Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Five
Richie abandoned them at the bottom of the grand staircase with another muttered complaint about letting “the plebes” into the Manor, but Kate was already taking the stairs toward the fourth floor two at a time before Richie could finish his classist argument. Jake trotted after her, catching up to her at the third-floor landing.
“Kate!” he called, snagging her sleeve and forcing her to slow down. “Where are you headed now?”
“To the murder board!” Kate said, before remembering nobody else in the house knew about the murder or the murder board. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “To the murder board. We have a whole new set of suspects to investigate, remember?”
“What was that with Richie back there?” Jake asked as they made the climb to the final floor. The lights buzzed and dipped low before struggling back to a soft yellow glow, yet another indicator that time was not on their side. “What was I distracting him for?”
Kate looked both ways down the hall before hurrying toward the golden pull and the attic room beyond, slipping Richie’s phone out of her pocket and holding it up triumphantly. “Richie’s phone. I swiped it when he wasn’t looking.”
“Should I even bother to ask why?” Jake pulled the cord and waved for Kate to climb up first.
“Evidence, Jake. Evidence. When Richie was checking what time his aunt left the pool room, I saw a bunch of pictures on his phone from last night. It will give us an idea of what he was up to and who he was with when his aunt was killed. Maybe he’s a real sicko and documented the whole thing.”
“Again, so gleeful,” Jake murmured, pulling the stairs up after them.
“Because this is the second body drop!” Kate said, as if that explained everything. When Jake gave her nothing but a blank stare, she sighed impatiently. “Every good mystery has it. You have your first body drop—Kennedy—and it sets our detective off in one direction. But then you get the second body drop, and it changes up the whole investigation! See, that’s why our suspect list wasn’t working, because we were investigating the wrong murder . For all we know, Kennedy’s poisoning was a distraction so the killer could deal with the real target—Rebecca Hempstead. We’ve got a whole new set of suspects to consider, with a whole different set of motives and alibis to line up. This is the break we needed. I can feel it in my sweater.”
Kate scratched fiercely at the soft insides of her elbows as if to emphasize the sleuthing sweater in effect. Jake shook his head.
“Are you sure you aren’t just itching because that wool is scratchy?” he asked.
“Don’t be a Geoff,” Kate muttered, turning toward the list of suspects taped up all over the walls.
“Did you just accuse me of being a Geoff ?” Jake asked, sounding truly offended. “The buzzkill boss who never believes in Loretta but whom she inexplicably keeps dating even though he’s a complete twat? When I’m so obviously the Blake in your life? The hot wakeboarding British bartender who would follow Loretta to the ends of the earth if she said there was a murderer to catch there.”
“Yeah, well, be a Blake, then,” Kate said, pulling a Sharpie from her bag and thrusting it at him. “Start listing new suspects.”
“I will,” Jake said, taking the pen decisively. Here he was again, so willing to play the Blake to her Loretta, encouraging her wild hair to investigate instead of castigating her like Spencer would have done. She hadn’t realized how alone she’d felt the last six months, and really the last two years, without him. And now that she’d had him around, even for a weekend, she wasn’t sure how to let him go again. The thought of it made her stomach rumble perilously.
“Richie Hempstead obviously goes on the list,” Jake said, oblivious to her fraught epiphany as he wrote out Richie’s name in big, bold print. “He admitted to being in the pool room with his aunt last night, and apparently, only family members have a key to access the room. And he was pretty upset with Rebecca over the trust announcement. Plus, did you see his hand?”
“The blister!” Kate exclaimed, happy to lose herself in the investigation and ignore those pesky feelings trying to get in the way. “You saw it, too?”
“He’s obviously our saboteur,” Jake said sagely. “That’s the kind of blister you get from working a handsaw without proper gloves. I’d put good money on Richie being the one who cut the generator line.”
“If you want to put good money on someone, put his lover on there, too,” Kate said, stepping up beside Jake and writing /Steven Moyers beside Richie’s name. “He was there last night, too. Plus, he was trying to convince Rebecca to make some shady real estate deal. They’re obviously in on it together. If Rebecca’s dead, there’s no one to complete the petition process for historical designation. The island is open for business again.”
“You think he killed her over a real estate deal?” Jake asked.
“People have been killed over a lot less,” Kate reasoned. “And we’re talking about a multimillion-dollar deal, which means Steven’s cut, if he manages the sale, would be astronomical. For all I know, the guy could have a gambling problem. Maybe he likes the ponies but the ponies don’t like him.”
