Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
Kate’s whole existence was just a long list of things that Spencer’s mother never approved of, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out which one she was currently on the hook for. And so, as Mrs. Lieman marched down the hall to her, red-faced and huffing, Kate could only stare in bemusement, waiting to find out.
“You thought your little trick would work, didn’t you, Katherine? Trying to make him fall back in love with you. You broke his heart, and now here you are trying to sweep up the pieces and tape them back together so you can toss it out later.”
In all the time Kate had known Spencer’s mother, the woman had never gotten her name right. She’d called her Karen, Katherine, Katelyn, and once, after half a bottle of red wine, Virginia. Kate had never been able to parse that one. She’d also never been able to correct Mrs. Lieman, no matter how many times she or Spencer reminded her that Kate’s name was, in fact, just Kate.
“Mrs. Lieman, I’m not sure what you think I did—”
“Oh, we saw that little show you put on with Kennedy last night, didn’t we, Frank?” Mrs. Lieman didn’t bother looking back at her husband as he stepped out of their room, seeming far more interested in squinting at the wood carving relief of naked forest nymphs along the hallway. “Pushing the poor girl over, ruining her presents, so you could throw yourself at our Spencey. Is that when you did it? Switched them out, thought nobody would notice? Homewrecker!”
“Mrs. Lieman,” Kate said, exasperated. “What are you talking about?”
“The speech, you idiot girl, the speech!” A fleck of spit flew from her twisted lips. “You took our poor son’s speech and switched it out.”
The speech . She’d actually forgotten about Spencer’s speech, which really said something about what had transpired between the dessert course and now. But Spencer’s mother seemed to be under the very mistaken impression that Kate had been the one to slip Spencer the speech. Which was absolutely preposterous, and yet the woman was looking at her like she was about to recommend Kate for an eighteenth-century firing squad.
“Mom?” came Spencer’s voice from over Kate’s shoulder. “Mom, what are you doing? Who are you yelling at?”
Kate whirled around to confront Spencer, who looked—there wasn’t a polite way to say it—like an absolute wreck. His hair was pulled in ten different directions and his glasses were smudged, dark circles pressed in under his eyes. He wore his rehearsal dinner suit, the jacket gone, the shirt rumpled and stained under the arms, his belt missing about half the loops on his dress pants. His voice sounded just as bad, hoarse and rough, like he’d been shouting all night.
“Spencer,” Kate said, because she didn’t really know what else to say.
“Kate,” he said, and the look he gave her was so… so hopeful , it made something sick lurch inside her. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been looking all over for you ,” Kate said, remembering what she’d been doing there before Mrs. Lieman’s attack. “Where have you been?”
“Don’t you dare,” Mrs. Lieman said, bustling between them. “Don’t you even look at my son, or talk to him, or breathe the same air as him!”
“Mom,” Spencer said, fiddling with his glasses. “Please stop. We can hear you all the way downstairs.”
“You are making a bit of a scene, Marge,” Mr. Lieman said, though he didn’t seem to be able to meet the small woman’s gaze, either. “Your blood sugar’s running low, probably.”
“I’ll make any kind of scene I want, if it saves my son falling for her mind games again,” Mrs. Lieman huffed.
“There’s breakfast downstairs,” Kate said weakly. “Scones, coffee. And mimosas.”
It was the promise of booze that finally kicked Frank Lieman into action. His grip on Mrs. Lieman’s arm tightened, the light coming on in his eyes as he dragged her toward the stairs. “Come on, Marge, let’s get you some eggs and coffee and leave the kids to work out their business in peace.”
“I will not leave him alone with her ,” Mrs. Lieman said, eyes bulging. “You let go of me this instant, Frank!”
“What’s he gonna do, Margey? Ask her to marry him? Move in with her? They did all that already. What harm is one little chat gonna do?”
“Your mother is in high form today,” Kate muttered while Mrs. Lieman stared bloody murder at the two of them as her husband towed her down the stairs.
Spencer turned to Kate, his eyes dark and serious. “Is that my shirt?”
It was not the first question Kate expected from Spencer, nor was she expecting the intensity of the look he gave her as his eyes swept down the front of her shirt, reminding her how soaked through it still was.
“I need to change,” she said abruptly, heading up the stairs toward the fourth floor.
“It is my shirt, isn’t it?” Spencer said, trailing after her.
“No, it’s not,” Kate said, tugging on the bottom to look at it. “This is mine. The Turkey Trot run we did our first Thanksgiving together.”
“You don’t remember?” Spencer said. “You woke up with food poisoning and begged me to run the race so you could get the shirt? Because you’d seen the design and thought a turkey wearing gold hot pants was the funniest thing you’d ever seen?”
“Oh,” Kate said, frowning. Now that Spencer mentioned it, that sounded… vaguely familiar. “Do you want it back?”
“No, it’s fine,” Spencer said, in that tone that always meant it wasn’t fine and she was going to hear about it in little muttered asides until the day she died.
“You can have it back,” she said, finding the pull cord with her face. She blinked in surprise and grabbed it. “I need to change into some regular clothes anyway. Or wedding clothes, I guess.”
“Yeah, wedding clothes,” Spencer said vaguely. But then he grabbed her by the arm, stopping her. “Wait! I mean…”
He looked terrified, like she might strip down right there in front of him, glasses flashing as a burst of lightning illuminated the vampire-killer stained-glass window at the end of the hall.
“Spencer, it’s fine,” she said, turning away so he wouldn’t see her rolling her eyes as she pulled the attic stairs down. Without the generator powering the lights, the attic was pitch black, not even a small window to light the interior. She should have grabbed that flashlight from Mrs. Lieman while the woman was waving it in her face. The ladder swayed slightly as she reached the top.
