Chapter Three

Rory

NO ONE

Performed by Aly & AJ

My first stop on returning to Cherry Bay was the police department. The building was several hundred years old, sitting at the edge of Main Street and butting up against the acres of green that made up the Bonnin University campus. Even after it had been retrofitted multiple times, the station still had a moody, Gothic vibe with its original stone, brick, and iron mixing in with high-tech cameras, computers, and bulletproof glass.

Harriet sat at the front desk where she'd been for as long as I could remember. Her dark hair was cropped short. She had a lean, toned frame and dark eyes in a narrow face. One of Mom's best friends and the department's dispatcher, Harriet was the first to know everything that happened in town. It tugged hard on my heart that she might have been hiding the truth from me.

"Look at what the cat dragged in," she said with a smile that faded once she saw my glower. "Is it Hallie?"

"Not in the way you're thinking," I said, and relief coasted over her face. I felt a twinge of guilt before I demanded, "What the hell, Harriet? Her wreck wasn't an accident, and you kept it from me?"

Her eyes widened in surprise. "What? No!"

Her reaction seemed genuine which meant she hadn't known either. My teeth gritted as I headed for the swinging half door that led to the desks in the back. "Where is Baloney-Muloney?"

She shook her head, reaching out to stop me. "Muloney isn't here, Rory. He drove to New York to bring his daughter home for Thanksgiving."

My emotions swung back and forth. A part of me wanted to storm into the bullpen, tear up the detective's desk and his computer, and get what I'd come for. Except that wouldn't win me any favors with anyone in the department. It would likely ban me from the precinct forever. The smart course of action was to pull out the Bishop family charm and win him over when he returned. With the way my anger was bubbling and growing, I wasn't sure I'd be able to channel it when he returned.

"When will he be back?"

"Sunday," she said.

Another two days wasted. I was already too far behind on Mom's case. Almost a year too late. Why hadn't I demanded more from him sooner?

"He lied, Harriet. He lied and kept the truth from me. He's lucky I haven't put out a hit on him yet."

"I haven't heard even a whisper of it being anything but an accident. I would have told you." She squeezed my arm again, and we shared a tormented stare before she patted my cheek. "Come to the house on Thanksgiving. Please. I told Kora I wanted you both there. Hallie wouldn't want the two of you sitting alone in a room at the recovery center."

That was the thing no one seemed to understand. My grandmother and I weren't alone. We were with Mom. And I wasn't much for holidays these days. It felt wrong to celebrate while Mom was lying there, but the hope in Harriet's eyes had me swallowing back my automatic no. Instead, I told her I'd talk to Nan about it and said goodbye.

It was a short drive from the station to Shady Lane Rehabilitation and Recovery Center across from the hospital. Both were square buildings built in the fifties, but they'd kept the charm of the town in their stone and plaster facades. Shady Lane was the second facility Mom had been in since the D.C. hospital she'd been airlifted to had kicked her out. Nan and I had moved her here, not only because the staff knew us, but because it didn't require Nan and me to commute in the horrendous beltway traffic. The downside was it cost even more than the last place.

I signed in at the front desk and made my way along the sterile hall to Mom's room. The quiet hum of the machines and the antiseptic smell were almost unnoticeable to me after eleven months of practically living in similar facilities. My grandmother was there, sitting in the same chair she always was, knitting a creation that wouldn't be straight and wouldn't fit right. It was a hobby she'd picked up to fill the long stretches at the side of a hospital bed.

"I was surprised when you weren't here," Nan commented as I strolled in and tossed my helmet onto the loveseat under the room's single window.

Nan's hair used to be as dark as mine but was now mostly white. It was cut close to her head for ease, but it suited her. She was only in her midseventies, but the loss of her parents, her sister, her husband, and now her daughter had aged her in an irreversible way, adding wrinkles that shouldn't have been there.

"Where's the Jeep?" Nan asked, head tilting toward the helmet I'd tossed aside. Technically, the Jeep I'd been borrowing ever since Mom's SUV had been totaled was my grandfather's. Nan had kept it running right along with her green Volkswagen Beetle from the sixties even though she definitely didn't need both vehicles. After twelve years, she still couldn't part with a single piece of him. It was why their closet still held his clothes, and the shed out back of their house held his woodworking tools.

"I had some business to take care of in D.C., and the bike needed to be driven."

