Exposure.
Exposure.
Exposure.
The word rang in my mind like the striking of a gong, tolling over and over as we drove back to Donn’s Hill. Each time I tried to break my thoughts out of the pattern, they inevitably returned to the fact that when we got home, our lives would be changed.
Yet another person had been taken away from me—like my father, like Gabrielle, like Kit. How many more would I lose? How much more change could I survive?
Then a wave of guilt squeezed my chest as I remembered that as much as my life was constantly changing, at least I was still alive. Elizabeth Monk hadn’t gone to prison or left town to pursue her filmmaking career.
She was dead.
From exposure.
Exposure. Exposure. Exp—
“I’m so sorry we couldn’t swing through Colorado to visit your dad’s grave, Mac.” Graham’s voice snapped me out of the loop.
“It’s okay,” I said automatically.
He took a hand off the wheel to squeeze mine. “We’ll go another time.”
“Sure.”
Striker was quiet for most of the drive, only complaining when we had to speed up to pass a truck. Graham and I made little conversation, relying on the radio to keep ourselves awake and alert, occasionally commenting on a news report or forgotten song. We kept our stops to a minimum, switching drivers every couple of hours.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Donn’s Hill in the small hours of the morning, my eyeballs were raw, and I wasn’t sure what I needed to do more: sleep or cry. Fluffy snowflakes drifted lazily downward over the yard at Primrose House as we ferried everything inside, but the yellow structure seemed determined to be sunny and cheerful in the face of the oncoming storm.
This will be my first winter here, I realized. More than half a year before, on my very first day in Donn’s Hill, a friendly barista had warned me about the snow and cold. I had reassured him that after living among the Rockies and the Wasatch, I was ready for anything.
That barista was dead now.
So was Elizabeth Monk.
From exposure.
“No!” I shouted, slapping myself lightly on the cheek before the loop could suck me back in.
Graham rested a hand on my arm. “Why don’t you go up and lie down? I’ll finish getting everything into the house.”
My exhaustion was so complete that I didn’t actually remember climbing the stairs to my apartment or crawling into bed. It wasn’t until I woke up a few hours later that I was even sure we had really gotten home. In my fitful dreams, we were still driving, trapped forever on an endless road. Once awake, I buried my face into the sheets and inhaled the fresh scent of my own detergent. Even though I hadn’t wanted to cut our trip short, it was good to be home.
Striker snoozed in her usual spot across the top of my pillow, but Graham wasn’t beside me. Either he had slept in his own apartment or he hadn’t come to bed yet. I showered off a little more of my travel fatigue, changed into jeans and a clean Led Zeppelin sweatshirt, and set off to fill my empty stomach.
Primrose House was even quieter than usual for a—I had to check my watch to be sure—Wednesday morning. I looked at my watch again and drew to a halt at the bottom of the staircase as the date and time fully penetrated the fog around my brain.
It was Wednesday.
How could it possibly only be Wednesday? We had left Donn’s Hill on Sunday. Somehow, a month’s worth of change, heartache, and stress had been crammed into the last three days, and I felt like I’d only had one night’s worth of sleep to process it all.
I wanted to turn around and retreat back to bed. Surely, I had earned a week or two of uninterrupted sleep. But my stomach gurgled and squeaked. Its demands were clear: Food first, sleep later.
Graham wasn’t in the kitchen, and the glass carafe beneath the coffee maker was clean and dry enough to make me suspect he was still zonked out in his own apartment. Our luggage sat in a small pile by the table, but I was too tired to ferry it up the stairs just yet. Instead, I poured myself a large bowl of cereal, nudged a suitcase out of the way with my foot, and collapsed into a kitchen chair to mull while I chewed.
I couldn’t wrap my head around the reality of Elizabeth’s death. It didn’t feel real. I suspected it wouldn’t sink in until her funeral, but the thought brought me no comfort. I didn’t want this to feel real. I didn’t want it to be real. A light like hers wasn’t supposed to go out like this.
It occurred to me that Elizabeth’s shop would join the unit below it on the list of available spaces in The Enclave. I tried to imagine something—anything—inhabiting her space, but just kept picturing her smiling as she carried Striker out of the pet therapy room.
Then, unbidden, I suddenly saw her lifeless body on the forest floor.
Exposure.
“Urngh,” I groaned through a mouth full of cereal as I squeezed my eyes closed. My hands found their way into my hair, and I clawed at my scalp to chase the image away.
“Excuse me,” a sharp voice asked. “You used my milk.”
I raised my head to find Reggie glaring at me from beside the refrigerator. His broad, shining forehead was wrinkled in frustration, and he held a milk carton in his hand.
