Chapter 1
BINDWEED
Harper
I WAKE UP TO MY phone alarm’s relentless beeping, but it seems farther away than it should be.
When I peel my eyes open, it takes me a moment to realize I’m not in my own bed.
Another to figure out where I am. And one more to remember how I crawled in next to Nolan.
My last memories from the night slowly surface.
His heat at my back, the weight of his arm across my waist. His hand over my heart.
The one that’s only beating because he saved it, even though he’d waited years to snuff it out.
My palm lingers on my chest, but it doesn’t ignite the same hum in my flesh that Nolan’s touch does. It’s only an echo of his warmth.
I glance at the empty space behind me where he once rested, then roll out of bed, switching off the bedside lamp he must have turned on for me as I go.
When the alarm is finally silenced, I slide on my penguin slippers and take the phone with me as I stumble toward the holy grail summoning me downstairs. Coffee.
When I get to the kitchen to start the process for making a stovetop espresso, I find Nolan has already set it up for me. All that’s left to do is turn on the gas. On the counter is a handwritten note, the script sharp, the loops and tapered lines familiar from his scrapbook.
This thing is archaic. Don’t you want a Keurig? ~N.
I smile, grabbing the pen to write a note in reply, just in case Nolan comes back to the cottage while I’m out.
This “thing” makes coffee so thick I can chew it. Don’t take that away from me. -H.
As the coffee brews, I get my breakfast ready and top off Morpheus’s bird feeder, which is now overrun by smaller birds who will scatter when he eventually returns from his escapades of stealing shiny objects or caw-cawing at tourists.
When I head back into the cottage, I take my coffee and toast to the living room so I can indulge in some Surviving Love reality TV trash.
But something out of place stops me on my path.
A sudden wash of memory layers over the chessboard as I stare down at the black knight. It’s not in its usual place. It faces my legion of white pieces from c6.
I stand unmoving for a long moment, but I’m not in my living room. I’m sitting in our van, the smoke of palo santo incense curling between me and Adam.
“How long did they say it would take?” I remember asking as I moved my white pawn forward to start the game.
I don’t remember which piece Adam moved next.
I just remember his smile, like it was no big deal that our vehicle was broken down on a remote stretch of gravel road in nowhere land, Texas.
We were supposed to be home in Lubbock in two days, and I know he was eager to see his parents after a year on the road, but he acted like it was just a minor inconvenience.
He rolled with these ups and downs of life in our van, which we affectionately named Goonie.
Adam could bob along in the current of life.
And I thought I could float along beside him.
I was wrong.
I blink away the image of his face before that smile can twist into a tortured grimace of desperation and terror. Those final moments that haunt me, like his scream does at night.
A knot tightens in the base of my throat as I set down my coffee cup.
I polish the black knight with the edge of my shirt.
It’s a need I find hard to explain. I feel like I can’t let Nolan touch this piece of my past, or the evil buried there could creep into the present and take him like it took Adam.
Only when it feels like the boundary lines between past, present, and future have been redrawn do I put the knight back in its rightful place.
I don’t turn on the TV, or eat my croissant, or even finish my coffee.
I’m not sure how long I sit there, fighting a battle I’ll never truly win, not when those days of horror stick to me like a shadow. I’m so caught up in my memories that I forget my most fundamental responsibilities—until an abrupt sound cuts through my torpor.
Oh dear god, how could I forget the fucking time?
“Shit,” I whisper, jolting up from the couch. I leave my food untouched on the coffee table and rush to the back door of the cottage. With the sound of the hedge trimmer as my guide, I run up the hill toward the fucked-up topiaries.
Arthur is balanced on the second-highest rung of the stepladder, his cane discarded on the grass as he wields the trimmer with both hands. I give him a wide berth just in case he startles and the machine ends up lodged in my face.
I come to a stop in his line of sight with my arms folded across my chest. “Hi, Arthur,” I say.
It takes him a moment to turn the trimmer off and acknowledge my presence. “Harper, you have many talents,” he says as his gaze shifts from me to the topiary moose I accidentally decapitated the other day, “but shaping topiaries into works of art is not one of them.”
“Yeah, I tried to tell you that,” I reply. When I offer him a hand to help him down, he waves me off. “Jesus fucking Christ, Arthur. You’re going to hurt yourself. Get down, please.”
