Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
STERLING
“ W hat’s that about?” a voice next to me asked. I looked over to see Avery sliding into the empty seat next to me, her eyes on the door closing behind Brax.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, wondering why Avery was sitting beside me in her Sawyers Bend Brewing polo shirt, her dark hair pulled back in a gleaming ponytail. Even sitting, she was taller than me, everything about her was larger than life—dark hair and eyes, strong brows, and a wide, expressive mouth. If she’d bothered with makeup or fashion, she would have knocked everyone dead. It was for the best that she rarely bothered with either. She was striking enough as she was. Five years older than me, we’d never had a close relationship, but we’d never had issues. As long as you didn’t get between her and the brewery, Avery was a sweetheart.
“People are dropping like flies around here,” she said, nodding toward Quinn and Hawk. “Another wedding soon, and now you’re seeing Forrest again.” I braced for her to weigh in, but Avery just shrugged. “He comes in sometimes to have a beer. He seems like a nice guy.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Avery and I weren’t BFFs. Aside from the age difference, for years, her brewery had been her first love and her baby, which meant she didn’t have a lot of time or space for the rest of us. I didn’t blame her. Until our father died, avoiding family seemed to be the safest way through life. And now, even with Griffen back and things so different in Heartstone Manor, Avery had been a little bit like Brax—buried in work, isolated even in the midst of our forced family reunion. But unlike Brax, Avery had always been cool, just busy with her own stuff.
“I was going to ask Quinn,” she said, “but I don’t want to bring all this up right now when she’s so happy.”
“Ask her what?” I said, curious.
“About the necklace she found in Prentice’s hunting cabin. The one she brought to Harvey.”
I knew what Avery was talking about. Quinn had taken over our father’s hunting cabin and made it her own. While she was cleaning it up, she’d found a necklace we thought might be the key to the mystery woman our father had planned to marry. So far, the only information we had was that there was apparently going to be a new Mrs. Sawyer no one had met. Prentice had been fixing up his suite in the Manor for her. We had reasons to think she might have been pregnant.
Then the renovations stopped, and Prentice withdrew, leaving the estate less and less, trying to raise cash by selling art, though he’d had plenty of money in the bank. He’d stopped maintaining Heartstone Manor and become a hermit until the day someone had walked into Heartstone and shot him at his desk. We were no closer to figuring out who’d done it than we were the day he’d been killed. Ford had been arrested based on evidence so clumsy it had seemed clear to everyone that he was being framed. Video evidence recovered recently exonerated him, but he was only one name crossed off a very long list.
Trying to figure out who had killed my father was like grasping at straws. I didn’t know a single human being with more enemies than Prentice Sawyer. In all the mysteries of the last years of my father’s life, the missing fiancée was the one we hoped would point us to his killer. Put that way, the necklace Quinn had found didn’t seem like much, but it was all we had.
“Since when are you looking into the necklace?” I asked.
Avery shifted, her eyes skipping to Griffen, then to Hawk. “I’m not looking into anything,” she said.
I might not be BFFs with my sister, but I knew when she was lying. “You’re trying to find out where it came from, aren’t you?” I asked, knowing I was right when she looked away.
“Are you going to tell me to stop?” she demanded under her breath. “Because I’ve already heard that lecture, and I’m not interested.”
I couldn’t blame her. I understood the instinct to solve riddles and get to the bottom of things despite the danger. But my working on Alan Buckley’s codes was a far cry from trying to uncover a secret that someone had killed to hide.
“I’m not going to tell you to stop,” I said. “Not exactly. Have you talked to Ford? He thinks looking into things is how he got framed for Dad’s murder in the first place.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m being careful.”
I believed her. Avery was a brewer, part scientist, part artist. She’d banned me from the brewery and attached bar when I’d been drinking, but I’d been in recently. I’d seen how neat and orderly things were. She wasn’t careless, and she wasn’t stupid. Anyway, I was dodging the Irish mob and following a scavenger hunt of ciphers around the Carolinas. Who was I to talk about being careful? Sometimes, risks had to be taken.
“I don’t have the necklace,” I said. “As far as I know, Harvey still has it. I never asked Quinn if she got it back, but I have pictures of it.”
Avery straightened, saying, “I didn’t think to ask her about a picture.”
“Are you done with your cake?” I asked. Avery nodded. “I left my phone in my room. Come up and I’ll show you.
Avery was out of her seat before I finished talking. We left the dining room and went up the back stairs, coming out into the hall of the family wing to find the lights off and a familiar dark shadow only feet from my door.
Avery flipped on the hall light to reveal Brax, his hair golden in the soft light from the sconces, his blue eyes like ice. He wasn’t touching my door, wasn’t even within arm’s reach, but something about the way he was standing left me feeling like he’d been doing more than just walking by. Had he been inside? Had he done something to Shadow?
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Going to my room,” he said, sneering down at me. “You keep forgetting I live here, too.” Brax lifted his chin at Avery and strode past us down the hall. I waited for her to chastise me for being rude, but her attention was fixed on his back as he shoved open his door and disappeared inside.
“Going to his room?” Avery asked, pushing through the door into mine. “From where?”
I followed her, glancing back over my shoulder at the end of the hall and another closed door.
