37. Chapter 37 #2
“Of course I did. He was taking too long.” She chuckles, and for one merciful second, I think we’ve drifted safely off track. Then she returns to the interrogation. “So. Are you together?”
“Milo!”
Peter’s moving at a pace that might have impressed me if he weren’t doing it in pressed trousers and a navy blazer thrown over his sports shirt.
“Morning,” he wheezes. “Just doing my usual route.”
“That blazer isn’t exactly athletic wear,” Maureen scoffs.
“This is breathable wool.”
“You’ve sweated clean through it.”
“That’s how you know the exercise is working.”
He straightens and spots Zia crouched halfway down the path, shooting the porch through a long lens.
“Professional photographer?” he asks me.
“Yes.”
“Interesting.” He shifts his weight, angling himself so I get what I can only assume he considers his better side. “She doing the front of the house? Because a fella near the porch would really lift a shot. Human interest, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t think it’s that kind of—”
“Every shot’s improved by a person in it.” He tugs the blazer straight, warming to the subject. “It’s a known thing.”
Maureen steps into his path. “Nobody wants your face in a magazine, Peter.”
“People love my face. Ask anyone at the store.”
“I have asked. That’s how I know.”
I slide into the gap between the pair of them and the porch, where Evie is bent over a plate of pastries, blessedly deaf to all of it.
Gravel crunches, and a patrol car rolls up the drive.
Lucas Vaughan climbs out, shuts the door with his hip, and surveys the gathering with resigned amusement. He gives the impression that very little surprises him, though I’ve learned that beneath the jokes, he misses almost nothing.
“Peter. Maureen.” He says it mildly, but both of them straighten anyway. “Got a call about a vehicle blocking the turn at the bottom of the lane. Wouldn’t happen to be your green sedan, would it, Maureen?”
“That’s not blocking anything.” But she’s already backing down the path.
“Then this should be a nice, quick conversation.”
“There’s plenty of room if people know how to drive.”
“I’ll be sure to note that in the report.”
Maureen narrows her eyes, but Lucas only smiles.
“We’ll finish this later,” she tells me.
He turns to Peter. “Frank’s been trying to get hold of you. Something about a delivery. Says it’s urgent.”
“Frank didn’t mention any—”
“Urgent,” Lucas repeats.
Peter goes, casting one last mournful look at the camera.
Once they’re out of earshot, Lucas’s grin widens. “There was no delivery.”
“I gathered.”
His gaze drops to the container in my hands, then to Evie.
“So you live here now?”
“Just while I help out Evie.”
His radio crackles.
“Lucas, we’ve got another one on Maple. Mrs. Whitmore says the goat’s back.”
He closes his eyes. “Inside or on the porch?”
Static, then, “Kitchen.”
“Four times this month,” he tells me, already reaching for the car door. He drops into the seat and leans out the open window. “Call the station if this lot gets out of hand again.”
Caroline arrives at eleven thirty with an armful of chrysanthemums in rust, wine, and burnt orange, the stems bundled in brown paper already darkening where the water has soaked through.
I’ve followed Evie through the market often enough that Caroline has stopped treating me like a visitor and started handing me crates, sacks, and unsolicited opinions. Three produce runs and six bags of compost later, she apparently decided I understood Brindlewood sufficiently to be trusted.
She sails past Evie, who is brokering an uneasy peace between Zia and the position of the sun, and comes to me instead, unloading the flowers into my arms.
“They grow up so fast.” She watches Evie work, one hand shading her eyes. “I remember her at seventeen, dragging laundry through that door in a basket twice her size and ordering grown men out of her way.”
“She’s still bossy,” I offer.
“She has to be. Polite women get volunteered for committees.” She adjusts one flower jutting beneath my chin, then reaches between the stems and pulls out a cream envelope. “There’s a card in there. Don’t let her bury it beneath a stack of invoices.”
“What is it?”
“County Independent Stay of the Year. It isn’t as impressive as all this.” She gestures at Zia and all the assistants. “The winner gets circulated through every tourism office, visitor center, wedding planner, and local guide.”
“And Evie applied for that?”
“Have you met her?” Caroline’s eyebrows climb. “Tell her you’re helping and she’ll produce a ledger, calculate the value of your time down to the minute, and try to reimburse you before you’ve finished offering.”
That’s painfully accurate. I’ve watched her do a version of it to me, standing in her own kitchen, insisting she didn’t need me to reach the top shelf while balanced on a chair with a bad ankle. I remember thinking I’d met demons in Hell less committed to their own suffering.
“She once tried to pay Daisy for designing the brochures,” Caroline adds. “Daisy sent the money back in an envelope full of glitter.”
I laugh, though a part of me winces on Evie’s behalf. I can picture her opening it, glitter spilling across her spotless counter. For a woman who alphabetizes her spice rack, it was probably less a prank than a small act of psychological warfare.
“Everyone in Brindlewood wants the inn full,” Caroline goes on, all the teasing gone now.
“Not because we think she can’t manage it.
Because she’s managed it alone for too long, and it shows, and we’re tired of watching it.
So we nominated her. Every local business signed the application.
Daisy wrote the supporting statement because she can make sheer damn stubbornness sound like resilience without technically lying. ”
“And nobody told Evie?”
“We tried subtle encouragement first.” Her mouth twists. “I mentioned it to her over the counter one morning. She told me that awards were expensive nonsense invented to make business owners buy plaques for their walls.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She would’ve found twelve reasons not to submit it and blamed herself for all of them. So we took her out of the equation.” She says it without a shred of guilt. “Sometimes the only way to do something kind for Evie is to do it before she can talk you out of it.”
There’s a ruthless efficiency to Brindlewood’s affection. They don’t ask Evie to accept help. They construct it behind her back, secure the result, then present it when escape is no longer practical.
Caroline taps the envelope against my arm. “Make sure she reads it.”
Then she’s gone, striding down the path with one hand raised toward Evie, who waves back without slowing her instructions. I’m left standing in the doorway holding a bouquet and a card, thinking that Evie has no idea how loved she is.
With the flowers settled in the green vase, I pocket the card to give Evie later. That’s when Marmalade appears in the archway. He sits down and stares at me. I refuse to look away. The contest outlasts my dignity.
Eventually, he crosses the room and deposits something small and pale beside me. Then he leaves with his tail raised, as though whatever message he intended to deliver should have been clear.
I glance down at Julian Ashford’s business card. A cat delivering someone’s contact details is odd, so I pick it up and turn it over to see if he’s chewed it. That’s when the smell reaches me.
Sulfur.
I stare at Julian’s name and start assembling every harmless explanation I can think of, because the obvious one is the only one I can’t bear to accept.
But if the card smells of sulfur, then the man who handed it to Evie can’t be a magazine editor from the city who happened to fall in love with a little inn on a hill.
And if he isn’t who he claimed, then the feature making Evie glow all morning—the break she finally let herself believe she’d earned—isn’t a gift. It’s bait.
But I have to be wrong.
Sulfur clings to me often enough that maybe I contaminated the card just by touching it, though even I know how weak that explanation is. Or perhaps it came from Marmalade. Whatever he is, he isn’t an ordinary cat.
I hold on to that because the alternative means taking another suspicion to Evie and watching it ruin her day. This isn’t enough proof that something is wrong, even though every instinct is warning me that it is.