Chapter 15
Kinsley
Chapter Fifteen
I was wrong when I thought Thomas wouldn’t keep his word, because as soon as I readjusted my clothes and we had left the tool room, he went to find his brother. It wasn’t a hard task because Connor was sitting in the living room with his phone in his hands.
“Will you tell him now?” I asked Thomas as we stopped at the edge of the room, Connor’s back to us.
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“You made a promise.” I scowled at him.
“I did, but I’m not sure he would like to hear it a second time.” My eyes widened.
“You said you didn’t tell him.” Thomas flashed me a mischievous smile.
“I have never said that,” he replied with a steady voice. “You just assumed, and I didn’t correct you.”
Before I could react, Connor turned toward us. “I can hear you two whispering,” he said, and I pursed my lips. “You two really need to find a new hobby besides creeping up on me,” he added, and Thomas snorted beside me.
“Kinsley just wanted to make sure I told you about the letter and the note. I told her you already know,” the prick said, and I clenched my fist.
“I was just as surprised as you that he told me.” Connor turned to me.
“I have a feeling that if I wasn’t there when we found the note, neither of us would know about this at all.” We both glanced at Thomas with fake contempt.
“By the way,” Connor turned with his full body, “I’m going into town to meet Kevin. So don’t expect me back until late.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Con,” Thomas said, and Connor rolled his eyes.
“Come on. I’m meeting with the chief’s son. There’s not a lot of things that are safer than that,” he joked, and Thomas made a face. “You’re just jealous because I might get some action.” Connor teased him, and I felt my cheeks redden.
I turned my head toward the large windows that looked over the woods, hiding my face behind my hair. The loud sound of a car horn saved my ass from the awkward situation, and Connor jumped to his feet.
“If you are so worried, I will send you updates,” he said to his brother as he headed to the door.
“Please don’t,” I heard Thomas mutter as the door closed behind Connor.
There was a moment of silence between us while I kept my eyes on the view. The forest was dark, and the trees slightly moved from the nightly summer breeze. When I first looked at them, I found them comforting but since last night I felt like Snow White lost in the forest of the nightmare trees whenever I glanced at them. It was as if they were waving at me to come closer and get lost in the sea of trees. I turned my head away from a window and shivered.
“You do that a lot,” Thomas said from where he was leaning against the couch. His head slightly tilted to the side, and his arms crossed over his chest as he observed me.
“Do what?” I asked with a scowl. “Stop analyzing me,” I added frustratedly.
“I will when you stop analyzing me,” he replied as his dark eyes zoned in on me.
I opened my mouth then closed it again, feeling defeated. My lips pressed into a thin line.
Checkmate.
“Do what?” I asked again, changing the subject.
“Zone out,” he answered simply, and I knotted my brows.
“I don’t,” I replied, holding my chin up, and he let out a low laugh.
“I can still taste you on my tongue, Sage. Stop bullshitting,” he said, and I snapped my head away so he wouldn’t see the blush creeping up to my cheeks.
I knew it was a mistake to let myself get carried away at that moment. But still, next to the embarrassment, I felt there was another feeling forming within me, and my stomach turned when I realized it was lust.
“I’m going to bed,” I mumbled, but Thomas grabbed my wrist.
“Do you still want to search the house?” he asked, and I only hesitated for a moment before nodding. My curiosity was undefeatable. “Well then, we should start in my parents’ bedroom.”
???
We walked up the stairs next to each other in silence, and I paid extra attention to not even brush my hands against his. His parents’ room was to the left, on the far end of the hallway, right next to the guest room. I walked past their locked white door as I crossed the hallway from there to the bathroom. Thomas pulled out a key from his pocket, and I arched a brow at him as he opened the door. My legs hesitated at the threshold, but I stepped inside. The bedroom was twice the size of Thomas’s, and that wasn’t small either. It had floor-to-ceiling windows on one of the walls, just like in the living room, and they led out onto a balcony looking over the forest and the lake. A king-size bed was placed on my right, its headboard against the floral-patterned wall that faced two closed doors, which I suspected were the bathroom and most likely the closet.
I turned around in the room, examining every piece of furniture while Thomas stared at me from the doorway. “Are you going to stand there the whole time?” I asked, turning my head around to face him.
“I might,” he answered, the corner of his mouth turning upward. “I’m quite satisfied with the view from here,” he added, and I blinked before turning away.
He caught me off guard with that one, but I didn’t want to show him how much, so I continued to tap on the walls and furniture.
