by Mira Gibson
Holly didn’t have to ask why that was. Lucas had probably gotten a call about her sister’s murder and had to rush off to the house.
“Did you circle back later that night?”
“I was planning to, but Roberta called me, said Benji had kicked her out of his room. She was in tears, a mess. She begged me to meet her at Diamonds to talk, but I kept telling her I’d meet her at the shed. Ron Conover hates me, I don’t have to tell you that. Meeting at Diamonds was just plain stupid, but she insisted.”
Holly was studying his face, her mind latching onto the shed—what shed?—as Lucas went on about how Conover had immediately thrown him out of the club.
Interrupting him, she asked, “Tell me about the shed?”
He smiled playfully. “It’s our place, the keeper of our secrets.”
“Where is it?”
“Why?"
“I'd like to know where it is," she said firmly. "We should go there."
His expression softened as he squeezed her waist, saying, “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, but not until...” He drank in the sight of her chest, hooking his finger under her thong, and then met her gaze. “I’m aching for you.”
When he reached for her breasts, she caught his hands. “Why was she worried about Warren Wythe?”
“Same reason you are,” he countered.
“Tell me.”
He gaped at her as if frustrated. “What's your angle? You dress in the most amazing lingerie so we can engage in idle chitchat? Come on, Holly.”
Appeasing him, she began hiking his sweater up and caressing his stomach. "What do you guys do in the shed?"
“Talk.” He pulled his sweater off. "I'd rather not incorporate Roberta into our foreplay, if you don't mind."
“Can we just talk now?"
"Are you fucking with me?"
He looked angered so she cooed, "No, I'm not, sorry," and began unbuttoning his jeans.
He settled, but his frustration remained. “I’ve tried, Holly. I’ve done everything I can to open up to you, but you've always shut me down. And now you want to talk?”
She tried to smile, but it landed badly and in response he stared off in another direction as though he needed a moment to cool down.
“Can we meet Roberta at the shed?”
His face snapped back to her. “This is seriously what you want to do tonight?”
Uncertain, she nodded anyway.
He snorted a laugh, lifting up on the bed. “You’re damn lucky I’m crazy about you.”
“I know,” she said kindly, as she climbed off him.
Though she turned for the bathroom, he caught her hand, rising to his feet. When he pulled her in, wrapping his arm around her lower back and angling in for a kiss, she didn’t react.
She also didn’t stop him.
As their lips met, she told herself to demand the location of the shed before pulling him out of his fog by saying, One Eight Seven. But she wasn’t sure she wanted that yet.
Kissing him, feeling his hands grazing her hips, her waist, scooping her tightly, hungrily, she was suddenly sure they weren’t going anywhere...
Chapter Twenty
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep.
And she would like to think she hadn’t meant to sleep with Lucas, that her idea of meeting him at the Lakes Motor Inn had been for no other reason than finding out what had truly happened for the purposes of clearing his name, getting a solid lead, and setting Cody in a worthwhile direction. But the moment she’d allowed Lucas to cross the blurred line into intimacy, Holly realized part of her had wanted this all along—to merge with him, to wake up in his arms, to feel like she had ten years ago.
And maybe to inspire hope that her sister could go on living if only through her...
Dusky morning light pooled across the comforter and spilled over the far wall. Careful not to wake him, she shifted, rolling over so she could glimpse his sleeping face. Lucas was lying on his back, one hand beneath his head, the other arm hooked under her neck, the comforter snugged up to his chin, though it did little to ward off the chill from the drafty windows.
During their frustrating and at times confusing conversation last night he had called her Holly, which told her that during the affair Rose hadn’t corrected him. She’d allowed Lucas to believe she was her twin. There was something so dark and disturbing about that fact, Holly could barely process it.
Why use him like that? Rose couldn’t have possibly loved him. Could a person love another yet lie to them? Had doing so been Rose’s way of feeling connected to her twin just as Holly had flirted with cocaine and played dress up in her sister’s clothes, exploring her sister’s life?
What had pulled the twins so far apart that they had both felt the need to do so?
For Holly it had been the estrangement. It killed her not to know her twin, not to have Rose in her life. But for Rose there had to have been a different catalyst. Their estrangement began two years ago, but Rose had connected with Diamonds year's prior. Tucker was four years old. He was Lucas’s son, which meant that while Rose was working alongside Holly at Shackles, tending to the bookkeeping and pushing sales in the store, she had been stealing away at night, indulging in a second life that should’ve belonged to her twin.
As Holly studied Lucas, her gaze tracing the slight curve of his lashes, the slope of his nose, she listened to the soft rhythm of his breathing and thought back to four years ago then five.
When Rose had met Benjamin...
Why had she nurtured a secret life with Lucas when her marriage hadn’t yet faltered?
She was honing in on something, a revelation perhaps, but it eluded her, as sunlight gradually brightened the room, so she gently shook his shoulder, the words One Eight Seven on the tip of her tongue. But she couldn’t say them, not yet, not until he brought her to the shed where she prayed answers had been tucked away.
As Lucas blinked his eyes open, drawing in a deep breath and stretching beneath the comforter, Holly reminded herself to make sure their game was still in play.
