If At First (Crimson Cove Mysteries Book 1)

by Tara Brown

  I reached in and dragged my hand over the Polaroids, scanning the photos of the young women flashing their goods for the camera. I pulled back, my stomach tightening as the pictures got less like selfies and more like creepy H&M ads. The girls seemed despondent and sad, like someone had taken the photos against their will. And Polaroids were not like pictures sent with texts. You were most likely there when the photo was taken.

  Nauseated and disturbed, I put the board back and closed the drawers, knowing I had been inside for far too long and those were a sign from God telling me I needed to stop snooping in people’s houses.

  I slipped my phone back in my pocket and headed downstairs, trying to find my usual sense of fulfillment and excitement about the fact I had a key to something I would have to solve.

  But the images I couldn't surpass flooded my mind.

  “Linds!”

  I jumped when I got to the office and heard Andrew calling me. I closed the door to Mr. Banks’ office and hurried in the opposite direction of Andrew’s voice. I curled up on a bench in the backyard, facing the ocean, and closed my eyes.

  “Lindsey. Where are you?”

  I fought seeing those images again as Andrew came around the corner. “Are you shitting me, dude? You fell asleep? Come on, I want my sushi.” He shoved me lightly on the shoulder.

  Ignoring him as if I was waking from a real sleep, I waited a few moments and stayed perfectly still. But then he went silent. Cracking one eye, I jumped, screaming, “Ahhhhndrew!”

  He was sitting on the ground, staring right at me. I sat up as he laughed. “I got you so bad.”

  “You did.” I blinked and breathed. “What do you want?”

  “Sushi.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” Leaving the Banks residence did sound quite good actually.

  “Did you even finish?” He shook his head.

  “Nope. But no one will even know. Let’s go.” I got up and grabbed the gardening supplies, trying to still my rapidly beating heart and twisting stomach.

  The key felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket. I couldn't stop thinking about what it might unlock and where the pictures had come from. If I knew one thing about Vincent, it was that he didn't need pictures of sad girls. He had every girl we knew throwing herself at him.

  So why would he have them?

  I had considered his house to be like all the others in Crimson Cove—a trial run for my future days when I would be a reckless journalist in the field—but that notion was gone.

  I had a firm sense that my days as a local snoop were over. If Vincent had taken those pictures or had any part in them, he wasn't who I thought he was.

  A desire to solve the mystery roamed about inside my mind, offering explanations that it was some kind of role-play or he had found them. I realized I wouldn't rest until I knew where they had come from. It bothered me that Vincent had them, but it bothered me more that he might have been the one pointing the camera. I always thought he was a playboy, but I never imagined it went to this level of depravity. He was a harmless annoyance I could shoo away, not a psychopath I had to fear.

  Or so I had thought.

  Chapter Two

  High-cut shorts and low expectations

  August 4th

  I walked out into the yard, strutting just a little because my theme song was playing over the speakers: “Do I Wanna Know?” by Arctic Monkeys. It was my summer jam from last year, and I still wasn't ready to part with it, so it was fast becoming my summer jam for this summer. The beat and the cool sound of the lead singer’s voice had me in its clutches.

  It was Friday, a day that had taken on new meaning for me. It was the weekend, which meant I was free for two whole days.

  The end of this wretched summer couldn't come fast enough. My father trying to teach me a lesson about being a good socialite was killing my back. I was nearly ready to break and resign myself to being a soulless mooch like the stepmonster.

  I stood at the edge of the pool, stretching and rolling my aching neck back and forth before I pulled my sweats off and picked the Sabz high-waist bikini bottom out of my butt. I didn't understand why I had listened when Sierra, my fashion-dictator friend, demanded they were the only bathing suit bottoms any of us would wear this summer. Classic cut was what she had said, but it meant classic wedgie in my books, and in my butt.