“That guy didn’t look like he had a problem with the ponies,” Jake said. “He looked like his wallet has a padlock on it. Though it would make sense if both of them tried to kill Rebecca and Kennedy, since that would put Richie next in line to inherit, right?”
“Good point!” Kate said, waving at the sheet. “Add it to the motive. Whoever killed Rebecca could easily have targeted Kennedy as well, and Richie is a prime suspect in that regard.”
“But we still don’t know how Steven would have gotten into the bridal suite or gotten Kennedy down to the wine cave without being spotted.”
“Which leads me to my next suspect,” Kate said, wielding her pen dramatically. “Kennedy Hempstead. She’s the heir, she just had a big falling out with her aunt over holding the wedding here, and she also seemed upset that her aunt was giving away the family farm. She said she wanted to be sure the island stayed with people who would properly care for it.”
“But we already established she was poisoned at the time.”
“Which is exactly the kind of thing a diabolical mastermind would do to escape suspicion,” Kate countered. “Consider this—it’s pretty amazing she had enough poison in her system to knock her out, but not kill her. That takes some precise measuring. Now, do I think Kennedy Hempstead is a diabolical mastermind? Behind that sweet, people-pleasing demeanor?”
Could she imagine it? Of course she could, she was a writer; she could imagine anything. It would certainly fit right into a Loretta novel. In fact, she would log that idea away for a potential book four storyline. But did she really think Kennedy Hempstead was a true psychopath, playing a role her entire life, biding her time to strike? She was the exact kind of nice that could mean she was hiding something. Kate couldn’t quite rule it out, even though it made her feel strange to put Kennedy’s name up on a fresh sheet of paper.
Jake narrowed his gaze on her. “Would that make you feel better about everything, if Kennedy did kill her aunt?”
“What?” Kate asked. “What is that supposed to mean?”
But Jake shook his head, clearly already regretting having said anything. “Never mind. Kennedy goes on the board. Who else?”
Kate frowned at him, but he refused to look at her, so she grabbed another sheet of paper. “Cassidy, the cousin. Remember, we saw her arguing with Rebecca in the garden when we first arrived. My guess is she was begging Rebecca to put her back in the will and Rebecca refused. Apparently, she’s got some huge debts from a busted food truck business. Her life is in financial ruin, her aunt has ample means to save her, and yet she won’t over some old family squabble. Whatever she said to Rebecca was enough to make her aunt slap her. Maybe she thought if she got Rebecca out of the way, Kennedy might be more forgiving as the new heir. They’re basically like sisters, according to Kennedy.”
“Speaking of old petty squabbles,” Jake said, “what about the guy in the portrait hall? Didn’t Richie say he heard his aunt arguing with him when she left the pool room?”
“And he said the Bitch Bull was finally going to be castrated,” Kate agreed, nodding. “Marcus Sheffield. Maybe he saw his chance this weekend to exact revenge against Rebecca ruining his company and his life all those years ago.”
“Doesn’t really explain why he’d poison Kennedy, though,” Jake said. Still, he wrote Sheffield’s name beneath Cassidy’s.
“Good point,” Kate conceded. “But maybe it was the distraction he needed, like I said. And it would explain why she was poisoned enough to knock her out, but not enough to kill her. Because she wasn’t his real target all along.”
Jake gave a low whistle. “Now that’s a diabolical mastermind. Poisoning his son’s goddaughter so he could kill a woman he thought about marrying decades ago.”
“I know, right?” Kate said, nodding enthusiastically.
“Why set you up to take the fall for it all, though?” Jake asked. “You’ve never even met Marcus, have you?”
“No,” Kate conceded. “But even I have to admit I make a pretty good patsy. I mean, someone’s got to take the fall for a murder, and after the whole rehearsal dinner thing last night, everybody was real quick to believe I’d poisoned Kennedy. Why not her aunt, too? And this weekend is tailor-made to fit my last book. It writes itself. It’s like I wrote it as a practice run or something. Someone’s obviously setting me up to look unhinged. But they don’t know just how unhinged I can be. In a good, catch-a-killer kind of way, I mean.”
Jake gave a funny little laugh. “You really are a special breed, aren’t you, Kate?”
Kate tilted her head to the side. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“You know, I’m not really sure, either. What I am sure of, though, is that it’s never boring with you around.”
Kate grinned, pointing at him. “Now, see, that one almost sounded like a compliment.”
Jake smiled. “You know, I almost meant it as one.”
They stood like that, smiling like idiots at each other, and for a moment Kate could convince herself that everything was fine between them. That nothing happened two years ago, that they were still friends who hadn’t just made out in a crawl space while tracking down a murderer. That her feelings for Jake weren’t a mishmash of hope and fear and a longing so deep it scared her. But apparently she wasn’t doing any better of a job at keeping those thoughts off her face than she was at keeping them out of her head, because Jake’s expression shifted the longer he looked at her.
