“If I thought she would agree,” Davis told me, leaning up against the deck’s railing, “I would ask your grandmother to dance.”
That wasn’t what he’d brought me out here to say, and it certainly wasn’t what I wanted to talk to him about, but I’d been a part of the world he and Lillian inhabited long enough to know that this was how the game was played. “She said she met my grandfather at a party like this one.”
Davis nodded back toward the ballroom. “In that very room.” He ran his thumb over his forefinger, and I noticed that he still wore a wedding ring on his left hand. “There was a time that I thought one dance with your grandmother might make all the difference in the world.” He was quiet for a moment, listening to the sound of the water and the faintest traces of music from inside. “It is out of courtesy to my relationship with her that I will ask you exactly once to stay out of my dealings with Victor
Gutierrez.”
There was something in his tone and posture that reminded me that he’d grown up with Lillian, in a town where my grandmother claimed that people had to fight to survive.
I wasn’t deterred. “His granddaughter was the teenage girl your adult son knocked up.” I rested my forearms on the railing and took in the way a muscle in his jaw had just ticced. “So it isn’t just business,” I said, reading into the tell. “Your dealings with Victor Gutierrez—and his with you—are personal.”
“What they are,” he emphasized, “is none of your concern.”
“You told me that you took care of the situation with Ana,” I said, studying the lines of his face, looking for another tell. “I assumed that meant you paid her off.”
That seemed to be the go-to move in the Ames family playbook. Davis had helped to cover for the accident that had put Nick’s brother in a coma, back when he’d thought that Walker was the one driving.
He’d paid Nick off once the truth about the senator’s involvement had come out.
“I believe,” Davis said, “that I’ve had enough fresh air.” He started back for the ballroom.
“Campbell thinks Ana is the body that’s been sitting at the bottom of Regal Lake for two decades.” I dropped that bomb, stopping him in his tracks. “She thinks someone in your family killed her.”
Davis Ames turned back to face me, his expression inscrutable, his posture impossible to read. “And why the hell would she think that?”
I kept expecting someone to open the door and join us on the deck, to interrupt this conversation, but no one did. It was just the two of us, out here, alone. “Campbell doesn’t have the highest opinion of your son,” I said. “Or her mama. Ana’s pregnancy was awfully inconvenient, and as far as Campbell and I have been able to tell, neither Ana’s family nor anyone hereabouts has heard from her in twenty years.” I held his gaze. “It doesn’t look good.”
He stared at me for a moment, then let out a huff. “Too much like your grandmother for your own damn good,” he muttered, before getting down to business. “How much have you told Campbell?”
“I didn’t tell her that you handled Ana,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”
“I didn’t kill the girl,” Davis said, “and you damn well know that.” He shook his head. “I spoke to her about her situation just once. I told her she had options.”
“Options,” I repeated, making no attempt to downplay the skepticism in my voice. Davis Ames did not strike me as someone who sat back and let other people make their choices, completely free of input and coercion.
“Yes, options. Alternatives. Choices. And I suggested that she’d have a hell of a lot more of them with money.”
Of course he had. “You bought her off.”
Davis Ames didn’t seem insulted by that statement in the least. “I scared the hell out of that girl, and then I offered her a way out. Money up front, and more once the baby was born.”
The latter half of that statement surprised me. “Once the baby was…”
He gave me a look. “I have a reputation for being a real bastard—well earned, I might add—but if there’s one thing I care about, it’s my own flesh and blood. Yes, I wanted to protect my son, but that child was my blood, too. I had hopes that once Ana realized her parents weren’t going to support her, she’d see her way to an adoption.”
I stared at him for a moment. This was a man who made decisions, a man who liked control. “You probably had adoptive parents all picked out.”
Davis didn’t deny it. “That’s neither here nor there. Ana took my money, Sawyer. She left town. And I never heard from her again.”
ithin moments of reentering the ballroom, I was waylaid by Campbell.
