forty-two.
Marsden rounded the corner of the front drive, sped toward the entrance of the boardinghouse, and swung off her bike.
She left it leaning against the side of the building, the side that led to the covert, not caring if guests saw it, not caring if their eyes followed the line from it to the covert and they wondered about the forest and its bloody soil. Nina would have a fit, too, that the bike wasn’t stored in the shed the way she liked it. She kept the landscaping as tidy as she could, as though doing so kept the boardinghouse more distant from the covert than it actually was.
Marsden simply didn’t care. She wasn’t scared of hearing the lecture, would even invite the anger, actually, let it stir into a rage. It’d give her the chance to yell back at someone. If that someone ended up being Nina, then she’d probably enjoy the argument even more. If it convinced her to think she could get her money back by simply breaking into Nina’s room and tearing it apart to find it, she would overlook how Nina had the whole boardinghouse in which to hide anything she wanted.
The memory of Jude on the street corner ensnared her mind, shoved it toward places she didn’t want it to be, made her map out the world’s cruelest corners. Her pulse hurt.
A single argument between them and, minutes later, he was off with Abbot, needing to be consoled, soothed. The image of them wrapped around each other—his fingers knotted in her cool, carefree pixie hair, her arms around his neck, pressed so close they would have felt each other’s heat—was a giant, livid tattoo smeared across Marsden’s brain, behind her eyelids, everywhere she looked.
Asshole. He was an asshole to the nth degree.
Yet, whatever he’d been proven to lack, she knew she was just as much to blame for him needing to fill that void—for helping create that void. And it hadn’t felt like just another argument, either, standing there with him as the Indigo raged and ran alongside them, his expression broken. It’d felt like . . . ruin.
She needed to keep moving. Keep going. Do her best to hate him when she knew, deep down, she never could. Abbot had been there from the very beginning, had built up a history with him and closeness to him that wasn’t based entirely on misery. Jude had only come to Marsden out of necessity, needing to go through her to get to the covert. Maybe whatever she thought they’d built on top of that—above it, beside it, other than it—would have never been enough. Maybe it wouldn’t have even come close.
She entered through the kitchen, as she always did. But instead of staying there to look over the menu for that night’s dinner, or to check what Dany might have brought back from the market, she went upstairs and headed for her mother’s room.
Marsden had questions for Shine—about Brom, about Wynn, about whether or not she’d known her husband had been with friends other than his best ones at Decks that night. She wanted to know why she’d told Nina about her daughter having a means to escape.
She knocked at the door, her heart thudding. Again.
No one there.
Then she remembered that her mother had had an appointment. The salon was downtown—she could have gone shopping or to eat afterward if she had no reason to rush back.
Marsden’s mind raced as she backed away. Where next? Who to ask? Her questions were suffocating, and time, Nina, Shine—their demands pressed harder.
She started walking down the hall again, knowing then what had to be done.
Peaches’s room wasn’t locked. The scent of her perfume still lingered, much fainter than before. Most of her things had been left behind, and Marsden remembered how lightly she’d packed. It was hard to tell what it meant—that Peaches had left enough to quickly slip back into an old life when she returned or that it was easier to keep going the less weighing her down.
She moved over to the bedside table and opened the drawer. It would come down to whether Nina had been more efficient than Peaches had been forgetful, or if she’d been rushed.
Marsden wasn’t entirely sure she wanted it to be there still.
It was.
She picked up the gun. Her hand trembled. The metal was strangely slick, almost oily—definitely unfriendly.
Could she really use it? She had no real idea how, only that if she went by books and movies, the recoil alone would be difficult to control. But she was not Grant Eldridge—she would likely need more than her poker face when it came to bluffing.
Peaches’s closet was still nearly full—clothes, shoes, jewelry—so Marsden had no problem finding a purse.
She dropped the gun inside, slung the purse over her shoulder, and left the room.
The lobby was largely deserted, which was typical in the hours right before check-in. Nina was at the front desk, fussing with a fresh bouquet in a glass vase, releasing its fragrances into the room.
Marsden’s throat went tight. The flowers had come from Evergreen. She recognized the hydrangea cuttings, the thin spires of quince, the puffs of pure color and scent. She wondered if Jude had put it together. Had delivered it. Had touched it. She again felt the echo of his skin on hers.