  I dragged off my shirt and tossed it on one of the new lounge chairs the stepmonster had bought. Seeing them made me wonder what she and Father Dearest were fighting about. It was the only time she redecorated, except for when she had first moved in with us. That was the summer of renovations as she had torn up the whole house. There wasn't even a tablecloth left when she was done erasing Terri, my dad’s first ex-wife, or Number Two, as I liked to call her.

  These new chairs were cream-colored fabric on dark wood frames, which seemed risky to me, almost like she dared me not to eat lime popsicles and chocolate cake on them. Not that I had to bother with ruining the furniture—two younger brothers would take care of that. Aaron and Matt were at summer camp, but they would be back and those chairs would be ruined.

  “Lindsey, is that back in style? The old-lady bottoms from bathing suits in the sixties?” Louisa offered up a smirk from behind the wide Ed Hardy shades she had lowered so she could give me the look.

  I grinned back at her, not sure which way we were going with this. The stepmonster and I usually avoided each other, and the pool had always been a safe zone—a neutral territory.

  I liked the neutrality of the pool, so of course that forced my answer to be one that might deescalate the situation instead of answering her the way I wanted to. My honest answers usually made things much worse between us.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself I was above her petty taunts. “Yes.” I pointed my ass at her as I popped it for her viewing pleasure. “See how the high-cut top shows off my narrow waist and it lifts in the bottom part so my butt cheeks show a bit. It’s this season’s super sexy bikini—or so Sierra says—and she does usually know this stuff.”

  She lifted a perfectly manicured eyebrow at me, still grinning wickedly.

  It had been a perfect retort until a little evil slipped from my lips, as it always did, “I mean super sexy for the younger generations, obviously. So the ladies in your group wouldn't know that—being why you weren’t aware of it.” I grinned wide, loving it when her jaw dropped.

  I had no self-control. The Doritos under my bed were proof of that.

  My inner Diablo relished in the fact I had a “screw you, Louisa” point on the board before noon, and said point involved calling her old. Hitting thirty was hard for her.

  Turning back to the pool, I tossed my short hair about and dove into the cool water, breaking the surface and pretending to ignore the little voice that suggested I should try not to be hateful to her.

  My inner dialogue always sounded like an argument between my mother and me. She was the ghost of common sense to my whiney teenaged brain that always insisted Louisa had started the fight.

  But there was a common denominator that I always refused to admit to. I had been the exact same with Terri. In fact, I had been this way with the women my dad had dated in between my mom, Terri, and Louisa.

  I hated it when I brought up that point, even if it meant hearing my mom’s voice again.

  I felt the subtlest amount of guilt for calling Louisa old, which thankfully didn't last long.

  By the time I surfaced, the water was so refreshingly cool that I couldn’t even force myself to feel sorry for saying it. My remorse slipped off my shoulders like water off a duck’s ass.

  I bobbed, enjoying the sun beating down on me as I scanned the deck for Lori; I needed a drink.

  When I turned back to the stepmonster, I caught a glimpse of a sneer. Luckily her eyes went over my head when she gave her annoyed sigh and spoke like she was being inconvenienced, “Marcus, stop. Seriously,” she demanded, using his big-boy name which meant he was in trouble. Most people called h
im Mark.

  I grimaced and turned around to see what my father was doing to aggravate her.

  He stood on the deck, one hand in his chestnut hair and the other holding his phone. His dark-blue eyes looked like they could shoot flames from them. “What do you mean the Blacks know Gerry Allen sold the market property to the Van Harkers? How the hell did they find out? If they decide to pull out before the Van Harkers have an idea of what’s going on there, we are screwed! We promised the Van Harkers we had taken care of their first sale.” My dad’s voice barked over my head as he lifted his face and scowled at the white fluffy clouds. “This better not become something. We have a firm deal with them over the land—I do not need this today! Do you have any idea who the hell Jamison Black is? Or better yet, who his father is? You better fix this, Janine!” He thumped the screen of his phone and tossed it on the lounger, sighing and giving Louisa a look. “Don't start.”

  She didn't. She didn't even breathe. No one liked it when Mark Bueller got angry, not even me.

