Where There's a Will

by Virginia Hale

Dylan’s tongue poked out from her lips as she concentrated on whatever it was she was noting down. “I was shutting down your laptop and your manuscript was up on the screen. I caught a glimpse and started reading, and some stuff came to mind that I think you should tack down.” She continued to type. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Beth smiled as she pulled up a chair. “Of course I don’t mind.” Over the sleeve of Dylan’s oversized navy jumper, she read the growing paragraph of bullet points. “You think I need to mention the portrait photographer?” She pulled back to study Dylan’s face. “Why?”

  “He was a friend of Jimmy Blaxland, well, an acquaintance. There’s this whole theory that Jimmy paid the photographer off to keep the photos of the door hidden. There’s not a record of the photos to be found. If it weren’t for the fact that Aileen had sent a copy of the portrait to her cousin, we’d never have—pardon the pun—opened this door.”

  Beth sat back in her chair. “This is so interesting.”

  “Sure is.”

  Beth digested the new information. “But is the fact that Jimmy knew the photographer really worth mentioning? What makes you think he paid him off? Maybe the photos just disappeared.”

  “You’re right, you’re right, it’s not proof. Just a possibility, and therefore establishes reasonable doubt. Things only started to slide this way a few weeks before we lost Elma. There’s more to it, though. A researcher from Melbourne contacted the photographer’s family. Apparently, he was pretty renowned. Anyway, the family allowed the researcher to go through their great-grandfather’s photography notes, all of these dated journals, invoices kind-of-thing, and interestingly, a page was torn from the book. It could have been anything, but the timeframe for that missing page fits. We’re inclined to believe he got rid of the record of his session with the Blaxlands.”

  “Wow.” Beth rested her chin on her hand and shook her head in disbelief. “Unbelievable. I would have loved to have known all of this for my PhD.” She traced her eyes over Dylan’s focused expression. “Hey, it’s late, we can do this some other time.”

  Dylan chewed on her lip as she backspaced a point and quickly amended the detail. “Give me ten minutes?” she murmured distractedly. “I want to get this down before it slips my mind.”

  Beth smoothed a hand over her windswept hair and tucked a lock behind her ear. That Dylan seemed to care so much about Beth’s newfound project was deeply endearing. “Sure. Do you want a tea?”

  “If you’re having one.”

  While the kettle boiled, Beth flicked on the oil heater and stood in front of the warming bars to settle the chill in her bones. She had planned on dropping Dylan off and continuing home, but there was no hurry, not really. It wasn’t like she had anybody waiting up for her, and a cup of tea would wake her up for the fifteen-minute drive home. She danced her hands over the steaming kettle to warm them.

  She placed Dylan’s tea down beside the computer. It took barely ten seconds before her eyes fell on her exposed webcam. Lifting her mess of notes in search of the fallen yellow strip, she asked, “Where the hell’s my sticky tab gone?”

  “It was distracting me,” Dylan mumbled. “I got rid of it.”

  “Dyl!” Great. Now she was going to have to buy more sticky tabs.

  “Relax, NASA has no interest in spying on us.” She swung back on the chair legs. “Hey, can you grab that little bar of choccie from the pantry?”

  With a huff, Beth crossed the room. “The one I bought you the other week? It’s not little, it’s family-sized.”

  “My dear, I think you’ll find that circumstances have changed.”

  Beth yanked on the dangling chain of the pantry light and looked around the shelves for a flash of royal purple.

  “I can’t see it…”

  “Pretty sure it’s behind the cornflakes.”

  Beth shifted the cereal box aside and found the bar, shrunken to an eighth of its original size. She slid the elastic-banded bar across the table to its offender like an air hockey puck. “Are you kidding me?”

  Dylan stopped the chocolate with a hand and a laugh. “Hey, come sit, I need to talk you through some of this.”

  As Dylan explained her notes, Beth encouraged her by adding to the scaffold of the theory. Dylan typed on, and Beth watched, nibbling on the remaining squares of chocolate, the late-night sugar rush washing her tiredness away. She looked out at the half moon, the stars. There wasn’t a street light in sight, and the nearest house—southwest of the kitchen—was asleep in darkness. They were all alone in their own little world. Beth couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so protected, securely wrapped up in the warmth. She uncurled her fingers from her fine bone china cup and unzipped her boots, brought her knees up onto the chair to rub at her socked toes.

