I blinked to focus the image before me, and the tears escaped.
“Whoa, whoa.” The shadow in front of the lights grew larger. Broad shoulders, hands held out in front of him. Detective Ben Collins stood in front of me. He placed a hand on my elbow, another on my shoulder, and guided me away from the car to the curb.
The trunk gaped open in front of me, and my stomach heaved again, so I had to rest my head on my arms, folded across my knees. He crouched down so his gaze was level with mine, and I shook my head, trying to focus.
“Have you been drinking?” he asked gently. Close enough to smell the mint on his own breath.
“What? No, no.” I took a deep breath, slowly raised my head.
He looked back at the car, then at me. I finally understood how Sadie had gotten from the party to the bluffs that night. The absolute horror of the thing.
Finally, I had a piece of evidence that proved what I had believed, that everyone would take seriously—a place to point the investigation. My car, with the trunk open, where Sadie had been—except everything circled back to me.
I couldn’t say anything without implicating myself.
He couldn’t search that car without a reason—unless he thought I was drunk or high. I had to get ahold of myself.
“Carsick,” I said, hand to my stomach. “And . . .” I waved my hand around uselessly, searching—
“I know, I know,” he said, patting my knee. “The dedication tomorrow. Everything coming back. I know you two were close.” He let me sit there in silence, looking over his shoulder. “Did you need something from the trunk?” He gestured to the car, the sickly dim light beckoning.
“No. I thought I had some water, something to drink, in there. I don’t, though.” I didn’t want him to look. Didn’t want him to see what I had seen, discover what I had just discovered. I sucked in a breath, and it sounded like a sob.
“Sit tight,” he said, and I was powerless to stop him. Powerless to prevent him from looking if he wanted to. That piece of metal still in view—how obvious would it be?
But he headed for his own car, parked behind mine. It wasn’t his police vehicle, I realized now, but a sedan, blue or gray, hard to tell in the dark. He turned off the engine, so it was just me and him and the crickets and the night.
He came out with a water bottle, half empty. “Sorry, this is all I have, but . . .” He poured the rest of the water onto a hand towel, then placed it on my forehead. The crispness of it helped settle my stomach, focus my thoughts. He moved it to the back of my neck, and when I opened my eyes, he was so close. “Better?” he asked, the lines around his eyes deepening in concern.
I nodded. “Yes. Thank you. Better.”
I pushed myself to standing, and he reached a hand down to help me. “All right, I’ve got you.” Compassion, even from him, in this moment. “Listen, I’ve been looking for you. Hoping to talk to you. Can I follow you back? Or swing by sometime later? There are some things we need to clear up first, before Sadie’s dedication tomorrow.”
“Is it . . .” I started. Cleared my throat, made sure I sounded lucid, in control. “Is it about the investigation? Is it reopened?”
He frowned, but it was hard to see his face clearly in the dark. “No, it’s something we found on her phone. Just wondering who took some of the pictures. Whether it was Sadie or you.” He smiled tightly. “Nothing major, but it would help to know.”
I couldn’t tell, then, whether this was a trap. Whether he was luring me in under false pretenses, ready to strike. But I needed to hold him off. “I can’t tonight,” I said. Not yet. Not right now, with the car. Not until I had a direction to point him instead. His face hardened, and I said, “Tomorrow morning?”
He nodded slightly. “All right. Where are you staying?” And I knew, right then, he’d heard what had happened with the Lomans. That I wasn’t supposed to be living there. That I had been kicked out and abandoned. Every single thing happening right now was telling him to look closely at me.
“With a friend,” I said.
He pulled back slightly, like there was someone coming between us. “Does this friend have an address?”
“Can we meet for coffee in the morning? Harbor Bean?”
His mouth was a straight line, his face unreadable in the night. “I was hoping for a bit more privacy. You can come by the station, if you’d prefer . . . or I can pick you up, we can chat on the way to the dedication.”
I nodded. “I’ll send you the address tonight when I’m back.”
“Great,” he said. “You sure you’re okay to drive?”
“Yes,” I said, shutting the trunk as I spoke, swallowing dry air.
His headlights followed me all the way into downtown, until I circled the block and he continued on, up toward the station. I parked one block up from the Sea Rose, walking back. I couldn’t shake this feeling that nothing was safe here. Not Sadie and not me. Someone watching in the dark. Something waiting for me still.
That there was something toxic at the core here—a dark underbelly happening in the gap between us all, where no one else was looking.
* * *
BACK INSIDE THE SEAROSE, I took the list of arrival times from my purse. Added one final name: Sadie.
Had I been talking with Luce and Parker when she sneaked inside? Had she slipped through the front entrance, heading straight down the hall for the bedroom?
I tried to feel her there, place her in my memory. Find the moment when I could turn around and see her, call her name and intervene. Change the course of everything that followed.
Someone had brought her there. Anyone could’ve hurt her, but someone else knew she had been there, and had kept silent. A house full of faces, both strange and familiar. Luce had summed it up when she stumbled out of that room upstairs: I have never seen so many liars in one place.
