“Not all men are so kind,” she said quietly.
Heat rose in my face. While I wouldn’t strike Pearl, my earlier outburst with Richard Trask showed I was willing to take a swing. What would Crista think when she heard about that little episode? And she would hear soon. If I wasn’t arrested for it, I was going to be ostracized over it, and in a small town like this, that was like being the living dead.
“Well, you know, she’s a kid, and it didn’t have anything to do with her.”
“May I ask what you and Mr. Arrighi were arguing about?”
“Oh, you know, a question of dogma.” I rubbed my increasingly sweaty palms against my thighs. “Is it okay if I leave you here and go work on something in the parlor?”
“Of course, Mr. Carrow. It is your house, after all.” She went back to cooking.
I slunk away. My house. Hysterical. Another lie on the pile, another secret to bury. Another thing to choke me in the middle of the night. Maybe Sev had the right idea. Maybe if we all said the truth out loud, it would hurt less.
It might even cut down on the murders.
Chapter Eleven
I pecked slowly at the space bar of the typewriter to match the motion of the second hand on my watch. I was desperate for a cigarette, but I was too afraid to move.
Tchk tchk tchk.
It’d been almost an hour after I’d sat down to pretend to work, and that had been a good forty-five minutes after Sev had stormed off. Crista was still in the kitchen, making what seemed like enough food to last us a week.
Half hour he’d said, an hour at most, and now the time was approaching two. Something might have happened. Arrested, maybe. Or maybe the gangs making the sweep of Westwick had decided to chase Bella and her family all the way out here. Or maybe whoever Bella was afraid of was lurking around. I still had Sev’s knife. If he had ended up in a tight spot, he would have had nothing to defend himself with. How would I even know? How could I even get to him?
Tchk tchk tchk.
What if Kelly came to arrest me for assaulting Richard and set a trap for Sev for when he got back? And then phone calls, an armed escort back to Connecticut. What if we both ended up in the electric chair, never having seen each other again?
Tchk tchk tchk.
The rumble of a car engine on the street cut through the ambient noise of the house. I jumped up so fast I slammed my hip into the desk. Cursing at the pain, I ran to the door.
It wasn’t our car. A truck had pulled into the drive of the Gaines’s place. A man hopped out, average build, graying hair. A very pointy chin and nose gave him a birdlike look. Mr. Gaines, I had to presume. He noticed me watching and turned, looking me up and down. Without saying anything, he headed into his house.
With Trask dead, the factory was probably going to fall to Mr. Gaines. Everyone said so. Ownership of a business was motive enough. I’d seen people killed for less. And now he was cornered enough to justify talking to him.
I took a step back into the house. “Crista?” I called.
She stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Yes?”
“You’re going to be here for another half hour, right?”
“I can be. Why?”
“I have to run out for a second, but I’ll be right back.”
I shut the door and hustled over to the Gaines’s house. About to knock, I paused. Did I want to deal with Fran right now? Well, her parents were there. They’d put a stop to her ridiculous flirting. Maybe even forever. I rapped on the door.
A woman with the same ash-blonde hair as Fran answered. She was flushed, and her eyes were red-rimmed. She sniffed into a handkerchief. Allergies or tears?
“Mrs. Gaines, so nice to finally meet you,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. Her cruelty to Sev was hard to get over. “I’m Alex Carrow. We moved in on Wednesday. I believe you met my brother-in-law yesterday.”
She shook my extended hand like I’d offered her a rotting fish. “Nice to meet you.” Her voice had a deep tone I hadn’t expected. “Fran has told us so much about you already.”
Yeah, I bet she had. “I would have come by earlier, but there was so much commotion with Mr. Trask passing away.”
She sniffed again. “Oh, yes, terrible business.”
One second, two seconds. She wasn’t inviting me in like I’d expected.
“Mr. Carrow!” Fran’s beaming face appeared behind her mother’s shoulder. “How nice of you to call. Come in!”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. Good luck or bad luck?
