financial obligation to an illegitimate child.”

Indira made a pained face. “Dash, Mason isn’t the only possible candidate. Cole might be the father. Or, for that matter, Gary.”

“Becky and Gary are toxic,” I said. “But do you think they’re that bad?”

“Do you? You’ve been around them. Do you think they could kill their own child?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe not on purpose—that was the sheriff’s theory, remember? It was an argument that got out of hand. It’s not hard to imagine Becky or Gary getting in Mason’s face, picking a fight about the money, and then a push, a shove, it’s a tragic accident.”

“But killing Jodi would have been something else,” Indira said. “Cold-blooded murder. Because she was going to change the trust.”

“You should have heard Becky,” I said. “Her voice when she and Jodi were arguing. She was so angry. She believes that money should be hers—like, she earned it by putting up with Jodi for this long.”

“Or Gary,” Indira said, “because his wife’s money is his money.”

“I don’t know if Becky feels that way, but yeah, something like that.”

Neither of us said anything. I still couldn’t shake the twin thing; it seemed like it had to matter that Mason and Cole were twins, but I couldn’t make it work. In one of Vivienne’s books, the plot had centered on a long-lost twin. Maybe there was a long-lost triplet, but that seemed like a stretch, and nothing better came to me. The pancakes had long since been demolished, and the mascarpone was gone, and I scraped the fork across the empty plate, filling the air with its soft screech.

“Are you all right?” Indira asked softly.

“I’m fine. Well, no, actually. I’m not. I’m angry. I’m angry at whoever tried to kill me last night. I’m angry that I’m caught up in this mess. I’m angry at Hugo, even though I know it’s not his fault.” I stopped. “I didn’t know—I mean, what he said last night—that’s not how I remember it at all.”

“That’s usually how it is,” Indira said, and although her voice was dry, there was a hint of compassion in it too. “The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, Dash.”

“I guess.” I heaved a breath. “Is it weird that I’m even mad at Deputy Bobby? I mean, I know he’d had too much to drink. And I know he was upset. But he was asking some personal questions, and it put me on the spot, and it put Hugo on the spot, and it made me feel…awful.” And even though I couldn’t say the rest of this to Indira, I was mad at him because of how his hand had felt on my nape, of the reminder of what it had been like to be touched, to have a man run his fingers through my hair, to not feel so lonely. I was mad that he’d come so close to kissing me, if that’s what it had been. (In the clear light of day, it seemed even less likely.) And I was mad, if I was being honest with myself, that he hadn’t kissed me. Although I definitely didn’t want to inspect that particular packet of crazy too closely.

Indira’s words broke through my thoughts. “Did you consider that maybe he wasn’t asking about you and Hugo?”

“Oh, he definitely wanted to know about me and Hugo. What did you do wrong? Why didn’t you fix it? What could you have done better? I don’t know, Bobby. I screwed up. I’m hard to be with. In emotional geography, I’m Antarctica, and none of this is Hugo’s fault because I’m terrible at relationships and he deserves someone better.”

“Dash,” Indira said.

It wasn’t a reproach, not exactly. If anything, she sounded kind. But I heard what she hadn’t said—like she was shaking some sense into me. My cheeks heated, and I said, “Sorry.”

“It’s all right; we’re all allowed to feel sorry for ourselves. Just not too much.” She paused and said, “I meant, did you consider that Bobby was trying to ask you about him and West?”

The fork clattered against my plate. I looked up.

“Oh dear,” Indira murmured. “You are bad at this.”

“Hey!” And then, slightly more cogently: “I didn’t—but he didn’t—but nobody said—” And then, in a burst of eloquence, “Who told you they were having problems?”

She looked at me.

“Okay,” I said with a tiny laugh. “Small town plus Millie. Got it.”

“Not Millie, dear. I’ve got eyes. I’ve got a brain. They’ve been together almost as long as Bobby has lived here, and they’re both lovely young men. But it doesn’t take a genius to start putting things together when Bobby drops by Hemlock House after a shift, or he spends a free afternoon here, or he invites you hiking on the weekends.”

