Chapter 28
April
I’m halfway through my shift, the last one before spring break, when I get a text from Annica. It’s a link to an article posted
by a Boston news station.
Ivy Gate Professor Arrested for Multiple Homicides
I gasp, dropping the cup I was holding. It shatters on the floor.
“Shit, shit, shit.” I step over the glass and run to the back. “Jess, I have to make a quick call.”
“Is everything okay?” she asks.
“Better than okay!” I run from her office and out the back door.
I dial Grange. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.” He does on the last ring.
“I take it you saw the news,” he says.
“What happened?”
“All I can say is we found evidence that ties him to the homicides.”
“My journal?” I say. “Did you find my journal?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Not quite. It was a story, among other items.” A story? The story he brought to me in his briefcase?
“A story about what?” I pry.
“I really can’t give you any more details at this time—”
I cut him off. “I want to talk to him. Can you arrange that? I want to talk to Miles.” This just doesn’t seem right. There’s
no evidence for three months, and now there’s a story among other items? What other items?
“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,” Grange says.
“Please,” I plead. “Can I just see him? He’ll approve the visit: He’ll want to talk to me.”
Grange sighs on the other end of the line. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Detective Grange calls me two days later saying he was able to get an approved visitation for the following Thursday.
“But that’s during spring break,” I say.
“Do you want the visit or not?”
“Fine, yes. I’ll be there.”
He sends me the paperwork I have to fill out in order to visit the maximum-security prison just outside Boston. Our friends
are supposed to go to the beach house Wednesday through Sunday. I tell them I’ll get there Thursday night. When Wes asks why,
I lie and say Adrienne needs me to drop her off at the airport for her spring break trip to Florida. No one needs to know
what I’m really doing. Not even Asher.
On Thursday I sit in a folding chair placed in front of thick glass, bouncing my leg nervously.
I look around and think it’s exactly like the movies and TV shows.
I had to leave my phone and personal items with the officer when I arrived, but the clock on the wall says Miles is two minutes late.
Grange got me a fifteen-minute visit, and now I have only thirteen.
Finally, a tired-looking man in an orange jumpsuit with his hands handcuffed in front of him is led out by an officer and
sits on the other side of the glass. I pick up the phone on my left, the one we’re supposed to communicate through. He does
not pick up his.
“Pick it up,” I say through the glass. We now have ten minutes. “Please,” I add. He lifts his shackled hands and picks up
the phone, holding it to his ear. “Tell me why you did it.”
“Sloane,” he says. “You came.” He gives me a watery-eyed smile and it roils my gut.
“Please save the crazy for another time. Why did you kill all of these people and try to pin it on me?”
“I would never do that to you.” He shakes his head. “I love you; you know that.”
“No you don’t. If you loved me you would not have done any of this. They said they found a story. Is it the one you tried
to give to me? You murdered all of these guys, wrote it down, and then tried to give me the story? That is demented, Miles.”
He’s quiet for a minute, and I glance at the clock.
Seven minutes. “I heard about it on campus,” he says finally.
“The Ryan kid, his name was familiar. Word got around about this strange eulogy type note that was in his pocket when he died, and I thought it was just a rumor going around the faculty. But it reminded me of that journal you kept, the one you showed me last year, and I realized he was in there. It was your journal page they found on him. It was brilliant, the whole idea. My next murder-mystery bestseller. I was going to ask for your permission to write it, your input even, but you wouldn’t see me, so I wrote it anyway. ”
“You were going to sell this story? And you thought you’d get away with that?”
“Once again, as I’ve told you many times now, I am not the murderer.”
“It doesn’t look like that from here.”
“I was set up,” he says.
I give a disbelieving laugh. “That’s rich coming from the person who tried to set me up.”
“I’m telling the truth,” he says. “Someone planted evidence in my office.”
“In your locked drawer under your desk?”
“Yes,” he says.
Our time is almost up. “Did you send Adrienne to the Four Seasons after the gallery shooting to drop the gun off to my room?”
“No.” He looks me in the eyes when he answers and somehow I know he’s telling the truth, but my mind refuses to believe it.
“I just don’t know how you expect me to believe any of this.”
“Read the story,” he says. “I’m sure they have it in evidence. Read it.” The officer comes to collect Miles from the phone.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait!” But the visit is over.
“Read it,” Miles says from the other side, before yelling, “I love you, Sloane!” He’s ushered back into the prison where he
belongs.
I get in my car to drive to Nantucket, thinking about my short thirteen-minute conversation with Miles and how it was the most confusing one yet.
He’s denied being the murderer this whole time, and even almost had me convinced that he isn’t.
I saw him in handcuffs myself, so why am I still not completely convinced? I call Grange from the car.
“Well, did you get what you were looking for?” he asks.
