Chapter 23
“We have to go back to the gallery.” I spring off of him and start digging for clothes.
“Fuck,” Asher hisses, getting off the bed. He puts on a hoodie and sweatpants and I shimmy into leggings and a T-shirt before
grabbing my coat.
I try to get a hold of Ty and Austin during the taxi ride to the gallery, hoping and praying Graham made it to his after-party.
But neither of them picks up.
Asher and I are dropped off at the front and I run to the entrance. Finding the doors unlocked, I push my way in, Asher behind
me.
“Graham?” I call out for him. “Graham?”
There’s no reply.
We walk through the empty gallery until I notice what looks like a hand from behind one of the freestanding walls. “Graham?”
I run toward it and gasp with horror at the sight. Graham is slumped against the white wall, now splattered with blood, with
a bullet hole in his chest. “No, no, no, no—” I kneel in front of him.
“Sloane.” Asher tries to grab onto me but it’s too late.
“Graham!” I pull him to me, trying to feel for a pulse. “Graham!” I yell again, and I might be crying now, I might be, but all I can focus on is the blood. It seeps from his shirt and his mouth. Graham gives a small raspy breath. “Oh my god, oh my god. Asher, call 911!”
“Sloane,” he warns, his eyes trailing up to the painting above us, with my journal entry taped over top. The one for Graham.
“Call them! I don’t care how this looks, call them! Just call someone!”
Asher pulls his phone from his coat pocket and dials 911.
“Graham, can you hear me? The ambulance is coming, help is coming.” I rock back and forth, keeping my fingers on his wound
as more blood leaks from his mouth and onto me. Asher walks around us. He talks to me but I don’t hear it. I only hear Graham’s
labored breaths and the sirens getting louder and louder as they approach the gallery.
“Sloane,” Asher warns again. “We need to leave now.”
“He’s still alive,” I say. “He’s still alive.” I hold on to Graham like he’ll die instantly if I let him go. But Asher begins
to pry my hands from his body. Red lights flash throughout the gallery and Graham once again leans on the wall as Asher pulls
me away.
“They’re here,” he says. “They’ll take it from here.” Asher hauls me up from the floor, ushering me to the back of the gallery
and out the exit. The frigid January air is like a shock to my system as I breathe in frantic breaths, each one burning my
throat and nose. We come out onto another street and Asher goes to call an Uber.
“No.” I grab his phone from him and take off down the street to circle the building. I need to know what’s happening. I run two buildings down before turning the corner onto the main street where the front of the gallery faces. There are two cop cars and an ambulance parked in front.
Asher comes up behind me and snatches his phone back. “Are you crazy? You are covered in his blood. We need to go.”
When the stretcher gets rolled out the front door and toward the ambulance I expect to see Graham with an oxygen mask over
his face, but instead it’s a body bag. A sound somewhere between a choke and a sob escapes me as I turn and bury my face into
Asher’s hoodie.
Graham didn’t make it. We were too late.
Asher takes off my coat and swaps it for his hoodie, tugging it over my head and telling me to keep my arms inside. The ones
covered in blood. He grabs a taxi to take us back to the hotel and we don’t speak on the way there.
In the hotel lobby, the same girl sits at the front desk reading her book.
“Excuse me,” Asher says to her. She doesn’t even look up. “Excuse me,” he says louder.
She looks up and smiles at him. “Hi, sorry, how can I help you?”
“We’re in room 317, and we were out for a while tonight. When we came back there was something left in our room. Did anyone
go into the room while we were gone? Cleaning crew or . . . ?”
“Room 317? Oh, yeah, actually. A woman came in and said she was staying in the room, so I gave her a key.”
“You what?” he says through clenched teeth.
“Yeah, I wrote down her name. Where is it . . . ?” She looks around the desk. “Oh, here. Uh, Kate Holland?”
Kate Holland.
“His ex-wife,” I say, feeling like an idiot. Because this whole time I was so intent on Miles being the main suspect that I never even considered Kate. Kate has a motive, and probably hates me even more than all my suspects combined.
“There is no one else staying in the room,” he snaps at her. “I should have you fired.” The girl looks terrified then. “You’re
going to get us into a new room, immediately, now that a psychopath has our fucking room key, do you hear me?”
“Y-yes.” She scrambles around the desk, checking availability. “I can move you to the fourth floor right now. I’ll send someone
for your bags—”
“No,” Asher cuts her off. “We’ll grab our own bags. Just give me the new room key.”
