Page 27 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

“Helllppp!” someone calls and then that scream again, high-pitched and keening.

Oliver grabs my hand, wrenching me off the spot. “This way,” he says. “Come on!”

We break into a sprint as the scream reaches a peak and then, in a way that’s somehow worse, stops.

CHAPTER 6Death Takes a Holiday

When we find Harper near Trajan’s Column, my heart feels like it might explode.

She’s hunched over on the ground, tangled up with another woman, and all I can think is that I can’t even breathe without her. My knees buckle and Oliver catches me before I fall.

“Harper!” I shout as I go down.

She turns and rights herself. “I’m okay. Just a bit scuffed.”

Oliver sets me back on my feet, then takes a step away from me. I feel like I’m going to start crying, and I’m not sure what’s making me so emotional. Harper’s okay, and the shock of seeing Oliver has worn off.

Those screams, though.

They’re going to be hard to forget.

“Why were you screaming?”

“I wasn’t, it was…” She motions to the ground, where the other woman rises slowly and starts to dust herself off. I realize she’s not a stranger. She’s—

“Allison,” Connor says, pulling up beside us, slightly out of breath. “I’d know that shriek anywhere.”

Allison Smith, née Rogers. Connor’s ex-wife.

Oh, did I not mention her?

Yeah, neither did Connor.

I found out about her right after we’d completed the negotiations—if you can call them that—over When in Rome’s publication and Connor’s take of my advance. We were meeting with our then publicist, Libby. She was confirming the details of his bio, and that’s when I learned he was married.

I should’ve seen that coming, right? A guy who’d extort his girlfriend isn’t someone to be trusted. But it was a shock anyway. And super embarrassing. Libby, who was all of twenty-two, kept asking me if I was okay. But she also hadn’t taken me aside to give me a heads-up.

I’m sure she dined out on that story for months.

Connor hadn’t bothered to deny it. If you can believe it—and why wouldn’t you, given everything I’ve told you about him?—he’d laughed when I confronted him. I “knew what he was,” apparently, which I’d demonstrated by capturing him so perfectly in When in Rome. A wife shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“What are you doing here, Alli?” Connor asks now, his hands on his hips.

“Getting accosted while minding my own business.”

She’s wearing a light caramel shift dress that’s too fancy for this bowl of relics. Petite, with wide-set brown eyes44—it was never hard for me to understand why Connor was drawn to her. Besides being beautiful, she’s smart and kind. We aren’t close, for obvious reasons, but every time I’ve been around her, she’s been nothing but nice, though she has every reason to hate me. They divorced after When in Rome came out. She’d ended up writing a tell-all about Connor—The Man Behind the Book—and we’d had to do more than one event together because Connor has created a constellation of authors in his wake.

The Vacation Mysteries Extended Universe, they call it. Like we’re superheroes getting spin-off movies after we’ve saved the world.

“Is this your thing?” I ask Connor.

He shakes his head in annoyance. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Oliver asks. “What’s ‘his thing’?”

Connor shakes his head again, a warning this time.

“He thinks someone’s trying to kill him,” Harper says.

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