33. Elijah

Idrove to the Beaumont estate as soon as I left Adrian, stopping first to pick up a few supplies and tools. There'd been no updates on Luke from Ripley, and the only other message I had was an extremely terse voicemail from Foster, reminding me to stay home and keep my head down.

I deleted it.

Outside the estate, I triple-checked the calendar we used to keep track of everyone's whereabouts. Confirmed that Celine, Luke's stepmother, was off on a trip somewhere and her security team was with her. The rest of the team had been rotated off the estate for the time being. I was able to slip in through the back, thanks to one of the estate staff, who brightened when she saw me and let me in immediately.

All of it was a stroke of luck I couldn't take for granted. I was about to turn Lincoln Beaumont's office inside out, an act that wouldn't go unnoticed for long.

Once inside, I pushed back my body's immediate reaction to Luke's lingering scent in the air. The sweatshirt he'd tossed over an armchair. An extra pair of sandals. Nora's book, Mayhem at Montauk Point, open face down on the page he'd left off.

Even the couch still bore the imprint of his body.

I shut the curtains and flipped on all the lights. Stripped away the emotion brimming over in this room and tried to examine it from a fresh perspective. It was true I often stood outside in the hallway when Lincoln worked in here, but I still spent more time here than almost anywhere else in the world. Except Luke had already spent countless hours doing exactly what I was about to do—evidenced by the overturned chairs, the piles of paper on the floor, the flipped-over shelves.

Which meant I had to go even deeper.

I tried to picture Luke's dad here—where did he stand? What parts of the room did he favor? My eyes roamed over to the empty spots on the wall where the hunting paintings had hung, the ones Luke had dispatched to a closet. I hauled them back out, then removed every painting in the room. Checked the backs of the canvases. Tapped on the walls in the spots where they hung, listening for hollow sounds. Found the loose floorboard under the desk and discovered Lincoln's collection of illicit gifts for various mistresses.

I searched the fireplace. Tested the bricks in the mantel. Pulled out books on the bookcase and opened them. After three hours, the office looked like a tornado had ripped through it, which didn't help my mounting panic. So when the office door creaked open, I was so focused that I dropped the ashtray I'd been holding. It broke cleanly in half.

Nora Jackson stepped through—palms out. "Elijah? Luke's bodyguard, right? I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

She walked over to pick up the broken ashtray, but I waved her away. "It's fine. It's not important."

She gave a sheepish smile, then raised the stack of books in her hand. "If it helps, I come bearing gifts. Is Luke around? I found some first editions of Death on the Dunes and a few other of my novels, thought he might appreciate them."

My stomach hollowed with grief. "He's…Luke's not here. He was kidnapped yesterday morning. No leads or ransom note so far."

"Oh my god," she said, her hand rising to her throat. "Elijah, that's horrifying. Someone took him?"

I nodded, my chest aching with emotion. Nora set the books down on the desk and leaned against it, a dazed expression on her face. "I'm so sorry to hear this. You must be worried sick."

I waited a beat, then said, "Did you know Clarence Craven had been feuding with Lincoln Beaumont for three decades? He didn't mention it when he met Luke at the protest."

She blinked. "Clarence? He was no fan of Lincoln's, that's for sure. I had no idea he personally knew him." When she noticed the look on my face, she said, "You can't possibly think Clarence is responsible?"

"Can't rule it out."

She pursed her lips. "If it helps, Clarence has been gone the past few days, down in Philly visiting some activist friends of his. He left on Sunday, got out of here right before the storm hit."

I sagged back against the wall. The timeline did fit—his house had been empty the day before Luke was kidnapped and the day after.

"And besides, Clarence's focus from an activist standpoint these days has been on the systems of inequality in this country, not on the individual. Kidnapping Lincoln's son doesn't help the cause from that standpoint," Nora continued. "It's why he wanted to help with the Sunrise Village protests. Prioritizing luxury housing over affordable housing is a choice we make, whether that's from our elected leaders or from men like Lincoln, whose wealth and influence means they can change the landscape of a community whether we like it or not. Deciding which of our neighborhoods have well-lit streets is a choice. Deciding who goes hungry and who doesn't is a choice. Who has rights and who doesn't, who feels safe and who feels fear, who thrives and who struggles."

I sighed again, rubbing my hand across the back of my neck. "Like you told Luke that day. He has a choice too, a responsibility." I nodded at the stack of books she'd brought. "That was nice of you to do, given that Luke is technically your enemy right now."

"Luke's been sending us pizza every day and blocking TBG's construction. He's not our enemy, not really, especially once he gets out of his own way and sees the good he can do."

Nora placed her hand on top of Luke's copy of Mayhem at Montauk Point with a fond expression, like bumping into an old friend she hadn't seen in a while.

"That's the one where the villain was loosely based off of Lincoln?" I asked.

Her smile was playful. "Indeed. Though the character itself wasn't a greedy property developer but something much worse. A corrupt politician."

Sparks danced through my thoughts, like small threads connecting. "What's your opinion on Senator Rosamund Wallace?"

Her entire body rippled with anger. "Violence is a choice too. Some of it obvious, bloody. Some of it much more subtle. It dresses up in fancy clothes and pretends to be on your side, pretends to care about your concerns when it's really only out for itself. Senator Wallace never cared about this town, never cared about the South Shore. We were a means to an end for her."

"You're talking about when she first ran for mayor?"

She drummed her nails on the spine of her book. "Funny thing about Rosamund. She won in a tight race, narrowly defeating a popular grassroots candidate, when a slew of public endorsements for her came through, from elected officials on both sides of the aisle. A whole bunch of positive media from the local papers sprang up too, articles that positioned Rosamund as someone who'd fight for our schools, our workers, every inch of this precious, beautiful land. It worked. She won in the end, but I'm not the only Cape Avalon resident who found her last-minute popularity suspect."

Clarita's words about Lincoln came back to me from that day on the beach. Your father owned every secret in the Hamptons, and he wasn't that private about it. He traded in information. Valuable information. The kind worth more than money.

I stiffened as a new theory blazed through my brain. Luke had wondered if Lincoln and the senator had worked together to blackmail influential people.

Now I was wondering if the senator was being blackmailed…by Lincoln.

Nora must have noticed the expression on my face, because she chuckled softly, then pressed Mayhem at Montauk Point into my hand. "If you need anything, call on us down at Sunrise Village. Regardless of who his father is, there are a lot of people who love Luke. More than he probably realizes."

My throat tightened. "What if I can't save him?"

"You'll bring him home, Elijah," she said, patting my hand. "Take it from a mystery author. The only good thing about villains is they can't stay hidden forever."

After she left, I stood in the middle of the torn-up office and tried to figure out what I'd missed. That's when I caught the flash of something sparkling in the middle of the rug. When I bent to pick it up, it nicked my skin.

It was a tiny shard of glass, the same color as the glass from the chandelier that had lurched from the ceiling, narrowly missing Luke, and shattered across the floor. The contractor had carted everything away after, claiming it was just an unlucky accident. An undetected leak, he'd said, causing the wood to weaken.

The panel where the chandelier hung was still there. I grabbed a screwdriver and dragged over a chair, feeling my heart race with every twist of the tool. The panel popped open and then I was staring into a bunch of disconnected wires. Tentatively, I turned on my phone flashlight and slipped my hand inside, splaying my fingers forward.

They closed around something small and rectangular.

When I brought it out into the light, it was a flash drive.