Chapter Seven
SEVEN
A dull gloom has settled over Hazelthorn as night falls.
Evander only gets turned around twice before finding the correct twisted hallway that leads to his room.
Once inside, he shuts his door and rests his back against it, breathing too fast, unsure if he should feel constricted by this return or relieved at the familiarity.
The caged terror he felt while being locked in for three days seems unreasonable now.
This space is his.
He’s safe here.
There is his comfortable four-poster bed. His shelves of books. His writing desk in the corner. His slim green door that leads to his bathroom. His nightstand with a framed photo of his parents. His window seat where he’s spent a thousand hours watching the garden grow.
He just thinks he might like everything better if the door stays unlocked.
Wasting no time, he rummages in his desk drawers for a fresh yellow notepad and index cards.
New stationery is an indulgence he’s never denied.
Every time he receives a box of schoolbooks, it comes with a collection of pens and notebooks, paper clips and Scotch tape, and he loves the soothing smell of fresh paper and pencil wood.
Towers of textbooks and half-finished assignments are strewn across his desk, and cleaning it off seems like too much work, so he flops on his bed with his hoard and bites the cap off a thick, black marker.
Every suspect gets their name in bold on an index card.
CARRINGTON
LAURIE
DAWES
The last name is unfounded suspicion, especially since Dawes wasn’t even here, but something about him feels off. Handling a late billionaire’s affairs would be a huge breakthrough for someone so new to their career, so the previous lawyer being “ill” is too convenient.
If Evander gathers information, puts it down in bold ink, and fits the pieces together, it will make sense. This is all that’s keeping him from letting grief slip through the fissures of his broken heart. He will find a way to make death make sense.
He’s read detective books, watched an active investigation in one of his documentaries—albeit one filmed like thirty years ago, but it counts—and he has a good handle on where to start.
What questions to ask. What to look for.
The top thing to consider is that someone unknown could have been in Hazelthorn the night of the murder.
The person who unlocked his door.
It would be a good distraction, wouldn’t it? Release the caged boy and see if he causes havoc while they slip poison into the tea steeping in the kitchen. Except all Evander did that night was go stare at Laurence Lennox-Hall.
He really needs to pull apart the wicker cage of his ribs and see if he can find the reason he’s so obsessed with that boy hidden amidst the rot.
He craves him. He thinks about him all the time.
Even when Laurie is at school, Evander still lies in bed and imagines how he must look in classes, tapping a pencil against his lips or reaching to pull books off tall shelves.
Laurie is smoldering sin when he tilts his head back in a way that begs to be kissed.
Not that Evander would kiss someone like that.
That would be akin to swallowing poison and relishing the taste.
He can picture himself kissing girls, and he likes that idea, so his addiction to Laurie must be born of starvation, of deprivation, of memories from a ruined childhood friendship that he can’t quite get over.
He is not going to sit here and let forlorn feelings walk all over him.
His guardian died. He needs to focus on that.
He flips the index cards and writes potential motive in a column.
Carrington is the obvious suspect since he served the tea—but he has zero motive.
Being the caretaker of Hazelthorn is his whole life.
He might not like Evander and acts as if his day-to-day care is an onerous chore, but then why not poison Evander’s milk instead of Mr. Lennox-Hall’s tea?
Carrington speaks of his employer with reverent adoration, and he hasn’t retired despite a lifetime of service.
Plus, his anguished cry of horror in the conservatory seemed real, and he surely couldn’t fake being hospitalized from shock.
What Evander needs to do is question Carrington. He has to figure out a way.
On Dawes’s card, Evander writes the motives of big career break and uninhibited access to the estate, though they feel more like assumptions than facts.
He moves on to Laurie’s index card and his brain pools into a sticky puddle.
Obviously, he has that damning declaration memorized: I hate the old bastard.
Long may he rot. It’s evidence now. But it seems shortsighted to murder the grandfather funding his life and fancy schooling, unless he thought he’d inherit everything as the only grandchild.
After a few moments chewing the marker cap, Evander adds and is a prick to Laurie’s card and feels satisfied.
A light tap at the door sounds and his neck snaps up fast. He’s cornered, he isn’t safe—
Laurie’s voice is a dull drone. “Pizza at the door, my lord.”
After a long moment, the footsteps retreat.
Evander waits to see if it’s a trap and then sneaks over to press his ear against the hard oak door.
Silence. Cautiously, he opens it and expects Laurie to materialize with a sardonic quip, but only darkness pulses down the hallway.
Evander scoops up the plate of pizza and inspects the stacked slices of gooey melted cheese.
Carrington serves food that’s easy on a delicate stomach: buttered toast, oatmeal, rice pudding, stewed apple slices, and saltines.
Evander can’t even remember what pizza tastes like.
He slams his door and inhales half of the slices before he gets back to his bed. The index cards end up smudged with tomato thumbprints as he sinks back into his sleuthing, and perhaps he should take a break—but he can’t. He needs to focus on this and only this.
After wiping greasy fingers on his pants, Evander opens the field guide.
