Frankie
“I did tell you who I really am,” he insists. “I told your cop friend, too. I’m Ash Merit.”
“Yeah, I know that’s what you said.” I peer past him into the interior of the house. I had been so distracted by the girl
when I was in there earlier, I hadn’t had much of a chance to look around. Had he actually painted all the wood trim inside
black, and the walls dark gray, or had I only imagined it?
Yep. He did.
“But you also said you’re a financial advisor for a family-run charity trust,” I go on.
“And I am.”
“But you told Meg that Emma Bridle’s family hired you to find their daughter. Since when do financial advisors offer that kind of service to their clients?”
“Oh, that.” He looks relieved, almost as if he was expecting me to say something else. “It’s kind of a long story. I can explain
if you want to come in—”
I’ve already missed my window of opportunity to make an appointment for Daisy with the local vet’s office thanks to this morning’s Ash-related emergency. I even had to reschedule two patients. What difference is another hour going to make, especially if I get the information I’m looking for?
“Thanks. I will.” I brush past him and walk into the living room, slightly encouraged by the fact that he seems so willing
to answer my questions. Though that doesn’t mean he’s going to answer them truthfully.
Still, it will be interesting to see what kind of story he cooks up. Something is going on with him. I’ve never seen anyone move as quickly as he did when I told him about the girl under his deck. I thought
he’d only run out of the house to see her for himself.
Nothing could have shocked me more than the sight of him striding back into the house a minute later with Meg’s limp body
cradled in his arms. He held her as gently as he had Daisy the day before. Only today, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, just the
black boxer briefs he’d slept in.
Naturally, since we were in the middle of a medical emergency, I wasn’t going to take the time to check out his nearly naked
body.
But it definitely registered. Not only on me, but on Jackie, too.
“That boy is hot,” she’d said to me in a low voice outside, raking Ash with her gaze. “You should ride him like a pony.”
When I informed her that Ash is suffering from a delusion that he has a superpower to find things, she’d replied, “Then he
should have no trouble finding your G-spot.”
After I gave her a sour look in reply, she said, “Hey, I’m married with two kids. Let me live vicariously through you.”
Fortunately Ash has covered all that masculine bounty in cargo pants and a flannel shirt, so I can concentrate on the rest of the details about him I might have missed earlier.
Like that his walls truly are painted gray.
Dark gray with black trim. What kind of person—who isn’t a college student going through an emo phase—paints the walls of a lake
house dark gray?
“Do you have any more of that coffee?” I ask, because I can still smell it.
“Sure.” He goes to the coffeemaker. “Look, I swear, my name really is Ash Merit, and I really am a financial advisor—”
“So explain to me why someone would hire a financial advisor to find their missing daughter.”
“Uh.” He’s shoveling beans into his extremely expensive and complicated coffeemaker. “They didn’t. My boss did.”
“Your boss? The same boss who owns this house?”
“Yeah. The Bridles are distant cousins.”
“Your boss is related to the Bridles?”
“That’s right.” He presses a button on the coffeemaker, then, as it whirs, heads toward the dining room table, over which
hangs a hideous chandelier made out of deer antlers. There’s a laptop open on the table. He sits down in front of it, then
pulls out the chair beside his and looks over at me. “Here. I can show you.”
Ash looks sincerely anxious that I see whatever it is he wants to show me, and I can’t deny I’m curious. It has nothing to
do with Jackie’s G-spot remark.
So I cross the room and sit beside him at the modern glass table. It’s got seating for eight, the matching chairs sleek with
metallic frames but comfortably padded in black suede.
The luxuriousness of my chair is almost enough to distract me from how close I’m now sitting to Ash, who has rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt to get to work on his keyboard.
This has revealed those same tanned, muscular forearms I saw cradling Meg earlier.
They’re without tattoos but lightly covered in dark hair similar to the chest hair I saw peeking from his neckline yesterday, and then today, in all its luxurious glory, when he was shirtless.
I’ve always been a sucker for body hair on men, even though I know it’s purely an unconscious physical reaction to an outward
sign of male virility. We’re biologically attracted to those we feel might make good mates, even when, as in the case of Ash,
the only signs of compatibility are purely physical. He’s a good-looking guy.
But then, so was Richard.
“The Bridles have been great at keeping their daughter’s story in the press,” Ash is explaining, his gaze on his laptop screen.
