Yet, I wondered exactly what he meant when he’d asked if I’d ever done anything for someone I liked that I’d regretted.
Right now, I didn’t have time to think overmuch about Abel. I needed to talk to Stiles and we needed to get in touch with this woman Sabrina. I’d never seen her face, but I knew she was the woman in the pictures. I felt it, and that lit a fire under my feet.
I moved quickly toward the front desk to grab my phone when I heard a child’s voice say, “Identify yourself!”
Nearly jumping out of my skin, I whipped around to find a little boy of maybe ten or so, in Batman pajamas, holding a shiny, red toy gun. He had a thatch of straight brown hair and mischievous brown eyes fringed with thick lashes.
Once I realized he was playing and my stomach stopped bouncing around, I threw my hands up and smiled at him. “My name is Halliday Valentine. Who, pray tell, is holding me at gunpoint?”
He fought a grin, trying to keep his expression serious. “Carter. Hudson Carter,” he said in a pretty good impression of James Bond—accent and all.
“Well, well,” I cooed playfully, narrowing my eyes and planting my hands on my hips. “If it isn’t the infamous Hudson Carter. What brings you all the way to snowy Maine? Spy convention? Hot on the trail of a jewel thief? Or is someone trying to blow up the world with an atomic bomb?”
He tried like heck to stay in character, but he crumbled into a fit of laughter. “You’re funny, and so is your name.”
I rolled my eyes with dramatic exaggeration. “Tell me about it. You should have had to grow up with a name like Halliday. So what has you up at this hour, Carter, Hudson Carter, and where’s the night manager?”
He grinned, his impishly freckled face turning pink. “He went to the bathroom, but I think that means he went to smoke because that’s what he does when it’s quiet ’round here.”
“And you didn’t answer my second question, what has you up this late?”
“Promise not to tell my mom?”
“Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult, and adults are supposed to do the right thing—which would be to tell your mom. But if you promise to go back to bed and stay in your room, I’ll lock up my lips and throw away the key.”
He shrugged and leaned against the front desk. “I was just playing spy. My mom says you can’t grow up and be a spy, but if James Bond can, I don’t know why I can’t. He was a little boy one time, too.”
I scooped up my phone and nodded with a grin. “He absolutely was, and very cool. I love spies.”
“Me, too,” he said excitedly. “Spies stay up late and have cool gadgets and they catch people doing things they’re not supposed to be doing.”
Absently, as I clicked my phone on, I asked, “They sure do. Ever catch someone doing something they’re not supposed to be doing?”
“Heck yeah!” he all but shouted. “Just tonight, I caught somebody looking at your phone. They didn’t see me because I was hiding over there behind that big fake tree.”
I looked to the Ficus in the corner of the lobby, and my spine went rigid. Oh, heavens. This wasn’t good. “Do you mean Abel?”
“No. It wasn’t a man, it was a girl. I saw her the other night, too. She was following Joey around.”
Holy coconuts, this must be the little boy who’d been busting his sister’s chops about her boyfriend earlier today, and she’d accused him of creeping around the lodge at night.
My mouth suddenly went dry. “Who was the lady, Hudson?”
“That lady with the ponytail who made up all those stupid games for us today. Can’t remember her name.”
Clarissa?
Trying to remain calm, I looked around the quiet lodge and decided this was no place for a small child. Who knew who was lurking around here and might hear him.
I was going to blackmail him back to his room, and I didn’t even care. “Hudson? Can you do me a favor? If you do, I promise not to tell your mom you were down here so late, playing spy.”
“Are you tryin’ to bribe me, lady?”
“I sure am. Here’s what you have to do if you want me to keep my lips shut. Go back to your room. Go right now and don’t come back down until your parents come and get you, okay? If you do, I’ll keep my lips zipped.” I made the universal sign of a key locking my mouth shut.
Hudson seemed to consider that for a moment, before he nodded. “Okey-doke.”
“Where’s your room?”
He pointed to the row of rooms at the top of the stairs. “Right there in the middle. I have to share it with my stupid sister, who plays kissy-face with her ugly boyfriend on her phone and cries all night because she’s not back at home with him.”
