Page 66 of Ghostlighted
“You can tomorrow. He’s not here right now. Visiting next door.”
“With Mrs. Vargas? Is she better now? We had dinner at the Taqueria last night and they said she was in the hospital.” She scrunched her face just as Dominik had. “I hope she doesn’t have to deal with that blondjerkright after she’s been sick.”
“Jillie!” Dominik said. “Manners.”
“What? It’s not like you thought he was nice, either.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Blond jerk? What— Oh, right. You were here when Liam arrived, weren’t you?”
Jillie bobbed her head emphatically, her nose still wrinkled. “Yeah, but I saw him before that. Like a week before. While Mom and Uncle Dom were talking to the B & B owners.”
I glanced between Dominik and Jillie. “But… Aren’t you the B & B owners?”
She gave the typical pre-teenseriously-can-you-believe-how-clueless-adults-areeye-roll. “Notours. The one inRichdale.”
“There’s a B & B in Richdale?”
Dominik nodded. “The people who run it are really nice. They offered to let us pick their brains about the business.” He nudged Jillie’s shoulder with his elbow. “But we didn’t make Jillie listen to all the boring logistical talk.”
She gave another epic eye-roll. “Itoldyou, Uncle Dom. I don’t mind. Iwantto know this stuff. Jenkins House is gonna be my home, too.” She grinned, a little slyly. “But the muffins were really good that morning, so I decided to pass on the meeting and just grill you both later. Plus, it gave me a chance to observe the breakfast service. Andthat”—she punctuated the word with a jab of her finger toward me—“is where I saw the blond je— that guy. He rolled into the room and started complaining about everything. The coffee. The muffins. The bacon.”
Dominik frowned. “They didn’t serve bacon.”
“Iknow,” Jillie said. “That’swhat he was complaining about. He insisted that they make some for him.” She peered up at the ceiling as though she expected a replay of the scene to unroll there. “I’m not sure, but Ithinkthey had to send someone out to buy some, because the server disappeared for a while before I smelled bacon cooking. That je— guy spent the entire time sitting at the only six-top in the roomby himselfand scrolling through his phone. He even took a call once and talked really loud about legal stuff.”
My jaw had slowly dropped as Jillie spoke. I snapped it with a click of teeth. “Let me get this right. Liam was in Richdale a week ago? Are you sure?”
Jillie nodded. “Positive. Plus, the server told me he’d already been there for two days and was making everyone’s life hell?—”
“Jillie,” Dominik said with the time-honored parental-equivalent warning tone.
“What? It’s what they said, and it’s not like we believe in that superstitious stuff, anyway. I think that’s why the owners were so glad to meet with you and Mom all the time. It gave them a chance to get away from him.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, doing the mental math as heat built in my chest and behind my eyes. Nine days. Liam had been in Richdale for nine days.
Never mind what he was doing in Oregon during the last weeks of his final semester—class requirements could vary, after all. But Sofia maintained an entiresuitefor him and set a place at her table for him at every meal, yet he’d chosen to stay an hour away at a B & B, for Pete’s sake.
He’d been there when he’d chastised her for losing her phone. When he’d thrown shade at her for inconveniencing him during graduation week just by being in the same city. Hell, when she’d collapsed in the garden and beenhospitalized.
Liam was Sofia’s only blood relative, and she’d financed his entire Harvard educationin cash, yet he didn’t bother to show up even once to share a meal or give her a hug or just say hello. If he’d been terrorizing the poor B & B hosts in Richdale fornine freaking days, he should have had plenty of opportunities to pop over to Ghost for an hour or two. Granted, it might have cut into his busy bacon-eating/phone-scrolling time, but was it too much to ask for him to make the effort?
Ice rolled through me from throat to belly.
What if hehadmade the effort? What if he’d made the effortmore than once?
Taryn told me that Ricky’s and my fingerprints were the only ones on the bottles and pill minder. But with two of the case’s compartments open, there was another set of prints that should have been there but were notably absent.
Sofia’s.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When Ricky had passed Sofia her prescription refill on the day we’d planted her garden, it had still been in the white pharmacy bag. To get the bottle into the medicine chest, Sofia would have had to touch it. She’d have had to touch the pill minder to open the empty compartments.
So why weren’t her fingerprints present on the bottle and the case?
Obvious answer: Somebody had wiped them down.
Now let’s see… Who might be invested in doing such a thing? How about another obvious answer: Liam, who’d been less than subtle about suggesting that Sofia wasn’t competent to take care of herself. What better way to prove his point than to make it look as though she couldn’t manage her medications at the same time as he’d been making a nuisance of himself in Richdale, conveniently within Porsche key-fob distance when Sofia had collapsed in her garden.