* * *
A YEAR AND A half after my grandmother died, Grant Loman bought her house, helped with my finances. He took control when I was barely keeping afloat, and he made sure I stayed upright. But at some point, I remembered how to read a ledger, how to track my finances.
So I knew that by the time my grandmother died, any supposed large regular payment she had once received no longer existed. After her death, I had transferred the small amount left in her account to my own. That old account no longer existed. There was no easy way to find the deposit that Sadie had discovered.
But maybe it existed elsewhere, in another form—maybe evidence of it lived on.
Everything I had left of my grandmother was in the single box that I’d moved with me to the Lomans’ guesthouse—with a slanted K for Keep, which Sadie had labeled herself years ago. Now I pulled it out onto the kitchen counter, emptying the contents: the photo albums, the recipe book, the bound letters, the clipped articles about my parents’ accident, the personal folder with all the paperwork transferring assets.
I couldn’t find any receipts, anything extravagant.
The only large asset in her possession was her house.
After I sold that house, I kept all my real estate details, organized every one of them—a paper trail, as Grant had taught me.
It was the first file I had created, data I’d never looked at too closely, because why would I need to? But I had it, our payment history, stored in my computer files.
I scrolled through the mortgage history now on my laptop with a fresh eye. It seemed that in the years before her death, my grandmother had paid a low monthly sum on automatic withdrawal. But earlier, she used to pay more. There was a line in the timing, a before and after, when the mortgage payment had dropped significantly.
When she’d paid it down with one large lump sum.
Here. Here it was. Money going out. A piece of evidence left behind after all.
I traced the date, finger to the screen.
It was the month after my parents had died.
I sat back in the chair, the room turning cold and hollow. I’d thought we had gotten a life insuran
ce payment—that’s what Grant had mentioned when he helped me organize the records. I was in good shape because of that.
But I looked again. An even one hundred thousand dollars. The same amount that Sadie had discovered, sent from the Lomans to my grandmother. Not a life insurance policy at all. Not an inheritance, either. Money, suddenly, where there had been none.
My stomach twisted, pieces connecting in my head.
I pulled up the images from Sadie’s phone—the photos she had taken. The picture of the winding, tree-lined mountain road. And I finally understood what Sadie had uncovered. The thing tying me to the Lomans. The cash payment she had found.
It was a payoff for the death of my parents.
CHAPTER 27
Here’s a new game: If I’d known the Lomans were responsible for my parents’ accident, what would I have done?
All night I played this game. In the dark of the house, with nothing but shadows and ghosts for company. What I would say, what I would do—how I would corner them into the truth. No: What I would take from them instead.
I felt it as I sat there—not the creeping vines of grief, pulling me down. But that other thing. The burning white-hot rage of a thing I could feel in the marrow of my bones. The surge gathering as I stepped forward and pushed.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to scream the truth to the world and watch them fall because of it. I wanted them to pay for what they had done.
But there was a flip side to that knowledge. Because here was what else that payment provided: a motive. My motive. All of the evidence fell back on me. The phone that I had found. Her body, with signs of a struggle, in my trunk. Me, wandering around the back of the Lomans’ house that night, looking for any piece of evidence left behind. And the note on the counter. It was my handwriting. My anger. My revenge. It was mine.
* * *
THERE WAS A KNOCK at the front door, and I peered out the gap between the front curtains, expecting that Grant or Parker had somehow found me. Or Bianca, come to tell me to leave again. But it was Connor. I saw his truck at the curb, so obvious on the half-empty street. “Avery? You in there?” he called.
Shit, shit. I unlocked the door and he strode inside as if I’d invited him.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked as he looked around the unfamiliar house. His eyes stopped on the stacks of family albums and letters on the counter.
He paused a moment, staring at the article on top of the pile, a black-and-white photo of the wreckage—Littleport couple killed in single-car wreck.
“Connor?”
“She told me what happened,” he said, dragging his eyes back to me. “Faith.” He was breathing heavy, wound tight with adrenaline.
“How did you know I was here?” I repeated. I thought I’d been so careful, but here he was, unannounced. I didn’t like the way his gaze lingered on my things. I didn’t like the way he was standing—on edge.
“What?” He shook his head, like he was trying to clear the conversation. “It’s not hard to find out if you know what you’re looking for.” I took a step back, and he frowned, his eyes narrowing. “You told me you weren’t living at the Lomans’ anymore. But you’re not at Faith’s, most of the hotels are still full . . . Plenty of people mentioned seeing you around. I checked a couple of the rental properties until I saw your car downtown. This was the closest one.” He started pacing the room again, like there was nowhere else for his energy to go. “Faith didn’t hurt Sadie, I told you. You believe her, right?”
“Wait.” My eyes were closed, my hand out. I couldn’t follow both conversations at once. “People told you they’d seen me around?” I’d noticed it recently, hadn’t I? The way people looked at me, the way they watched. How they seemed to recognize something about me. I thought it was because of the investigation, new rumors that might be swirling. But maybe it had always been there. And like the Lomans, I’d become desensitized, unaware of the gazes. “Right,” I said, hands gripping the counter in front of me, spanning the distance between me and Connor. “The girl fucking around with the Lomans up there. Is that the talk?”