Fighting a smile, I ordered, “Scoot now! As fast as you can. I’ll watch you go to make sure you’re really in your room, okay?”
He blew on the end of his toy gun and tucked it into the waistband of his Batman pajamas. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Promise you’ll stay in your room till tomorrow?”
“Swear.” He held his hand over his heart.
“Then go!”
As he ran up the stairs, I watched until he was in his room before I texted Stiles with what I’d just learned. I didn’t know how it all fit, I needed time to process it, but Hudson had just given me a major clue.
When I opened my phone, I’d forgotten I’d left it on the Facebook app. What Hudson said about Clarissa made me look up her page before I zapped myself back home.
When my eyes fell on her profile picture, I had to fight a gasp out loud.
Because guess what Clarissa’s doing in her profile picture?
Fencing.
You know, with a sword.
Oh, and she also listed she was in a relationship and it was “complicated.”
With guess who?
Igor Brown.
Oh, hellfire.
Chapter 15
“I gotta give it to you. You really are like a dog with a bone.”
Whirling around, I came face to face with Clarissa, but she was no longer the perky, smiling events coordinator.
Her eyes were hard and glassy behind the muzzle of the gun she held.
Seriously, Universe? Two in a row? Didn’t we just do this the other night?
She yanked my phone from my hands and threw it on the ground, stomping on it with her heavy snow boots until it smashed into tiny pieces.
I responded by saying something stupid, because, you know, stressed. “Clarissa. What are you doing up this late?”
She sneered a laugh, lifting her chin. “Well, Halliday—or should I call you Columbo? Isn’t he a great television detective?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I kinda liked Magnum P.I. He gets forgotten a lot because he was more sex symbol than anything else, but he was also super smart. I mean, there’s no denying he was hot because, phew. Hot, like lava hot…but then there’s Monk. Not as hot, but definitely as smart, which makes him a little hot, if not hot coupled with some hang-ups—”
“Shut up,” she demanded coolly, her eyes scanning my face. “You know why I’m up. And why I have to do what I have to do.”
I cocked my head at her as though I had no idea what she meant. “I have no idea what you mean. What do you have to do?”
“Move,” she barked, her stare coldull as she held tight to the gun.
“Where?” I squeaked, trying to look around and see if there was anyone with us, but the lobby was quiet.
“Out the back door. Now,” she said with an eerie calm that left me chilled to my marrow.
I didn’t have a choice, so I walked toward the door—slowly. Very slowly.
But Clarissa came up behind me and jammed the gun between my shoulder blades, leaving a sharp sting behind. “Move,” she hissed in my ear.
I went out the door as instructed, my legs stiff as the blast of bitter cold air hit my face. We headed toward the thicket of trees across the way from the lodge, where the ocean met the bit of untouched forest.
Swallowing hard, I
forced myself to remain calm. Just a day ago I was almost in the same position, and I’d learned that talking too much confused the perp, and stress confused me, and when I was stressed and confused, I produced dragons.
I wanted to avoid that if at all possible. So I kept my voice even and my eyes on the prize—getting out of this alive. “Why are you doing this, Clarissa?”
“Walk!” she hissed again.
The falling snow spat at my face, pinging my cheeks with wet splats as the sound of the ocean grew closer. “Where are we going?”
“To the edge of the cliff, where you’re going to jump to your death,” she said quite plainly and far too calmly. “And it’s going to be so sad. The local nosy body, beloved by all in the stupid town of Marshmallow Hollow, dead at such a young age. Boo-hoo.”
Oh. Well. At least she had a plan, right? It’s good to have a plan.
By the way, the edge of the cliff she spoke of? It was a deadly drop with nothing but craggy rocks and freezing cold ocean below. For sure, I was going to die if I didn’t try to stop her first.
I guess I could always jump and suspend myself, but of course, that took a moment to figure out a spell, and I think we all know how that works out for me under duress.
