The Cabin

by Natasha Preston

  He smiled sarcastically and nodded toward Aaron.

  I added, "That I knew of."

  "This is pointless. Driving this around was fun, but we're not undercover cops. Let's take the car back and head to my house," he said.

  "Today was a complete waste of time."

  Blake stroked the steering wheel. "I enjoyed driving this."

  "Oh, I stand corrected," I replied sarcastically.

  "I liked spending time with you," he said quietly.

  Well, that did things to my heart that had me falling even harder for him. "Yeah, I enjoyed it too."

  He flashed a boyish grin. "Let's go chill on my bed and I'll let you take advantage of me."

  I shoved his arm, then gave him my best smile.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wednesday, August 26

  Since Blake and I admitted we'd both received threatening texts, we wanted to check out Josh's room, in case he had also been getting threats before he'd died. We didn't have access to Courtney's place, but if we found anything suspicious at Josh's, I was going to find a way to get into her house.

  "I just don't get it," I said into the phone to Blake while starting up at my ceiling. Mum and Dad were downstairs, and I couldn't handle them constantly questioning if I was OK. I wasn't and pretending was draining.

  "To be fair, you don't get any of it. Don't yell, because neither of us do."

  I ignored him, half because I couldn't be bothered to bicker and half because I knew he didn't mean to make it sound like I was stupid.

  "If Josh and Courtney were being stalked before they died, why wouldn't she tell me? It's a long shot, isn't it?"

  "Probably, but it's a scenario we should consider. Maybe they figured out who it was and that's why they were killed."

  OK, that made sense. If Megan, Kyle, or Aaron had been sending threats and Court and Josh figured it out, they'd want to shut them up. Maybe something the stalker had sent to Josh was still in his room. I had kept the texts sent to me.

  "So we need to find something that links Megan, Kyle, or Aaron to evidence we may or may not find in Josh's room?" I said, putting the phone on speaker so I could lay it down.

  "Piece of cake, right?" he said sarcastically.

  "I'm scared, Blake. Whoever is sending those messages has made sure we're too scared to show the police. That message said they'd kill me." Betrayal burned like acid. Whoever sent that message didn't care who they hurt, and that made them dangerous.

  "Do you want me to pick you up?" Blake asked.

  "No, it's OK. I'll be over in a few."

  "All right, see you soon."

  I rolled onto my side and ended the call. When I got to Blake's, I would feel better. Something about him made me feel safer. He was big and strong, and I knew he wouldn't let anything happen to me. I might not have known him long, but I trusted him above any of my friends--he was the only one helping. Whether Courtney and Josh were already dead when Blake and I went upstairs, I didn't know--and I believed that Blake didn't know either.

  Since the murders, going outside left me full of nerves, and today was no different. I got ready and slammed the front door as I left. The local knitting club was walking by on their way to the village hall for their weekly meeting. Five old biddies judged me, stopping to get a good look.

  Before the murders, they would have stopped to chat and tell me I needed to put some "meat on my bones." This time, they whispered to each other, stealing glances at me out of the corner of their eyes.

  Mildred, the eldest and brightest-purple rinse of the bunch, was the first one who would usually call me over. Last winter, she knitted me a pink-and-brown-striped scarf because I didn't wrap up warm enough, apparently. It hurt that she turned so easily.

  People weren't supposed to be guilty until proven innocent. Ignoring them, I got in my car and got the hell away from all the judgmental looks.

  Blake was sitting on his front doorstep when I arrived. "You're waiting for me," I said as I got out of the car.

  "Did Josh have something going on with Tilly and or Gigi?"

  "Tilly and or Gigi? Where did that come from?"

  He shrugged. "I get them mixed up."

  "No, he didn't have a thing with either of them. Gigi was a lesbian, remember?"

  "Megan was straight, remember?"

  Fair point.

  "Why'd you ask, Blake?"

  "Because," he replied, holding out a handful of photos of Tilly, "I found these in his sock drawer."

  Cocking my head to the side, I took them from his hand and flicked through them. They were all close-up pictures of Tilly. None were too odd, most candid ones, as if she hadn't known they were being taken.