“See?” He pointed to the carton’s label, which had the letters RA scrawled across it in fat black marker. “I put my initials on it.”
“Whoops, sorry. I didn’t notice.”
He huffed out through his nose and stuffed the milk back into the fridge, grumbling something I couldn’t quite hear. As I went back to my cereal, he tossed something heavy onto the counter and started filling a French press with water.
“Graham will probably make some coffee soon,” I said. “But I’ve got to warn you, it’s potent stuff.”
“Oh, I know.” Reggie made a face. “It’s too strong for me. Besides, judging from the snores rumbling through the second floor, he’s not going to be down here anytime soon.”
I buried my face in my bowl to hide my sudden grin. Graham’s snores were usually as soft as a cat’s, but when he was particularly exhausted, he rattled the shingles. He must have decided to sleep at his own place to spare me from hearing them, but I wondered if the sound might be enough to make Reggie regret moving in here.
Only if we’re lucky, I thought and nearly choked on my Froot Loops while trying to smother a laugh.
When I got up to rinse out my bowl, I caught sight of what Reggie had tossed onto the counter. It was an unopened ream of paper.
“Is that for your typewriter?” I asked.
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.
I had enough social sense to realize he wasn’t in a chatty mood, but I couldn’t help myself. Everything about the guy rubbed me the wrong way, but I couldn’t contain my curiosity. “What are you working on?”
“Nothing you would be interested in.”
There it was again, the implication that I wasn’t smart enough to read whatever it was he wrote. My cheeks warmed, but before I could figure out a way to call him out for the insult, he took his paper and his French press and left me alone in the kitchen.
“I do not care for that man,” I muttered to myself. The least he could have done was share his coffee with me.
I wanted to call Kit, just to hear a friendly voice and have a sympathetic ear to talk to, but her cell phone didn’t seem to be working in Paris. I hadn’t gotten a response to any of my messages since she texted me from the airport. Her radio silence irked me. Couldn’t she borrow a phone? Call me to check in? Even if she did, I grudgingly admitted to myself, she would probably get the time zones wrong and call while I was sleeping.
What I needed was someone to talk to here. I had so much to talk about—the trip, the letters, the jewelry boxes, Anson Monroe’s house, Elizabeth’s death…
The cruelest irony of losing a friend is that you can’t talk to them about what losing them feels like.
That earlier sense of surreality returned. It just didn’t make sense to me that she was gone, and it made even less sense that she had died in the same way my mother and Camila Aster did. Could it be coincidence?
And if Anson Monroe/Horace was involved with both my mom and Camila, could he be involved with Elizabeth’s death too?
I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know enough. All I knew was that I didn’t want him to be. Tragic though losing Elizabeth would have been under any circumstances, if I could rule out any connection to Horace or a wooden jewelry box, I felt like I would be free to mourn her without also feeling afraid for myself. Because if Horace was involved, that could only mean one thing: Horace had come to Donn’s Hill.
A shiver ran through my body. I couldn’t afford to put my faith in assumptions. I had to know for sure.
There was one person in town who would not only have access to helpful things like the coroner’s report, but who also knew about and believed in the psychic world. If anyone could help me confirm my suspicions, it was Deputy Cynthia Wallace of the Driscoll County Sheriff’s Department. She didn’t answer her cell phone, so I grabbed my coat and Graham’s keys and headed out the door.
Graham’s car was a cantankerous old Geo Metro he had named Baxter fifteen years before. Baxter didn’t seem to like me much; even in ideal conditions, the car was reluctant to start or shift gears. In the midmorning cold, with snowflakes sticking to the windshield, the old engine complained even more than usual before finally agreeing to turn over.
The banana-yellow beater rattled and sputtered across town to the sheriff’s station, but it got me there safely. As I climbed the short flight of concrete steps at the front of the building, a heavyset man with a large mustache sauntered out the main doors with his thumbs tucked into his pockets.
“Miss Clair.” Sheriff Harris touched the wide brim of his felt campaign hat and gave a slight nod. “What brings you down to the station?”
I returned his nod with a polite one of my own, but it took some effort. The sheriff and I hadn’t gotten off to a great start. Our first meeting had been in an interrogation room where he left no doubts about his opinion of me. My opinion of him had flatlined pretty hard by the end of that conversation; getting called a fraud and being accused of murder has a tendency to do that, I guess.
Judging by the set of his mouth, he didn’t look any more excited to be running into me than I was to be seeing him.
“Hey, Sheriff. I’m just here to see Deputy Wallace.”
“She’s off today.” He shifted his belt. “Anything I can help you with?”