“Hey,” she said softly and, testing the waters, asked, “we had talked about that shed?”
He furrowed his brow and for a stunned moment she worried the real Lucas, the detective, the one who thought he had lost her a decade ago, was beside her in bed. But when he groaned, “I was hoping the impulse had passed,” she breathed a sigh of relief.
“No, not passed, just postponed,” she smiled, brushing his dark hair off his forehead and eyeing his messy cowlicks.
Did this man know his son was missing?
“Let’s get dressed,” she suggested, but he quickly pulled her in for a long kiss.
It felt unfair. She didn’t want to lie to him like Rose had, didn’t want to take advantage of his confusion any longer than necessary.
Getting him out of bed was as easy as climbing out herself. As she shut the bathroom door, Lucas began pulling on his jeans and complaining his way around the room, collecting his socks and undershirt, boots and sweater.
If they drove separately, he might shift into his primary persona, so when they started for the parking lot, having paid for the room while ignoring the orange-haired punk’s uncouth guesses as to how they had used their time, Holly offhandedly proposed they take his Ford.
“Since when do you and Roberta get along?” he asked after settling behind the steering wheel—engine idling and cold air blasting from the vents.
“I don’t have a problem with her.” When he shot her a skeptical glance, Holly said, “She has her affair and I have mine.”
It seemed to satisfy him, but he still commented, “Showing up at the shed seems off to me.”
“Don’t you show up there?”
“I’m usually invited,” he explained, as they drove into the street.
“What makes you guys so close?”
Suddenly on edge, he said, “We’re damaged in the same way."
In silence, Holly watched fog slip over the windshield and it was
n’t until they had merged onto the Daniel Webster Highway that she asked, “You were never caught... Your parents... You were never charged?”
He hesitated, stiffening in the driver’s seat. “No.”
“Were you suspected?”
Looking over at her to perhaps assess where she was coming from with all this, he stated, “No,” then returned his eyes to the slick asphalt, the gray landscape, sky as dreary-white as the snow lining the highway.
Though it was only a guess, she said, “You never told me... how you did it.”
“When I said I wanted you to be okay with me opening up… You need to know how I killed my parents?” he asked, his tone hitching up as if disturbed. He inhaled deeply as if doing so could steady his emotions.
Gently, her voice was like wind over reeds, she said, ”I don’t need to know” and they drove in silence until Lucas flipped on his turn-signal, veering down the off-ramp and passing a green road sign—Laconia.
After zigzagging on back roads until the Ford spilled onto Messer Street, he surprised her, disclosing in a hollow tone, “I shot them. First my father. Back of the head. He was watching the evening news on TV.” His brow furrowed as though he no longer saw the road ahead, but a disturbing image in his mind. “I don’t know why I had to kill him first.” After a tense minute, he went on. “My mother... it was ugly. Her running into the living room, screaming at the sight of my dad, me scrambling to cock the gun, misfiring at the coffee table, another struggle to pull the slide, get a bullet into the chamber. She started racing through the house, upstairs not outside.” He clenched his jaw, swallowed hard, turning to stone, his hands clasping the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip. “I charged after her, shot her five times. I was just a child. A boy in a man’s body. I wiped the gun clean and dropped it. It was my father’s anyway. And then I ran.”
Lucas angled the car up an unplowed driveway and soon a white, Colonial house came into view. At first, Holly tensed, scanning the windows, but realized no one lived there when a For Sale sign caught her eye. It was leaning in snowdrift, nearly on its side, and so weathered—scarred with amateur graffiti—that she figured the house had been on the market so long it might never be sold.
They rolled to a stop. Lucas pushed the gear shifter into Neutral and pulled the key from the ignition. The engine pinged and clanked as if refusing to die.
“Roberta’s stronger than me. That’s what I tell her when we meet, when we spend time. Retaliating against those monsters who raised me wasn’t a courageous act, though for years I told myself the world was a better place without them. I was weak. I couldn’t go on living knowing they were alive.”
She scanned the woods and saw the shed sitting within a cluster of Birches covered in snow.
“But Roberta could?”
“She did. She held on. She saw light at the end of the tunnel.” Lucas grabbed her arm, forcing eye contact. “You don’t have to understand our friendship, but she’s kept me sane in an insane world. I would’ve died without her. I would’ve killed myself. I can’t explain what she means to me...”
He didn’t have to say more. Not only did she understand what Roberta meant to him, she could feel it, which made what they were about to do, about to potentially discover, all the more harrowing.
She almost didn’t want to say goodbye to this other side of Lucas whom she had gotten to know, which was why she kissed him, their lips pressing for a long moment. She pulled back, smiled at him, and without thinking, soft and fast and nearly holding her breath, recited, “Call from dispatch.” Her voice was trembling, but she pressed on, “One Eight Seven in progress, Lucas are you there?”
The light behind his eyes dimmed as his expression clouded over then in a snap his eyes brightened as though coming alive. The gasp that followed alarmed her and when his eyes widened, darting around, she placed her hand on his. He kept a lid on his panic as he struggled to get his bearings, his breath quickening until he ran his hand down his face.