The room was painted bright yellow, and the furniture had a satiny sheen. A well-woven carpet covered most of the floor. Lined up on the mantelpiece were fancy plates, not the kind used for eating. So, the Gaineses did have money or at least wanted to look like they did.
Fran deposited me in a plush armchair and scampered off, squeaking about how she would get tea. Mrs. Gaines paced into the parlor, squinting at me. I got a better look at her as she sat in another chair. While she wasn’t adorable like Judith or elegant in simplicity like Crista, she had sharp, proud features that gave her a regal bearing. Too bad she was rotten all the way through.
More noticeable than her features was her dress. It was very clean, maybe too clean, and there were no signs of any fading or repairs. Clearly it was either new or rarely worn. Likely the latter, if she was in the factory all day. I wondered how Mr. Gaines felt about her being away from the house all day. Not that the house seemed to be in bad shape, but some men had a hard time with their wives working. Unless, of course, there were money issues, and she’d been working to help keep them afloat. Low funds would certainly emphasize the business as motive for murder.
“Oscar,” Mrs. Gaines called, “we have a guest!”
“Be there in a second, Louise,” came the reply from the room to my left.
Mr. Gaines appeared after a series of creaks. My assessment of him from the porch as a grumbly pigeon of a man was only reinforced by the hesitant, jerky way he walked. He brushed some dirt off his dungarees as he stepped into the parlor.
“Give a man a minute to change out of his gear, why don’t you?” he mumbled as he passed in front of his wife to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Carrow. Sorry I snubbed you a minute ago. You know how it is, don’t want to talk to anyone as soon as you get home.” He took a step back. “Normally, I don’t make rounds of the groves on Saturday, but what with Walter gone and all someone’s got to.”
Louise leaned around her husband. “And what is it you do, Mr. Carrow?”
“Wait a minute, woman! Don’t you see I’m talking to the man?”
She gave him a poisonous look.
Fran pranced into the living room with a tray sloshed with tea from already-poured cups. She cast a nervous glance at her parents before setting it on the table. She lifted a dripping cup and pressed it into my hands and smiled encouragingly.
“Fran!” her parents shouted almost at once. She flinched back, her face scrunched. Great, now I felt bad for her.
Louise took over again, adjusting the tea set into what I assumed was a more pleasing pattern to her. “What I mean is we’re so happy to get to speak with our new neighbor.” She tugged the back of Fran’s dress until the girl sat with a huff. “We’ve already heard so much about you, but you know how gossip is. You can’t trust a single bit.”
Oh, irony. “Ah, well, I’m a writer, and Sev is an accountant, as you know. We’re from Boston. Um, unfortunately, we’ve had several recent deaths in the family, so we thought we might change the scenery for Pearl’s sake. Not sure what else there is to tell.” I put the cup back on the tray and tried to discreetly dry my hands on my clothes. “I did also want to come over and offer my condolences on the death of Mr. Trask. I heard you both worked for him.”
Oscar cleared his throat. “Well working for him isn’t quite right. We were more like full partners, he and I. And I’ll keep the business going good and proud.” He shot a look at Louise. “And I’ll find myself a proper
secretary.”
Louise sniffled into the handkerchief again. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with my skills, darling?”
“No, I’m saying”—he looked at me out of the corner of his eye—“some other people might be able to use the opportunity. Just think, with Walter gone, what’s going to happen to little Judith there? No husband, no work.”
At Judith’s name, Louise’s face darkened. “You’re not responsible for her future. You have your own girl here.” She gestured at Fran. “If you want to give a young lady some assistance, you could give your daughter some experience in the workforce.”
“But mama, I don’t want—”
“Frances is no good. She can’t read, Louise! What am I gonna do with a secretary who can’t read?”
Fran’s face paled. She glanced at me and started chewing on her lip. Poor thing. She had started the conversation with such high hopes. Neither of her parents seemed to notice.
