Chapter Transplant #3
“Yeah. I like that. A Carnivore.” The amusement in her face fades to something more serious as she leans a little closer.
“People like them have been coming here since I was a kid. Looking to solve something better left in the past. They want to get famous, and they don’t care if they fuck up our town to do it.
But we look after our own. Sarah Winkle aside, that fucking cunt—”
I snort.
“—everybody knows that Arthur isn’t La Plume.
He might be a grumpy old bastard, but he’s our grumpy old bastard.
Folks from here know how much he loved his family.
How much he suffered when Poppy died. How hard he tried for years to find La Plume while raising Lukas all on his own.
And everybody sees how much you do for him.
People like those assholes that just left?
They just see a brilliant, eccentric, reclusive grump and they decide to tie up some loose threads and pin the murders on him.
They don’t want to understand. They only come because they think they’ll get famous on our town’s pain and suffering.
So I’ll be damned if they get anything from me. ”
There’s so much she doesn’t know. About me. About Arthur. About this town. But I know her heart is right where mine is. In Cape Carnage.
“I appreciate it, truly. Thank you, Maya.”
Maya’s expression brightens a little as she unloads the two bottles from my basket and rings up the total. “Sounds like those fuckwits will be gone soon. Maybe it’s best if you lie low, if you can.”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “You’re probably right.”
“Any chance you can stay somewhere else? Your pad is kind of a heat score, ya know?”
I’ll admit, the same thought has rolled around in my head, but coming and going from somewhere beyond the property to look after Arthur seems just as bad as staying on the estate.
Maybe worse. Places like the Capeside Inn or the Lionshead Motel would only increase the chances of having a Sleuthseeker for a next-door neighbor.
“It’ll be okay,” I say, handing her my cash.
“If you need anything from the shop, just send me a text and I’ll bring it over. I can take Auntie Irene with me. She’d love to see Arthur. Maybe we could all do lunch at the manor house.”
I grin as I take my change. “He’d love that. And if he claims he doesn’t, he’s fucking lying.”
“Would a certain Nolan person be joining us . . . ?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Auntie Irene says he spends all his free time at the cottage when he’s not running the search.”
“I’m leaving now.”
I slide my bag from the counter and head toward the door, scanning the road through the windows as I go.
The sidewalks are empty, the rain pelting the streets with heavy drops.
I’m just about to open the door when Maya calls out my name.
Her tone is so quiet, so unsure, that I turn enough to look at her over my shoulder.
“You know . . . I once caught Jake Hornell looking through my window,” she says.
A faint smile flares and dies on her face, as though she’s embarrassed for something that was never her fault to begin with.
“At first, I wasn’t sure I heard what I heard, you know?
Sound seems to travel differently at night.
It’s as though the darkness plays tricks on you. ”
I swallow, breaking my gaze away, my grip tightening on the door handle. I stare down at my blanched knuckles. “Yeah. It does.”
“I heard him before I saw him. He was masturbating outside in the bushes as I was cooking. Not that it should matter what I was doing, you know? But still.” She shrugs.
“I ran out there with a knife and scared him off. Called the police, but you know how that goes. Anyway . . . it really frightened me. I felt . . . violated. I spent a few nights at the inn, until the worst of the fear passed. But it never left. Not until the day I came to get strawberries from your cottage.”
The details of that moment return with perfect clarity.
Nolan, with Jake’s severed hands clutched in his grip.
Jake’s eyeless, severed head pressed to my chest. Maya’s unplanned interruption.
When she’d asked if I was entering the gravity races, I’d made a dumbass joke about throwing my hat in the ring.
Played it off like I’d already gotten the silicone parts for a corpse copilot from Craft-A-Corpse for the annual race.
I made Corpsie the Copilot a female corpse for my soapbox racer a few days later, complete with long pigtails.
But the head in my grasp that day was very obviously not the same.
Did she see me at the race? Could Maya have figured out my error?
Did she hear about it and start to wonder?
Or was it the smell, or the way I was acting that day when she’d first walked in on that fraught moment with Nolan? Was it the fear in my eyes—
“Every day I look at that missing persons picture on the pole outside, and I think, ‘I’m glad he’s gone,’” Maya says, snapping me out of my spiral. “Maybe it’s not good, or right. But it’s true.” When I meet her eyes, Maya smiles. “Thanks for stopping in, Harper. I’ll see you later?”
Maybe she suspects more than what she’s willing to voice out loud.
But judging by the way she smiles at me now, I’m positive our conversation will never go further than this moment.
And that’s not just true for her, but for me too—I’ll never mention it to Arthur, who might now not even remember, or to Nolan, who could see her as a threat to our safety.
This moment will just be a fleeting breath of time, and one I’m grateful for.
Because I don’t feel like an outsider in this macabre little town. I feel like a Carnivore.
I give her a single, shaky nod. “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”
With my hood tugged higher, I step out into the rain and suck in a tremulous breath.
I start heading in the direction of home, but I stop as I near the telephone pole.
Jake’s smiling fucking face stares back at me.
He looked like any other gym bro meathead that people would mourn and call “a really great guy” if they knew he was dead, even though I know he had more than one DUI charge that resulted in a suspended license, and he was obviously creeping on multiple women around town.
A certain kind of fury sparks to life in my blood.
The kind that’s insatiable for justice that can only be seized.
I might not have been the one to kill him, but I feel just like Maya. I’m glad he’s fucking gone.
I scan the street. No one is on the sidewalk, or watching from the shops.
I tear the poster free of the staples, ball it up in my fist, then throw it in the trash and stride home.