  "Tilly," I whispered, unease seeping into my bones. "Why would he have all these?" There had to be at least twenty pictures. When I reached one of the bottom photos in the stack, it was just of her cleavage. I shoved them back at Blake. "Why does he have those?"

  "I dunno."

  "Oh God, was he cheating too? No," I said, shaking my head at how ridiculous the thought was. Tilly wouldn't go near Josh. Like, even if he were the last man on earth. She may have thought less of him than I did. "They don't look right, do they? If you were posing for your piece on the side, you'd actually pose a little. Half of them look candid and the other half look like general pictures."

  "General pictures?"

  "Yes!" I exclaimed, having gone way past my tolerance for his smart remarks already. "You know, a smile for a picture anyone would take."

  "All right. Josh has general and candid pictures of Tilly. No sexy posing." He shook his head and said, "I still don't know where you're going with this..."

  "Really?" I replied flatly, pushing past him to go inside. "Blake, they mean Josh had a thing for Tilly, but it was just his thing."

  "She didn't have a thing," he muttered and closed the front door behind us.

  "I'm going to hit you very soon."

  He grinned and stepped far too close to me. "OK, I'm done."

  I stood my ground, not letting him know he affected me, even if every single nerve in my body fizzled. He would just love it if he knew how my legs turned to jelly when he stood just inches from me and how his voice gave me goose bumps.

  "Lead the way," I said, waving my hand to the stairs.

  "Ladies first," he replied. His voice was low, husky, and incredibly sexy. "Ah, but you're not a gentleman." I already felt boneless, so knowing his eyes were on me as we walked upstairs would probably make me collapse.

  His lip curved with amusement. "You're right."

  Blake walked ahead. As soon as there was some distance between us, my clouded mind cleared. I shouldn't have even been thinking of a guy with everything that was going on, and I couldn't even talk about it with anyone because things with Megan were weird and my only other girlfriends I could talk to about boy stuff were dead.

  I stopped at Josh's open door. Blake had already gone inside, not caring that we were about to breach the privacy of his dead brother. "You waiting out there all day?" he asked.

  "It feels wrong."

  "Do you want to get us off Wright's little list, or do you want to respect Josh's privacy?"

  I walked straight in.

  "That's what I thought. There's nothing else in any of the drawers. I've not looked anywhere else yet. You look under the bed, and I'll look in the wardrobe."

  "Great," I muttered. Now what kind of grossness was going to be lurking under an eighteen-year-old guy's bed? That was something I was more than happy never to know the answer to, and I needed an answer for everything.

  Turning my nose up in anticipation of all things disgusting, I knelt down and lowered my head to the floor. If there was a used condom, I was out. "Nothing," I said, shocked. Everyone had at least a sock that had been kicked under their bed. Josh's was so clear I could see right through to the other side.

  "Huh, what a pansy. You should see what's under my bed," Blake said. I couldn't see his amused, cheeky little grin, but
I knew it was there.

  "No thank you," I replied and stood up. "So where does he keep the things he doesn't want anyone to find then?"

  Blake shrugged, holding up a black plastic box. "My guess is in here."

  My first thought was Please let there be some useful clue in there, and my second was I really don't want to know if there is. What if there was evidence that he'd been in a secret relationship with Tilly, and Aaron had found out about it? Stranger things had happened. Not a lot stranger, but still.

  "You ready to see what deep, dark secrets my brother had?"

  I shook my head. "Not really."

  "Good," he replied as if I'd said yes. "Let's open it then." He dropped the box on the bed, steadying it with one hand as it bounced. I held my breath as Blake took off the lid.

  "Car magazines. Why hide those?" I asked. My heart dipped, thinking it was just a box full of old rubbish Josh hadn't got around to chucking. We were never going to find what we needed.

  Blake cocked his head to the side and smiled as if to say aw, bless. "Underneath," he said and lifted the two magazines that hid the real contents of the box.

  My eyes widened in shock. "What the..."