  We both sat in awkward silence, feeling sorry for Janine, his secretary. She was an unusually nice lady, especially for this part of the world.

  He shook his head and bent forward, picking his phone up. Just as he had it in hand, he caught me in his peripheral. I took the face he made as my cue and sighed my breath out, letting my body sink back under the water. I opened my eyes as I submerged, and grimaced seeing his hard stare lowered to me. His lips moved fast, making me glad to be under the water, where I could pretend he was saying anything to me, and the haze made the lies possible.

  His version of coping with conflict and failure was to strike out at everyone else.

  And I knew what he would attack me for. I knew Andrew wouldn't keep his mouth shut. He was such an imbecilic moron when it came to knowing when not to talk. If he wasn't such a nice person I would hate him, but his genuine indifference to everyone was a bit endearing to me. He wouldn't even have bitched about me napping—he would have just said it nonchalantly, not understanding that my dad would kill me for it. His dad was pissed about his drunk driving, but his sentence of manual labor was to appease the sheriff far more than it was to make his father happy. His father was less aggressive than mine.

  But there, floating in the water and watching my father shout, I didn't care about the fact I’d been busted napping at work. Instead, my head rang with the name Black.

  The Blacks were buying something new with Lainey’s dad? I thought they had just moved into their new house last summer. They owned a beautiful estate on the water, like all of us did. I knew this because we did their gardens—we as in me and Andrew, the rat.

  The Blacks?

  Maybe it was a different Black family. The last name was a bit of a Smith or Brown or Jones. They were everywhere.

  I wished I had Lainey’s ability to catalogue all the things she saw and read.

  I kicked off the bottom of the pool, surfacing and gasping for air as the shadow of my father turned and huffed into the house.

  Treading water, I glanced back at the teary eyes of the stepmonster, wincing and wondering what vile sentiments of love and respect they had spewed at one another while I was under the water. She lifted her drink and pulled on her sunglasses again, this time with her wide-brimmed hat.

  This brand of denial was the key ingredient in the recipe for a successful marriage in Crimson Cove.

  And Louisa was the queen of making it work.

  What I wanted to know was how she had gotten a drink in the time I’d been underwater and where the hell Lori was. Lori was Louisa’s maid and loyal to a fault—just not to me. She had come with Louisa which meant our old maid got fired.

  I still missed our old maid. She was loyal to me.

  I swam to the stairs and climbed out, grabbing my towel. My eyes drifted in the neighborhood of the stepmonster, and I contemplated just ignoring the sniffles, but I knew it might be worth something later. An ounce of kindness went far with wicked stepmothers, possibly because I hardly ever showed it. When I did, it was in public. I found acting like we were BFFs in front of others bought me more with her. “You all right?”

  “Yes.” She sniffed and smiled. “Fine. He’s just temperamental. You know how he is when a deal is falling apart and tomorrow is the big event. He’s just stressed. Jamison Black is a powerful man in the Senate and his father is a chairperson on some zoning committee or something. It’s a big deal if we screw the Blacks over.”

  What I wanted to say was that my dad was an asshole and she deserved better. But she didn't. So I shrugged and played along. “He kicks it into high gear, Louisa. He acts like he hates all that work drama, but when he has to earn a buck, deep down he’s in heaven. This is his jam. He and Mr. Allen will figure it out.” I smiled and wiped my face and body. “I’m going to the Shack. You want some pastries?”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head. I saw the look in her eyes and almost thanked her for not commenting about how I didn't need a pastry. She didn't understand my body just as I didn't understand her getting Botox at thirty as a preventative measure.

  My mother had been Italian, so I had a pear shape like all the women in her family. My breasts were smallish but my trunk had junk. Thankfully, Nicki Minaj had made junk in one’s trunk akin to winning the genetic lottery. I wasn't ever overweight. Being five foot four and one hundred and thirty pounds was respectable. Being a size four or a six wasn't bad to me, just to the rest of Crimson Cove. But I was the last girl to care.

  I left my wet towel in a mound on a chair and hurried inside before I convinced myself that I should stay and talk it out with Louisa. Being nice to her scared me.

