by Lyla Payne
After all, there’s no telling how long we’ll have to talk before Jack wakes up and needs her. No telling how long this reprieve is going to last.
“So, how are things going with Brick?”
“Really good.” Her cheeks go pink.
“I mean…is he a good kisser?”
“Grace!” She swats me with a towel, her face bright red now, but then a smile breaks out. She’s shining, undeniably happy. “But yes. Heavens. Whoo.”
Amelia repurposes the towel to fan her face, and the two of us catch a case of the giggles.
“Well, that’s something. Not that I’m surprised. You two have always had chemistry, even before it was romantic or whatever.” I finish the last dish and put it away. When I turn, intent on pressing her some more, she’s already left the room. I follow her to the couch in the living room, plopping beside her as she peers at the baby monitor. “What’s he doing tomorrow?”
“Apparently Cordelia wants to update her will.”
“Have you two talked about his family? Or, you know. Meeting them?” I venture carefully, not wanting to bring up my own, well-documented issues with not being good enough for Cordelia Drayton’s other son.
Of course, Amelia’s not me.
“You know, we haven’t talked about it much. Meeting each other’s families.” She frowns. “I mean, he’s met my parents, obviously, but they don’t know we’re dating or together or whatever. I think Birdie knows.”
“Beau probably knows, too.” I give her a soft smile, so she knows that it’s okay to talk about him. “They talk a lot, I think.”
“Yeah.” She sends a curious look my direction. “Did you ever answer him?”
I nod. “Just to tell him I got the letter, and that I appreciated it but thought we should stick with the status quo, at least for now.”
“I think that’s for the best.”
“Me, too. I mean, I won’t be able to avoid him forever, not once you and Brick get married and everything…ow.” I rub my nose where she whacked it with a throw pillow. “I’m just saying. I’m okay with it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Her tone is wry, but the smile playing across her lips says it’s something she’s considered, at least in a fanciful sort of way. “How are you doing?”
I start to say fine but stop myself; she’s not talking about ghosts or the murder case or work or even my articles about Henry. She’s talking about Leo. Maybe Beau, though we’ve really said everything there is to say on that topic.
“I’ll be okay, Mill. I miss Leo. Way more than I thought I would, to be honest. It’s like…I pick up my phone to text him twenty times a day. I didn’t even realize we talked that much.”
“You two have been as thick as thieves. And, you know, been actual thieves together. I’m sure you’ll work this out in time.”
“Mel said the same thing.”
“Well, she and I are both very smart.”
“It’s true.”
She smiles, and I smile back, trying to believe that one day Leo and I will be friends again. “Any ideas on Clete?”
I shake my head. It’s only been a couple of days since Big Ern showed up and dropped his mumbled bombshell. Clete’s words have been on my mind. I’ve read the article clipping someone left at the library for me a dozen times, but I’m no closer to a breakthrough.
“No. Ern thinks I know where he is, even if I’m not aware of it, but that seems ludicrous to me. I barely know the man. He’s made darn sure of that.”
“Surely there’s someone else in town who could tell you whether your mom and Clete ran around together as kids.”
I hadn’t really thought about that, but it must be true. “Maybe your mom?”
Amelia cocks her head at the suggestion, then nods. “Maybe. She’s been bugging me, asking when I’ll bring Jack down to Charleston so she can show him off to her friends. We could both go next week. Ply her with booze.”
“Sure.”
The booze will be necessary if we want my aunt Karen to talk about her sister. She avoids the topic like I’ve been avoiding Westies since Leo and I parted ways.
We chat about when to head down to Charleston, and Amelia says that she wants to go by Market Street and show Jack to Odette. The old woman will like that, I have no doubt, and the thought about seeing her again brings a smile to my face.
It’s bedtime for me, and Jack is fussing, ready for his last feeding of the night before Amelia tries to get some sleep. I get up first, haul her off the couch, and then the two of us check the locks and turn out the lights. The rightness of it is bittersweet, because for the first time, I admit to myself that things can’t stay this way forever.
Nor should they. Amelia is falling in love again. Maybe I will, too, someday. We won’t live together forever, and I won’t get to see Jack every day. Life is supposed to change, but if it could stay this way for just a little while longer, I promise myself I’ll cherish every day.
“Oh, hey, Grace,” Amelia says as I stop by my bedroom door, the first one on the long hallway.
“Yeah?”
I figure she’s going to ask me to go back downstairs and get her something, a habit she picked up in the late stages of her pregnancy and hasn’t shaken.
“I think maybe that Gillian woman was stealing our mail.”
The statement is so far from what I expected her to say that it takes me a minute to catch up. “Why?”
“There are a couple of bills we didn’t get last month, and a gift from one of my college friends that was mysteriously lost.” She shrugs. “Could be nothing, but it seems like quite the coincidence.”