Her stomach twisted as she approached Nina, considering the last time they’d spoken it’d been over blackmail and raspberry crumble. Instinct told her to turn and go the other way, but she had no choice now.
“Are you here with good news?” Nina stroked a blue hydrangea blossom with an elegant finger. Her eyes were cool and probing and hard as diamonds.
“You said I had a few days.”
“Well, I’ll be here waiting—don’t make me wonder if I should be worried.”
“Nina.” Marsden’s voice was stiff, full of taut wires. “Someone’s at the back entrance, wanting to talk to you about an advertising opportunity for the bed-and-breakfast.”
Her mother’s boss’s mouth curled up into her moue of distaste. “You should have told them to come around front.”
“I’ll watch the desk for you while you talk to them.”
Nina set aside the vase. Marsden got a whiff of deep, earthy sweetness, was instantly back at Evergreen—that back room, that sprawl of flowers on the floor, Jude’s mouth—before mentally dragging herself back.
“Fine,” Nina said with a huff. “As if I don’t have better things to do. I’ll be back in a minute.”
As soon as she left, Marsden opened the guest log and flipped the pages until she found his name and room number. She shut the log, fished out the corresponding room key from the front drawer, and turned down the guest wing.
Ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the doorknob, she made herself knock before she could think too hard about what she was doing. Did it count as a real plan when all she had were questions she didn’t know how to ask and a gun she hoped she wouldn’t have to use?
When there was no response, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
It was decorated as the rest of the bedrooms in the boardinghouse: gray-flocked wallpaper, navy tiling with a faint fleur-de-lis pattern, pine-framed windows. There was also a television and an electric kettle on the desk, a clock radio and lamp on the bedside table—standard for all the guest rooms. One of Dany’s welcome baskets still sat on the dresser, and Marsden knew that it would hold packaged mini soaps for use in one of the two communal baths down the wing, coupons for the local movie theater, and a package of the homemade rocky road brownies that Marsden baked and froze by the panful just for those baskets.
Already nervous, her breathing uneven and too loud in the room, she placed Peaches’s purse on the bed and pulled out the drawer of the bedside table.
A notepad, a pen, a leather-bound Bible. More of the standard.
Marsden slammed the drawer shut, suddenly full of fresh doubt, despising her own desperation to finally be free of guilt.
What was she expecting to find? Her father’s four grand from winning blackjack eight years ago? If Brom had taken it that night, it would be long gone, spent or saved or lent out—anywhere but there in the boardinghouse, she was sure. And even if she did find the money and could somehow prove it was her father’s from that night, it still wouldn’t mean Brom had anything to do with his actual drowning.
You know how sometimes you just feel it in your gut? That it’s something way beyond logic and probability yet somehow just is?
Heat rose behind her eyes at the memory of Jude’s words. She wondered where he was right then, what he was doing besides hating her.
She pulled out the drawer again, this time careful to look more thoroughly.
Gut feeling.
And humans were creatures of habit.
In the very back was another notebook, identical to the ones she’d found at his house. It was only half-full, the most-recent section dated just last week, with more rows of Rms and what she felt more and more to be shorthand for names of banks.
And neatly printed in the far margin: Nina’s cut 30%.
A rush filled her ears at seeing the name. Whatever Brom was doing, he was paying off Nina. She remembered her earlier guess of Rm meaning “room.” Nina somehow being a part of it meant it would have to be rooms of the boardinghouse.
Those rooms came with guests. Guests who, unless they were paying up front with all cash—which almost never happened—had to provide some kind of bank info to secure their stay.
And Brom was in banking.
The rush in her ears grew louder as all the pieces tried to fall in place to become an answer.
Could Brom and Nina be working together to steal money from boardinghouse guests? Brom must have access to all kinds of accounts through his work, and it was Nina’s policy to get that bank info so she could use it if a guest’s payment didn’t go through.
If the two had a system and were careful, Marsden could see how they might have been scamming people for years.
It was all still just a guess, she knew, even if most of it felt more right than wrong. And none of it explained what Brom might be hiding when it came to the night of her father’s death.
But Marsden was no longer a stranger to blackmail.