My face felt like it was on fire. “Deputy Bobby and I—”

“Dash,” she said, and I stopped. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot. That’s not the point. What I’m trying to tell you is that you did something remarkably brave: you were unhappy in a relationship, and instead of staying there, instead of choosing what was safe and familiar, you decided to fight for your happiness. Even though it was scary. Even though—and I’m speaking from personal experience—it’s terrifying to leave the things that are comfortable and secure, no matter how unhappy you are. And Bobby is unhappy, Dash. I’ve never known him, in all the time since he moved here, to drink to excess. I don’t know if he’s unhappy with West because they’re not the right match or if he’s unhappy because they’re going through a rough patch—those things happen. Everything might straighten itself out in a day or a week, and they’ll be back to normal. But I don’t think Bobby was asking about you and Hugo last night. I think he was asking you to help him because he’s hurting and he’s scared and he doesn’t know what to do.”

“But he’s Deputy Bobby!” As soon as I heard my words, I flushed. I tried to think of how to say it differently, but the only thing I could come up with was: He’s Deputy Bobby. And then I remembered how he’d looked last night. Those lost eyes.

Indira must have taken pity on me because she said, “I know. But he’s also a human being. And he’s confused. And, I imagine, right now he feels very much alone.”

I picked up my fork and spun the tines against the plate again. The chiming was shrill, and I stopped.

“All I’m saying,” Indira said, and she reached across the table to squeeze my hand, “is don’t judge him too harshly.”

My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out to look at it. Cole’s name showed on the screen.

“Oh my God,” I said and showed her the screen.

“You don’t have to take it,” Indira said, “if you don’t want to.”

I nodded. But then I answered.

“Dash?” Cole asked. His voice was gravelly, and instead of the easygoing animation I remembered, he sounded subdued.

“Hi, Cole.”

Silence was broken by a rasping sound that I thought, at first, was the wind. Then I realized it was his unsteady breaths. “Can we talk?”

“We’re talking right now.”

His laugh was short, and it went through me like an electric charge. “I guess I deserve that. I mean in person.” More of those harsh breaths came across the call. “I need to talk to someone.”

Outside, the crows that nested in the sea cliffs began to caw.

“I’m sorry about those texts last night,” he said, his voice even lower now. He was hard to hear over the noise of the birds. “I was in a bad place, but I shouldn’t have messaged you like that.”

What about trying to run me over with your car, I wanted to ask.

“I didn’t stand you up,” he said.

“What?”

“Dinner. I didn’t stand you up. That’s why you came to the house, right? I fell asleep, and when I woke up, everybody was gone.”

“Cole—”

“I couldn’t find my phone. I looked everywhere. Then I saw my grandma—” His voice broke. It felt like a long time before he said, “You know, right?”

“I’m sorry, Cole.”

“Yeah. Me too.” In the distance, the crows were going wild again. “I didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

He laughed. “Come on, I know how it looked. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I didn’t kill her or Mason. I never would have hurt either of them.”

“I believe you.”

“No, you don’t. But I can prove it.” His breathing got a little faster. “I found something.”

“What?”

“I want to show you. I want to see if you think the same thing I do.”

Well, I thought, if that didn’t sound like a trap, I wasn’t sure what would.

“I guess I could come by your house—”

“No!” The word was sharp, and it sounded like it took a lot to buckle his voice down again when he said, “No, not the house. I’m never going back there again.”

“If you have evidence, this is a conversation for the sheriff.”

“No way. Not a chance. You saw how they handled things so far. They want to make me look guilty.”

“What does that mean?”

After several seconds of silence, he asked, “Have you ever been to Klikamuks?”

“Yeah, a few times. Hiking.” Okay, more like enthusiastic walking, but that wasn’t something to quibble about with a potential killer.

“You know the first lookout?”

“Cole, I don’t think—”

“I know. I promise I’d never hurt you, but—” His laugh set my teeth on edge. “—I know you can’t trust me. I’ll be at Klikamuks for an hour, and then I’m leaving. If you want to help your friend…”

Into the silence that came after, I said, “I’ll think about it.”

“One hour, Dash.”

Then he disconnected.

“Call the sheriff,” Indira said.

“You heard him: he’s not going to talk to the sheriff.”

“Well, you can’t go alone.”