“Yeah, it does,” I murmur, wondering if that could also be the reason I never heard back from Carlotta, then dismissing the thought. Gillian was already dead by the time I got around to responding to her letter. “Well, I guess if it stops happening, we’ll know it was her.”
Like Lavinia.
“I just wanted to mention it. Weird thing.”
“On a long list of weird things, yes.” I shake my head. “Goodnight.”
“Night, Grace.”
I head into my room and climb into my pajamas, deciding to wait and shower before work in the morning. I’m thinking that I’ll go for a run, on a different path.
A new one. One that maybe, just maybe, I’ll decide is better.
I’m the slightest bit surprised to see Brick at the library the next day. He’s armed with lunch from Westies, though, and since it’s been days since I’ve had any of their soup or coffee, I decide to wait and hear him out.
“I suppose I’ll find out sooner or later, but what are you doing here?” I take a bite of a chocolate croissant and stifle a moan. “I mean…thanks for lunch.”
“You’re welcome,” he answers in a wry tone that sounds as if he borrowed it from my cousin. Maybe they are spending too much time together. “I had a chat with your friend Will at the coffee shop and figured you’d be interested in the outcome of the case against the late Gillian Harvey.”
My ears perk up, my heart racing at the sound of her name. “Definitely.”
I could have asked Will myself—in fact, he probably would have told me soon enough, but it was nice for Brick to come by. “But are you supposed to be bringing Amelia lunch?”
He laughs, a relaxed boom that takes me by surprise. “Yes, but she’ll forgive me. I’m heading back to get her reuben after we talk so it will be hot.”
“You’re a smart man, Brick Drayton. Annoying, but smart.”
“I’ll take it.”
We each take a couple of bites, but my impatience grows with each one. “So? What did you find out?”
“They’ve officially closed the case, but Will thinks the FBI wasn’t exactly thrilled with Gillian as the culprit. The evidence in her car and the fingerprints on the drugs were both compelling—far more so than anything they had against you—but as far as motive…there are some things we weren’t aware of at the time of her death.”
“Such
as?” I can’t even think about eating now, which is a shame.
“Such as the fact that, in the weeks before her disappearance, she’d called the police in Sherman several times reporting that her house had been broken into, that someone was following her, and that she feared her life was in danger.”
My stomach sinks. It sounds familiar, to say the least. And not in the way that she was one of the Fourniers hunting down her supposedly evil relatives.
In the way that she was one of us who felt hunted.
I frown. “Did she say who she thought was after her?”
He shakes his head. “No. They were worried when she disappeared, but she’s always been a bit batty. Institutionalized a couple of times, though both were of her own volition. That was another thing that convinced them to close the case. Her mental health history, and those books. She looked pretty nuts. It’s easy enough to believe that she was just paranoid.”
Easy, perhaps, for anyone who hadn’t read the Carlotta journals. For me…not so much. The information wasn’t enough to convince me that Gillian hadn’t killed Frank, but it did muddy the waters. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see the bottom of the Fournier family lake. As far as motive, well…if Gillian was one of the Fourniers without the gift, that would explain her desire to kill those of us who did.
But if she didn’t have the gift, then who had sent Lavinia? If someone even had, though I was more and more inclined to think that was what had happened. The way she was so aimless, and the fact that there was nothing buried in that cemetery, not to mention the fact that she’d disappeared all on her own…she felt like a plant.
“Also, they didn’t find your bag in her car, but your purse was in the backseat. They should be getting it back to you any day.”
That startles me. Not the part about my purse—that’s awesome. But that they didn’t find my other bag, the one that contained her books and papers. Where could she have dropped it between my house and Travis’s?
I suppose we’ll never know. If she tossed it in the Charles or a Dumpster behind one of the restaurants, it’ll be long gone by now.
“Did they find any of our mail in her house or car?”
“Not that he told me.”
“They probably would have mentioned it, though, as part of the evidence that she’d been lurking around,” I reason. The FBI had talked to Cade Walters, I knew, and he had tentatively identified Gillian as the woman he’d seen wandering around our house. “Did the cameras catch anything?”
Now it’s Brick’s turn to frown. “No. We didn’t point any toward the garage. A mistake I promise you I will rectify this weekend.”
For some reason, Cade’s face pops into my mind. It’s one-hundred-percent possible that Gillian is the one who stole our mail. Perhaps she simply discarded it, either at her house or when she dumped the bag of things I’d taken.
But if it wasn’t her…I don’t know what bothers me so much about Cade, but it’s undeniable that something does. Maybe it’s simply the mental image, unshakable now, of him snooping in our side yard, rising up on his tiptoes as he stared into the garage.
