Connor lived outdoors, more animal than human. The type of kid who nursed wounded animals back to health and knew every plant and animal species in our area. He slept under the stars with a pocketknife in one hand and a book about constellations in the other.
During his senior year of high school, he earned his way to Eagle Scout and then applied to college, wanting a degree in Forestry. Two weeks after he died out on the icy lake while fishing with my dad, we received his acceptance letter to an exceptional school in the Adirondack Mountains. My mom had it framed, and it still hangs in the small living room of the private quarters. I knew he’d get in, we all knew it.
I was so proud of him. Siblings fight, but Connor and I were best buds. I think losing Eli when we were young led to a stronger bond between us, different from what other brothers and sisters have.
Nate lifts his head and scratches his chin, the motion cutting into my memory. I stare at him for another minute before moving closer. There’s no reason to be tiptoeing other than I’m not sure how else to approach the guy. I’m confused by his personality. He was threatening when he first got here, called me beautiful when he came back drunk, then was standoffish early this morning. Some people are assholes in the morning, but how about now? What should I expect from Jekyll-and-Hyde Harlow now?
He tilts his head as I approach, hearing the sucking noise of my hiking boots in the muck. With his back still turned, he reaches for me. Is that an offer? He’s barely spoken to me and now he wants to hold hands?
He wiggles his fingers after I stop a few feet behind him. “Take my hand, Salem.”
“Why?”
“We’re going for a walk.”
“I’m not going in the forest with you.”
“After all these years, you’re still afraid of Grady?” He lowers his hand. “He’s not even here.”
I look down and make a circle in the melting snow with my boot. “N-no, it’s not that,” I say. “I want answers first, that’s all. Besides, I don’t even know you.”
“Trust me.” He puts his hand back up.
“Why?”
“Because I might have answers.”
“Right.” I snicker. “Girl goes into the forest with a gorgeous stranger, never to be heard from again.”
“I’ll tell you what you want to know, but you have to come with me.” He doesn’t mention that I said he was gorgeous. “And Grady’s not around. I promise.”
“Don’t you call him granddad?”
“No, Grady.” He turns and flashes a warm smile, one that slows the heart. Is Nathan Harlow good-natured, or is he a wicked trickster?
“What’ve you got to lose?” he asks, taking a step closer.
I shrug. “I don’t know, my life? What if you chop me to bits?”
Nate’s amused, his eyes dancing. “Good sense of humor.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“I think you were.” He bumps into me on purpose. “Salem, I’m a detective, not a killer.”
“Private detective.” I back up. “You guys make the best killers. Who hired you anyway?”
“No one. I hired myself.”
“Why?”
He takes my hand and waits for a struggle, a smack, or a scream, but I only gaze at his touch in disbelief. My ex never held my hand. He didn’t like to show affection in public. And there was no need to hold hands in our home. He touched me when he wanted to fuck, but he wasn’t a cuddler. Neither were my fleeting relationships before him.
My eyes close when his thumb grazes my palm. Butterflies stir in my belly. Nate can jump-start something inside me with a single touch. His breath is like a feather on my cheek, his hand warm from being in his pocket. I want to say more, more please, but his gravel-deep voice snaps me out of my daze.
“Two steps forward and no steps back.” He leads me into the pines.
I catch sight of the lodge one last time before the forest eats us alive. If we were closer, I’d see Ollie watching me from the bay window of my living room, one paw up on the glass, signaling not to go.
“Sorry to be such a dick yesterday,” Nate says.
“And this morning,” I add.
“Yeah, and this morning. I get testy when I don’t eat, low blood sugar or something. Even after drinking, I couldn’t sleep. That’s not like me.”
“Is being a dick like you?” From the corner of my eye, I see a smile. Or was that a smirk? A smile would be better. I hope he smiled.
“Is having clammy hands like you?” he retorts.
“I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be.”
“I have to be back by four to reopen the lodge. No, before four.”
“You will.”
“And you have to fix my front door chime when we get back.”
“It’s broken?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
“I’m not.”
He keeps a straight face, focused on where he’s walking. I can tell he knows his way through the forest. We head east toward the lake, then north, choosing not to go west where the ground is rocky. He guides me along a stream but doesn’t attempt to cross it. There’s a reason. He knows about the felled tree that Connor and I once used as a bridge. The one my granddad cut down for us. It’s still here, and still as massive as I remember it. This tree was our boundary when we were kids, never to explore past it because of Eli. And somehow, Nate’s aware of it.
He knows too much.
“You’ve been here,” I say, invaded with a jolt of confusion.
“Yep, years ago before my grams died.”
He tests the trunk then waves to cross once he’s safely on the other side. I raise my arms for balance and inch over the length of the old tree, remembering how I’d pretend I was crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope when I played here as a kid. That was before Connor warned me of Madman Murphy carrying the dead raccoon. I didn’t wander this far from the lodge after that, but I know Connor did. He went everywhere. The creepy-crawlies, lack of light, and the eerie feeling that someone was always watching didn’t bother him.