That was quite enough for me. Fighting like I wasn’t there was one thing, but dragging their kid under with them was out of the question. I stood up. “Excuse me. I just realized I need to run an errand before tomorrow. Thank you for the tea.”
Fran jumped up as Oscar and Louise continued sniping at each other. “I’ll walk you out.”
I didn’t want to let her, but if it got her out of that house for a few minutes, at least it was something. As soon as the door closed behind her, she began to cry.
“Oh, no. Christ, here.” I stuffed my handkerchief into her hand. “I’m sorry about what they said about you in front of me.”
“It’s not my fault,” she whimpered. “The words jump around the page.”
“I know. I know. I didn’t say it was. And I don’t think any less of you.”
“But you said you’re a writer, and I can never read what you write and—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I coaxed her off the porch. I didn’t want her to stalk me through my writing anyway. “You have lots of other stuff you can do. You don’t want to be indoors reading all day anyway. You’ve got such a nice bike. Wouldn’t you rather ride out in the sun?”
“It is a nice bike,” she sniffled. She ran a hand across the handlebars. “And it is very fun. But they bought it to try to make up for something.”
Oh Lord, not another abusive household. “What’d they do?”
Fran looked at me, swallowing a few tears before she whispered, “They’re getting a divorce. They decided about a month ago. They avoid each other as much as they can while the lawyers do up the papers.”
“Ah. Well, I’m sorry for that too.” I patted her arm. “You know it’s not your fault, right?”
She nodded. “I know. They’ve been fighting for a long, long time, and it got much worse about six months ago, a little after Mom started working for Mr. Trask.”
“Do you know what about? Does your dad not like your mom working?”
“I don’t know, but it sounds like something happened and that Mom was the one who did it, but she’s always saying Dad drove her to it. But neither of them killed Mr. Trask though. I swear. Mom was in the factory the whole day; you can ask anybody.”
Interesting. She’d leaped to her mother’s defense and not her father’s. But I wasn’t going to get anything more out of her with her sniveling like this. Since I wasn’t in the mood to coddle her, it would have to wait.
“I believe you. I do. And no one is going to arrest your parents.” Yet. “Why don’t you go clean yourself up and take a ride before supper, huh? Get all the bad stuff out of your head.”
She gave me such an adoring look I knew I’d only made her infatuation with me ten times stronger. But what else was I going to do? Let a girl bawl her eyes out while her parents were at each other’s throats?
Just as I was wondering how I was going to ditch her, another car pulled onto the street: the rickety ancient Oldsmobile. Sev was home.
“Right, well, good luck,” I said quickly. “And, uh, if you ever need to leave for a few minutes, you can come by our house, okay?”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Carrow. I—”
I didn’t hear the end of her sentence since I was hurling myself at the car. I grabbed at the door handle as Sev stepped out, and I nearly got smacked in the face. He blinked in surprise and gave me an odd look.
“Hi,” I said. God, Alex, are you ever not going to be awkward?
“Ciao?” He edged past me and started for the porch stairs. I trailed after him like a puppy, trying to ignore Fran’s continued presence in the yard.
“You said you’d be gone less than an hour,” I said.
“I did,” he replied as he reached for the doorknob.
“It’s been two.”
He didn’t answer as he stepped inside and hung his hat on one of the hooks in the wall. Crista stepped out of the kitchen door. She grinned.
“Mr. Arrighi, so nice to see you back.”
He broke into a brilliant smile, enough to tighten the crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes. “Crista, you’re still here?” He stepped forward with a gust of energy. “I know we’re men, but we’re not helpless around the house.”
She giggled and spoke again, this time in Italian. He answered, and the small talk became a full conversation, complete with hand gestures and laughter. She turned to go back into the kitchen, and he moved to follow.
Being stabbed by Pearl’s father had hurt less than this.