“I will help,” he finally said, coming closer. “If you tell me what exactly it is that you are doing,” he added.
“I’m searching for loose boards,” I replied, knocking on the next wall panel.
Thomas didn’t react, and when I looked up at him, his brows were knitted, his eyes moving fast, as if he were remembering something.
“Can you help me with this?” he suddenly asked, turning his back to me.
He stepped to the bed, kneeled down, and looked under it. I didn’t need to ask questions to know that he figured something out. Instead, I hurried to the bed to help him. He straightened back up and put the nightstand out of the way. We both leaned against the side of the bed and pushed it to the wall, revealing the dusty floor underneath it.
“I remember seeing my mom crawl out from under here a few times,” he explained while he kneeled again and started to knock on the floorboards. “It never seemed important.”
“A lot of people store old things under their bed,” I agreed as I kneeled into the dust too. The second panel I tapped slightly moved under my touch, but when I tried to open it up, it was stuck.
“Let me try.” Thomas moved closer and lifted the board away before I could even blink.
“Show off,” I muttered as we both leaned closer to the hole.
I held my breath and Thomas reached into the darkness in the floor. A moment later, he furrowed his brows, and when I wanted to lean even closer to see what he found, he pulled out a stack of notebooks and envelopes.
“That’s definitely something,” I said, but his complete attention was on the things in his hand.
Before I could suggest splitting them so we could work our way through them faster, he muttered something.
“There’s more,” he said, putting the ones in his hand aside and reaching down again. My eyes widened in surprise when he pulled out another stack of notebooks.
“Is there more?” I asked, peeking into the hole.
“No,” he replied, his voice raspy.
“This is a lot,” I said, and he nodded, putting the two piles next to each other.
“I will look through these.” He motioned at one of the piles and slid me the other. “If you want,” he added, glaring at me, and I nodded.
I felt a knot forming in my chest as I sat down and pulled my legs under me. I touched the notebook on the top and peeked inside. I didn’t know why I felt so bad about this. It wasn’t like I was violating her privacy. Right? I closed the notebook, a bit harder than I intended to, and Thomas, who was already reading, looked up at me before glancing down at the notebook in my lap.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he stated, and I shook my head.
“It’s not that. It just…feels weird. I don’t even know her. What if she wrote her deepest thoughts into this?” I brushed my fingertips over the pastel green notebook with golden flowers over it. I hated how I overthought everything. I wanted to do this; I was the one who had suggested searching the house in the first place. So why was I feeling bad?
Thomas stretched his neck and turned fully toward me. “What do you want to know?” he asked, and my eyes rounded.
“You never told me her name.” A glimpse of emotion ran over his features before he blanked them again and cleared his throat.
“After she disappeared, whenever Connor or I mentioned her name, Joshua would either get really mad or completely ignored us, there was no in-between,” he explained. “So after a while, we just learned not to mention it.”
I bit the corner of my lip.
“She was called Elizabeth. Lizzie for short.”
“Lizzie,” I repeated, picking at my dark blue Converse shoes. “What was she like when you were little?” I asked, and at that, he turned his gaze away toward the wall.
“She was nice,” he answered, and I dipped my head.
“You don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that.” He shook his head, his eyes still on the floral-patterned wall. “This house,” he suddenly said, his eyes capturing mine. “Was a gift from my father to her. They have had a few pretty hard years at the beginning of their relationship.” I moved, hugging my legs and resting my chin on my knee as I listened to him. “When my mom was pregnant with Connor, that was when my father started to build his firm, or at least that’s what they told me. I was around three years old when it finally took off, and it was the same year they celebrated their seven-year anniversary. This was his gift to her,” he said, and I lifted a brow. “Lizzie told us this story a thousand times, it’s not that hard to remember.” A light laugh fell from my lips and his eyes studied my reaction the same way I studied his.
“Why here?” I asked. This question had bugged me for some time now. Why would someone build a house here instead of the mainstream lakes like Tupper, which was in the same state as where we were from.
“Lizzie wanted a hidden place, I guess.” He shrugged. “She always told us she dreamed of a place just like this for her family. So, when my father’s firm took off, he built her this house.”
I looked around the room again, my lips slightly parting. There was just one other thing that I couldn’t make sense of. “But Josh…he’s…” I had no idea how to say it, but to my relief, Thomas nodded.