“Lucas?” Touching his arm, she said, ““There’s a shed through the woods. I think we should check it out.” But she was moving too fast. He was grappling with the lost time, the black hole in his memory, struggling to process where he was and why he was here. “What’s the last thing-”
“I remember?” he supplied, catching on. “The motel... stepping inside... you disappearing into the bathroom.” His eyes snapped to hers. “Did it work?”
Nodding, she said, “Yeah,” but when it seemed he might fire off a million questions, she stopped him with, “Come on.”
Keeping at her heels as they trekked through the snow, ducking under frozen branches and stepping over spikes in the drift, he asked, “Where are we?”
She didn’t want to lie to him or omit the truth, but she wasn’t sure this side of Lucas would agree with his other half. Lucas harbored a unique love for Roberta. She didn’t have the heart to admit they were moments away from finding evidence of the girl’s guilt so she went with, “A shed.”
“I can see that.”
“I think the murder weapon might be here.”
“Whose shed is it?”
But she was already at the door and opening it was her excuse for not answering.
Stepping inside, her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness. A stream of dusky light shafted through a tarnished window on the east wall.
Groaning, childlike and distressed, stunned her. She caught movement on the floor in the far corner of the room and though at first she was too anxious to process what she was seeing, soon she jolted with the realization that it was Tucker.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, rushing to him and dropping to her knees. She cupped his cold face in her hands, staring at him, a strange mix of disbelief and heart pounding relief warming her chest. His eyes lolled and she noticed snot running from his nose. He felt weak in her arms. “We have to get him out of here.”
When she touched eyes with Lucas—shocked still, his mouth gaping—he looked like a concerned father.
His voice was a thread. “Holly, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s over,” she said. “Let’s get him home.”
“Who did this? Whose shed is this?” he asked, as she hoisted Tucker into her arms, rising to her feet.
When she had him securely on her hip, she met Lucas’s gaze. “Not now-”
“Not now? I’m going to arrest whoever took him.”
“Lucas,” she insisted. “He’s sick. He needs to get to a hospital. After everything we went over last night, I have enough to convince Cody you didn’t do this and I didn’t either, and we will convince him of that, and Cody can proceed accordingly with this shed and the people responsible, but first Tucker needs help.”
Tucker coughed in her ear, his head weighing heavily on her shoulder.
“Tell me who,” he demanded.
“Last night you told me she was with you. She didn’t kill Rose or Benjamin just like you and I didn’t.”
“Who was it, Holly?”
But she refused, strangely loyal to the man with whom she had shared a night. “You have to drive me to the hospital now.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Lucas couldn’t take his eyes off her.
After the hospital, where a pediatrician had diagnosed Tucker as having a severe cold and then prescribed antibiotics, Holly had insisted that he drive her to the resort. She opted to sit in the backseat with her nephew, cradling him and at times meeting Lucas’s gaze in the rearview mirror. When they walked through the lobby—Lucas shepherding Holly as she carried the sleeping boy in her arms—Warren Wythe rounded the corner from the east wing. Astonished, a broad smile came over his face, registering his grandson’s return, and he spread his arms wasting no time embracing her.
He exclaimed something about a miracle, but Lucas wasn’t listening, his whole world was Holly.
A phenomenon had occurred in the hospital—one that Lucas had kept to himself. Standing in the corner of the examination room and watching the pedi
atrician press her stethoscope between Tucker’s shoulder blades, Lucas had been overcome with flashes of his night with Holly—her lingerie, the draft in the room, their entire conversation and everything that had followed surging to the forefront of his mind as though the two halves of his psyche were suddenly merging. After the initial burst of recall, other memories had bubbled up in rapid succession, all centering on one fact...
It wasn't a fantasy or an obsession.
He loved her.
Deeply.
As Warren helped Holly to settle on the couch in his private study at the back of the Wythe Resort, Lucas watched her and the older man’s doting behavior, the glances he exchanged with his wife, who seemed elated though barely lucid enough to grasp the miracle at hand.
Tucker was kicking his little legs, smiling up at her and cackling, something hysterical about the children’s book Sarah was starting to read.
Affectionately, the older man glanced over at his wife and took her hand, though Sarah seemed to loll in some hazy stratosphere, drugged up and grinning like a lost hyena.
“He’s bouncing back beautifully,” said Warren, tickling his grandson’s socked-foot.
“The fever’s coming down,” said Holly, setting the back of her hand against Tucker’s forehead.
As Warren released his wife’s hand in favor of turning the page for Sarah as she continued reading quietly to her grandson, a waiter shouldered into the library, careful to keep the tray of tea and coffee in his hands level.
Diverting his gaze from the waiter, Warren said through a tight smile, “Anything you need, Holly, to make your life here more comfortable, you won’t hesitate to ask, will you?”
Before she could answer, Sarah chimed in. “You do want to live here, don’t you?” Perhaps the drug-haze clouding her world had cleared enough for her to speak coherently. “You know the west wing is under construction. We can easily build you proper quarters. This can be your home, do you understand? We can be a family. I’ve always liked you, Holly.” She locked eyes with Warren before driving her point home. “I didn’t mean to come off as adversarial.”