A familiar, hot feeling not unlike the one that often prompted me to throw punches blazed down my spine. Maybe he ought to know what it was like, desperately wanting to talk and not being allowed to. To wait, panicked, while I disappeared for hours.
It was doable. The door was right there. Only trouble was, I was restricted to walking distance since I hadn’t the faintest idea how to drive. So where could I go? It wasn’t like I could stay with anyone, and the library was still off-limits.
Fine, I’d pout in my bedroom like a child.
I slumped up the stairs, too frustrated to even stomp. What had I gotten myself into? And it wasn’t even all the murder stuff—that wasn’t actually my fault—it was the running off into the sunset with someone I’d met less than a month ago and thinking it’d be happily ever after. The stories never did say what happened after the royal wedding, did they? Probably a lot of arguing and plotting infidelity. So much for fairy tales.
I tossed Sev’s knife onto the nightstand before flopping into my bed. I buried my face against the pillow, determined to smother my own tears. Fuck Sev. Fuck Trask. And Kelly and Bella and Crista and Fran and everyone else in godforsaken Chickadee, Vermont!
Chapter Twelve
I woke up blurry and blinked at the darkness surrounding me. It had been midafternoon when I came up here. I must have been out for hours. Squinting at my watch in the thin moonlight, I learned the time was eleven fifteen. Well, at least I’d slept nightmare free for the first time in a while.
My painfully empty stomach had woken me. I hadn’t eaten lunch or supper, and I was starving. I’d skipped plenty of meals before, but that had been out of desperation, and now with a stocked kitchen a floor below me, there was no reason not to eat.
I peeked in Pearl’s room on my way down. She was sleeping peacefully, and Daisy too. Thank God. How did parents do this all day, every day, focusing on a tiny person’s well-being while handling everything else in their lives?
The stairs creaked as I went down, and I cringed. The last thing I wanted to do was let Sev know I was up. But the lights didn’t seem to be on in the parlor, and I didn’t see any spilling from his door. I nudged it open a crack, just to make sure he was asleep.
He wasn’t there.
I turned and saw the whole of the empty parlor. I went down the hall into the kitchen to see if he had gone to the bathroom. No. My heart squeezed tighter and tighter as I ran back to the front of the house.
He wouldn’t just up and leave in the middle of the night, right? That was the kind of shit I wrote for the pul
ps, not something real people did. Or what if something had happened; one of the people out for Bella had hunted him down and me with his knife upstairs? I yanked open the front door.
He was sitting on the porch swing, smoking and staring out at the street. The white of his shirt almost glowed in the moonlight while everything else about him ranged from a dusty gray to a pitch-black. Even his eyes, gold in the light, were an unimpressive charcoal. Only the end of his cigarette sparked a bright orange. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to kiss him or kill him.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. And it’s cooler out here.”
Well, he was right about the cooler part. A continuous breeze tousled his curls and chilled me, though I wasn’t quite sure if the tremor in my shoulders was from that or from all the panic flowing out of them.
“You could have woken me up for supper, you know.”
“I did go up, but you were sleeping so quietly I thought you maybe needed the rest.” He glanced at me before looking away again. “I know you’re having nightmares.”
How he knew that was a mystery since we hadn’t been sleeping anywhere near each other in over a week. Not the current problem though. “Still. It would have been nice to talk. You had me scared almost to death before, you know.”
He nodded and edged to the side. I took the seat next to him, and the swing jolted at my weight. He continued to avoid my gaze.
“So, where’d you go?” I asked.
He took a breath and exhaled the smoke through his nose. “I started for the church, but as I drove, I thought about what you’d said, and I needed to think some more, so I kept driving. I didn’t realize I’d gone so far until I saw a sign saying the distance to Boston.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye again. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Part of me was still furious, but I knew very well I’d chased him off in the first place. At least he’d come back in one piece. “So, what are you going to do? About the confessing thing.”
He took another drag on the cigarette. The burning end cast odd shadows across his face. He shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do until next week.”
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