I hadn't told Nan I was asking Dad for a loan because she would threaten to sell the cottage again. A home she and Pop had bought in their twenties and was mortgage free, but that she could still barely afford because the property taxes and insurance stretched her meager income.

"You got a new case?"

I nodded. It wasn't a lie. I had Mom's case now.

"How is she today?"

Nan's knitting needles slowed ever so slightly, and she didn't respond right away. When she finally looked up, I saw hopelessness in her eyes. It had been a bad day, and I'd been off on a useless errand.

I went to her, crouching down and surrounding her hands with mine. "What happened?"

"Doctor Huan showed up. She basically said we were wasting time, money, and love holding on to a physical body when Hallie is already gone." Nan choked on the last words, and my anger flared back to life.

How could everyone just give up? I knew the odds. I knew the miracle we were looking for was rare. Mom's lack of eye movement, the lack of any response, and the stupid Glasgow Coma Scale they administered all told us the numbers were not in our favor. But every time I looked at my mother, I felt like she was still there, and I'd read enough stories about people who'd recovered even a year later that I couldn't just remove the life support and let her body die. Not yet. Not when we were still within those miraculous months.

"Screw her, Nan," I said gently. "She doesn't know Mom. She doesn't know us. She has no clue what kind of fighters we Marlowes are."

Nan sniffed, grabbed a tissue from the side table, and dabbed her eyes with it. "You didn't get that fight from the Bishops, that's for sure."

After giving her a weak smile, I winked. "I got my charm from them."

I stood and Nan smiled. "The Marlowe women have been known to make a few siren calls ourselves. You got the best of both families. Which makes me wonder why you haven't been luring any hot bodies to your bed lately."

I laughed and went over to Mom's side, grabbing her cold hand and rubbing it between mine. I didn't answer because I didn't have to. Nan and I had been consumed with Mom's recovery. But even before that, my sex life had been pretty hit or miss. Especially when most of the guys I'd tangled with in high school and college had been overwhelmingly immature. Or maybe it had nothing to do with them but a flash of stormy gray eyes I couldn't forget. Memories of a boy who'd burned himself onto my soul without even knowing it. Without even a single kiss.

A man I'd purposefully ignored since moving back to Cherry Bay.

I wasn't exactly sure why.

Liar , my soul screamed. The harsher truth was that I didn't want him to see me this way. I didn't want him to look at the girl he'd thought could be Veronica-Mars-strong and see her struggling to hold herself together.

I didn't want to be pitied by him. Not him.

I sat on the edge of the bed, moving Mom's legs, massaging them, and doing all the things the physical therapists and nurses had taught us to do. She'd be weak when she eventually came back to us, but she was going to recover. She had to. The Marlowe strength was part of our doggedness. We didn't give up once we set our minds on something.

And it would be a hot day in space before I gave up on the most important person in my life.

***

I spent Friday night and most of Saturday on my laptop in Mom's room, doing what I always did—working on my cases and my classwork.

Normally, whenever Nan wasn't in the room, I talked aloud to Mom because the first doctors we'd seen had said it was important for a coma patient to hear their loved ones' voices. I'd ramble on about the Department of Defense background checks I was running, the cheating partner I was following, or the deadbeat parent I was tracking down for child support. I'd talk about my classes or brag about Nan's latest gardening achievement.

This weekend, my silence hung oppressively in the air.

As I was researching her accident, I didn't want her to relive the trauma if she could hear. The most recent reports insisted she didn't have any brain activity and that nothing I said mattered anymore, but I couldn't believe that because if I did…

I shook my head, concentrating on the final string of code I needed to create a backdoor into the Cherry Bay Police Department's server. I smiled when I got in, covering my tracks as I went, like brushing away footprints in the snow.

There was nothing like the thrill of a good hack in the morning.

If I wanted to, I could tell the department how I'd done it so they'd be protected in the future, and maybe I would. But not until Mom's case was solved.

I rooted around their system, learning the ins and outs, and finally found Mom's file. It was suspiciously thin. I didn't know if it was because Muloney had done a shit job or because Dad had told him to be careful what he put online in case I came looking. Whatever the reason, there was nothing about her car's computer being compromised like Dad had insinuated. The handful of notes were about where the Pathfinder had been towed, the stops she'd made before her trip to Cherry Bay, and people they'd interviewed at those locations. There weren't even photos from the actual accident scene, which raised the hair on the back of my neck. The lack of information made me all the more determined to see Baloney-Muloney when he returned. I wanted photocopies of his handwritten notes and the pictures someone had to have taken.

