Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
STERLING
F orrest slowed as we rounded a bend, almost coming to a stop before making a right into the gravel drive of a small cottage. White siding. Green trim. Green window boxes overflowing with flowers, the lake sparkling beyond the house. At its edge stood a matching white and green boathouse.
Forrest stopped the car, staring at what had been his family’s lake house, his face blank, eyes shuttered. The moment stretched. I had to fight the urge to ask what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He had to feel something, being back in a place he’d shared with his father, but he didn’t give a hint of what was going on in his head. Then, he abruptly put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Is this the wrong place?”
“No,” he said, “this is it, but we can’t park in front of the house.”
“Why not?” I asked, impatient to find a way into that boathouse.
“Think for a second, Sterling,” Forrest said, his eyes glued to the right side of the road as we crawled forward. “Whoever is watering those window boxes isn’t just coming up on the weekend. It’s too hot this time of year. Someone is watering them every day. Maybe they ran into town for groceries. Maybe they’re out visiting friends. But they will come back, and we don’t want them to find our car there.”
“I didn’t think about that,” I admitted, annoyed at myself. I was so focused on getting to the next clue, I was forgetting the most basic thing—the people who lived there.
Forrest pulled the car off the side of the road into some bushes. As we moved, the hood of the car pushed aside the greenery. I realized that we were on a driveway of sorts, but one that clearly hadn’t been used in a very long time. Branches slid back into place behind us. When Forrest stopped, we were surrounded by the woods. It was a short trip through the trees and a quick dash across the lawn of the cottage next door to get to the boathouse. There was still no car in the driveway.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s go before somebody gets home. It might take us a while to search.”
I dashed across the short expanse of lawn between the edge of the woods and the boathouse, hand closing over the knob, only to come up short as it refused to turn. Locked. Of course, it was locked. I stepped back, looking for a fake rock with a hidden key. I checked a few, all the real thing. I felt above the door frame for a spare key. Nothing.
I moved to the closest window and peered inside. A pontoon boat rocked gently in the U-shaped dock. The interior was neat as a pin; life preservers hung on the wall, and towels folded on a bench. What I didn’t see were window or door sensors. If they had an alarm on the lake house, they hadn’t bothered to extend it over here. Just as the thought solidified in my head, I heard a thunk and turned to see Forrest pushing open the door.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I broke the lock,” he admitted, looking a little sheepish. His eyes scanned the inside of the boathouse. “Cleaner than when we lived here,” he commented.
“Does it look familiar?” I asked. “Did they change anything?”
Forrest let out a long breath. “It looks exactly the same. Some of those cabinets might be new.” His voice trailed off as he studied the wall on the opposite side of the boat. “I think we had cabinets there, but I don’t remember so many.”
He crossed the boathouse, opening the first cabinet he came to. I followed suit, and together, we searched for something, anything that might connect to Alan Buckley’s clue. I found fishing lures and old bottles of sunscreen, but nothing that looked like it could be a clue.
“What if he wrote something, and they painted over it?” I asked.
“Then I guess we’re out of luck,” Forrest said, shutting yet another cabinet.
“That’s it?” I stared at him, but he refused to meet my eyes. “That’s all you have to say?”
He turned, his hazel eyes intense with emotion for a second before he blinked and looked away. “What do you want me to say, Sterling? I can’t find what’s not here.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. He wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t here, it wasn’t here. But we’d barely started to look. I wasn’t ready to give up. I didn’t think Forrest was either, but I had to remember to give him space. Alan’s ciphers were sending us down a memory road Forrest probably hadn’t been prepared for.
From that perspective, I couldn’t quite imagine how hard this must be for him. I couldn’t relate to losing a father I’d loved. At best, I’d been indifferent to Prentice. At my worst, I despised him. I didn’t remember anything of my mother except a faint memory of sweet perfume and a high-pitched laugh. But I’d lost Darcy when I’d been only seven, and the pain of it could still steal my breath. If Darcy had left these clues behind for me? A wave of grief hit me at the thought, followed by the desperate wish that I could feel her love once more from beyond the grave. So, I had to give Forrest the room he needed to work through this.
“What about—?” I stopped at the crunch of tires on gravel. “Shit.” A glance out the window told me Forrest had been wise not to park in the driveway.
A gray sedan pulled in, followed by a dark SUV. A woman with short, dark hair got out of the sedan, followed by a man on the other side. They both looked a few decades older than us. Another couple about the same age got out of the SUV carrying a bag that looked like it was from a grocery store. The neck of a wine bottle poked out from the top.
“I’ll set up a picnic on the dock,” I heard the first woman say, and my eyes flashed to Forrest in a panic. The dock was attached to the boathouse.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck. Come on, Forrest,” I grabbed his arm and pushed him away from the window.
