by Jen Blood
“About what?”
“The lie. I mean… She knew, obviously. Did you tell her, or did Adam?”
“Nobody told her anything. She never knew.”
Abbott scratched his pointed chin. “Listen, you don’t need to protect her. It happened a long time ago… I’m just trying to get to the truth.”
“And so am I,” I insisted. “I’m not protecting her—I’m telling you, she never knew. I never told her, and my father sure as hell didn’t. She was the whole reason he told me to lie in the first place.”
I thought back to those days after the fire, trying to call up conversations I’d had with my mother. Had she asked me what happened? Pushed me to tell her the truth? I could remember little about that time, but I had a funny feeling that the reason I didn’t remember that particular conversation was because we’d never had it.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” I confessed. “If this was your investigation, where would you go next?”
“This was my investigation.” He smiled dryly. “What about the other guy who was there—the one I’m assuming shot these pictures. Noel Hammond? He was there when the investigators arrived, if memory serves. And with the history between him and your mother, I always got the—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “What history are you talking about, exactly?”
Abbott’s eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He bit his lip. “You didn’t know about the, uh…”
“ ‘The uh’ what? Noel Hammond was married.”
“It was never confirmed—it was just a hunch I had. I could’ve been off base.”
And pigs could fly. “Did my mother know about this theory of yours?”
“She denied it, as did Detective Hammond. No surprise there, of course.”
“But you didn’t believe them.”
“I had my doubts.”
He didn’t come right out and say he knew my mother had been lying through her pearly white teeth, but it came through loud and clear anyway. My chair scraped across the linoleum as I stood. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me—I really appreciate it. I should get going.”
“Listen, I might have been wrong. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m sure you were right, actually. Don’t worry about it. Things are making a little more sense now—thank you for being honest with me. If it’s all right, could I call you with any further questions?”
He looked uncomfortable. Sorry for what he’d said, and even more sorry for me. I’d always loved being a reporter, but I’d never known what it was like to actually be the story.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
“Of course,” he agreed. “Call me anytime, I’ll be happy to help any way that I can.”
We shook hands and I was on my way. The prospect of a romantic dinner with Jack Juarez was suddenly the very last thing on my mind.
Chapter Twelve
“Noel fucking Hammond. Can you believe that?”
It was just after one a.m. I’d been waiting three hours for Diggs to get home from work; Juarez had given up and turned in at a little after ten. Our dinner together had been fine, but I was distracted and he was distracted, and neither one of us seemed eager to share the reasons for our distraction. Conversation was stilted, and we hurried through our Eritrean veggie platter and were back on the road by five. I’d had too much honey wine and ended up falling asleep in the car. I woke up as we were pulling into the driveway, glad to have the day come to an end.
And now, I was back in the kitchen with Diggs. We were both in sweats and slippers, munching on leftovers and talking quietly so we wouldn’t wake Juarez. The fact that I’d never quite achieved this level of comfort with my ex-husband was not lost on me.
Diggs shook his head in response to my question. “It does seem a little coincidental. Noel Fucking Hammond.” He was making fun of me, but that was fine. I knew I was onto something.
“She slept with him. Do you know how many times he could have mentioned something about sleeping with my mother?”
“Several?”
“At least a few. You know how many times he did mention bumping uglies with my mom?”
“None?”
“None.” I kicked back the last of my beer, my second of the night. “What the hell were they thinking? I mean, obviously something was going on. Do you think she slept with him to keep him quiet?”
Einstein sat up and rested his fuzzy chin on my thigh, ever hopeful. I gave him a piece of the leftover injara I’d brought home for Diggs. The dog gobbled it up, then resumed his position at my feet in hopes of more of the same.
Diggs got a glass of water from the fridge for himself, and I nodded gratefully when he tipped the pitcher my way. A headache was starting somewhere behind my eyes; more water and less beer was a good place to start. He sat back down, close enough that I could smell the chocolate on his breath from the hot cocoa he’d just finished.