Turning away from the disappointing search, I pulled up Mom's calendar in our Marlowe & Co. system. There was nothing out of the ordinary for the day of the wreck. She had time blocked for yoga in the morning, a meeting with the DoD about our contract for background checks, and then a client meeting in the afternoon. The only thing that made me raise a brow was that she hadn't referenced a case file for the client meeting. I'd check her physical planner later at home.

Still not prepared to give up, I turned my attention to scouring security footage from the day of the accident. I didn't have video saved from our D.C. condo because I'd wiped the server clear when I'd sold the place, but I did have recordings from our office cams. I was still running security for the wannabe game development company who'd subleased the space from me.

Swiping through the stored files, I found the day of the accident. Mom had worn a black-and-white-checked blazer, a black turtleneck, and dress pants. Formal for her. Likely due to the meeting with the DoD. Her steps were hurried as she headed for the door, but nothing to make me think she was upset. I froze the screen, fingers lingering on her face.

Regret was like a computer virus. It ate away at your insides until nothing was left but spoiled zeros and ones. I wished I'd said something more important that morning. More poignant. More lasting. At least I'd shouted I love you as I'd left. But had she felt the full impact of it? Had she heard how much she truly meant to me?

"I miss you," I whispered, and then instantly felt guilty as my eyes landed on my breathing mother lying in the bed next to me.

I swallowed hard. Were the doctors right? Was she gone already? Were the thousands of dollars Nan and I had spent to get her into Shady Lane and keep her body breathing doing anything? Would she ever open her eyes, register me, and talk to me… say anything so I would have something besides See you at dinner as my last words from her?

Unexpected tears filled my eyes like they had at Dad's office the day before. Nothing gets solved by crying, Rory-girl.

I rubbed my eyes and returned to my hunt for video evidence. Most businesses only kept security cam footage for thirty days unless it was subpoenaed by the authorities. Had the police done that for the places Mom had visited? I'd found none of it on the department's server, so I doubted it. I searched each of the businesses only to be handed more disappointment.

If I'd done this last December, we'd be ahead of the game instead of miles behind.

As the sun sank behind the spirals of the buildings on the Bonnin campus, I kissed Mom's cheek and said, "I love you. Maybe think about waking up, okay? You can hand Dad a healthy dose of fuck-you that would make both of our days."

Then, with a heavy heart, I headed back to the cottage and Nan.

The porch light was shining on two pots of multicolored chrysanthemums that would bloom for a few more days. Nan and Pop's place had always been full of color, almost year-round due to Nan's love of gardening.

The half-timbered style of many of the homes on this side of Cherry Bay reflected the Englishmen who'd built them from plaster, stone, and maple wood that had been on the land before the cherry trees had taken over. Once thatched, Nan's roof was now a bright blue tile, giving it a fairytale quality. The cottage had been remodeled several times over the centuries until it now accommodated three bedrooms, a single bathroom, a spacious kitchen, and a living room.

I parked my bike behind Pop's yellow and rust-colored Jeep inside the detached two-car garage. Nan's Beetle wasn't there. She'd gone to bunco with friends for the first time in months. It was good she was doing something normal, but it also seemed like life was moving on without Mom. Like we were leaving her behind. Giving up.

I gritted my teeth, unlocked the front door, and punched in the alarm code that would have made the CIA happy. I made my way directly to Mom's bedroom which I'd temporarily converted into an office. Once she was better, we'd figure out a new place to do business.

I tossed my things on a chair and went straight to the boxes sitting in the corner. They were Mom's things I hadn't had the heart to unpack yet. It took me two boxes before I came up with her scratched leather day planner. I opened it, and her tight but slightly slanted print caused my heart and throat to squeeze closed. I forced myself to flip the pages until I found the day of her accident. In the two-o'clock slot for the client meeting, she'd written Space Force, Lincoln Memorial in a shorthand code that only she and I knew.

I sat back, drumming my fingers on the pages. I'd closed all the outstanding cases, and we definitely hadn't been working with anyone from the Space Force. Why hadn't she logged it into our case files? She'd been nervous enough to use our shorthand code instead of writing it out. Unease filled me. Was this what had caused someone to mess with her car's computer? Had the person she'd met done it, or had someone hacked their way in? There were only a couple of ways to get into a car's systems—the easiest through the online navigation or by attaching a device to the car's computer directly. If it had been the latter, the evidence was probably gone. Crushed with the totaled car at the junkyard.

