Page 5 of To the Grave

But I was also… worried? I’d been trying to identify the feeling in my chest, the way it felt heavy and tight even when I wasn’t with Daisy. That was new for me.

I was an in-the-moment guy.

Except now it felt like there was a dark cloud hanging over my head every fucking day, and I knew it had to do with Daisy and the way it felt like we were losing her.

The only time I didn’t feel like I was wearing a lead vest was when I was working on one of the cars. Then my mind went back to work, overriding this worry about Daisy or whatever it was.

And it wasn’t like we didn’t have other things to think about. Wolf and I were stuck when it came to who was behind the girls’ disappearances. We’d tried connecting the missing girls, combing through their backgrounds to see if they had something— or someone — in common, but it had been pointless. They were all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one but there were no other common denominators.

We’d gone through Calvin’s phone with a fine-tooth comb, but there was nothing pointing to Mr. X except the messages themselves, cryptic enough to be about anything if you didn’t know better, and one mention of the dive bar.

Our one hope was Blake’s phone. Other than his messages with us the night we’d killed him, there wasn’t anything overly incriminating on it, but we’d given the phone to Aloha, hoping he could find something on the people Blake had been texting, websites he’d visited before wiping the history from his phone.

The fact that the phone was old, that Blake had been using it five years earlier, worked in our favor. Aloha had taken one look at it and nodded, then set it next to his bank of computers at the lab in the old warehouse in town.

“Think Aloha will be able to get in?” I asked Wolf, breaking our long silence.

“I think he’s already in,” Wolf said. “He would have contacted us if he couldn’t crack it.”

That made sense. If Aloha had hit a roadblock, he would have told us.

“So what do we do?” I asked. “About Daisy?”

I wasn’t exactly confident in the relationship management department. There were too many nuances, too much subtlety.

“What we’re doing. Try to get her out of it.” Wolf was staring out the windshield, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Try to wake her up.”

Chapter 7

Daisy

Locke worked my ass off. There was no easing back in. After a run on the treadmill to warm up, I spent the next hour and a half squatting, jump roping, and lifting. I felt slow at first. Slow and heavy. But after a while my body remembered what it was like to really move.

Other gym members arrived while we worked, and by the time Locke told me I could stop, I was dripping sweat.

“Thank you,” I gasped, trying to catch my breath after a series of burpies.

He looked down at me. “Feel better?”

I nodded. “I think I do.”

“Good. Same time tomorrow.”

“Don’t I need a rest day?” I asked, because even though I wasn’t a gym rat I knew you were supposed to rest your muscles between workouts.

“You work Monday and Thursday, right?” he asked.

“Usually.” The resort was inching closer to its grand opening and I’d been coming in a few extra days here and there as the deadline loomed.

“We’ll work a different muscle group tomorrow,” he said. “You can take Thursday off since you have to work.”

I considered arguing — who did Locke think he was? — but didn’t. I felt better already, the quiet of the house at the top of the falls far away from the lights of the gym and the people working out around me.

Life.

I thought of Jace, picked at the wound of his death, testing it, and an unseen hand crushed my chest.

I pushed the thought of him away. I would visit his grave when I got home, think about him in the big house where I could cry alone. Here I felt more like myself. Maybe that was the trick: compartmentalize my loss, my thoughts of Jace.

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