His throat moved as he swallowed, but he didn’t deny it. “The girl doing something up there.”
I looked to the side, to the covered windows and the dark night beyond. I didn’t understand why he was here, what he wanted. How many people knew I was hiding out here? Hadn’t I learned better than to think I was invisible by now?
“It wasn’t Faith,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know it wasn’t Faith. I know what that money was for now.” My hands tightened into fists. My entire adult life built on a lie. On a horrific secret. Molded by people I thought had given me so much but instead had taken everything.
Connor stopped moving, watching me carefully. Maybe this was my downfall—always too trusting in the end; choosing someone else over the solitude. Yet again thinking people had anything but their own interests at heart. We were alone in this house, with no one else around. He had kept things from me already, and we both knew it. But Connor was here. And he’d come for me that night, a year ago, when Sadie had texted him from my phone. With him, there was always a push and pull. Logic versus instinct. I didn’t know which motive had brought him to my door in the middle of the night, but I’d learned long ago it counted only when you knew someone’s flaws and chose them anyway.
“The Lomans, they paid off my grandmother after my parents died.”
He blinked, and I watched as his entire demeanor shifted. “What?”
I sucked in air, thought I was going to cry. Then I stopped trying to fight it, because what was the goddamn point? “They killed my parents. They were responsible somehow.”
Connor looked over his shoulder at the closed door, and I wondered if someone was walking past. “Who? How?”
I saw it then, back to the start, every moment with them—until it slipped, slowly and horribly, into focus:
The picture of Parker in the living room—his face youthful and unmarked. The way Sadie was teasing him about the scar last summer, not letting it go. The dark look he would give her that Luce had noticed. Shaking and shaking until something broke free.
The double take when Parker saw me sitting in Sadie’s room the day we met—he knew who I was. Of course he did. Avery Greer, survivor.
“Parker,” I said quietly into the night. “It was Parker.”
The scar through his eyebrow, his own reminder. Not a fight but an accident—Sadie had just figured it out for herself. An accident that he had caused. But Parker Loman was untouchable. Somehow he had gotten away with it. One hundred thousand dollars—the price of my parents’ lives. Given for our continued silence. One of two payments that Sadie had uncovered. I wasn’t sure whether the other payment was related—someone else who knew the truth—or whether the Lomans had covered up more than one horrible action.
Parker can get away with literally everything.
They will sacrifice anything for the king.
That was what we were worth to them. Two lives. Everything lost. The entire future of who I was supposed to be—just gone.
I was wrong. This place, it wasn’t the thing taking from me. It wasn’t the mountain road, the lack of streetlights, the brutal extremes. It was the people up on the bluffs, looking out over everything. Covering up for their own. How old must he have been—fourteen? Fifteen? Too young to be driving. Something he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of, no matter what the excuse. Some laws could not be bent or skirted.
His question that night, as he stood over me at the party in the bathroom—did I think he was a good person. Needing me to absolve him in his own mind. No. No, there was nothing good about him. Nothing at his core but the belief that he was worth every little thing he had been given.
Instead of the simple truth, the only thing that mattered: Parker Loman had killed my parents.
“I’m supposed to meet up with Detective Collins tomorrow,” I said. “If I tell him, I can’t control where the investigation goes fr
om there.” I said it like a warning. I said it to see what Connor would do or say. I wouldn’t be able to stop the police from looking at Connor or me.
Connor looked at the front door again, and I started to wonder whether there was someone else here with him. Or maybe I was just seeing the danger inside everyone suddenly—all the things we were capable of. “Parker hurt Sadie?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought back to what Luce had said about the darkness between Sadie and Parker. Sadie had believed I was a secret, and I was. The reason they took me in, the reason it was the right thing to do—the reason Parker did the double take the first time he saw me. He knew exactly who I was. And she finally saw him for the truth.
I didn’t know who had hurt Sadie or why. Only that she had uncovered the secret at the heart of both of our families, and now she was dead. Taken from the party back to her home in my car.
All of us were there that night. It could’ve been anyone.
Suddenly, I needed Connor to leave. I needed to sort out my thoughts, to protect myself. I crossed my arms.
He shifted on his feet. “Are you going to the dedication tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes. You?”
“Everyone’s going,” he said, holding my gaze.
I shook my head, looked away. “I’ll talk to you then.” A set of headlights cut through the front curtains before continuing on. “You need to go,” I said.
“You can come with me. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, but I can sleep on the couch—”
But I knew exactly what I needed to do. I couldn’t take down the Lomans on words alone. You couldn’t fight that sort of power with nothing but belief. You needed proof.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at the dedication, Connor,” I said, opening the front door. Holding my breath. With Connor, I realized, I was always waiting to see what he would do.
He turned at the entrance to say something. Then thought better of it. He peered down the dark road, eyes narrowed. “You’re not supposed to be here, are you.”
The Last House Guest Page 24