“He was different before. At least with her.” I stayed silent. We both did. I didn’t want to scratch any more wounds, so it felt wiser to just seal my lips. “Let’s make a deal,” Thomas said suddenly, and I looked up. “If we finish with this,” he motioned at the piles, “I will tell you another story.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, chewing on my bottom lip before I nodded. “Okay,” I agreed, and I finally opened the pastel green notebook. I could still feel Thomas’s eyes on me as I held my breath back and read the first page.
I smoothed over the words written by the woman whose house I was sitting in. She was probably a child when she wrote this. I flipped through some pages, but it became clear pretty quickly that this wouldn’t be the one to give me clues, as it mostly contained stories about unicorns and yellow monsters. I put the notebook aside and opened the second one, a plain beige.
The knot in my chest tightened. This was one month and two days after Thomas was born. I glanced at him, but he was busy reading. I studied him for a second—the way he was sitting with his head tilted, the lean muscles that the light blue shirt covered, and his dark waves falling almost into his eyes. My mouth watered, and I turned my attention back to the book, flipping through its pages, part of me only searching for the paragraphs that were about Thomas.
I flipped some more.
I let out a short laugh, and Thomas turned his gaze toward me, his eyebrows raised. I shook my head and turned back to the notebook, the smile staying on my lips. I could totally see Thomas as a baby saying the word moron.
When I was sure there was nothing strange that happened in the book, I put it aside and opened the next one. This one was lilac with painted white dots on it.
My heartbeat quickened and I straightened up. This could be it. I may find something that could tell us what happened in the summer of 2009. This may have been the last notebook she wrote. I turned to the first page and read. To my surprise, this wasn’t like the ones I read before. Instead of the diary layout she used in the other two notebooks, this was more like a planner filled with to-do lists. Meetings, appointments, events, and even grocery shopping lists. I turned the pages one after the other, coming across a few ripped-out ones, where only a small piece had been left behind. Then I reached the next month. July. The month she disappeared.
I scanned through her days. She had an appointment at Cindy’s hair salon in Coldwater on the second of July at four p.m. Then the next day nothing really. A grocery list for a grill party they were having. I assumed it was for the Fourth of July. I turned another page, wanting to find the last day when a paper fell out and landed in my lap. I lifted it up and unfolded it.
I read the note once, then twice with a frown before I called out to Thomas. “I may have found something, but I’m not really sure,” was all I said, and he was next to me within seconds. I handed the note to him and flipped through the rest of the book, searching for other papers that might have been tucked into it while I waited for his reaction. Another one fell out from the last page of the book, where there wasn’t even anything written, and I opened it eagerly.
I shivered, putting the note down on the floor so Thomas could see it too.
“What the fuck,” he muttered, and I licked my lips while goose bumps spread over my skin.
Thomas reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper, spreading it next to the other one. It was the note that was left to us on the door, and I leaned closer to see if there were any similarities between the two. There wasn’t. While the one left to us was written with huge capitals, the other two from Lizzie’s notebook were written with small cursive letters.
I turned back to the notebook, flipping the pages back to July 6 to find it missing. I skimmed over what was left of the ripped-out pages, when Thomas glanced at it too. I handed the notebook to him.
“July six is missing,” I said, and he let out a tired breath.
“Of course it is.”
I curled my shoelace around my index finger. “Somewhere along the way, your mom stopped writing down her thoughts of her day, and instead, she turned these into to-do lists.”
Thomas flipped through some pages. “Is it possible that she wrote these?” He looked at the notes while comparing the handwriting to the book’s.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t match,” I said, hesitating. “Do you have anything with Josh’s handwriting?” I didn’t really believe that Josh would have written these, but I wanted to rule it out just to be sure.
“It’s not his,” Thomas replied, and I pursed my lips, feeling unsatisfied. “But I will look around for you.” I raised my brows, surprised by his offer. “Otherwise, you will be asking me every other hour if I’m sure it isn’t his.”
I hid my smile, because he was right. I would. I liked to see things with my own eyes.
“So, hypothetically,” I took the two notes between my fingers, “if Lizzie didn’t write these, and Josh didn’t either, that could mean that she had been threatened too?” I asked, and Thomas massaged his temple, before glancing at his watch. “Have somewhere to be?”
He glared at me from the corner of his eye. “Yes, I have a date with my bed.”