The garage where I almost died a few hours later. Where there were, conveniently, no cameras pointed. A fact someone might know, if they stared at our house long enough.
I give myself a mental shake. Cade ran over as soon as he sensed trouble. He told me about every weird thing he’d ever seen, warned me about the police being there before I was arrested. Nothing suggested he was trying to be anything but a good, watchful neighbor.
The note from my father and from Carlotta had warned me to trust no one, and perhaps my subconscious had taken it a bit too seriously. A person can’t live that way. I refuse to consider that the people in my life, even the ones I don’t know well, might be out to get me. Heron Creek is a safe place, one where kids play outside and women can jog alone, where people watch out for you. I want to be a part of it, not someone on the outside always looking in, wishing I could be one of them.
Brick and I finish our lunch quickly and he leaves without much more conversation. He’s a man of few words, who is also probably anxious to get food home to Amelia—or, more likely, just to see her for a few minutes before he needs to get back to work.
I clean up our mess and spend the rest of the afternoon doing regular library work, processing returns, helping people find the books they’re looking for, and putting the finishing touches on the plans for Cade’s book talk later this week—rescheduled after the attempt on my life. I’ve kind of been hoping they would cancel altogether, but no such luck.
The whole time, I think about Gillian. How her life sounds eerily like mine, like the Carlotta’s whose journal I recently read, aside from the paranoid rantings. I hate all of the questions that her death has left behind. First and foremost, I have to wonder if all of this Fournier stuff is over. If it could ever be over, as long as there are more of us out there.
I suppose the answer is that it’s over for now. Like the Carlotta believed after she’d killed the man in her house, maybe the only thing I can do is live each day and be grateful for it. Try not to judge myself for the mistakes. I’ve got my cousin and her baby, after all, and the life I’ve built here in Heron Creek.
No one, after all, can guess when another challenge or change is barreling their way. The difference between most people and me, though, is that no matter when it’s coming, I can be pretty much certain another mystery is on its way.
THANK YOU!
Thank you for reading Not Quite Free, and for being excited to continue Gracie’s story in Heron Creek! If you enjoyed this installment, please take a moment to review it - things like that are such a big help and I so appreciate your time!
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Acknowledgments
You might think that by a fifteenth or sixteenth (omg I’ve lost count and am too lazy to look it up!) I would have thanked everyone there is to thank or just cut and paste these things, but you would be wrong! I never ceases to amaze me how different the process is for each book, front to back, and even when I’m thanking some of the same people they have each grown with me and my projects to the point where I’m no longer sure any of this would be possible if I lost a single one of them.
Many thanks to Angela Polidoro for her editing skills and otherwise keen eye - this is our first book together but I certainly hope it won’t be our last. It was a pleasure working with you to bring this book and these characters up to snuff.
Shannon Page, thank you for stepping in and copyediting these crazy books. You know how to roll with the punches, and that’s all a writer can ask for these days.
I’ve come to realize that proofreading is one of the hardest things to get right, and that no matter how many eyeballs go on a manuscript, there are things that slip through the cracks. The team I’ve pulled together have the best eyeballs in the business, which means less distractions for the reader, and for that, I’m grateful. Thanks to Mary Ziegenhorn, Cheryl Heinrich, Diane Thede, and Diane Cleary for cleaning these up for me.
There are certain people who might not think they have much to do with this specific book, but without whom my life would be such an unholy mess that creating anything except rocking motions in the corner wouldn’t be possible. In no particular order—Denise Grover Swank, LeighAnn Kopa
ns, Amalia Dillon, on the writing side, along with my wonderfully patient and supportive agent, Kathleen Rushall—you save me. Then there’s my family, blood and not (that includes you, Julia, Jenna, Ryan, and Emma), who put up with my nonsense and make me feel like there’s no one they would rather me be than just me. Andrea Sola, who has likely secured sainthood after nearly thirty years of friendship with me and Paul, a more patient and loving and steady love than I could have ever hoped to find—I love you both.
I love you all.
And I love you, dear readers, whose reviews and tweets and mentions and emails do more than brighten my day. They make it easy to sit down in front of the keyboard and do what I love to do—write stories—with the confidence that there are people out there who are dying to read them.
Also by LYLA PAYNE
WHITMAN UNIVERSITY
Broken at Love
By Referral Only
Be My Downfall
Staying On Top
Living the Dream
Going for Broke (published in Fifty First Times: A New Adult Anthology)
LOWCOUNTRY MYSTERIES
Not Quite Dead
Not Quite Cold
Not Quite True
Quite Curious
Not Quite Gone
Quite Precarious
Not Quite Right
Not Quite Mine
Not Quite Alive
Not Quite Free
Quite Dubious (March, 2017)
THE PIACERE PRINCES
The Playboy Prince
A Royal Wedding (November 18, 2016)