Bits of compost flake off and collect on his bed as he looks at tiny, careful drawings of plants and terse handwritten descriptions in barely legible cursive.
He’s read botanical and horticulture books before and he’s not unfamiliar with a few Latin terms for plants—Quercus, Acer, Pinus, Ilex—but he recognizes nothing in this field guide.
Page after page has been filled with watercolor illustrations of strange, twisted plants with toothy thorns and petals that seem to go all the wrong ways.
Either the botanist is terrible at capturing likenesses or these are the most bizarre plants Evander has ever seen.
Where are the oaks, the crab apple trees, the roses and hollyhocks and daffodils?
He flips pages fast, wanting to find one familiar thing to reassure himself the guide isn’t a joke.
Instead, he finds a page neatly labeled: Deadly Nightshades.
The plants on this page come with berries in shades of indigo and vermilion, juicy and plump and toxic, their leaves hooked and flowers lined with teeth.
If someone wanted to poison tea, it would be easiest to use poisons on hand. Like those grown in the garden right outside the back door.
His brain is caught in a too-fast spin-cycle.
The day has been too much, everything is too much, and he finds himself lying on his side, the field guide spread open before him while he plays with the sharp corner of the pages and lets his eyes drift shut.
The litany of to-dos he meant to accomplish fades into a smoggy oblivion: washing his bloodied feet, taking a bath, pulling on clean pajamas, taking his night meds …
There are no meds.
There is no Carrington.
He should talk to …
—something about …
he needs—
you need Mr. Lennox-Hall but he’s dead dead dead and whoever killed him might be after the fortune which means you’re in the way or maybe you’re a game piece that will be easily pushed around since you know nothing about the world outside your—
Sleep drags him under with rocks in his pockets. All his thoughts smudge to the left, his fingers pressed into gray clay that he can’t seem to work into a reasonable shape. There is a wrongness to this sleep.
His throat is wrapped in honeysuckle, perfume staining his lungs.
There is dirt in his mouth. A name lies under his tongue.
He’s spoken it before, it shouldn’t be this hard, but someone is pushing a seed down his throat, deep and deeper. Tiny white fleshy roots unfurl like fingers and attach to his esophagus until he’s choking, unable to breathe, calling for help but his mouth is too full of growing things.
Say it.
Don’t you remember how?
hazelthorn
Hazelthorn
HAZELTHORN
He wakes with a gasp, his hands cupped about his neck to feel for tiny roots puncturing his skin.
Nothing. Of course there’s nothing. He sits on his bed in the brutish dark, gasping for air, his skin slicked with fevered sweat, strands of hair plastered to his cheeks.
It’s only as he fumbles for his lamp that he remembers he never turned it off.
He slaps the switch.
A glow like browned sugar spreads a neat circle around his side table. He’s still breathing too fast as his eyes lock on the soothing image of his parents’ dusty photo. They watch him with eyes trapped in gloss like taxidermy animals. Dead. Everyone who ever loved him is dead.
He slaps the frame face down, a sob caught in his throat, and then he knuckles his eyes and tells himself it was just a creepy dream. Understandable, really, after the day he’d had. Then he hears it.
There is the tiniest sound, a brush of air, a soft shush so small it might not exist. He turns to look.
His door is open.
A hollowed nothingness stares at him from the pitch-black hallway.
“Don’t,” he whispers, but isn’t sure if he’s talking to the growing scream climbing up his throat or to the sudden idea that someone was in his room.
He closed that door. He absolutely closed that door.
The darkness beyond it is so thick he could dip his hand in and feel his nightmares ooze between his fingers.
His heart pounds hard in his ears and he can’t think.
A quick glance around his room shows nothing amiss, but what if they stood there as he slept?
Leered over him. Traced skeletal fingers down the arch of his bared throat.
He slips from his bed, his fear compounded into a bass beat that throbs through every limb as he hurries over and shuts the door again. With his spine pressed hard against it, he tries to breathe. Nothing happened. It’s fine. Stop freaking out.
Trembles run up and down his arms until his legs go molten and he slithers down into a crouch. If he stays perfectly still, if he doesn’t breathe, he thinks he can hear the infinitesimal tap of a footstep outside his room. Just one.
Did they leave? Or are they still there? Mouth pressed to his keyhole, forked tongue flickering at the lock?
Breathing.
Waiting.
He should have barricaded the door. He should not be this naive. Yet some part of him doesn’t think this was Laurie.
Evander squeezes his eyes closed and shoves his knotted fists hard into his stomach until the pain makes him gasp in momentary distraction. Unsettling things like this never happened when Mr. Lennox-Hall was alive. What if this is all a terrible, terrible game to mess with him and—
“Stop.” Evander’s voice is dry decay as he covers his ears. “Stop stop stop.”
But the what-ifs have already stoked themselves into an inferno.
What if this isn’t the first time your door has opened at night?
you’d never know
you have no idea what stares at you from the dark
what touches you
they make you sleep
you don’t have a choice