Page 22 of Tourist Season
“Oh, yeah?” I jerk my head in the direction of the manor house. “Lookin’ to start with whoever lives there?”
Sam’s cheeks puff out as he blows a long breath through pursed lips. “I wish. Somehow, I don’t think the old man is going to give me an interview, all things considered.” I tilt my head, my brows furrowed, and Sam smirks. He knows he’s piqued my interest, and I’ve given him just enough of a reaction to warrant the crumb of a reward. “You really don’t know the story about that place?”
I shake my head. This time, my reply is honest. I swallow the swell of anger I feel at myself for being so focused on hunting Harper that I didn’t research the town’s ancient history, and now I have to defer to this frat boy–looking prick with his polo shirt and his stupid bleached teeth and country club–bland yet conventionally “good” looks. I grind my teeth in irritation before I paste on a lazy smile and say, “I heard it won a gardening competition or two, but beyond that, no.”
“Lancaster Manor is as old as Cape Carnage. The Lancaster family owns half of the businesses in and around town. A silver mine, back in the early days. A distillery. The general store. The list goes on. Problem is, when you’re looming over a town like this one for generations, it might give you wealth and success, but it makes you a target, too.” Sam stares up at the house for a long moment before turning his attention to his equipment, pulling the camera off the tripod, then removing the plastic cover protecting it from the rain.
“You mean for that Plume guy?” I ask, purposely flubbing the name even though I remember it with clarity from the last time we spoke.
“La Plume, yeah. Have you ever heard of Sleuthseekers?” When I shake my head, a thread of disappointment weaves itself through Sam’s expression. He straightens his cap and places the camera into its padded bag before starting to dismantle the tripod. “I’m one of the founding members. It’s an online amateur investigative group. We’ve solved two murder cases already. You really not into true crime stuff, huh?”
“I mean, it sounds pretty cool,” is all I can manage with a shrug. I guess he’s not that different from me, in a way, considering I hunt down criminals in my spare time, too. But I don’t relish the thought that Sam Porter and I might share similar pastimes. I don’t know why that bothers me. Maybe it’s an aura about him, something I can’t see or hear, but something I feel. Or maybe it’s just the fucking hat. “So what, you’re after La Plume now?”
“You could say that. We’ve been trying to track down his real history for the last five years.” Sam huffs a laugh. Shakes his head, then jerks it in the direction of the estate. “As far as anyone knows, this place is the location of the last kill by La Plume. Poppy Lancaster was the woman’s name. He killed her right there on theproperty, in the little stone cottage where she lived with her son. As the story goes, her father was the one who found her body. He ended up raising his grandson on his own.”
My first thought is Harper, alone in that same stone cottage with a man outside her window, watching her intimate moments from the shadows of her garden. My fingers tighten around the handle of the knife, the quiver of Jake Hornell’s final breaths a memory imprinted into my skin. I would kill him again, if I could.
You want to kill her too, I remind myself.You just want her to yourself, that’s all.
“But the way I see it,” Sam continues, breaking me free from the storm that’s rolling through my thoughts, “if Poppy Lancaster came across a secret her father was hiding, who says he didn’t kill her to keep himself hidden? What better way to throw suspicion off himself than to murder her with the same method and then cover his tracks with a weak alibi and the burden of a grandchild? And then if he changed his modus operandi entirely after murdering Poppy, he could have kept killing in Cape Carnage without ever being caught.”
“I thought serial killers don’t really change their methods. You really think he completely gave up his pattern and managed to stick to it all this time?”
Sam’s brows knit and he tugs the zipper of the camera case closed with more force than necessary. “It’s not totally unheard of,” he says, his eyes meeting mine only briefly, as though he’s struggling to hide his irritation at my dismissive comment. “He’s a smart guy. If he really did kill his own daughter to remain undetected, changing his pattern isn’t much of a stretch. He wouldn’t be the first to do so.”
“Interesting. You know more about this stuff than me, that’s for sure,” I say, and he preens at the acknowledgment. “Guess that makes sense if the disappearances around here haven’t stopped, like you were saying.”
“Exactly. And the police aren’t going to get off their asses and do anything to solve it. They only care about keeping tourism alive and the dollars flowing. It’s not like they’d want to bring attention to it, you know? Cape Carnage used to be just another sleepy little seaside town on the slow path to abandonment until several years ago, when they elected Mayor Patel and she ushered in the plans that overhauled its tourism industry. They’re making money hand over fist now with all the weird and creepy Carnage shit. And this town belongs to Arthur Lancaster, just like it’s belonged to the generations before him.”
Arthur.
I fight to keep a devious grin from slipping across my features and unmasking my hidden desires. Harper Starling might have taken my most prized possession, but I have something just as powerful. I have a wolf on a chain. One who has scented his precious beast. One who clearly will not be deterred from flushing out his prey.Arthur Lancaster.
“I mean, I guess that all makes sense,” I say, trying to temper my excitement with notes of skepticism. “All you need is proof, I guess.”
Sam slips the tripod into a carrying case and slings the camera bag over his shoulder. “I have something better. I have the story of a lifetime. And all I have to do is wait for the sun and moon and sea to align to get it. At the next spring tide, Arthur Lancaster’s biggest secret will surface, and even he doesn’t realize just how big it is.”
“Spring tide?” I ask. But Sam doesn’t answer. He just smiles in a way that’s meant to bait and control, to keep me hooked on a line he’s not ready to reel in.
He claps me on the shoulder, a gesture that should feel friendly, but seems hollow. “Need a ride back to the inn?”
“Nah,” I reply. “Thanks, though. I’ll keep going for a bit.”
“See you around.” With a tip of the brim of his hat, Sam heads to his car. I watch him drive off in the rain. I wait until the road descends into silence. In nothing more than a handful of heartbeats, it’s just me and the manor on the hill. It’s the branches that reach toward me in the mist, offering their secrets. It’s the ghosts that Harper Starling can’t outrun.
A raven caws in the fog. A throaty diesel engine starts up from the direction of the little stone cottage.
I smile.
DESCENTHarper
“GOOD BOY,”MORPHEUS SAYS ABOVEthe rumble of the tractor engine as he picks at the mulched flesh on my gloved palm. “Pretty murder bird.”
I shake the glove off my other hand, and with a slow and fluid motion, I raise it to pet his back. “That’s right. You are a pretty murder bird.” His feathers shimmer beneath my fingertips, iridescent blues and greens and purples vibrant despite the dim light of the overcast sky. I turn and set him down on the garden wall with a hunk of Jake Hornell’s mangled right hand to eat. “I’ll bring you some more treats in a minute.”
I check my watch and press my arm against the gun that’s holstered at my side to ensure it’s still there, as though it could simply disappear and leave me unarmed. It’s nearly noon, almost an hour since I made it home from the the Capeside Inn. Nolan has probably finished his jog by now, and who knows how long it will be until he realizes I was there. It could be days, depending on how often he needs to use his bag of tricks. He could be checking his safe even less frequently if he’s here for several weeks. Maybe hedoesn’t indulge in frequent scrapbooking. And it’s not like I can wait around all day until he figures it out and either leaves town like he should or comes to Lancaster Manor to get himself killed.
I probably should have planned this better. Bought some cameras and hidden them in his room, perhaps. Taken his point about communication and written a more comprehensive letter. Spelled out my almost-innocence. I could have made it clear that he’s right—I am no saint. I did leave him behind on that road, after all. I left him to die so I could start a new life. But I’m not the person he thinks I am. And I will not break my word to Arthur. I’m not about to give up the life I’ve worked so hard to create just because he’s mistaken one monster for another.