  “Hey…” Dylan murmured as she raked her eyes over the page of notes Beth had scribbled on a loose leaf of paper.

  Beth sipped at her tea. “Yeah?”

  “I think it’s really noble that you didn’t include what Elma told you.”

  Their eyes locked. She had an idea of where this was going, or what Dylan was implying. “What do you mean?”

  Dylan’s eyes dropped to Beth’s mouth. Beth released her bottom lip, unaware it had slipped between her teeth. Knowing blue met her stare again. “I mean that you didn’t include the fact that Elma thought Jimmy Blaxland was schizophrenic.”

  So Dylan did know. Beth shrugged. “It didn’t make any difference to the case. He had an alibi. It didn’t make him any more prone to violence than Sarah, and all signs point to her.”

  Dylan nodded, and it was clear from the way that she looked at Beth that she agreed wholeheartedly.

  She massaged her feet. “You know how people twist things when they hear a mental illness was involved. It was just unsubstantiated rumour, nothing that could be referenced properly, so it wasn’t my place to share what might be considered just gossip with the world. That was between us.”

  “Yeah.” Dylan’s eyes bore into hers. “The three of us.”

  Beth nodded. “Yeah,” she whispered, the acknowledgement as clear as stars in a country sky. Dylan knew that Elma had suffered, too. Of course she knew. Beth had known Elma for just six months, but Dylan had lived in the homestead for close to ten years.

  Dylan reached across the table for the last two squares of chocolate. With a pop, she broke the pair in half and placed one on the table in front of Beth. Beth smiled her gratitude and slid the square between her lips. It seemed odd to think that, not all that long ago, she hadn’t even known this woman existed. Now, here they were, seated together at the kitchen table of the Blaxland Homestead, well after midnight, sharing chocolate and protecting Elma’s family secrets.

  Dylan sat back and raked her eyes over the screen. She pointed to Beth’s introductory paragraph. “This needs flavour,” she said, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked on the square of chocolate.

  Beth rested her elbow on the table and studied the screen. “Flavour?”

  “It’s a bit boring. Formal.” Her lips twisted in thought. “You should read Helter Skelter for reference. You know, the Manson case? Great storytelling.”

  Beth pulled the laptop toward her and rolled her eyes. “I have a PhD, I don’t need to read Helter bloody Skelter to learn how to detail a murder case.”

  Dylan folded her hands behind head and smirked. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I just think this is kind of bland.”

  “I’m not writing an instalment for the Twilight Zone.”

  “I know, but if you want to mainstream publish it, it has to be readable. Come on, even academics like a bit of excitement, a bit of titillation…”

  Her emphasis on each syllable of “titillation” fired every synapse in Beth’s body at once. She stood, gathering the chocolate wrapper, their tea cups. “They don’t, they’re bores.” She could feel Dylan’s eyes on her as she rinsed her cup.

  “You aren’t, and you’re one of them.”

  “I…”
Her eyes landed on the clock of the microwave. “Oh my god, when did it get to two a.m.?” She leaned back against the sink and ran her hands over her face. “I’ll be back in four hours.”

  “You should just stay.”

  Beth blinked.

  “I can’t let you go.” Dylan rested an arm over the back of her chair and set serious eyes on Beth. “I caught you nodding at the wheel back there.”

  Beth blushed. How was it that Dylan was always watching? Sometimes Beth caught her at it, her eyes intense, and it sent a secret thrill through her. The thought that maybe it happened more often than Beth was aware made her head spin.

  “Where would I sleep?” she asked.

  Dylan shrugged. “There’s room in my bed.”

  Beth froze. “Your bed?”

  “Yeah, ’course.” Dylan stood, and with a sigh, she gathered the papers into a neat pile.