I slip when getting down from the trunk, but catch the sleeve of Nate’s hoodie to help regain my footing on solid ground. He insists on taking my hand as we continue.
The ambient stir of wildlife in the brush and trees are oddly missing. No birds, or squirrels, or even a slight breeze. Sometimes the fog can deaden the sounds, other times the eeriness comes from human movement temporarily paralyzing nature.
I stay a step behind him to study his features. Eli could be this tall. He’ll be twenty-five this year. Maybe he has the same manly jawline, broad shoulders, dark stubble, and thick eyebrows. Whitfield’s all have thick brows, handsome on the men, a burden for the women.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks. The tips of his eyelashes are in wet clumps from the weather.
A pause. “Faces. Eyes. Eyebrows.”
“Really?” He turns. “Not where we’re going, but eyebrows?”
“You have a Whitfield face.” I move right up to him, my eyes inches from his to examine their color. “Do you wear colored contacts?”
“No.”
“Your eyes are blue then, not gray?”
“Blue as the sky above us.”
I look up. The tops of the pines lost in a gray mist. There’s not a spot of blue. “Are you joshing me?”
He pulls me forward to keep moving. “I’m not Eli, Salem. My eyes are blue, my name is Nate, and I grew up in Vinland Falls.”
“Okay. It’s just … when things are about Eli, I’m allowed to act desperate.”
“We’re not related,” he adds. “You wouldn’t have that look in your eyes if we were.”
“What look?” I try to stop him, but he tightens his grip.
“That look. The look women get when they’re drawn to me.”
“Wow. Smug much?”
“Experienced.”
“Lucky you.”
; “Not really. Women who lust after me just for a fuck get boring after a while.”
“Hey.” I tug my hand to get away. No luck. “I’m not out here to lust after you or to fuck. I’m here for other reasons.”
“I know.”
My body stings. “Your friend Jim told me not to push you, that I should wait for you to talk. But I’m getting tired of having no control over this situation.”
“I’m sure.”
“And I have no interest in making out in the forest like a couple of horny teens.”
He smirks, indeed a smirk this time. “I know you’re not interested. That lipstick you put on is just to impress the deer.”
I draw my lips into a thin line, embarrassed, hiding my raisin-colored lipstick. He noticed. Most men are oblivious to the small amount of makeup that I wear, but Nathan Harlow noticed.
“You’re a distraction, Salem, but a good one. Those lips are a cruel tease, like a ripe grape I’d love to roll my tongue over.”
My cheeks flush with heat. “So lust is a double standard? It’s okay for you, but women like that are boring. How fascinating.” I hope he picks up on the sarcasm in my voice.
“Having a healthy appetite for beautiful women isn’t lust.”
My cheeks are now on fire.
“Salem, here’s my guess. We both have obsessive personalities. That along with the fact that you like me and I like me is another plus.”
“Seriously?”
“And as far as I can tell, this will be a good week if we work together. I just need to ease off the booze for a bit, and you need to serve a meal or two at the lodge.” He holds a straight face. Then, a grin expands. His unexpected playfulness puts me at ease.
“Well then, tell me what you’re obsessed with.”
“Same thing as you. Eli Whitfield.”
“You do know something. Have you seen him?”
“We’re here.”
“Where?” My stomach climbs to my throat. I try to get my bearings on where here is, and if Grady’s house is nearby.
“I like to call it my former summer home.” He points to a run-down fort sandwiched between four pines. Boards nailed to the trees form the sides, and tied bundles of long branches lay over the top for a makeshift roof, half of them missing or on the ground. A sign nailed to the front with the words Girls Keep Out is etched in a child’s handwriting.
“Yours?” I ask.
“Mine and Connor’s.”
My throat constricts. It’s hard to swallow and even harder to speak, but somehow I manage to say, “You knew Connor?”
“For a few years, I did.”
“When? Did you also know Eli? How come I don’t remember you?” I grab his sleeve. “Why did you say we haven’t met? We must’ve if you knew my brother.”
He crosses his arms and looks at a clearing at the bottom of the hill. Below us is Madman Murphy’s neglected log cabin, the roof marbled with moss, windows shattered, just a shell of how I remember it from when I was a kid.
“I met Connor when we were about ten. He was out looking for snakes in the forest. He showed me where they hid under the rocks. When I came back the following year, we built this fort and spent the summer playing in the pines. Just him and me, no girls allowed.”
I spy over the top. Two wooden chairs rest on their sides, cocooned with sticks and pine needles. There’s an empty shelf, and a metal cot with the stuffing of the mattress ripped to shreds by mice.
“He was a fun brother.”
“Definitely a cool kid. But he didn’t talk about Eli. A few times he said his little brother was missing, that was it.”
“We weren’t supposed to talk about him to any of the kids in town. My parents said our words would get twisted and stories would spread.”
He walks closer to me. “I watched you, Salem. But we never met.”
I wheel to face him. “You watched me?”