“No, I’m not sure he did this,” I admit.
“You were once very adamant that he did.”
“I know, I know what I said,” I say quickly. “Can I read the story?”
“I cannot give you evidence before a trial, no.”
“Well, did you read it?” I ask.
“No, not fully,” he says.
“I need you to read it and tell me what happens.”
“You want me to read this three-hundred-page, single-spaced book from a madman and give you the CliffsNotes?”
“Yes . . .”
“No.”
“Can you at least tell me what happens at the very end? Tell me who he wrote that the killer was.”
Grange sighs. “Enjoy your spring break, Miss Sawyer, you deserve to relax.”
The sun sets behind the McCavern beach house on Nantucket when I finally arrive, and it’s even more stunning in person.
Large white-trimmed windows cover gray slatted siding, with a double glass-paneled door welcoming you in the front of the house.
As I walk down the stone driveway with my suitcase, I imagine the big sign in the front yard that’ll say “Margot’s Bed-and-Breakfast.” I pretend I’m a guest there.
I know when I enter, Wesley’s face will be at the front desk to check me in, and I’ll be drawn in by his smile and kind eyes, and I’ll never want to leave.
It’s half true when I walk in and Wes meets me at the door to take my bags. “Welcome to the soon-to-be Margot’s,” he says.
“Wow,” I say back, taking in the open, airy layout of the first floor. The foyer opens up to a grand living room surrounded
by floor-to-ceiling windows that look out into the backyard. Cream couches with light blue accents are placed on white stone
floors. To the left is a white marble kitchen that looks like it’s never seen a stain a day in its life.
“Wait until you see the back,” Wes says, leading me to the sliding glass door. We walk out to a deck that overlooks an inground
pool and hot tub surrounded by lush grass and an outdoor dining gazebo. Just past the grass is a trail to the beach. Our friends
are all back there when we walk out, watching the sun set over the beach horizon. Dani and Annica come back up the beach path
toward the house.
“Yay! You’re here!” Dani calls out to me. I smile and wave.
“Sloane!” Jake yells from the pool. “Glad to know you weren’t really the Pembroke Psycho after all!”
I look over to the hot tub, where Asher sits with Erin. She’s drinking white wine right from the bottle. Real classy. Seeing
them together makes me wonder how he treats the girls that he’s actually seeing. Is he sweet to her? Does he hold her at night?
I’m not jealous, just curious.
“Glad you could make it,” Asher says. “It really sucked without you here.”
I give him a tight smile. “I’m sure it did.” I look back at Wes standing with his arms crossed over his Cape Cod sweatshirt, and with a backward cap. He looks like he belongs here. “Why don’t you show me to my room.”
“Our room.” He winks, placing a hand to the small of my back and leading me inside. We walk down the long hallway on the bottom
floor and stop at the door at the end of the hall. “This is the master bedroom. We’ll be in here until Saturday, when my family
visits.”
“Your family is coming?” No one said anything about the rest of them showing up. I’m not sure how I’d even go about seeing
them all again, now being with Wes and not Asher.
“Yeah, we’re having, like, a ‘last party at the house’ kind of situation before renovations start.”
“Oh, okay.”
The master room is huge, with white plush carpet and a bed on a two-step landing. It has its own sliding door to the patio
as well as a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a heated toilet seat. Wes drops my bags by the bed.
“There’s another room I want to show you real quick. It’s my favorite.” I follow Wes out of the bedroom, back down the hall,
and up the stairs leading to the second story of the house. We pass more bedrooms and bathrooms, even a small library, before
getting to a ladder leading up to an opening in the ceiling.
“The attic?” I guess.
“Not quite,” he says, grabbing on and hoisting himself up.
He climbs to the top and I follow. The room is empty, aside from a few boxes and old containers of paint, but I know immediately why this is the best room in the house.
The glass-paneled ceiling slants down to meet glass-paneled walls, like being in a bubble in the sky, which is now streaked with pink and orange. “Cool, huh?”
“Wow,” I say. If I lived here I would die for this to be my room.
“You should see it during a storm. I’d come up here when I was younger to lie on the floor and watch the rain slide down the
windows.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Make it a room,” Wes says. “Take out the ladder and put in stairs.”
“I bet people would pay good money to stay in here,” I say, walking out onto the small terrace, just outside the room. It’s
only big enough for two, but the view is breathtaking. You can see the entire beach. The salty breeze whips my hair around,
and I tuck it behind my ears.
“I bet they would too. But it isn’t about the money; it’s about the experience. Me and my sisters have so many good memories
here. I want that for other people. I want to give them that.” Wes leans on the railing, looking out into the ocean before
us, which stretches on and on, and I can’t imagine a more perfect moment. We watch the sun dip below the horizon as the night
sky darkens above us. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like everything is going to be okay.