ten
Baron Dolce
“I’m going for a walk,” Mabel says, stepping into the doorway to the study, where I’m working.
I finish up what I’m doing before I spin the chair to face her. “Are you asking permission?”
“No,” she says, scowling. “I’m telling you, so you know that I’m not running away.”
I take in her appearance—white tennis shoes, navy shorts, a white T-shirt, a ponytail.
She looks like the classic American girl-next-door, the exact type that a serial killer would target.
Not for the first time, I consider that the Black Widow Killer was stalking her, waiting for the perfect victim.
Is he one of her dates, one that got away?
I push myself up from my chair. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t you like to run?” she asks. “I’ll slow you down.”
I know I made the right call, since she wouldn’t argue unless she had something to hide. I’m beginning to think I’ll never know the new Mabel. Even more unsettling, I wonder if I ever knew the old Mabel. I’m still not convinced that she’s not the killer herself.
“I ran this morning,” I say, stepping over her cat, who likes to sleep under my feet while I’m working. “I don’t mind keeping you company.”
I know this will bother her, since we think alike, and it would bother me for someone to erroneously assume I wanted company when I notified them of my plans. Goading her is usually Duke’s specialty, but I’m particularly frustrated at the moment, and susceptible to more petty urges than usual.
“Should we get Duke?” she asks as she waits for me to lace up my shoes.
“He’s over at the other house.”
“Hickory House.”
“What?”
“That’s the name of your house,” she says. “The house I grew up in. Hickory House.”
“What about Devlin’s house?”
“Lilac Place.”
“Preston’s?”
“That’s just Preston’s house,” she says. “It wasn’t in the family before they bought it, so it doesn’t have a name. Same with my father’s house. He had that built when he left Hickory House, so it wasn’t a Darling family home.”
Summer House is inside city limits, but it’s on the north side of town in a nice area.
Behind each house sprawls a large lawn, and beyond that, a section of woods.
Mabel heads for that, and I follow, since she seems confident in her direction.
It’s a sweltering afternoon, and we’re both sweating by the time we reach the shade of the trees.
“You could get a treadmill,” I tell her. “That way you wouldn’t have to leave the house.”
“I like leaving the house.”
“I remember that,” I say, catching her hand. “From when we were dating.”
“You could run on a treadmill too.”
“I did last year,” I say. “I didn’t like to leave Jane alone more than necessary.”
I watch her from the corner of my eye, searching for signs of jealousy or guilt.
Mabel is quiet for a minute. “Did you love her?” she asks at last.
“Of course not.”
“Not even in the way you’re able?”
“No,” I say, scowling at her. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because you didn’t kill her.”
I bristle, but she doesn’t notice. “I tried to kill her.”
“I don’t think so,” Mabel says, never breaking stride as she steps over rocks and fallen branches. “I don’t think you’d make a mistake like that.”
“I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t run,” I grit out, stopping to help her over a log. “I saw your location, and I had to hurry back to get you. Was that your plan all along? Is that why you ran, knowing I’d come after you, and it might save her?”
She shrugs. “I don’t see why you chose her. She didn’t deserve what you did to her.”
“You told me to get rid of her,” I remind her.
“Death seemed preferable to torture.”
I remember the night Royal came home and told us he’d taken her to the hospital after dragging her out of the river. “I think she jumped,” he said. “That, or she walked in and tried to drown herself.”
I was pleased with myself, knowing we’d pushed her to it. That we had won, making her life so unbearable she craved death.
I turn to Mabel now. “If death is preferably, why are you upset that I tried to kill her?”
“Not at all,” she says. “I’m curious why you spared her.”
“I didn’t intentionally spare her,” I say slowly, forcing my voice not to betray my irritation. “And I don’t think you’re in any position to cast judgment, seeing as how you led a half dozen men to their deaths. If you didn’t kill them outright.”
“Those men deserved it.”
“Why?” I ask. “For talking to a girl who they thought was underage? You weren’t, so did they even do anything wrong?”
“They had a sickness that can’t be cured,” she says. “They were removed from society before they could do further harm. What harm was Jane doing?”
“She was contributing by being my subject,” I say. “Until you wanted her removed.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes, Mabel having pulled her hand away and taken the lead again. “Maybe I made a mistake,” she admits. “I let my sympathy get the better of me.”
“That’s unlike you.”