“I don’t have a clue why your mother would sleep with the guy,” he finally answered. “Hey, you know who you could ask who probably would know?”
“Forget it,” I returned. “I’m not calling my mother. I’m asking Hammond. And you better believe he’s gonna tell me.”
“Hammond won’t even take your calls. Your mother, on the other hand…”
“Diggs.”
“Solomon,” he countered, the water at his lips.
Things got quiet for a few seconds. I kneaded the back of my neck, trying to ease the tension there. “Can we talk about something else, please?”
“Yeah, no problem.” He studied me in that way he’s been doing since I was fifteen—like I’m one of those translucent frogs you find somewhere in South America, all my twisted innards forever exposed to him. “I got a call today,” he said. He let the silence stretch between us.
“Am I supposed to guess from whom? Because I’m a little tired for games.”
“Michael.”
“Michael my husband?”
“Ex-husband, isn’t it?” I didn’t say anything. He scratched his chin. “He said he’s left a couple of messages but you’re not returning his calls. He’s worried—wanted to know if you saw your doctor before you left town.”
I lay my head on the table, resting my cheek on the cool pine. I closed my eyes when Diggs brushed the hair from my forehead.
“You could’ve told me you were pregnant, you know,” he said.
“I know that.” His fingers remained in my hair, a ghost of a caress that brought back memories I wasn’t prepared to revisit.
“How many times did we see each other? Hell, I saw you the weekend before the—”
“I didn’t tell Michael, either.”
He didn’t say anything for so long that I looked up. “I don’t want another call like that in the middle of the night—especially not from him.”
Diggs had never made a secret of his disdain for Michael, but now there was pure bile in his tone. I got up and dumped the rest of my water down the drain. Diggs followed me over, but I noticed that he was careful not to stand too close when I turned to face him.
“So, this whole thing is…what? A pissing contest between you and my ex-husband because he was there to pick up the pieces when I almost bled to death on our bathroom floor, and you weren’t? You’re not my fucking guardian angel, Diggs. There was nothing you could’ve done.”
His eyes flashed with that undercurrent of fury he always tries so hard to keep hidden. He closed the distance between us. I stood with my back to the sink, Diggs close enough that I could smell his aftershave and feel his heat, his gaze locked on mine.
“I should have known,” he said. The anger was gone suddenly, replaced with a guilt so deep it almost hurt to look at him. “That weekend—I knew there was something wrong. You looked like hell, you weren’t eating, didn’t sleep… I’ve known you almost twenty years now. I should’ve known something was wrong.”
I could have handled a fight—hell, I can always handle a fight. It’s all those ot
her, messier emotions that make me crazy.
“I didn’t want you to know,” I said. “Not yet. I needed to figure everything out first.” I didn’t go into the details, all the stupid scandalous crap with my philandering ex-husband and a baby I couldn’t handle and the envelope from Malcolm Payson that had effectively upended my universe. I didn’t really need to, though; Diggs always got that kind of thing.
We stood there in the kitchen in relative darkness for a few seconds, close but not quite touching. I fisted my hand in the front of his t-shirt. He didn’t move. I took a step forward—enough that our bodies were flush, neither of us breathing. He tucked a tendril of hair behind my ear.
“Erin,” he said. A whisper, so soft that it sounded part-plea.
I leaned up on my toes, my hands at his sides. He met me halfway, his lips softer than Michael’s, his body familiar and tantalizing and terrifying against mine. For a few seconds, the kiss was the only thing that existed, his mouth warm and bruising, his hand tangled in my hair.
There was a battle he was fighting—I could feel it in the kiss, in the tension his body still held, in the way he never quite gave himself over to the moment. His left hand fell to my arm, squeezing gently as he started to pull away. Before he could disentangle himself entirely, there was the sound of movement at the kitchen door.