“I’m not taking Keme,” I said. “He’s way too protective, and he has a seventeen-year-old’s total faith that he’s untouchable. And Cole would hear Millie from a mile away.”

“I’ll go,” Indira said, setting her coffee down firmly. “You’re not going by yourself.”

“I don’t even know if I’m going at all.”

With a sniff, Indira began collecting my plate, the cups and saucers, the utensils. “Shoes and socks, dear. We only have an hour.” And then, voice brightening, “I’ll get my gun.”

“Oh my God, do not do that.”

“Shoes, Dashiell.”

“Why do you have a gun in the first place?”

“And socks. Quickly.”

And before I could reply, she carried the dishes into the kitchen.

As I trotted upstairs, my phone rang again. It was Deputy Bobby. I stared at the phone as it rang. And rang. And rang. And then, somehow, I managed to answer it.

“Uh, hi.”

My throat locked up, and I couldn’t get anything out.

A few long moments followed. In a voice that on anybody else I would have called sheepish, he mumbled, “I wasn’t sure you’d answer.”

For some reason, that made everything easy again. “Of course I answered.”

“I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk to me.”

“I’ll always want to talk to you.”

More of that silence. They did taffy-pulling in some of the artisan candy shops in Hastings Rock, and it was like that: drawn-out, slippery, lissome moments getting longer and longer.

In a tone somewhere between disbelief and scandal, he blurted, “Did you put a blanket over me?”

A laugh eased out of me. “I didn’t want you to get cold.”

Deputy Bobby groaned.

“The good part was that you had your nose in the cushions and your bum in the air.”

“Oh my God,” he breathed.

I laughed again. “It’s okay. Believe it or not, it happens to the best of us.”

He groaned again, but his voice was a little stronger when he said, “I need you to be honest with me: how bad was it?”

“Uh, not very?”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Light to medium bad.”

“Light to medium? Are you for real? What happened to ‘not very?’”

The giggles caught up with me as I grabbed a pair of socks from the tallboy.

“Light to medium is a huge range,” Deputy Bobby said.

“Stop being a baby,” I said. And then, a little more carefully, “Are you okay?”

“I guess.”

“You’re hungover.”

“I honestly think I’m going to die. I haven’t felt like this since college. Since I was a freshman, to be specific.”

“Deputy Bobby was responsible even in college,” I said. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“I don’t know if I’d go so far as responsible.” His voice was dry, but it had a funny little edge. “My parents certainly wouldn’t say that.”

That seemed like too big a fish to fry for this particular conversation, so I said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” But a moment later, he said, “I’ve been going through some stuff, I guess. But that’s not an excuse for how I acted last night.”

“You had a little too much to drink. You didn’t burn down an orphanage.”

“Light-to-medium bad, remember? It’s kind of blurry, but I get the feeling I might have made you—” He stopped. “If I did anything out of line, I mean.”

The weight of him in my arms. His hand on the back of my neck. The way his lips had parted.

His voice shattered the memory. “I kind of remember, uh, asking questions that were definitely none of my business.” He waited, as though that, in itself, had been a kind of question. And then he said, “Anyway, I’m sorry. And I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“I want you to be happy.” The words exploded out of me before I could reconsider them. “You know that, right?”

He didn’t say anything, but his breath had a strange hitch in it, almost like a laugh.

“I should have said that last night,” I said; the explosion kept, uh, exploding. “There are a lot of things I should have said last night. Hugo and I didn’t work because I wasn’t in love with him. And I don’t know what you’re going through, Bobby. I don’t know what you’re dealing with, or what you’re trying to figure out. But there wasn’t anything Hugo and I could have done differently. There wasn’t anything we could have done to fix things. I made a mistake, thinking that something that was good enough was what I wanted. And that wasn’t fair to me or to Hugo. I wanted you to hear that.”

He didn’t say anything, but his breathing sounded thick and wet.