“What are you doing?” she asked Spencer as he mounted the bottom stair.
“I’m… going up the ladder?” he said, equally surprised.
“Okay, but… why?”
“Well, that’s where you’re going, isn’t it? I’m just following you.”
“You can’t do that!” she said hastily. The attic was small, and still smelled faintly of Jake. Plus, there was the matter of her murder wall, and Kennedy’s poisoning. And Spencer being prime suspect number one, at least in Jake’s eyes. “If you come up we’ll be bumping into each other. Inappropriately.”
“You don’t seem to mind bumping into Jake up there,” Spencer muttered as Kate felt her way across the room. Though Kate wondered if you could call it a mutter when it was loud enough that anybody on the floor could hear. “So, what’s the deal with you two, anyway? Are you… dating?”
He said the word like anybody else would say “murdering children.”
“Uh, we’re… seeing each other,” Kate said, feeling like that was innocuous enough that she couldn’t later be accused of lying. She pulled things out of her suitcase and held them up blindly, trying to figure out what they were by shape. Were these pants or a shirt? Only one way to know. She stripped out of what was apparently Spencer’s shirt and pulled it on before wrapping herself in the sleuthing sweater, the wool scrubbing away some of the chill still left on her skin.
“When did that start?” Spencer asked, his voice sounding awfully close. Kate paused and glanced over the stack of books, but she couldn’t see a thing. Which meant, hopefully, Spencer couldn’t, either. Not that he hadn’t seen it all anyway, but still. Things were different.
“It’s new,” Kate said, still hedging that line of truth.
“Well maybe this fling will finally inspire some Loretta chapters out of you,” Spencer said. “Considering you’ve been dying to put Loretta and Blake together since the beginning.”
Kate sighed toward the ceiling. “Seriously?”
“At least now you can admit it,” Spencer said defensively.
“Blake is not based on Jake,” Kate said.
“Oh sure, the hot British bartender who was supposed to be the murderer and go to jail in the first Loretta book that you magically decided would be a better rival love interest for Loretta is definitely not based on Jake.”
The sarcasm was thick enough that all Kate needed was a knife to spread it on a piece of toast. Or to stab Spencer with it.
“Their names even rhyme!” Spencer said.
“Why does everyone keep pointing that out?” Kate muttered. She felt around in the suitcase again, trying to locate a pair of pants and maybe some socks. She felt along the inside of the suitcase for the mesh pocket where she kept her bundled socks. Her fingers snagged on a little hole in the lining, the fabric making a small ripping sound. Great, now even her suitcase was falling apart. There was something wedged down in there, hard and small, and it made the sleuthing sweater itch all over.
“I ran into Eric,” Kate said casually, digging her fingers into the lining to try to hook whatever was stuck in there. “He said you bailed on him last night. Apparently, you were supposed to have bro time together? What happened?”
“Oh, that,” Spencer said, trailing off awkwardly. “Something… came up.”
“Something like… what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Spencer said, in a tone that implied it definitely did, and he definitely didn’t want to tell her. “Kate, about the speech I gave—”
“Yeah, why does your mother think I switched your speech?” Kate demanded.
Spencer grunted, and she didn’t need the light to know he was tugging at his hair, another nervous habit from childhood. Kate used to tease him, saying he’d be bald by the time he turned forty if he couldn’t break the habit. “I tried to tell her it couldn’t have been you, but she’s convinced you were trying to… I don’t know. Sabotage the dinner? Embarrass me? Win me back?”
“Win you back?” Kate said, finally getting ahold of something long and thin and tugging the piece loose from her luggage. The cardigan was so itchy it was like fire ants crawling all over, the delicate chain dangling from her hand with a surprising weight. A keychain, maybe? “Spencer, that’s the most—”
Not a keychain. A necklace. Kennedy’s diamond pendant necklace.
Kate gasped, standing up so fast she knocked over one of the book stacks and sent them scattering across the attic floor.
“Kate?” Spencer said in alarm, and there he was, taking her by the arms. The necklace swung wildly in her hand, knocking into his wrist. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“Spider,” she gasped, the first thing that came to mind. “I thought I felt a spider.”
Kennedy’s necklace. Hidden in the lining of her suitcase. Just like Loretta book three, when Loretta found the family heirloom ring that the groom’s sister, Lucretia, had stolen and hidden in the lining of her luggage because she had considered it her inheritance.
“Kate,” Spencer said, his grip tightening. Drawing her in closer.
“Spencer,” she said, slowly and cautiously. It occurred to her that they were alone, in an attic on the fourth floor, on a remote island several hours off the coast of Seattle with no working phones. Spencer could be anyone in the dark, a complete stranger. A killer who had planted his fiancée’s necklace in Kate’s luggage to frame her for murder.
“Spencer,” she said again, more hastily. “We should go. This isn’t… We shouldn’t be here. You can’t… We can’t be up here. Let’s go.”
“Kate,” Spencer said again, and she knew that voice well enough, even though she hadn’t heard it in six months. It triggered an automatic, highly inconvenient reaction in her body, which was when Jake fucking Hawkins decided to make an appearance.
“Kate, you up here?” he called, his voice rising up the stairs. “Good news, Abraham said they found a patch for the generator, they’re powering it up now.”
At which point the lights buzzed to life, illuminating Kate in her sleuthing sweater and no pants, Spencer with his arms halfway around her, and Kennedy’s missing necklace dangling from her fist.