We sprang apart like a Roman candle had gone off between us.
Juarez stood at the door with an empty glass in his hand. “I was just—sorry, I couldn’t sleep. I was getting some water. I’ll—I can get it from the bathroom. Sorry,” he repeated.
I couldn’t look at Diggs. My face was burning, my body still charged with the kiss and the thought of where it might have led. I grabbed Einstein and hurried away, brushing past Juarez.
“Don’t worry about it. I was just going to bed.”
“Erin,” Diggs called after me, but I was already halfway down the hall. I didn’t turn back.
I tossed and turned for most of the night after that. About twenty minutes after I’d locked myself in my room like an angsty teen, I heard footsteps outside the door. If I’d expected Diggs to barge in, I was disappointed; he didn’t even knock. I imagined him in the hallway wrestling with his conscience, already condemning himself for his moment of weakness. I told myself I was glad he didn’t force the issue by making us talk it out then and there, and I almost believed it.
The next morning, I was up and out before dawn. I had been hoping to get Diggs to help me unlock Payson’s mysterious suite that day, but I decided to go it alone. It wasn’t like he’d been trained in lock picking anymore than I had. Besides which, it felt like I’d started to rely a little too much on the men in my life these days; it would do me good to stand on my own.
By the time I got to the island and made the trek up to the house, morning had broken. A cool, damp fog hung over the water and wrapped around the shore, and a light rain had dampened my hair and my spirits. My nose and fingers were ice cold. I could hear the low diesel hum of fishing boats in the harbor, but all else was silence. Apparently, the birds were sleeping in.
The wrought-iron gate I’d wrestled with the last time I was there had blown shut again, though I had thought I’d propped it open securely enough to stay that way. A niggling voice that sounded a lot like Diggs whispered warnings that I chose not to heed.
I checked my cell phone. There was a weak signal that might do the trick if I needed to make a call. Not that reassuring.
“It’s my friggin’ island,” I said, after a few seconds of immobility. Einstein looked at me and whimpered, but he didn’t argue.
I pulled the gate back open as wide as it would go, grabbed another branch from the forest floor, and wedged it in place. After a couple of times hauling on it, I convinced myself it wasn’t moving again.
Einstein and I resumed our hike.
There was nothing strange about the house when I got there. Not that there would have been, necessarily, but I’d seen enough horror movies over the years that a ghostly face in the window or a slamming door wouldn’t have been that surprising. Terrifying, yes; surprising, no. Once we were inside, though, there was nothing but the same old darkness and mildew and oppressive silence. Einstein growled at the meeting room entry, but after a few seconds waiting to see if the sky would fall, I convinced myself that he was just being paranoid. He’s watched most of the same movies I have, after all.
The rain began to fall harder outside, beating down on the old roof and slashing against the windowpanes. I lit a couple of battery powered lanterns I’d brought over earlier in the week, and started a fire in the fireplace.
Einstein paced at the bottom of the stairs. He started up the steps a couple of times, whined, and returned to my side. I thought of the lamb’s head we’d found the other day, then of the gate I had been almost positive I’d propped open securely before.
“We could call Diggs,” I said.
Once the suggestion was out there, it sounded lame—especially given the incident the night before.
“Or not.”
I got up from my spot by the fire, grabbed a flashlight and my trusty hammer, and headed up the stairs.
I opened the bedroom doors on the second floor in an effort to start airing the place out—which thrilled Einstein, who took advantage of the opportunity to explore a whole mausoleum’s worth of new nooks and crannies. We were about halfway down the hall when he lost interest in the game and began to growl, then raced ahead of me, the fur raised along his spine and his tail held high. He stopped short at the double doors leading to my father’s old room. His nose was glued to the bottom of the door, his lips pulled back to reveal some very sharp canine teeth and a snarl I’d never seen before.
I went to the door and dragged him back by the collar. The growling gave way to a desperate whine as he tried to get away. He glanced at me, brown eyes anxious, then back at the door.