He nods. “I stood in the pines at the back of your property, even though Grady said not to pass the stream.” He points in the direction we just came.
“We weren’t allowed to pass it either.”
“I know, but Grady was stricter about that boundary than your parents were. If he caught me, I’d get his belt.” He lowers his voice. Our eyes meet and then skitter away. “I didn’t listen. I wanted to see the pool and the playground that Connor always talked about. And the hippo, I didn’t believe you guys had all that stuff. It sounded like an amusement park.”
“What was I doing?” I ask.
“Running and dancing in bare feet through the yard.” His face lights up. “Sometimes doing cartwheels, or swimming in a bright orange bikini. It was a sight.”
“The suit with the white polka dots. I loved it. My grandma bought it for me.”
“I loved it, too.” He looks down and rubs the back of his neck. “You played the same song over and over while you danced.”
“What song?”
“I didn’t recognize it, but Connor told me it was ‘MMMBop.’ ”
I laugh. “Gawd, Hanson was my favorite band for years when I was a little kid. He must’ve also told you how much he hated it.”
“Yep. Me too, after hearing it so many times.”
“Oh. How many times did you watch me?”
“Only a few.”
“So … three?”
“Five or ten. Maybe twenty.”
“Twenty?” I scrunch my nose. “Why didn’t you just say hello?”
“Because … you … because you were a pretty girl in a bikini, that’s why.”
“Oh, come on. I was nine.”
He shakes his head like I’d never understand.
Twenty times, he watched me. Twenty times! I bet it was more. And I bet he touched himself while he snooped. How could a boy that age not? Innocent, though, we were only kids, but still. I must’ve been his first crush.
“It’s no different from you watching me from the side of the lodge earlier,” he says.
“Yeah, it is. You know it is, or you wouldn’t be blushing.”
He cradles his cheeks, rubbing them up and down. “I don’t blush. It must be the warm weather.” He pulls off the hoodie and ties it around his waist.
“Poor excuse. It’s not even fifty outside.” I turn back to the fort and trace the Girls Keep Out sign. “Connor made sure I was afraid to come out this way. He said Grady killed a raccoon with a knife, and I’d be his next victim if I ever wandered the forest alone.”
“That raccoon probably had rabies. He killed quite a few of them over the years to keep us safe.”
I look up. “Connor didn’t tell me that.”
“Yeah, well Connor could’ve had other reasons he wanted you to stay away. Maybe this was his only spot for privacy. That’s why I came out here, to get away from my family. It’s like being in another world when you’re that age. I’m sure he felt the same.”
“It’s still like another world,” I whisper.
He rubs my lower back, his skin scented with the juniper berry soap stocked in the lodge.
Nate has known me forever, but he knows nothing of me. I’m beginning to hope that will change, my initial scare over him was just a misunderstanding.
I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans in case he wants to hold hands again.
“I didn’t think Connor had any secrets,” I say.
“Everyone has secrets.”
“I don’t.”
“You must.”
I shrug. “I can’t think of any. At least none that Joss doesn’t know about, which means they’re not secrets if she knows. It’s not like I’ve hijacked cars or dealt drugs or anything.”
“I’m sure there’s something, Salem.” He takes my hand, and we start down the steep hill toward Grady’s house. We use the trunks of the pines for support until we reach the edge of the unkempt yard.
“Grady left me this property.”
“Really? Wait, Grady’s dead?”
>
“Yeah, he died last year. I own the land from the fort, to an acre north of his house, to another acre down the long, dirt driveway. I tried to come up here yesterday, but a tree is down over the drive.” He looks at the abandoned cabin. “It seems worthless, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not. The land is beautiful.”
“Maybe the view, but not what’s in here.” He taps his head. “Not the memories. This place is a nightmare. It reminds me of when my grams got sick and came to live with us. Grady wouldn’t come because he said he couldn’t bear to watch her die. It was selfish. I realized then that my mom and I spent the summers here to see my grams, not to see him. And we never came back once she was with us. We never heard from him again until we got notice he was dead.”
“He was a cold man.”
“Bitter. He was distant because people hurt him. Angry at life is my guess.”
“Where was he all those years?”
Nate looks inside one of the broken windows and up at the leaky ceiling. “No one knows. This cabin is his last known address. He was still paying taxes on this place and had a bank account. But his body was found close to my mom’s house in Vinland Falls.”
“Was he murdered?”
“No, it was a suicide. My mom thinks he became a hermit. More of a hermit than he already was. She said he lived off the land on this property, just not in the house.”
My heart misses a beat considering the possibility. “Here? No way. Someone would’ve seen him. He wasn’t here all that time.”
“He was somewhere. In a tent, a cave, or on a boat on the lake.”
“It’s way too cold in the winter. He wasn’t outdoors in Tilford Lake.” My mouth feels like it’s packed with peanut butter, my speech is bumbling and cumbersome. “I just can’t see a person being out here for that long.”
The Release of Secrets_Littlest Sparrow Gone Page 5