She hands us the key to 408. “I—I’m sorry, she said your names and knew the room number. I just thought—”
Asher only huffs in irritation, pushing me along to the elevator.
“Kate Holland,” I whisper, shaking my head.
We get into the room and I take off the hoodie, once again staring at the blood on my hands. It’s my fault. It’s my fault
he’s dead.
Asher puts the new key in my hand. “Go to the new room. I’ll grab our stuff.”
“What about the gun on the bed?”
“I’ll wrap it in a towel and bring it with us.”
“Bring it with us?!”
“I can’t leave it in here!” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Go to the room.”
I do what he says, mindlessly walking to room 408. I get into the elevator with another couple. They move close to the wall when they see me. Asher comes into the room a few minutes later and puts the towel with the gun on the table. And we stand there staring at it.
“We should’ve done something,” I whisper.
“What could we have done?”
“The past two months we carried on like this wasn’t happening: We stopped digging. We could’ve figured this out sooner but
we went on that stupid fucking ski trip and now Graham is dead.” Asher doesn’t say anything, either because he thinks I’m
right or because he’s tired of arguing with me. The handgun sits unmoving on the table and it’s hard to imagine something
so small causing so much pain.
“I didn’t have time to take the eulogy,” he says after a while.
“Good,” I reply, and head toward the bathroom, where I sit under the hot shower water watching streaks of red snake down the
white porcelain tub. Even after I scrub my hands clean I still see Graham’s blood everywhere.
Asher is on the couch with a pillow and blanket when I finally come out of the shower. I go into the bedroom to put on the
other oversized T-shirt I brought for bed. Thank god for overpacking. I don’t text Ty or Austin about tonight. I wonder if
they’ve heard by now. If they’re still out with Laken, I’d imagine they have.
The bed is big and cold and I toss and turn in it, saying their names again, adding the newest addition. Jonah, Ryan, Marco,
Bryce, Graham. Jonah, Ryan, Marco, Bryce, Graham. I sit up, looking out toward the couch.
“Asher?” I say into the darkness.
He’s quiet for a moment and I think he may have fallen asleep already, but then he replies, “Yeah?”
“Will you sleep in the bed with me?”
“Yeah.” I hear him move around on the couch, and the sound of his footsteps as he comes into the room. The bed moves and the
familiar, now comforting scent of cinnamon and pine fills the space between us. “Are you . . . okay?” he asks after a while.
My face crumples but he won’t see it in the dark. “No.” And I’ve come to expect that every time I cry in front of him, he
only awkwardly stands at a distance and waits for it to be over. So when he reaches out a hand to hold mine, I let him.
I open my eyes early Sunday morning and Asher’s face is the first thing I see. I watch him sleep while his eyes flutter under
long lashes, and I count the faded freckles over the bridge of his nose. I hope he’s dreaming of something nice, something
better than this. I carefully remove myself from the bed, slipping on my jeans and sweater from when I got here yesterday.
I grab my duffel bag and put in the towel holding the gun, before I leave the hotel and drive straight to the Boston Police
Department.
I look up at the tall brick-and-concrete building before me with “Boston Police Department” in big gray letters above the
double doors. It’s busy inside for a Sunday, but I suppose crime doesn’t stop for the weekends. I walk up to a woman at the
front desk who is stirring cream into a cup of coffee.
“Hi,” I say nervously.
“How can I help you?” she asks, pouring in sugar next.
“I’m looking for Detective Grange,” I say. “I’d like to speak with him. It’s . . . important.”
The woman still doesn’t look up at me. “He’s got a busy morning,” she says.
“I have information on a murder,” I blurt out, and she finally looks up from her coffee at me and clears her throat.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll take you to his office.” I adjust the duffel bag on my shoulder and follow her back through the station,
past police officers chatting and drinking their morning coffees. The woman knocks on the door of Grange’s office.
“Come in,” that deep, comforting voice calls from behind the door. She opens the door and ushers me in. Grange looks up at
me with a flicker of surprise. “Miss Sawyer, it seems I don’t need to make the trip to Pembroke after all.”
“Hi,” I say, taking a seat in front of his desk. “I take it you were wanting to talk to me about last night?”
“And I take it you’re here to tell me about it?”
I take a deep breath. “I’m here because I’m being framed for murder.”