Shit.
I stood there for a moment of indecision. I could call someone. I should call someone. Especially if some lunatic had been out on the island screwing around with the gate—presumably the same lunatic with a penchant for decapitating farm animals.
Instead, I knocked on the bedroom door.
“Anybody in there? Ghosts, psychotic killers, mutants of the underworld?”
No answer.
I took a breath, since I’d forgotten to do so for a while. My hand fell to the doorknob.
I opened the door, the hammer held aloft.
Einstein tried to scoot past me, but I blocked his way. We stood in the doorway, the dog whining as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The smell was unmistakable. Something long dead lay in the center of the old wood floor, beside a double bed that had once belonged to my mother and father.
“So, I guess we found the rest of that lamb,” I said.
I ordered Einstein to sit just outside the threshold, which he did grudgingly. Sure enough, by the light of my flashlight I traced the body of a decapitated lamb, the wool and part of the flesh well-rotted by now. Someone must have been holding onto this for a while—when we were here just two days ago, Einstein hadn’t shown any signs of smelling it, so I couldn’t imagine it had been in the house long.
Which meant someone had been here. Recently. The realization blindsided me: I wasn’t overreacting. This wasn’t my imagination, or just some redneck playing a prank. Someone had been here, and whoever that someone was, they had access to the house and an obvious axe to grind. I returned to the hallway and closed the bedroom door, then started to call Diggs before I reconsidered and called Juarez instead.
The call went straight to voicemail. I left a message and hung up. Once Einstein realized he wouldn’t be having lamb for lunch, he abandoned me and headed back downstairs to chase wayward field mice around the house. I waited for Juarez to return my call and tried to sort through everything that had happened since I’d first gotten to town.
There were Joe Ashmont’s threats on the first day, followed by the disc
overy of the lamb’s head on the property and my bizarre run-in with Matt Perkins in the middle of the night. I was now convinced that it hadn’t been the wind at all and someone had actually re-closed the gate to the property within the last day or so, but that was pretty minor compared to the beheaded corpse in my father’s old bedroom. The fact that they’d chosen that particular room told me that whoever this was had some knowledge of the Payson boarding house—certainly more than they could have gotten from reading a few articles online.
I may be slow on the uptake, but I’m not a complete idiot—it was time to get the hell out of Dodge, at least until I had some backup. My mind made up, I headed for the stairwell before I realized I hadn’t heard anything from Einstein in a few minutes. I called for him and heard a muffled ‘woof’ downstairs in response—as though he was barking behind a closed door.
My heart sped up and my mouth went dry. Einstein kept barking, his yips higher in pitch once he realized he couldn’t get to me. I made for the stairs at just short of a run, the hammer clutched in my right hand. I was five steps away, maybe less, moving fast while the dog kept barking and the blood rushed in my ears and the darkness closed in, when I heard the clip of heavy footsteps coming toward me. I wheeled around an instant before he hit, tackling me with a lowered shoulder and the force of a freight train. The momentum carried us both a solid three feet before I slammed back against the wall with a faceless man’s hands around my throat.
Chapter Thirteen
Everything after that was a blur. I dropped my flashlight but managed to hang onto my precious hammer, slamming it hard into my attacker’s side. He yelped and dropped his hands from around my throat, but he was on me again before I could get free. He pulled the hammer from my hand and it dropped to the floor. I struck out blindly, and managed to get a solid left hook in before he countered with a blow to my right cheek that nearly dropped me where I stood.
I kicked out blindly, trying to recall the lessons I’d learned in self-defense classes back in Boston. Knees, nuts, eyeballs. The problem was, I couldn’t see a damned thing. I landed a glancing blow to his leg before I struck upward and the heel of my hand caught his chin; I felt the bristle of a beard before he knocked my arm aside and a second blow landed dead on as his knuckles connected with my lip.