  "Ohhh, Joshua!" Blake exclaimed, laughing. "What were you into?" He lifted out a black gag and swung it around his index finger. I think I'm going to vomit. While Blake was playing and picking out metal handcuffs and something that looked like it belonged in a medieval torture chamber, I was motionless and speechless.

  "OK," I snapped. "Put it all back."

  "Oh, we got pictures!" he said, waving a pouch of disposable camera prints.

  I raised a hand. "I don't want to. We can't."

  "These might be a clue. What if some are of Tilly?"

  "Then they would be with the others you found." And I'd want to see them even less. I knew it was likely to be photos of Courtney, handcuffed, bound, and whatever else they did together. "And why didn't the police find all this when they searched his room?"

  "Because I might have found it in the loft last night and brought it down before you arrived."

  I threw my hands up in the air, exasperated. Blake was worse than a naughty toddler. "Well, why did you put it in his wardrobe, and why did you tell me to look under the bed?"

  "I could hardly leave it on his desk, could I? My mum could have walked in and found it. And making you look under the bed was purely for my amusement." He laughed and shook his head. "The look on your face when you thought you were going to find something disgusting under there..."

  I took a deep breath. Count backward from ten...

  "Mackenzie, we have to look at the pictures. The whole point of snooping is to find evidence."

  "Something that lead to him killing Courtney and himself, not the kink he got off to!"

  "How do you know it's not all linked? Who knows what he was into or how deeply?"

  "What if it was some satanic...something?"

  "Not sure you have to worship the devil to enjoy a bit of rough sex."

  I rolled my eyes. "I'm not saying that, but what if he did?"

  "Why don't I look?"

  "Oh, you'd love that, wouldn't you?"

  "Ain't denying it, sweets." What the hell was wrong with him? "Oh, don't look at me like that. It's not my thing, but whatever tickles your pickle."

  I laughed--properly laughed. "Tickles your pickle?"

  "You must have heard that phrase before?"

  I shook my head.

  "You poor, sheltered girl." He pulled the photos from the sleeve and his eyes widened. "Whoa."

  "What? What does that mean?"

  He looked up over one of the photos, white as a ghost. "You really don't want to see."

  The very tips of my fingers tingled. "What is it? Don't show me, just tell me. Is it Courtney?"

  He nodded. "And some of Josh." His eyes rounded even more. "OK. That's going to take a lot of therapy." Throwing everything back in the box, he shuddered and put the lid back on.

  "Blake, what were the pictures of? How bad is it?"

  He shuddered again. "Bad. Let's talk in my room, yeah."

  It must be bad if he can't even be in Josh's room anymore.

  "Well?" I said, closing his door and shaking my hands.

  "They did things to each other."

  "Yeah, I got that. What...what things?"

  "Whipping. I saw a whip and...marks on Josh. Blood."

  My pulse thumped in my ears like a drum. "Blood? What were they doing? And whose blood?"

  "Josh's. There was a cut on his chest. He had the camera at arm's length, taking a picture of Courtney..."

  Oh, no, no.

  "Courtney. Courtney doing what?"

  "Licking it."

  "Bugger off," I said. If he thinks I'm falling for that...

  "Mackenzie," he whispered. His face was dead serious. He was not joking. My stomach lurched, and I slapped my hand to my mouth. "You might be right with your satanic thing. I know some guys get off on pain while they're balls deep, but that..."

  I turned my nose up. "Oh my God, can you never refer to sex as 'balls deep' again?"

  He half smiled but mostly still looked sick.

  "Damn it," I muttered and sat on his bed. Courtney never mentioned being into that kind of stuff. Not even being tied up or blindfolded. We confided in each other about our intimate lives. Was she ashamed?

  "You didn't know about any of it?" he asked.

  I shook my head slowly, still trying to process the blood thing. "She never said a word."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "Me neither. Not about the really...odd stuff. I thought she would talk about lighter things though, but she hadn't--not even when Tilly admitted she loved being tied up and Gigi confessed her chocolate mousse fetish."

  "Please tell me you recorded your sleepovers."

  I arched my eyebrow, and he held his hands up, surrendering.