“What just happened?” she asked. “And don’t tell me that you and my grandfather were simply overcome with a need for fresh air and chitchat.”
“He didn’t want me asking about his interaction with Victor Gutierrez in public.” I let that sink in, then imparted the other piece of information I’d gained. “Your grandfather admitted to paying Ana off. He was trying to bribe her into an adoption. A quiet one.”
“You should have let me come with you,” Campbell insisted. “I could have gotten him to tell us more.”
“There might not be any more to tell,” I replied. “If Ana took his money, if she was keeping the pregnancy quiet…what motive would anyone have had to hurt her?”
Campbell didn’t have an immediate response. I glanced around the room, looking for the others, and realized that Sadie-Grace and Boone were on the dance floor.
“Where’s Nick?” I asked Campbell. I had a sinking feeling about what she was going to say before she replied.
“He said to tell you that you suck at favors, and then he left.” She made a tsking sound. “Don’t look so disappointed. Nick’s not a boy you rely on, Sawyer.” She gave the faux sympathy a rest and offered me a wicked smile. “But he is an awful lot of fun.”
I wouldn’t know. Before I could dismiss the alien sense of disappointment that accompanied that thought or tell Campbell that Nick and I weren’t really dating and she could stop marking her territory, a third party entered our conversation.
“Did someone mention fun?” Victoria said, sliding in between us.
Campbell eyed her. I wondered if she was thinking about Ana, but what came out of her mouth was: “Done flirting with my brother?”
Victoria was undaunted by the question. “It was just one dance,” she said. “And Lily doesn’t own him.”
Sometimes, I thought, a dance is more than a dance.
“And I suppose your interest in Walker has nothing to do with whatever ax your family has to grind against mine?” Campbell asked Victoria sweetly.
“No more than my interest in you,” Victoria replied. She tilted her chin up slightly. “For the record, I didn’t come over here to talk about Walker.” She brought her hand to her lapel, and I realized that she was wearing a pin. Silver. A snake wrapped around a rose.
“Kind of hard to top our last rendezvous,” I commented dryly.
Campbell batted her eyelashes. “Discovering a twenty-year-old corpse really does have a certain flair.”
“Twenty-five,” Victoria corrected.
“What?” I said.
“My father’s been keeping tabs on the investigation,” Victoria told us casually. “The body has been dated back twenty-five years. And, yes, the authorities do suspect foul play.”
Not twenty years. I tried to wrap my mind around that. Twenty-five.
Victoria let her hand go to the pin on her lapel again. “You two and Sadie-Grace might want to check out the valet stand,” she advised us. “And don’t tell Lily.”
e should call the boys.” Liv addressed that statement to Julia, but Charlotte was the one whose gut twisted in response.
The boys. Liv knew how Charlotte felt about Sterling Ames. Of course she knows. And of course she wants to call the boys. Hadn’t Charlotte told her that she wanted more? She could taste the words on the tip of her tongue, even as her stomach fl
ip-flopped at the thought of Julia’s twin brother. The golden boy of their senior class. Just this once, I want to break all the rules.
“And what are we going to tell the boys?” Julia asked dryly. “That we’re going on a drunken adventure?”
“I’m drunk,” Liv corrected. “You’re not, because you’re driving. And Charlotte’s not—yet—because I want her sober when she calls the boys.”
Boys, plural. Charlotte could manage a call to J.D. He and Liv had been together since the beginning of the summer. Sterling Ames, however, was another story.
“I’ll call my brother,” Julia volunteered suddenly. “He has a new friend. Thomas. He worked for Daddy this summer. He’s a little rough around the edges.”
Liv cackled. “Just the way you like them, Jules.”
wenty-five years,” I told Campbell. “Not twenty. Whoever the Lady of the Lake is, she died five years before Ana disappeared.”
“Is this the part where you tell me I told you so?” Campbell asked.
“No,” I said. I’d wondered—and suspected—too.