For a moment, I considered asking him what he knew about Elizabeth’s death. But I had a feeling he would laugh me right off the steps.
“No, just wanted to chat. Will she be back tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “She took some personal time. Death in the family. You might have heard her grandmother passed away.”
“Oh no! That’s awful. When did that happen?”
“Night before last. Very unexpected. Elizabeth was fitter than I am—we all thought she’d live to be a hundred at least.” He assessed the expression on my face and chuckled. “You look surprised. I thought you were supposed to be psychic?”
I didn’t need to explain myself to him, but the words reflexively popped out of my mouth anyway. “I’m not that kind of psychic.”
Even if I had the kind of omniscient powers people like Sheriff Harris loved to accuse me of pretending to have, I shouldn’t have needed them to realize Deputy Wallace and Elizabeth Monk were related. In retrospect, it was obvious. They both shared the same broad-shouldered build, and they even wore their hair the same way.
I wondered when Wallace’s braid would turn white.
“I’m just surprised Elizabeth was old enough to have a granddaughter around my age, that’s all.” I pulled my hood up against the chill wind and shivered. Then, since he had raised the subject, I asked, “How did she die?”
“Hypothermia. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the cold snap.” He delivered the facts about her death in a detached manner that I found disturbing. How many tragedies did someone have to deal with before being able to talk about them so casually?
“Did she…” I hesitated, not sure how to phrase the question in a way that would sound like any regular person with a passing interest in local news. I couldn’t come out and ask, Did she happen to die with a small wooden box in her hands? “Was there anything strange about her when you found her?”
Sheriff Harris’s eyes hardened. “Strange? Miss Clair, there’s nothing about finding an elderly woman alone in the woods in her pajamas that isn’t unsettling. It’s a tragic situation. But that’s not what you meant at all, is it? I know all about your involvement in the apprehension of Thomas Bishop’s killer last spring. One of these days, I’ll get to the bottom of how you knew so much about his death, and I won’t be at all surprised to learn you were more involved with Gabrielle Suntador than you claim.”
His accusation made my heart thump inside my chest and my fingers curl into fists at my sides. Gabrielle had been my friend and my mentor, and it had broken my heart to learn that she helped two local men commit a series of burglaries before accidentally killing her co-conspirators. She had begged me not to tell the police what I discovered, and I could have let her get away with it.
But I hadn’t.
“You’re way off base,” I snapped at him. “Deputy Wallace can back me up.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh yes, she told me all about you and your psychic detective skills. So what? You heard about Elizabeth’s death and now you can’t wait to get out your magnifying glass and your deerstalker hat and go hunting for clues?”
I opened my mouth to object, but he had no interest in hearing anything I had to say. He raised his voice and steamrollered right over me.
“How about I save you some time? Elizabeth was an insomniac who often took walks when she couldn’t sleep. Her neighbors confirmed it. And do you know what happens when your body temperature drops below eighty-nine degrees? You get confused. You start walking in the wrong direction.” As if to illustrate his point, he ambled toward me, forcing me backward into the cold metal railing at the top of the steps. “We found her in her pajamas, but she likely left the house with an overcoat on and stripped it off as she got colder. They call it paradoxical undressing.”
He leaned toward me so close that I could smell the subpar coffee on his breath. I sidestepped him and moved down a few stairs.
Once more, I tried to defend my interest in the case. “I’m not—”
“The bottom line, Miss Clair, is that as awful as the way Elizabeth died is, there is absolutely nothing suspicious about it.” He was leaning toward me again, nearly shouting now.
Nothing about this situation was remotely funny, but I felt laughter welling up inside me as my brain crept closer to full panic mode. Clearly, despite the fact that I had been completely cleared of suspicion in Raziel Santos’s death last month, Sheriff Harris still didn’t like me. And he was going to punish me for my innocence by yelling at me until I died right here on the station’s front steps.
I mentally amended my earlier thoughts about how the years on the job must have made him so detached from emotion; anyone who could rant this long at a near-stranger had to start off detached from a lot of things.
“We found no signs of drugs or alcohol in her system, and no evidence that she was forced or coerced into leaving her home.” He finally straightened back up and adjusted his hat. “There’s just nothing here to concern you at all, got it?”
His pause left a window for me to speak, but I didn’t dare try. As soon as I opened my mouth, I was sure he would launch back into his tirade. I nodded, which was apparently good enough for him, because he strode past me and down to his black truck.
I stayed still until he pulled out of the parking lot. Only then did it feel safe to climb back into Baxter. Like the sheriff, the car hated me, but at least I didn’t have to listen to it talk.