  Just when she was beginning to overthink the offer, Dylan pulled the sticky tab from beneath her notebook, grinning as she secured it back in place over the web camera. Beth breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief and Dylan chuckled, smiling tiredly as she pushed her chair under the table. Hours earlier, after what had almost happened in the Storybook Garden, Beth would never have considered sleeping in the same bed as Dylan. But the electric tension between them had cooled to that cosy warmth, that safe comfort she found each morning at work. It was fine, she decided. They were fine. She could sleep—nap, really—in the loft with Dylan.

  “So are you coming up?”

  Beth nodded. She turned the heater off and followed Dylan.

  “Do you want to shower?” Dylan asked.

  “Is it okay if I take one in the morning?”

  “You can do whatever you want.”

  Dylan fumbled in her cupboard for a moment before she pulled out a pair of track pants, a jumper and a pair of socks. “I hope they’re okay,” she murmured as she dropped them onto the unmade bed. “We’re about the same size.”

  “I think you have an inch or two on me.”

  “Maybe.” Dylan winked.

  Dylan found her a spare toothbrush. As Beth cleaned her teeth, her brow furrowed as she stared at Dylan’s gathered shower curtain.

  “Why the long face?” Dylan joked.

  “I’m trying to figure out whose face is on your shower curtain. I can make out teeth and the corner of an eye, but…”

  “Oh.”

  When Dylan pulled the plastic curtain across with a “Tada!”, Beth chuckled around her toothbrush. The famous Psycho shower scene—Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, pixie cut saturated, lips parted mid shriek as she looked Norman Bates square in the eye. “Whoever came up with the idea to print that on a shower curtain is rolling in it…” Beth said through a mouthful of toothpaste.

  “Pretty great isn’t it? Got it on Etsy, half off.”

  Beth nodded to the blank space above the sink. “They didn’t have a half-off deal on mirrors, too?” There had been one up there all those years ago when she’d lived in the loft…

  Dylan yawned as she worked toothpaste from the tube. “It fell and smashed just after I moved in.”

  She sat down on the lid of the toilet. “That’s seven years’ bad luck.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dylan said, the toothbrush slipping between her full lips, “I already have a lifetime of it.”

  “How do you survive without a mirror?” Beth mumbled unintelligibly.

  “Perfectly well.”

  “I suppose you don’t need it. You have perfect skin.”

  “So do you.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Dylan scowled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She pointed to the corners of her eyes, the right side of her mouth, the left.

  Dylan squinted theatrically as she bent forward. “I’m sorry, is there something I’m supposed to be seeing?”

  Beth rolled her eyes. She brushed more aggressively. “Lines.”

  “Oh yeah. Deep as the fuckin’ Grand Canyon.”

  Beth crossed the bathroom and rinsed. “If you don’t have a mirror, how do you do your hair in the morning?” She’d never seen Dylan’s hair out, only ever in a bun or up in a twist. On a couple of rare occasions, strands had escaped at the end of a long day, and Beth surmised that the blond tresses fell somewhere between her shoulder blades and the middle of her back.

  “I don’t,” Dylan said, her hip firm against Beth’s. “I sleep with it in a bun.”

  “What about after a shower?”

  Dylan turned to rinse. “I don’t know, Beth, I just pull it up.” She sighed tiredly. “You want to stop giving me the third degree and wash your goddamn toothbrush sometime tonight so I can kick you out of my bathroom and change?”

  After she’d pulled on Dylan’s clothes, Beth slipped into the left side of the bed where the covers were undisturbed, the side she rarely saw Dylan sprawled across each morning when she snuck up to the loft.

  She looked up at the exposed rafters and waited for the en-suite door to open. The whole vibe of the room felt so different from when she had called the loft her own. Back then, it had been much darker. Now, the floodlight outside glowed through the bare window, casting shadows across the walls. With Dylan’s bed beneath the window, the slope of the roof angled toward her rather than away. If she gave it too much thought, like she was tempted to, it would feel like the roof was coming down on her, ready to crush her. Looking at things from a different perspective changed everything.

  Dylan opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the room. She looked dressed for the Antarctic.

  Beth watched as she pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table and took a small puffer out. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just Ventolin.” She took a single puff and closed the drawer. “Lung function is worse in the middle of the night, that’s all,” she explained as she lifted the covers on her side. “I don’t want to wheeze all over you all night.”