I’d be dead on the rocks below in a watery grave, and there’d still be dragons. Or Jason Momoa. He’d shown up once, too.
Or you can be shot, Hal.
That meant I needed to start talking—stir the pot a little.
As we plodded through the almost calf-deep snow, the wind howled harder the closer we came to the water. I hadn’t put on a hat or gloves when I’d so smugly zapped myself here, and it was bone-chillingly cold. My lips stuck to my teeth and my eyes burned from the gusting wind.
Which meant I needed to start talking fast. “What happened with Igor, Clarissa?”
She rushed up behind me and shoved me down to my knees, gripping the length of my hair and pressing the gun to my temple. “What do you know about Igor? Don’t you dare speak his name!”
Here went nothing.
Gulping, my neck arched backward in her painful grip, I said, “I know that he’s Sabrina Caldwell’s boyfriend.” Then I winced because I didn’t even bother to save the biggest bomb for last. Instead, I rushed toward end game.
“He is not! He’ll never be her boyfriend. He’s my boyfriend!” she cried, her voice angry and raw as she gripped my hair tighter and shook my head.
That meant I’d touched a nerve. One I decided to rub a little raw.
“That’s not what his Facebook page says, Clarissa,” I yelled above the howling wind. “It says he loves Sabrina…”
She yanked me up so hard, I almost fell backward. “He does not! He! Does! Not! He loves me—and I told her. I told her she’d never have him! I sent her an email and told her to leave him alone or something bad would happen!”
The skin on my neck was stretched so tight, I thought my flesh might split. “But she does, Clarissa. She has him. Right now in Westbrook at his coffee shop,” I taunted, my throat burning and my eyes watering.
Clarissa let out a wail of torment, one I can bet no one would hear because of the roar of the ocean. She threw me to my back in her anguish and put her foot on my chest. I sank into the snow as she ground her heel painfully into my collarbone.
Her eyes, once so friendly and open, were wild with her suffering and her anger that Igor was with Sabrina. “I hate her! She doesn’t deserve him! That’s why I did what I did! She deserves every minute of the pain she’s in after stealing him from me!”
Gripping her ankle with both hands, fighting the cold snow on my back and the violent shivers it produced, I tried to squirm away, but she kept that gun aimed at me.
“What did you do, Clarissa? What did you do to Sabrina?” I spat.
She smiled then, not the smile she’d displayed when we’d first met her, but a smile that was wide and cold and didn’t reach her eyes.
“Aw, c’mon, amateur sleuth, you know what I did. I videotaped them when they were here for a lovers’ weekend, then put it on a website. That’s what you do when dirty-dirty women behave like cheap floozies and need to be taught a lesson!” she said with sick pride, her eyes glassy and gleaming.
Had Igor really been her boyfriend? Call me crazy, but I didn’t understand how she could have talked him into coming to the lodge she worked at with his new girlfriend if they’d broken up.
That compelled me to ask, “How did you get them here, Clarissa? Why would Igor come here if he knew you worked here?”
She bent her knees and leaned forward, jamming the gun in my face, her eyes wide and glazed with hatred. “Hah! It was genius, if I do say so myself. I lured them here under the pretense of a lovers’ weekend getaway, all expenses paid. When Sabrina called to see if it was real, I assured her it was the gen-u-ine artifact and the rest was simple. I arranged to be gone while they were here and voila! Instant revenge porn! He never even knew I worked here. I sent it to everyone, too. Her parents, the parents of her first-grade students, the school she works for—eeeeveryone!”
The sick joy she got from that made me want to throw up, but if I hoped to get out of here, I had to listen to her brag.
I blinked the snow from my eyes, falling in fat splotches on my face and soaking my hair. I ask you, why does being held hostage always have to involve me soaking wet?
I fought not to struggle under her foot with that gun staring me down and keep her engaged in conversation while I tried to come up with a spell that would get me the heck out of here.
“But Joey,” I murmured, my heart picking up speed, my pulse throbbing in my ears. “Why would you kill her brother? What did he do to you to deserve that?”