“Good,” Campbell replied. “In other news, I vote we get Sadie-Grace after we visit the valet stand, because the good Lord knows the girl’s sweeter than she is discreet. Now, do you want to distract the valet, or should I?”
Campbell could go from zero to full-on Southern belle in half a heartbeat. Luckily for us, she could also go from Southern belle to seductress and back again in a heartbeat and a half. The poor valet was going to get whiplash.
But at least she had his attention.
I ducked behind the valet stand, telling myself that I was doing this for Campbell—because I owed her one, and she needed the White Gloves.
She needed something. I knew what that was like.
The valet stand had a cabinet built into the back. It was, not surprisingly, locked. I grabbed a pin from my hair and went to work.
“But what do you do,” I could hear Campbell saying, “when a car is too big to fit in a spot? Or too…powerful to handle?”
I rolled my eyes and continued jimmying the pin in the lock. The mechanism clicked, then gave, and a second later, I had the cabinet open. Inside, there was a Peg-Board, with easily a hundred numbered pegs. Valet keys hung on a good three-quarters of them. I scanned the rungs, trying to figure out what Victoria had meant when she’d said that we should check out the valet stand.
“Personally, I’m a bit of daredevil. You won’t tell, will you? I just like to go fast, is all.”
There. Three rows down, there was a key on a familiar-looking chain. A snake wrapped around a rose. I plucked it from the board and then saw two others. I grabbed them, too—seconds before I heard someone coming out the front door of the Arcadia hotel.
Keeping low to the ground, I shuffled toward the entrance and then popped up beside the group as they exited. When Campbell saw me, she cut the valet loose, and two minutes later, we’d made it far enough away from the building to examine our loot.
The three key chains were identical. The keys that hung on them were different, but all three had one thing in common.
Size.
“Golf cart keys,” Campbell said. “One for you. One for me. One for Sadie-Grace.”
Right after Victoria had pointed us to the valet stand, I’d been more focused on the bombshell she’d dropped about the Lady of the Lake than her parting shot. Don’t tell Lily.
“If Lily’s out, I’m out,” I told Campbell. I’d never cared about impressing the White Gloves in the first place, and I didn’t think there was any more information to get out of Victoria.
“What if Lily weren’t out?” Campbell asked me.
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “Victoria just said…”
Campbell smiled. “I happen to have an in with one of the other White Gloves,” she said. “One who isn’t overly fond of Victoria Gutierrez.”
texted Lily and Sadie-Grace. Campbell texted Hope, who met us—all four of us—at the front of the hotel. I didn’t know what Campbell had texted her, but she didn’t bat an eye at Lily’s presence.
“The golf carts are parked around back,” she said. “You obtained your keys?”
“Easy as pie,” Campbell replied.
“Apple pie,” Sadie-Grace added confidently. Then, in the interest of full disclosure, she continued. “Or so I assume. I wasn’t there.”
“We only have three keys.” I phrased my question carefully. “Is that going to be a problem?”
I was keeping secrets from Lily. If and when the truth about my parentage came out, she might hate me, but I wasn’t going to sit back and let anyone else hurt her if I could help it.
“Not a problem,” Hope replied cheerfully. “Each White Glove picks her own replacement. Victoria can’t cut any of you as long as I’m interested.”
Apparently, she hadn’t found Lily interesting enough to keep around on her own, but if she was part of a package deal with me and Campbell—so be it.
What are the chances that Lily can change any of the other White Gloves’ minds tonight?
Lily must have sensed something was off with me, because she squeezed my hand as we rounded the back of the hotel. “Don’t worry,” she whispered as a line of a dozen golf carts came into view. “I won’t let them cut you.”
Hope was as good as her word. Victoria didn’t say a thing about Lily’s presence. I counted sixteen other Candidates present, along with the eight White Gloves.