“I’m not heartless,” she says, and there’s that defensiveness in her tone, just under the surface, the same one that creeps in when she says she’s not crazy.
“You think I am.”
It’s not a question, and it doesn’t bother me, but I enjoy turning the thought over in my mind, considering its implications.
“No,” she says after a minute. “Duke is your heart.”
The woods have grown thicker, the canopy so dense the sun barely shines through. Where it does, bright patches spot the leaves underfoot like blood left by a wounded animal.
“Are you bringing me out here to kill me?”
It’s my attempt at a joke, but my gaze sweeps over her, searching for a gun. She couldn’t have hidden even a small one in the scant clothing she’s wearing, though.
“You wanted to come,” she reminds me. “I would have come out here whether or not you joined me.”
“Or maybe you knew I’d want to come if you told me you were walking alone. Especially if there’s as killer still out there, stalking you.”
Stalking her better than I can. That thought keeps me up at night far more than Jane.
“We’re on Delacroix land now,” she says, stepping over a pile of rocks on the invisible footpath she seems to be following through the woods.
“Arkansas is a stand-your-ground state, so technically, they could shoot us if they saw us trespassing. They would never harm a Darling. Do they have a reason to want you dead?”
“No,” I say, scowling at her. “I fit into society better than you do. The Delacroixs like me.”
“All of them?”
I remember publicly humiliating Walker Delacroix in the café at Willow Heights, but he’s only a teacher. We made Gideon fuck Gloria, and he left school afterwards, but that was his choice.
“The important ones like me,” I say, annoyed by Mabel’s perceptiveness.
She smiles, that secretive smile that makes me question everything, that makes me love and hate her in equal measure.
“What?” I demand.
“Who decides which ones are important?”
“Society,” I say flatly. “Robert Delacroix is our lawyer. He’s important.”
“And Dr. Delacroix?”
I swat a mosquito on my arm. “You know I don’t believe in psychology.”
“Did you find anything about Dahlia?”
“No,” I say. “If she’s still alive, she’s invisible. Probably going by another name.”
“Another ghost,” Mabel says, sounding vaguely pleased.
“She’s not Ingrid, is she?” I ask.
Mabel would know that, but I wouldn’t. Ingrid doesn’t resemble the photos I found of the kid Mabel was friends with, but I can’t be certain she hasn’t had work done to disguise herself or simply changed dramatically since childhood.
“No,” Mabel says. “But I was thinking I might go see my parents and ask them about her. They don’t like me bringing it up, but…
I remember once after I started asking about her again, my stepmom was talking on the phone to Grandpa, saying, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with her.
’ When I walked in, she shoved an envelope in a drawer and pushed it closed like she was trying to hide it.
She looked guilty. Maybe she was hiding her letters back to me. ”
“This seems like a distraction,” I say, watching her closely. “We have a missing girl who has a lot of incriminating evidence about me on her body, and a ghost who might be following you and killing people for you.”
“And Duke.”
“And Duke.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes. “I need to know,” she says at last. “You can focus on the other girls. I don’t find them important.”
“And Duke?”
“He’s important,” she says quietly. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”
There are too many answers to that, and too many of them he wouldn’t want me saying to Mabel. At last, I choose the one that covers all of them. “He’s too sensitive.”
“What can we do about him?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
We come out to a slight clearing that’s not much more than a gap in the canopy.
To our right, a series of two-by-four sections were nailed to a tree in the distant past, though they’re greying and rotted away on the ends, covered over with a skim of green moss and splotches of flat, blue lichen.
At the top of the rudimentary ladder, an equally decrepit platform spans the space between two branches of the old oak.
“Oh,” Mabel says, her voice faint, her fingers going to her mouth.
“What is it?” I ask, frowning at her reaction.
In answer, she rushes toward the tree, grasping the highest board she can reach and bracing her foot on a lower one. It twists when she puts weight on it, and her shoe scrapes down the trunk.
“Mabel,” I call, hurrying to her. “That doesn’t look safe.”
“You can stay down here,” she says, lifting her foot to the next rung up from the one that caved. “I just want to see.”
“See what?” I ask, but she’s already climbing, not even testing each step with her weight.
“Careful,” I order when a piece of wood comes off in her hand and tumbles to the ground.
She reaches the top without an answer and folds her body over the edge of the platform, boosting herself with her hands and scrambling over.