Now she narrowed her eyes, shining with victory. “You mean Grady? Because he couldn’t keep his nose out of it! She went crying to him and he went to the police. But I’m smarter than him, and he couldn’t find out where the video had come from. Some software engineer he was, huh? The police wouldn’t even help him because they knew Igor belonged with me!”
Something was desperately off about her relationship with Igor, but I didn’t have time to pursue exactly what that could be.
I tried to arch my neck to relieve the cold seeping into my skin—at this rate, I’d die of hypothermia before she shot me between the eyes. Still, I didn’t try to move her foot.
Instead, I asked from frozen, rapidly cracking lips, “Why did he get a job here at the lodge? How did he find out it was you?”
She snorted, her hands shaking, her mouth a thin line of hate. “He was stupid, but he wasn’t that stupid. When he found out the video was taken here at the lodge, he figured someone who worked here made it. So he applied for a job and played undercover cop because poor Sabrina had to be protected at all costs, and if the cops wouldn’t help, he’d do it himself. He made a fake ID with all his tech skills and wormed his way in here and the chase was on!”
Digging my heels into the snow, I began to prepare my escape as I kept her talking. “How did he find out it was you, Clarissa?”
Now Clarissa stiffened, her rage barely contained. “I made a stupid mistake. He caught me looking at Igor’s profile on Facebook. I couldn’t take any chances. He had to go after that. That part was easy, by the way. A guy who sits at his desk all day does not a worthy opponent make.”
“Killing him was easy?” I squeaked.
All those holes in him said he hadn’t gone down without a fight. That couldn’t have been easy…
Now she pressed the gun to my cheek, her perky ponytail flattened to her head, her jacket soaked in falling snow but her hand steady as a rock. “No, silly! Getting him to meet me so I could explain. I sent him an anonymous text. I told him I had information about his sister and that video. He met me, I caught him off guard…dead nosy body,” she said flatly, with next to no emotion and certainly no remorse.
“But how did you get him to the lifts?”
Now she tipped her head back and laughed, her face maniaca
l, her skin soaked. “He put up a good fight, for sure. He ran, of course, and I followed. It was like he was meant to die on that lift.”
Hobbs had been right. He didn’t die at the pear tree. He’d died when he got to the lifts.
Is now the time to nitpick, Hal?
That was when a strange fact about the case made me ask, “Why did he take his shirt off?”
“To stop the blood, of course. He bled like a stuck pig!” she crowed, far too animated for me. “But alas, it didn’t help, did it? He died anyway. Sad, huh? Bet Sabrina’s going to cry so much, Igor’ll get sick of her.”
Sabrina. Goddess, I needed to get to Sabrina.
I was running out of questions and my legs were going numb when another revelation slapped me in the face and gave me another excuse to keep her engaged. Abel ran marathons…and he regretted doing something for someone…
Why did this always happen when I was in the throes of a death match? Like, I could have used this information before being held at gunpoint?
As snow hit my face and stung my eyes, I let go of her ankle and put my elbows into the snow. “Abel! You talked him into stealing that box Grady had hidden in the ski hut, didn’t you?”
She rolled her eyes in disgust. “I sure did, and after he got it for me, that stupid dork whined about it. But he was an easy mark. He likes me, you know,” she said with a chuckle. “Men are so pathetic. Like Marcelle. All I needed him to do was touch that ski pole and then I threw it somewhere I knew the police would find it. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!”
Poor Marcelle, who was being questioned right now. He must be terrified. Hobbs was right. He wasn’t the killer.
“Does Abel know you were the one who killed Joey…er, Grady?” I asked, my teeth chattering.
“Don’t be stupid, Halliday,” she ground out between clenched teeth, spittle forming at the corner of her mouth. “He didn’t know why I wanted all the evidence Grady collected in his little box. He didn’t even know it was Grady’s box to begin with. I just told him not to get caught getting it for me. But I did pretend to be interested in him until he got it, then I left him in the wind. That’s why he was crying earlier tonight—because he couldn’t have his way. Wah-wah.”
Carnage in a Pear Tree Page 13