“This way,” he said, pointing me to a wooden ladder built into the back wall that I hadn’t noticed. I skidded to a stop and looked into a dark square above.
“What’s up there?” I asked.
“Probably a lot of cobwebs and mice, but it’s big enough for us to hide in until they go away. Unless you want to go out there and explain what we’re doing here.”
I did not. I climbed the ladder, trying not to flinch at the thought of cobwebs and mice. I wasn’t a scaredy cat, but cobwebs and mice in a hot, dark attic did not sound like fun. Cobwebs meant spiders. I wasn’t a big lake girl, but I knew about dock spiders. And we were in a boathouse. My skin crawled. How much did I really want to find Alan Buckley’s treasure?
Enough that I was willing to face whatever lurked above. I climbed off the top of the ladder and crawled across the rough wooden planks that made up the floor. It wasn’t much of an attic. I saw life preservers so old the orange had faded to white, two mostly deflated, donut-shaped floaties, and a stack of ancient fishing poles. I scooted enough to make room for Forrest. He squeezed beside me, his head almost touching mine. It was hot, but not nightmarishly hot. A blessing, given it was a summer afternoon in Georgia.
The attic space ran the full length of the boathouse. It was long but low, and we could only sit upright in the very center. There were cobwebs, as promised, and probably some mouse droppings if I went looking for them, which I wasn’t going to. But otherwise, it wasn’t as gross as I’d feared.
Forrest shuffled on his hands and knees to the far end and peered out the dusty window overlooking the lake and the dock below. A few minutes later, he crawled back. “They set up a picnic on the dock. Sandwiches, salad, wine. They’ll be there a while. There’s no way for us to get out of here.”
“Then we might as well search up here while we’re stuck,” I said. And we did, spending a hot, sweaty hour searching every inch of the attic. The water lapping at the pontoon boat and the wind in the trees around us more than covered any noise we were making, and I grew less and less nervous as we searched. I found the promised mouse droppings, too many cobwebs, and two black, hairy spiders. I managed not to scream, always aware of the four people just below the window at the end of the boathouse, happily eating sandwiches and drinking chilled white wine. I’d peeked through that window myself. They were having a lovely afternoon. I wished I could say the same. I’d have killed for a whisper of the breeze ruffling the surface of the lake.
If there was any clue left by Alan for his son, it wasn’t in the attic of the boathouse.
I let out a sigh and sat cross-legged in the center of the attic. “I give up,” I said. “Whatever we’re looking for, it’s not here.”
Forrest moved to sit a few feet away, also cross-legged, one elbow on his knee, his chin propped on his fist. He looked glum. I felt glum, but not like Forrest. He looked more than glum—he looked defeated. I wanted to tell him everything would be okay, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what was going through his head. Was he angry I’d dragged him here? Were the memories making him sad? I couldn’t fix it if I didn’t know what was wrong. And why the hell did I want to fix anything for Forrest Powell?
But I found myself saying, “You said you know I want nothing to do with you. But it isn’t that simple.”
Forrest’s hazel eyes showed a flicker of acknowledgment. He didn’t say anything, and I kept talking. Maybe I just needed to get it out, like lancing an infected wound.
“I’ve never had good judgment. With men, with sex, with love, with any of it. I don’t trust anyone. I never have.” I sucked in a ragged breath, both surprised and not, to find my eyes stinging. “Everything was so different with you.”
Tears hit my eyes, and I turned my face away. I didn’t want him to see me cry. It felt too raw. Too intimate. Too much to share with the man who had shown me what I could have and then taken it away. My chest ached, but I pushed through. I needed him to understand that I wasn’t just being petty and bitchy. His lies had broken something in me. For the first time in my entire life, I’d fallen so hard I couldn’t help but trust. I couldn’t help but believe. And the truth had shattered me. It had been so hard not to fall back into drinking, just to dull the pain a little. Some days, I’d felt like it was all I could do to get out of bed in the morning and not take a drink before I fell asleep.
“Everything was so good with you,” I choked out. “I thought this time—” I sank my teeth into my lip, fighting back the well of tears and trying to swallow through my tight throat. “I don’t know how to let it go,” I said. “Sometimes I want to.” I raised my eyebrows, lifting my chin and looking past him at the flash of late afternoon sunlight on the water through the dusty window. “Sometimes I want to forgive you and just live our lives together, but I can’t go through that again. I can’t be wrong again. Not like that.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I calmed. It was what I’d needed, to let this out, with him. The pain of the last year settled, not gone, but not quite as sharp.
“I know,” Forrest said, his voice heavy with pain and regret. “And I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, needing an answer to this one thing. “Why did you stay? I know you weren’t that desperate for a job. And I know my brothers aren’t that amazing to work for. So why did you stay in Sawyers Bend?”