“Kate,” he began, and she knew she didn’t want to hear whatever words were on the other side of her name.
“We should go interrogate!” she said loudly, waving at the suspect list. “Before we, you know, run out of generator power. Or the storm destroys the house. Or the murderer figures out we’re onto them and we’re next.”
Jake took a breath, forcing it out in a sigh as he reached for her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Kate, I’m going to say something.”
“I don’t think you need to do that.”
“I do. And these things historically go tits up between us, so I’m going to try to be as clear as possible so you don’t misunderstand me. I want to have sex with you.”
She blinked several times, waiting for her brain to catch up and tell her she’d misheard, or misunderstood, or mis… something. But Jake was still there, his hands still on her arms, his gorgeously gorgeous face still looking intently at hers.
“What?”
“Normally I would think I’d made that plenty obvious, but communication with you on this topic has always been a bit dicey. So I thought, better to just come out and say it. I’d really like to have sex with you. Very badly. Right now, preferably.”
Whatever her brain was doing, her body got the message loud and clear, her heart thumping hard and her belly warming and buzzing in anticipation. But her mouth was too connected to her brain, and all that came out was “Why?”
His brows arched up. “Why do I want to have sex with you?”
Kate shook her head. “No, I mean… why now? You rejected me last night!”
“Last night when you were drunk off your ass and said we were making a huge mistake?” Jake asked. “ That last night?”
“Okay, fine, but what about two years ago?” Kate demanded. She lowered her voice, as if anyone might overhear them alone in the attic. “What about the incident ?”
Jake leaned in, his expression intent. “What incident ?”
Great. Fucking great. The biggest regret of her life and he didn’t even remember it. Of course he didn’t, he was Jake Freaking Hawkins. He probably had to fend off girls throwing themselves at him all the time. They probably blurred together.
Kate gave a huff of impending embarrassment. She was really going to have to recount the whole sordid thing for him. “The incident where I tried to kiss you in my apartment and you totally turned me down. That incident?”
Jake’s lips screwed up in a contemplative frown. “Are you talking about the night you made those awful watery margaritas?”
“It was the blender’s fault!” Kate protested. “And, yes, I’m talking about that night. ”
Jake crossed his arms, studying her for a long moment. “What exactly do you remember about that night?”
Oh good, they weren’t done reliving her humiliation. “I remember you coming over to pitch ideas for a third Wandering Australian book, and I remember talking about the novel I’d sold to Spencer.”
Jake nodded. “The first Loretta book, I remember. Go on, what then?”
“Are you really going to make me do this?” Kate whispered.
“Oh, I definitely am. What happened next?”
Kate sighed to the ceiling, digging back into that awful memory she’d buried for two years. “I remember you talking about a new business venture, too. That you were going to join up with your friend… I want to say his name was Trout? But that’s not a human name.”
“Trent. Go on.”
“Trent! Yes, Trent. So, Trent was starting this new extreme adventure tourism company, and he wanted you to join as a partner and lead the expeditions. Which meant you’d be gone six months at a time.”
Jake’s gaze was steady, unrelenting. “And then what happened?”
“I… remember I accidentally emptied the whole bottle of tequila into the next batch of margaritas because I thought it would somehow make it less watery? Which, in hindsight, is ludicrous, but I’d already had three of them by that point. And I remember you saying you’d have to call an ambulance instead of a rideshare if you drank any more of them, so I said I would finish off the batch because it was good tequila and I couldn’t let it go to waste.”
Jake tilted his head to the side in question. “You see where this is going?”
Kate huffed out a sigh. “So, I got a… little drunk.”
“A little?” Jake gave a disbelieving laugh. “Kate, you tried to prank call the police . Lucky for both of us you dialed 822 instead and got some weird answering machine. On which you left, if I recall, a very racy voicemail.”
Kate winced. She didn’t remember leaving a voicemail, but she did have a sudden memory of advertising mustache rides for a dollar.
“And then you swore you could climb the fire escape to the roof to look at the stars, despite it being rainy that night and your building not even having a fire escape. And, if all that wasn’t bad enough, you tried to kiss me while promising it was just for the night and nobody would find out. Like I was some kind of… shameful secret. You were a complete mess, Kate. I told you last night I wouldn’t take advantage of you like that, and I wouldn’t have done it two years ago, either. We were friends, Kate. I cared about you. And, yeah, maybe it could have been something more, but you were always going on about maintaining a professional relationship, not crossing professional boundaries. I figured it was your way of telling me you weren’t interested. And after I left and I heard you and Spencer started dating, I knew that was it.”