  What if we had a moment?

  Then I might have to overdose on something later while wearing far too much mascara and listening to nineties grunge. I even had the blonde wig to go with the depression I would be forced to fake.

  I made it as far as the kitchen with my thoughts distracting me. I almost didn't see him, but when I did, I skidded on the large tiles to halt myself while gasping in shock. “What are you doing here?”

  Shit.

  Did he know I had his key and had snooped in his room?

  Did he know I’d seen the vile photos?

  No, how could he?

  It was weird timing for Vincent Banks to be standing in my kitchen with a drink. He was dressed in a pair of beige dress pants and a pale-blue dress shirt. He belonged in a men’s cologne commercial.

  I hated how attractive he was.

  “Hey, princess.” He seemed weird or cockier than normal. I had to tell myself there was a slight possibility he knew I had his key. He winked and sipped his drink. “I have been thinking about you, a lot.”

  His broad shoulders and thick muscles were hard not to notice, even with hateful thoughts roaming in my head. And his chestnut hair was shaggy instead of slicked back, maybe because we weren’t at school, in proper uniform. It was the one feature he had that I adored. It made him look sweet, which was contrary to his actual personality. I reminded myself about the Polaroids.

  “What are you doing in my kitchen and how the hell did you get a drink? Where is Lori?” My eyes scanned the kitchen for her.

  He cracked a grin, lifting one side of his lips. “I suspect she doesn’t like you. You’re too nice to her; she doesn't dig that. She, however, was very attentive to me. I think she likes me.” He lifted the straw to his lips, sucking and swallowing with great emphasis.

  “All older women like you, Vince. Ask Andrew’s mom.”

  He flinched but recovered quickly as his green eyes trailed down my body, nauseating me. “I like the swimsuit. It’s a little less than you normally wear, isn’t it? I almost prefer you dressed like a nun, the way you always are. I like imagining what’s in there. I feel like it’s a game we play, no?”

  “No. We don't play games.” That was a lie—we always played games. But since the pictures in his drawer were haunting me, I didn't want to play anymore. In fact, I almost covered m
yself, but I knew that’s what he was going for, so I stood there, nearly naked. “You are so nasty, Vincent. The very worst of the very best people.” I wanted so badly to say I knew about the photos.

  He laughed, loving it when we bantered back and forth. His eyes narrowed but remained filled with humor. “Oh, I assure you, princess, I am the very best of the very worst.”

  The name was ironic and I knew it. I was the last girl to be called princess in this neck of the woods.

  I swallowed hard, thinking I wasn't sure I wanted to be having this conversation with him.

  He stepped forward, leaving the nearly full drink on the counter as if to taunt me with it. I wanted to run but I didn't. He made my stomach twist in knots when he was near me. It was the oddest feeling.

  “Oh, Lindsey.” He sauntered to me, making my nerves light on fire. “Why don't you let me show you just how good I can be?” He looked down on me, his green eyes lit with that look he always had. I hated it. It was like he was undressing you or imagining a dirty scene being played out. “Make me be good.”

  I shook my head and brushed past him, walking to his drink. I plucked the straw out and left it on the marble counter before lifting the drink to my lips and sucking it back. I swallowed the last of it and smacked my lips. “You know what your problem is, Vince?”

  He grinned wider. “That I have somehow let you slip through my fingers at every opportunity?” His answer was mocking and cocky.

  “No. You have never actually had an opportunity. That's all in your head.” I took another sip. “Your problem is that you always forget you have a girlfriend. You are truly notorious for forgetting this fact. But luckily for you, your girlfriend is one of my besties. So I can remind you and keep you on track. Like a nun might.” And you have dirty pictures I don't want to talk about.

  “Too bad for you, I have a thing for modest girls.” He shook his head, his eyes sparkling in jest. “One day, princess. One day you are going to be begging me to take that v-card.” He walked past me, leaving the kitchen and intentionally brushing the back of his hand along my thigh as he did it.