I narrowed my eyes. “It’s only two a.m.,” I argued. “And?—”
“We’re just guessing things.” Thomas sighed. “We don’t have anything to work with yet, and when we do, I want to be well rested so I can use my brain properly. I suggest the same for you, Wise Girl.” He stood up, holding out a hand to help me up from the floor.
I scoffed. In times like these, it was hard for my brain to stop swirling. But Thomas was somewhat right. We had made some progress, yes, but we were barely scratching the surface.
I put the two notes back into the lilac notebook and held it against my chest, accepting his hand. His skin was warm against mine as I slipped my hand into his, and I felt my body betraying me as it started to ache after him more. I got up onto my feet as fast as I could and let go of him before turning to the door. Stupid body. She had no idea what was good for her and what wasn’t. I let out a sigh and walked out of the room. I heard him follow me outside and lock the door behind us, but I didn’t stop until I reached the guest room. I turned around to wish him good night, but he was already looking at me.
“Thank you for helping me,” he said, and without waiting for my answer, he walked away toward his room on the other end of the hallway.
A sorry and a thank-you in two days? Was he sick? I turned the doorknob to the guestroom and pushed the door open. Before I could turn the lights on, cold wind slicked through my hair, and I darted my gaze toward the window. I was pretty sure I hadn’t touched it since we arrived. My eyes widened as I stepped closer to the slightly open window, and the small hairs stood up on my neck as I shivered. I closed my mouth, which I had opened in surprise, and pushed the window shut, keeping my eyes away from the dark forest staring at me while I backed out of the room.
I hurried toward Connor’s room—which was the closest to mine—when I realized he was still out. The hallway was dark around me, and I had no idea where I had left my phone or where the light switch was, so I placed one hand on the wall next to me and made my way toward Thomas’s room while trying not to think about scary things that hid in the dark. When I saw a glimpse of Thomas’s white door, I let out a relieved breath and knocked.
The door opened almost instantly, revealing a naked upper body that I needed a moment to process was obviously Thomas’s, and suddenly I was glad it was dark around us. I hoped he couldn’t see the blush on my face. I quickly glanced at the gray sweatpants he was wearing, before I finally looked up at his face. While I measured him up, he leaned against the doorway and waited for me to finish with a smug smile.
I scoffed and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. “Have you been in the guest room?” I asked, crossing my arms on my chest.
“You came to my room to ask that?” He lifted a brow. “I haven’t,” he added a moment later when he realized I was being serious.
“Well, someone has been,” I stated, and he straightened.
“What?” He stepped around me and moved toward the room without knowing what was going on. “Who?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“Well, if I knew, I wouldn’t have asked if it was you. The window was open when I came in,” I explained, following him in the dark. “And I didn’t open it,” I added, shivering again.
“I guessed that,” he replied, entering the room. He turned the lights on and looked around. There was a lot to look at. I had left my clothes lying on the chair, and the few books I brought with me were all over the hardwood floor, mixed with some papers and crosswords. I made this much of a mess while I was searching for the white dress for the party. He walked toward the window, trying not to step on any of my things, and when he reached it, he peeked back at me, making a face. He opened the window and leaned down, running his fingers over every part of it.
He turned back to me with a frown. “There’s not even a scratch on it,” he said, closing it again, and I wanted to go and check for myself, but something didn’t let me. It could have been the woods that I didn’t wish to see just yet, or the weird feeling that maybe whoever it was who had been in here was still out there, looking, watching, and waiting. Thomas walked around the room, opening the closet and looking under the bed before straightening again. “I will look around the house,” he said, and I opened my mouth to say that I would help, but he cut me off. “I will search the house,” he repeated, his tone changing. “And you will get in the bed.”
“You know you are not my father, right?” I mocked him, and he made an annoyed face.
“Well thank the fuck,” he answered, and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What I meant is, you can’t tell me what to do.”
“Can’t I?” he asked, leaning into my face. “Get into the bed, Sage, before I put you in there, and then I promise you, someone crawling in your window might not be the scariest experience of tonight.”
My eyes widened at him. “Psycho,” I hissed, but still turned to the bed. When I looked back at him, he was wearing a smug expression on his face. “You know,” I started. “I’m only getting into the bed because I want to.”
“Sure,” he replied, and I scoffed.
“Just scream if you find something,” I teased him with a fake smile on my face, and he turned his eyes toward the ceiling.
He stepped out of the door, but before he fully closed it behind himself, I heard him murmur, “We both know I’m not the one who screams,” which made me throw myself backward on the bed with an embarrassed blush on my cheeks.