“Ford’s room,” I answered, not sure if I was right. But I had to be unless Brax had been hanging out in the stairwell. Or somewhere else. I grabbed Avery’s arm and stopped her in the doorway. I swept my eyes over my room, taking in every detail. A soft meow sounded at my feet, and I bent over, scooping up Shadow and nuzzling her soft, dark fur. She seemed fine. Everything seemed fine.
“You think he was in here?” Avery asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, annoyed at myself. “I just…I don’t trust him, and I hate that he’s home so much lately.” I bit my lip after the sudden outburst, surprised when Avery nodded.
“I know. He’s never been my favorite brother, but he was easy to ignore. I work a lot, he works a lot—” She shrugged. “But now that Ford is home, he’s around all the time.”
“It’s odd, right?”I asked.
Avery nodded. “I think…” She hesitated.
“What?” I asked, needing to know what she was thinking. I’d hated Brax for years. Forever. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one.
“I think,” Avery said, “he wants something from Ford. I don’t really get it. But I…” She hesitated again, drew in a quick breath, and said, in a rush, “I overheard a conversation they had in the library the other day. I was walking down the hall, and I heard Brax’s voice raised, and I stopped. I was curious.”She rolled her eyes, a clear assessment of her own nosiness. “Brax told Ford that he was the only one who didn’t care that Ford had killed our father. That he was the only one who understood Ford, and they needed to stick together.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. We all knew Ford hadn’t done it, so Brax was clearly up to something. Or knew something we didn’t. I knew Brax liked to go after the weak, the unprotected. And while Ford could certainly protect himself, he was vulnerable and alone right now.
“Shit. Really?” I said. “Does he seriously think Ford killed Dad?”
“It sounded like it,” Avery said, “but I mean, come on. There’s no way.”
“Definitely not,” I agreed. “For one thing, if he had, there’s no way Ford would have been caught so easily.”
Avery laughed. “He’s not at the top of my list of favorite people, but I know he didn’t kill Prentice. So, I don’t know why Brax seems to think he did.”
“What did Ford say?”I asked.
“He said…” Avery closed her eyes as if trying to see the memory clearly. “Ford said… ‘I can’t give you what you’re looking for, Brax. I can’t help you if you can’t see.’”
“What? What did he mean?” Before Avery could answer, I asked, “Did Brax understand?”
Avery opened her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mostly because he said, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Ford didn’t answer, and Brax stormed out.”
“Did he see you?”
“No,” she said. “The whole thing was weird.”
“Everything about Brax these days is weird,” I said, filing the conversation away to think about later. “Anyway, the necklace.”
I grabbed my phone off the desk in my room and flipped through the photo album until I got to the pictures Quinn had texted me of the necklace. I dropped them to Avery’s phone.
“Exactly what are you going to do with these?” I asked.
Avery shrugged. “Go around town asking questions. See if I can find anything similar. I don’t know. I just… I’m tired of this, Sterling.”
“Tired of what?” I asked, rubbing Shadow’s soft ears until she relaxed into me, boneless and vibrating with purrs.
“Living like this. It’s been almost a year and a half since Dad was shot, and we’re still on lockdown with no idea who killed him. No one’s come after any of us directly in a while, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. Especially now that Ford’s home. I’m just tired of it. I want to know who killed Dad. I want to know who tried to frame Ford. I want us all to be safe. And I’m fucking frustrated as hell that nobody seems to be doing anything about it.”
I thought Hawk, Griffen, and West, our police chief, might push back on the idea that no one was doing anything about it. But I got where Avery was coming from.
“We can’t go on like this indefinitely,” she continued, staring down at the pictures of the necklace, in the shape of a gold oak leaf, now on her phone.
No one had been able to trace the necklace to the original owner. But then again, no one had been able to figure out the code on the Vitellius statue until I’d done it. Maybe Avery could figure out who killed our father. “You’re being careful, right?”I asked. “Someone tried to kill Ford before he got out of prison. Whoever did this, they’re still out there.”
Avery shrugged one shoulder, keeping her eyes on her phone. “Careful enough.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Old you or new you?” she asked, flashing me a bright smile that felt like a hug.
“Let’s try new me,” I said. “If you’re poking around in Dad’s murder, I don’t think old me is a good role model.”
Avery shoved her phone in her pocket. “I like all of you, Sterling. Though I think new Sterling has a longer shelf life than the old version.”
“Me too,” I said, returning her smile. “Keep me posted if you find anything.”
Avery shut the door behind her without answering.
Alone in my room, I looked around again, remembering Brax standing just outside my door. Shadow was fine, and everything in here looked untouched. But…
I strode across the room, pulled open my desk drawer, and dug under the notebooks to close my fingers around the peppermint tin. The sudden tension in my gut relaxed at finding it exactly where I’d left it. I opened it, closed it, and set it on the desk with a click.
Before I could think about it, I picked up my phone and tapped the screen until I got to Forrest’s name. I hesitated only a second before hitting the icon of the phone.
Five minutes later, I was in my car, the peppermint tin in my bag, along with my toothbrush and a change of underwear.
I wasn’t exactly sure if I was following my heart or my hormones. Was this what I needed? Or what I wanted? Either way, I wasn’t going to figure it out sitting alone in my room.