“No. Not until I fix this atrocity. We can’t win the best garden award with a headless moose. I shall make it into a pair of piping plovers.”
“No, you shan’t, actually,” I say, reaching up to snatch the handle of the hedge trimmer before he can turn it on again.
But he’s strong for an octogenarian with bad knees and a B12 deficiency, among other things.
He doesn’t relinquish the trimmer until I give it a bit of a twist. “You’re going to come down from there before you fall and break all your bones, and we’re going to have breakfast and your pills. ”
Arthur scowls, taking an unsuccessful swipe at the trimmer. “I already had breakfast.”
“You could have called me, Arthur. I would have made it for you.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you in case Mr. Rhodes was still at the cottage. Are you sure you don’t want me to cut off his hands?”
Blush creeps into my cheeks, and I catch a little twinkle of delight in Arthur’s eyes. He loves when he strikes a mark.
“I’m sure you’d enjoy that, but no thanks.
Well, not this morning, anyway,” I say, finally guiding him down from the stepladder.
With that little dig about Nolan, his memory is clearly more lucid than usual this morning.
Though I know I can’t place unfounded hope in the B12 Arthur’s been taking, it slithers into my thoughts anyway.
What if his Alzheimer’s isn’t getting worse?
What if it’s something that was treatable all along?
Maybe he doesn’t need to be in a care home.
He could stay right here at Lancaster Manor.
I should tamp down these ideas before they sharpen into a future that will look real but cuts deep when it shatters.
“What are you wearing?” Arthur asks, pointing to my penguin slippers with his cane when I hand it to him and loop his arm through mine. “You look ridiculous.”
“They’re comfortable. Sue me.”
“What will your new suitor think about them?”
I snort. “Suitor? You really are ancient.”
“That’s what I keep telling you.”
“Well, I don’t really care what he thinks about them.”
“Correct answer,” Arthur says, patting my hand as we start toward the manor house at the top of the hill. “Nonetheless, they are still atrocious. I can buy you appropriate footwear.”
“Even Christina Riccis?”
“Stefano Riccis, for Chrissakes, you intractable boor.”
“I always wanted to be an intractable boor. Life goals, Arthur.” Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but I’m not just pushing his buttons with the little digs about shoes.
I’m testing his boundaries. Probing his recent memories, the ones that are always the most fleeting and fragile.
Between Nolan and now the Christina Riccis, it seems worth the risk when I clear my throat and venture, “Speaking of life goals, want to tell me a little more about what happened with the tourist man in the cemetery the other night?”
Arthur grumbles, stabbing his cane into the lawn with more force than necessary. “The vacuous gnat with the ill-mannered purse demon?”
The hope from earlier binds a little tighter around my bones. “That’s the one, yep.”
“Well, he deserved it. He hit me. He could have broken my nose, that brute.” Arthur points to his face with the handle of his cane, the carved wolf snarling at the dark bruises. “Horrible little man.”
“Do you even know his name?”
“I don’t recall that detail. It wasn’t important,” he says as he tilts his head up. Something in the way he shifts his eyes from my direction to the carved oak door of the manor house makes me think he doesn’t want me to pry too deeply into the other details of that night.
But I try anyway.
“So how did that all start, anyway? Was it with him hitting you in the head? And did he do that before you tried to inject him with midazolam, or after?”
Arthur guffaws, unweaving his arm from mine to lead the way into the foyer. “You’ve never needed all the details of my . . . adventures . . . in the past, Harper. Just as I haven’t needed the details of yours.”
“Yeah, but you’ve never been nearly killed on your adventures, as far as I’m aware. A little clarity is warranted, especially as a Search and Rescue operation is now underway for Mr. Evanston.”
Arthur’s gaze slices to mine and sticks. “Truly?”
“I don’t lie to you, do I, Arthur?” His brows lower into a thoughtful frown.
I touch his arm to stall his progress toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen.
“I’m only asking you because I’m trying not to break my promise to keep Cape Carnage safe.
And the most important person to me here is you.
I need to make sure this can’t be traced back to you.
So could anyone have seen you with him? Could anyone link you with his disappearance?
To the Lancaster family plot at the cemetery? ”