  "Courtney never said anything," I continued. "Not anything out of the ordinary anyway. Do you think she really wanted to do that stuff?"

  "Lick her boyfriend's blood during sex? Does anyone want to do that?"

  "Do you think he forced her?"

  Blake shrugged. "I have no idea. I am thinking that maybe this murder/suicide thing is a definite possibility. But I'm thinking Courtney did it."

  "No. No way. She couldn't."

  "Think about what she was doing to Josh, Mackenzie. If you saw a way to make that stop, if she really didn't want to do those things, wouldn't she take it?"

  "She could have just broken up with him."

  "Maybe there was more to it than that. Think about how she would have felt if he had been forcing her to do that stuff."

  Disgusted and belittled.

  But murderous and suicidal?

  I rubbed my aching head. "I have no idea what to think anymore."

  "We take this to Wright and let him investigate."

  "Yeah," I replied, sagging into the mattress.

  "You OK?"

  I shrugged. Tears stabbed at my eyes. "What if Courtney didn't want to do that stuff?" Oh God, how scared and alone would she have felt?

  He dropped to his knees and leaned his forearms on my thighs. "I don't know what to say, Mackenzie. Saying the right things in situations like this isn't one of my strong points."

  "You don't have to say anything. Sometimes there are just no words."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  What could he do? What were you even supposed to do when you found out your dead friend may or may not have been taken advantage of and abused? How did she feel? Why couldn't she have told me? I could have helped her.

  "It might have been Courtney," I whispered.

  "It can't just have been Courtney. Who's sending the messages?"

  I shook my head, squeezing my eyes closed. "I don't know. None of it makes sense, but we have to go to Wright with this. It could help uncover what really happened." Was I actually considering that Courtney had help to kill Josh and then kill herself?
Or had someone else just figured out who the murderer was first and was now messing with me and Blake?

  "I don't think it's a good idea. He's just going to think we're trying to get the heat off of us," Blake said.

  "Come on, we can't keep this to ourselves."

  "Why not? We're keeping the text messages to ourselves."

  OK, he'd gotten me there. "No, we've only kept those secret because I was threatened. You said yourself we'll tell after they arrested someone and it's safe. That way, they'll have extra evidence against the killer. But this could help the police solve the crime."

  He groaned and covered his eyes with his hand, clearly not OK with taking these pictures to Wright. No one had to know we'd handed it in, so I wasn't any more scared for my own safety than I already was since I'd read the text threatening me.

  "Please." I moved closer and put my hand on his arm. "I understand why you wouldn't want to share those pictures of your brother, but we don't have a choice. Come on, please? Let's go to the police now, Blake."

  Dropping his hand, he looked straight through me. "Fine. But this will be a waste of time and only make us look worse."

  I wasn't sure we could look worse in anyone's eyes. Most of the town had already condemned us, and Wright was suspicious as hell.

  We didn't have much to lose, but we had our innocence to gain.

  Chapter Twenty

  "This is a good idea, isn't it?" I asked Blake for the tenth time, needing reassurance as we looked on at the police station doors from his car.

  He cut me a look. "No."

  "Why are you so against this?"

  "I told you! This is a bad idea but, hey, it's your show."

  "Show?" I spat through my teeth. "This isn't a game, Blake! And if it is, I'd really like someone to explain the bloody rules."

  "Chill," he said, lowering his voice. "I didn't mean it like that, OK? I'll follow you in there, but don't be surprised if this comes back to bite us on the arse. I'm just worried that this is going to make us look more suspicious."

  "Blake," I breathed, leaning closer and putting my hand over his. "We're in this together. I know you're innocent and soon everyone else will too."

  His fingers stretched and weaved between mine. "I wish I could share your optimism."

  "I'll be optimistic for us both."

  He took a breath and grabbed the box of Josh's kinky, and frankly horrifying, sex stuff with a death grip. It was as if he felt guilty that he was about to expose his brother's dark secret.

  There was a possibility that the killer could have been Josh or Courtney. Maybe. I didn't particularly want anyone else knowing what they got up to in the bedroom, because it was clearly something Court wanted to keep quiet, but we were running out of options.