“But they clearly need help if they’re ever going to find Emma. So Guy asked me to see what I can do, since—”
“They’re related, and lost things find you.”
If he hears the sarcasm in my voice, he doesn’t pay any attention to it.
“Yeah. So I started by checking Emma’s social media.” He hits a button on his keyboard, and up pops Emma Bridle’s page from
a popular video-sharing service. I recognize her from the photo I’d seen in the paper. “I’ve looked at this so many times,
I feel as if I know all her posts by heart.”
“Pretty girl,” I say, admiring the thumbnails of the videos and photos Emma’s posted. She seems to favor selfies, sunsets,
flowers, and synchronized dances with her friends. In each one, Emma looks doe-eyed, happy, and almost heartbreakingly young.
“Yeah,” Ash agrees. “She is. If she weren’t so pretty, the press wouldn’t have stayed as interested in the story for as long as they have.”
“That’s very true. Unfortunately.” I’m impressed that he knows this.
Sitting as close to him as I am, I can smell his deodorant. He doesn’t seem to wear cologne—or hasn’t had time yet this morning
to put any on—which is a relief. Men’s cologne tends to cover up their natural scent, the same one that’s so crucial to developing
attraction and chemistry.
“So what do you think happened to her?” I ask, steering my mind with effort away from the surprisingly good-smelling man sitting
beside me. “And why do you think Meg was too scared to tell you where she is?”
“Because of this girl.” He hits a button, and a photo of another girl appears on the screen. This one is every bit as pretty
as Meg and Emma, but she looks a little older. She’s blonde, too, like Meg, but her hair is long and curly. “Emma made friends
with her and a bunch of other witchy girls this past year—”
“Witchy girls?”
“Yeah.” He turns his head to look down at me, his expression carefully neutral. “You know, they’re into witchcraft?”
“Oh.” I keep my expression carefully neutral as well. I’m not going to mention my mom’s belief in stregheria, or Dina’s conviction she saw the souls of dead witches that night at the courthouse, or that Angie changed the name of her
salon to Hairitic . . .
Or that my close proximity to Ash’s well-formed, really quite sensitive-looking mouth is causing my nipples to go hard inside
my bra. None of these things are relevant, particularly the last one.
Thankfully, he turns his head back to the computer screen. “I don’t have anything against witches. Most of them seem like solid citizens who genuinely want to make the world a better place—”
I say nothing. I’m worried if I open my mouth, something about Devorah Rainbow might come out.
“But there’s one particular witch in this coven that Emma’s joined who concerns me,” Ash goes on, and hits another button.
The photo of the curly-haired blonde disappears, and a video begins to play.
My new besties! someone has captioned it. In the video, Emma and five or six other girls sit laughing around a table in a coffee shop. Emma
looks happy and healthy, enjoying the company of her new friends.
One of those friends seems to be the center of the videographer’s attention—that same pretty blonde from before, the one with
the tousled curls of a cherub.
Only now the cherub is wearing a T-shirt with the words Vegan: Evolve or Die.
“How long ago was this posted?” I ask. I’ve spotted Meg Boucher sitting beside the cherub. Meg looks like an almost entirely
different person from the girl who was just taken away by ambulance. Her hair is long and carefully straightened, her cheeks
healthily full, her skin clear, and her clothes stylish, well-fitting, and spotlessly clean.
“Emma posted this in April. Seems normal, right? Just friends having fun?” Ash clicks another button. “But check this out
from a few weeks later.”
Another video, this one of the same girls as they merrily build a bonfire on what I recognize as a popular beach outside of
Greenwich.
Green witchy girlies do it best! reads the caption, along with a series of—to me, anyway—incomprehensible emojis.
This doesn’t seem particularly alarming. Sure, bonfires are strictly prohibited on that particular beach in tony Greenwich,
a fact of which I’m all too aware, since Troy has been lobbying for some time for a similar rule for West Harbor’s beaches.
But kids do lots of crazy things. Building an illegal bonfire is one of the least of them.
It’s the next post that causes my eyebrows to rise. The blonde cherub—tagged as HecateHaley—is lounging on a mattress in a
pretty nice-looking tent.
The tent has a mini fridge and a microwave inside, powered by a generator I can hear off in the distance. Dark has fallen
outside the tent, but the blonde is well-lit by the warm glow of a string of fairy lights along the tent’s ceiling.
“Green witches,” she’s explaining to the camera, “draw their power from the elements of the earth, its plants, and all of