“And you are an amazing person,” I said. “You deserve to be happy. You don’t have to settle; you owe yourself more than that. And even though change is scary, well, that’s why you have friends. That’s why you have people who—” I stumbled. I almost said, People who love you. At the last moment, I managed to change it into “—people who care about you. Because we’ll be here. And we’ll help you. I wish someone had told me that. I wish someone had told me that it doesn’t matter if everyone in the world thinks you’re happy, if everyone in the world thinks you’ve got the perfect life, if everyone tells you what a perfect couple you are. You have to be true to yourself; it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

When I finished, I gulped in air. I felt like I’d run a marathon. (Full disclosure: I have never and will never run a marathon.) I wiped sweat from my forehead. I tried to swallow my heart. I considered the fact that, when I was trying my absolute hardest to help someone I cared about, I sounded like the slogan for an inspirational yogurt. You have to be true to yourself. Inspirational yogurt was probably setting the bar too high. Inspirational fabric softener, maybe.

Deputy Bobby spoke, and his voice was rough, and it had that funny little edge again, the one I’d heard a few moments before. “Doesn’t it, though?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

He was silent for a long time, but his breathing was there: labored and deep. Finally, he said, “I should—”

“I’m going to meet Cole Meadows in a murder place. And it’s entirely possible he’s going to kill me. Well, try to. Ideally, he won’t actually kill me.”

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—

“What?”

It was more of a shout than a word. I moved the phone away from my blown eardrum and switched it to the other side. “Uh, which part?”

Deputy Bobby had told me any number of times that he thought being called Deputy Bobby made him sound like a character in a kids’ show. Right then, he said a lot of words that, if he had been on a kids’ show, would have required an emergency cut to commercial.

“I understand you’re upset,” I said.

Another quick cut to commercial.

“But,” I said when I had an opening, “I’m going to be super safe. Indira is coming, and she has a gun.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you do this to me?”

“Well—”

“You realize I’m hungover, right?”

“Right, but see—”

“Where are you meeting him?”

“Klikamuks,” I said, “but—”

“So help me God, Dashiell, if you set one foot past the parking lot, I will murder you myself.”

“That’s not very supportive.”

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes, yeah, I got it.”

He grumbled something that would not have made it past the public television censors.

I opened my mouth—hoping for some more inspirational, yogurty wisdom.

“I can’t have one day to lie around and feel sorry for myself,” Deputy Bobby said. “Next time you get into the gimlets, I’m going to drag you out of bed the next morning and make you run a five-k.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“All hills,” he said grimly. “There’s going to be so much puking.”

And with that disturbing image, he disconnected.

I thought it was an empty threat. Probably. Likely. Although Deputy Bobby wasn’t given to empty threats. Or empty promises. In fact, Deputy Bobby had a terrifying propensity for doing exactly what he said he was going to do, every time, without fail. I’d seen an infomercial the other night about an old lady who fell asleep in her chair and used a can of hornet spray to ward off a burglar (no, to answer your question, I still have no idea what they were selling). I was starting to think I should invest in hornet spray.

As I went downstairs, a knock came at the front door. I stepped into the hall to see Indira peering through the glass. She glanced at me and waved frantically for me to go back and mouthed, The sheriff.

We both knew what that meant—as soon as Keme had sent those pictures to Deputy Bobby and Deputy Bobby oh-so-dutifully forwarded them to the sheriff, there’d been a countdown running. It had only been a matter of time before the sheriff came to interrogate—uh, interview me about the night Jodi died. And, in the process, possibly arrest me for interfering in her investigation.

Indecision twisted Indira’s face, so I whispered, “Deputy Bobby’s meeting me there.”

With a nod, Indira waved for me to go.

As I slipped into the servants’ dining room, I heard the front door open.

“Hello, Indira,” the sheriff said. “I’d like to talk to Mr. Dane. I understand an ‘anonymous’ source was at the Gauthier-Meadowses’ home last night.”

I almost stayed to quibble about the pettiness of the air quotes, but instead, I sprinted across the servants’ dining room and let myself out the door, and then I cut across the back of the house. The lawn gave way to the sea cliffs and the twisted, tangled hemlocks that gave the house its name, but I went as quickly as I could—well, as quickly as I dared, anyway. It only took me a couple of minutes to reach the coach house, and I sent up a silent prayer as the overhead door clattered on its track that Indira could keep the sheriff occupied for a few more minutes. As soon as I could clear the opening, I eased the Jeep forward and started for my meeting with Cole.