  “That’s okay,” she said softly.

  “Chest just feels a bit tight.” She slipped beneath the covers and rolled onto her side to face Beth.

  The scent of Dylan was gentle, calming, but the heat of her eyes warmed her in a different way. “You know,” Dylan said softly, “It’s been really nice waking up to a warm room every morning. Helps me breathe a lot easier.”

  Beth’s heart swelled.

  “Who’s going to let the heat in tomorrow now that you’re up here?” Dylan joked.

  She shifted. “Sarah Blaxland?”

  “She’s too self-involved.”

  She snuggled further into the doona. “God, how do you sleep with the floodlight?”

  “I like it. Mood lighting.”

  She arched her foot over her shin, rubbed it warm beneath the blankets. “Yeah, for a murder mystery party—not for sleeping.”

  “We should do that…” Dylan murmured tiredly.

  “Sleep?”

  “No. Murder Mystery Party.”

  “Forget it.”

  “It could be a gold mine.”

  “It could be a disaster.”

  Dylan chuckled, her breath warm on Beth’s cheek. “Come now, Miss Scarlett, we’d have a ball,” she whispered. “You’d make a perfect picture, alone in the kitchen with the candlestick…”

  Beth turned her head to face her. She slid a hand beneath her pillow. “Now, you see, what you’re talking about is Clue—it’s not the same thing.”

  Dylan grinned. “No?”

  Beth shook her head against Dylan’s pillow. “No.”

  Her eyes glassy with fatigue, Dylan offered a weak smile before she rolled onto her back and sighed. Beth watched as she stretched and yawned, reaching upward to crack her fingers over her chest. Beth cringed as the pop of air in Dylan’s joints snapped the silence. Dylan’s wrist twisted, bared to the floodlight, and Beth’s eyes landed on the four-inch scar that ran in a thin, vertical line from her wrist.

  She reached out, and with a curious to
uch, traced the stripe. “This is from your surgery from your bike accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  She ran her fingernail down its length. Dylan’s clawed fingers danced at the touch.

  “Are you going to come to the sleepover this weekend?” Dylan’s question was soft, a warm breath against Beth’s forehead.

  “Yes.”

  In a trance, Beth ran the pad of her index finger back up, up and up into the crease of her wrist.

  Dylan dropped her hand back to the space between them on the mattress. For a moment, Beth worried that her weary daze had let her push too far, but when she lowered a nervous hand back to her hip, Dylan reached out. With a hesitant touch, she laced their fingers together on Beth’s hip. The touch was light, just enough that it felt like more.

  “Beth?”

  Her eyelids drooped in the dark, exhaustion and the warmth of another beside her a heady cocktail. It was so effortless with Dylan, so easy. “Mmm?” She gave in, let her eyes slip closed, and listened.

  “I just want you to know,” Dylan whispered, her voice slow, her skin warm, “I want you to know that I’m glad Elma chose you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was beginning to happen like clockwork. Between Beth’s morning shower and hearing Rose’s car reverse out onto Derby Lane, footsteps would sound on the landing. Seconds later, the doorbell would chime. Beth slid the chain across and pulled open the door. On the rickety landing was the same woman who had shown up at her doorstep Thursday and Friday morning.

  In the driveway, Rose hovered by her car, staring curiously up the side of the house at their recurring visitor. For the third time in three days, embarrassment flared hot on Beth’s skin.

  The florist grinned as she handed over the boxed bouquet. “Somebody’s still in the doghouse?”

  Beth looked down into the arrangement of pink and cream roses. It was larger than the native flower bouquet she’d woken to Thursday, quieter than the bundle of yellow roses Friday had brought. “Somebody will be.”

  “You need to stop sending me roses.”

  With her back turned, Dylan ignored the slink of the screen door behind Beth and made a show of unpacking groceries. The counter was covered in trays of sausages, a package of bacon, cartons of eggs. She could make out the outline of juice bottles and fruit through the unpacked bags. She had arrived late by her own standards, but it was still only eight thirty. Dylan must have been up with the sparrows to shop for their sleepover guests.