Irritation and impotence whirled through me. Had Dad checked it out before the car had been picked clean and then destroyed?

I turned toward the window and the quiet street outside, searching for peace or answers or a wormhole into the past. The lantern-shaped streetlights barely shimmered through the fog that had rolled in from the Potomac River.

What the hell did Dad and Detective Muloney have that proved it hadn't been an accident? And why hadn't they been able to find out more in the eleven months since? For all his faults, Dad was damn good at his job, so if he didn't have more, it was either because he wasn't inclined to go looking, or it was hidden deep. Neither was an answer I liked.

I looked down at the day planner again, absentmindedly flipping pages until it fell open to a month before her accident. More coded notes, but this wasn't our normal one. A stab of pain slid through me as I realized she hadn't wanted me to be able to read it either. That stung more than anything Dad had said to me yesterday.

On the other side of the page, she'd drawn an icon of some sort. It almost looked like the Avenger symbol, except instead of an A and an arrow, there was an A and an S with a zig-zagged line inside the circle. I snapped a picture, loaded it into a search engine, and went down a rabbit hole trying to find anything that looked like it.

My phone rang, and I glanced down, tempted to ignore it, but then guilt ran through me. My best friend had left me several messages over the last two days, and I hadn't returned them. Instead, as often happened when I was on a case, I'd lost sight of anything but the trail I was following.

"Hey! I was going to call you."

Shay snorted. "Liar." But there was no malice to it. Not anger or frustration either. She was exactly the forgiving angel she'd always been. "I need my wingwoman tonight."

I groaned internally. "Shay—"

"Please. You know I have a good feeling about this one. But…"

She didn't trust herself. Not after the last cheating bastard who'd stomped all over her heart and then had the audacity to say it was her fault.

"Where am I meeting you?"

She hesitated, and I knew what she was going to say before it even escaped her lips. "I know you've been avoiding it…him… But I didn't want to make it feel like a date, so I agreed to meet up with Devlin and his friend at The Prince Darian."

I didn't know which part of her statement elicited more twists and turns in my chest—where she wanted to go or the fact that it would be a foursome.

"He's bringing a friend?"

"I promise I'm not trying to set you up."

"Two couples in a bar on a Saturday night… definitely not at all date-like."

She chuckled. "This is just Devlin and me trying to get a feel for each other without Dad hovering around us at the café."

Devlin was new to town and the campus, carrying his newly appointed associate professor's title like a badge. His visits to the Tea Spot where Shay worked for her dad while going to college had increased until the guy was practically eating every meal there. She'd begged me not to go all "Rory" on him, but I'd still done the basic search. Enough to know he didn't have any priors and no complaints had been filed against him at his last college.

"What time are we doing this?" I asked, and my friend literally squealed. It simultaneously made me feel worse for neglecting her and made me smile.

"If you'd answered my texts, you would've had more time. They're meeting us in thirty minutes."

I put a hand to my messy ponytail, flattened from wearing a helmet, and then rubbed my makeup-free cheeks. I didn't need to look in a mirror to know they were pale and lifeless and that my eyes were shadowed after months of tossing and turning instead of sleeping. This was certainly not the way I wanted to stroll into the tavern for the first time in years. Definitely not how I wanted him to see me for the first time in years.

"I look like I've been on a stakeout."

"Come over. I'll have you fixed up in ten minutes."

The debate within me was strong. But I couldn't abandon Shay. Not again. So, I hung up, grabbed the keys to Pop's Jeep, and left a note for Nan before walking out the door. The Jeep smelled like oil and ancient vinyl. Like salt and sea and rust. The scent was one more reminder of things I'd lost. A grandfather who'd been one of the only people in my life to truly spoil me. He'd been gone two years before Mom and I had moved in with Nan the first time. We had stayed barely a year, but those months had branded themselves on my soul just like a certain gray-eyed boy once had.

A gray-eyed boy I wasn't prepared to see again.

I wasn't ready to walk into The Prince Darian.

But I'd do it because Veronica Mars's words were true. The people who really deserved your time, faith, and love were the ones who came through even when you hadn't loved them enough. And that was Shay for me. I'd always been more caught up in my tragedies than hers. So, if she needed me, I'd be there.

If that meant seeing Gage Palmer for the first time in seven years, I'd just have to take the hit and hope I could get up and walk away when it was over.