“Jake, are you crazy ?” Kate could have laughed, if it weren’t all driving her crazy, too. “I only said all that stuff to remind myself not to make a move on you, which obviously didn’t work when it came down to it. You had all these stories of your wild adventures and the girls you’d been with. I knew if I let you, you would…”
Well, she couldn’t come out and say he’d break her heart and ruin her for any other man, could she?
“Meanwhile,” Jake continued, “I get a call from Spencer two days later saying they were putting another cowriter on the Wandering Australian book because you were too busy with Loretta edits to write a third book. And it pissed me off, sure, but I wanted you to succeed. I thought Loretta sounded brilliant, and I knew you’d do a cracking job with it. And you did. But you dodged my calls and texts, you iced me out when I came to your apartment to talk to you, and it was like I just… it was like you couldn’t give a fuck about me. Like you’d had your success out of me, and now you were on to bigger and shinier things. It fucking hurt .”
Kate’s eyes went wide. “You think that was over Loretta? You were the one who asked to stop working with me .”
“What?” Jake said, incredulous. “I never said that. Why would you think that?”
“Spencer called me the day after the incident and said you’d called him up and said that I had crossed a professional line and you weren’t comfortable working with me anymore.” Kate buried her head in her hands, her face glowing hot. “And you were right. I definitely crossed a line and you had every right to not want to work with me anymore. But then you were just so… so mad that night outside my apartment. I know I fucked up, but I don’t do spontaneous confrontation, okay? I need prep time. I need flowcharts and alternate scenarios and maybe some light dialogue prep. And then you said you were gonna leave the fucking country and I don’t know. I guess it… I don’t know. It… broke me.”
“Kate,” Jake said, stunned. He didn’t try to touch her, which she didn’t think she could handle just then.
“I thought we were friends,” she said, and oh god, here they came. The snotterworks. Why couldn’t she be a dainty crier, like Natalie Portman or something? Maybe they got surgery, actresses. Tear-duct reductions or something, so only one solitary tear could trail down their perfectly sculpted cheeks. “But I guess I messed that up, didn’t I? I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you, I know. I was drunk, which is obviously no excuse. And I was scared, also not an excuse. You were talking about Trout and the adventure business, and how you’d be gone for months at a time. I always knew you would leave someday. I knew you couldn’t stay in one place for very long, but I guess I thought… I don’t know, some dumb part of me thought maybe you would stay instead. Just for funsies. It wasn’t fair, and I had no right. And I know these all sound like excuses and I swear they’re not. Or maybe they are?”
“Kate,” Jake said, and now he did touch her, his hand sliding up along the side of her face to thumb away her tears. And it was just as unbearable as she’d thought it would be, even as she hiccupped a little and leaned into it. “Kate, I never called Spencer.”
“I said sorry! Wait. What did you say?” She looked up at him with big eyes; his gaze so serious. Boring into her, seeing right through all the artifices she’d worked so hard to put in place this weekend, all of them stripped away one disaster at a time.
“I said, I never called Spencer. I never would have called Spencer, because I was never upset with you for trying to kiss me. I wanted you to kiss me. I wanted to kiss you. I want to kiss you right now. But not as some drunken mistake you could laugh off later. I was only pissed because I thought you were trying to get rid of me. Like you didn’t care. If I had known what you were actually feeling, I might have given you more time and space to cool off. I had no idea about Spencer calling you. I don’t even know how he would have found out. I certainly never told him.”
“I definitely never did,” Kate said, shaking her head. “Or maybe I did? I don’t know, I was kind of a mess that night. I could ask Spencer.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got some questions for him,” Jake said darkly, heading for the attic trap door. “Questions that might involve my fist and his face.”
Kate grabbed his hand. “Jake, wait.”
“I know it’s his wedding, Kate, but the twat deserves it.”
“I know he does,” Kate said. She barely had the courage to look at him, much less ask what she really wanted to know. “But… what… what would you have done? If I’d been sober, if Spencer hadn’t interfered. What would you have done?”
Jake’s gaze shifted, the pupils expanding. “You want to know what I would have done?”
Kate nodded, swallowing loudly. “I think… Yes. I want to know.”
He stepped close enough that she took an instinctive step back, her calves bumping into the overstuffed chair. Jake closed the space, his thighs brushing hers, his hand feathering along her jaw and down her neck. He gave her the faintest smile, his fingers digging into her scalp, pulling her mouth toward his. “What if I show you instead?”