Page 96 of To the Grave

And that was other thing that worried me. If Michael and Arlo had been extra tight — and they probably had been since they were foster brothers — then where the fuck was Arlo in all of this? Had Michael aka Piers done something to April Hedges, the girl who’d gone missing at Wharton? If so, had he come back to Blackwell Falls to exact some kind of revenge for the years when he’d been a chubby foster kid, on the outside of Mac and Nory’s world looking in?

I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road, but I had to think Jace was asking himself the same questions. It was all a jumble, my mind too focused on getting home to Daisy to connect any of the dots.

My heart skipped a beat when the phone finally rang, but it wasn’t Daisy and it wasn’t Otis.

It was Aloha.

I tapped the screen to answer the call. “What’s up?”

“Finally got into Blake’s email,” Aloha said. “Got a report for you on his activity in the weeks before you killed him.”

Jesus. Just come out and say it, why don’t you?

“Cool,” I said. “Anything jump out at you?”

“I can send the report to your email,” he said.

“Definitely do that, but we’ve got some new info on our end. Wondering if you noticed anything unusual.”

“Hard to say without the big picture, but there was one place Blake went to more than ten times leading up to his death,” Aloha said.

“Where was it?” I felt Jace tense in the passenger seat as he waited for the answer.

“Shitty bar about a half hour from town. Place called Mo’s.”

Chapter 71

Daisy

Ruth practically dragged me up the stairs away from Otis. If I’d been alone I wouldn’t have gone. I had next to zero idea how to use the gun in my hands, but I would have used it to help Otis.

Now he was down there alone.

My chest clutched at the thought of something happening to him, but Ruth was pulling me down the second-floor hall, making it impossible to focus on anything but our movements. “Where do we hide, Daisy?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

She stopped moving and put her hands on my shoulders. “Youhaveto know. You live here.”

I swallowed against my panic and tried to see the house the way it looked on the blueprints, then with the overlay of furniture, designed to utilize the antiques that were part of the house.

“There’s a big cupboard,” I said. “In the room at the end of the hall.”

The end of the hall meant more time for Otis to head off Gray and whoever else he’d brought to the house.

And it had to be Gray. It was the only thing that made sense after what he’d done to Ruth.

If I’d been more focused when we’d come up the stairs I would have continued to the third floor, but it was too late to double back.

“A cupboard?” Ruth didn’t sound convinced.

“It’s… like an armoire. A big one.” Now I was the one moving, pulling Ruth with me. “Trust me.”

We’d just reached the door to the room when gunfire sounded from downstairs.

Adrenaline coursed through my body, my head buzzing with it, fight-or-flight pushing me forward even as I fought an internal scream at the fact that Otis was down there alone.

We barged through the door of the room and I headed straight for the double-wide armoire, a shadow in the dark against one wall. An old skeleton key protruded from a keyhole in the center of the cupboard. I took it and slipped it into my pocket because the last thing we needed was to get locked inside the armoire.

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