“Keys, please,” Victoria told us. I handed them over. She tossed one to Sadie-Grace. “You’re with Nessa’s group. Hope, you can have Campbell.” Another key toss. Victoria waited a moment and then closed her fist around the last key. “Sawyer and Lily are with me.”
Each golf cart had two seats—one front-facing and one back. I ended up behind the wheel of our cart. Lily was sitting beside me, and Victoria had taken up a perch on the backseat.
On the carts around us, the other White Gloves and Candidates chattered. Every single one of them was dressed to the nines.
Golf carts? Check? Formal wear (lake version)? Check.
“What exactly are we doing tonight?” I asked.
The answer, it soon became apparent, was off-roading. Victoria directed us past the hotel, past the ramp down to the docks, past the golf course and the tennis courts, past the condos, down a gravel road….
After that, things got rural, fast. Our drive ended outside a gate. The grating beneath it prepared me for the possibility of cows.
“Sawyer.” Victoria nodded toward the gate. “Would you do the honors?”
She probably expected me to be horrified of the mud or the fact that the headlights on the golf cart couldn’t compensate for how quickly things had gotten dark when the summer night had finally lost its sun.
But darkness I could handle. Mud I could handle. I had a healthy respect for—and accompanying wariness of—cows.
Trespassing I tended to take on a case-by-case basis.
“We have to cut through here to get to the woods.” Victoria took note of my hesitation, however brief. “There’s already a trail from point A to point B. Having second thoughts, Taft?”
“Sawyer doesn’t have second thoughts!” Sadie-Grace insisted from the golf cart behind us, loyal to the bone. “Sometimes, she doesn’t even have first thoughts!”
Thank you, Sadie-Grace. I jumped out of the cart and opened the gate. Mud flicked up onto my lower calves as I walked back to the golf cart. Aunt Olivia was not going to be happy about the state of my sandals.
Once I was situated behind the wheel again, Victoria leaned between Lily and me and waved me forward.
“The Candidates are many,” a White Glove called out behind us. “The Chosen are few!”
Victoria didn’t sit back down. Instead, she braced her hands against the frame on either side of the cart, her arms and legs forming an X that I could only partially see when I glanced back at her in the dark. She angled her face skyward, her long hair waving behind her, lost to sha
dow, as I gave the golf cart a little more gas.
“Let the games,” Victoria murmured, “begin.”
t became clear pretty quickly that the primary game in question was chase. The woods were vast, uneven, and littered with rocks, trees, and the kind of dense underbrush that a golf cart could only plow through going full speed—and only because these particular golf carts had a lot more horsepower than the kind you’d find on a golf course.
“Truth or dare?” Victoria yelled in my ear as we hit a bump that sent us airborne—and swerving to miss a tree. Behind us, I could hear another cart full of girls shrieking—and closing in.
“Really?” I shouted back, easing off the gas just enough to hang a turn. “You want to play Truth or Dare now?”
Our headlights illuminated the woods for just three or four feet in front of us. I aimed for what I hoped was a bit of a clearing and gave the cart enough gas to tear through the brush.
Victoria may have tightened her hold on the cart, but she didn’t show any signs that her heart rate had ticked up even a beat. “My mother is thirty-five years younger than my father. I’m the family scandal and the much-beloved baby. It’s called multitasking. Truth or dare, Taft?”
“Truth!” Lily yelled as we picked up speed. The shrieking behind us got louder and our pursuers closed in. “She’ll take truth.”
“Excellent choice,” Victoria commented. I hauled it ninety degrees to the left, hit a clear patch, and managed to circle back behind the other cart, flying past them before they’d registered what was happening.
Victoria chose that moment to let loose her question. “Why did you ask me about Ana?”
“Who’s Ana?” Lily said beside me.
This time, I took a major bump on purpose. Golf carts didn’t come with seat belts, so we all bounced upward, fast enough and far enough to nearly hit our heads on the cart’s roof.
Unfortunately, once we’d righted ourselves, it became clear to me that neither Victoria nor Lily was letting go of the question.
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