Page 15 of Our Darkest Summer
“I’ll just head to bed.”
I walked up on the wooden stairs to the porch, my body heavy from the tiredness. My hand slid to the doorknob and I waited for Thomas to get the keys, but nothing happened. I raised my eyes, to see him completely frozen in place, looking at something over my head. I followed his gaze and my stomach dropped. A note.
A small piece of paper, stuck to the small window on the front door. I leaned closer with a frown, my pulse jumping as I read the scrawled letters.
I turned to Thomas, expecting to see the same surprise on his face that I felt in my bones, but he didn’t look shocked at all.
Chapter Eight
Thomas
“What’s going on?”Kinsley asked as soon as the door shut behind us. She was holding the piece of paper between her fingers and kept glancing down at the single word written on it.
I had no idea what to tell her. If this had anything to do with my mother’s case, which I suspected it had, I didn’t want to drag her into it. But keeping it from her, and even Connor, could be a risk to them both. I agreed for them to come because I thought I could find something in my mother’s file that would crack the case quickly. But that wasn’t what happened, so now I had two options. Send them both home, which could trigger my father to come up here and make it into a whole thing, ruining my plan entirely, or tell them everything, which, as funny as it was, could also ruin my plan.
Kinsley must have seen something on my face, because she crossed her arms with a frown.
“I’m not dumb, Thomas,” she stated the obvious, “Connor said you haven’t been up here for almost twelve years, and then suddenly you want to come up and party? You don’t even like partying!”
My eyes narrowed.Touché.It was a bad excuse, one I crafted without considering her knowing about it.
“And when you get the opportunity to do what youallegedlywanted to—” she made air quotes, “you suddenly have other things to do. And then you say that not all ground is safe in the forest, yet we didn’t have any problem walking across it, did we? What’s going on? Who were you following in that forest…and what’s with this?” She raised the note. “Does it have anything to do with…” she bellowed. “With your mom?”
I froze.
What did she know about my mom?
“A girl I met at the party mentioned her,” she explained, without me having to ask.
Of course. Small town. But on the same day we arrived? I thought I would’ve had at least a few days before the gossiping started. I turned around and walked into the kitchen, knowing well Kinsley would follow. She was like me; she wanted facts over nice words, so I took out the box of orange juice I had bought earlier from the fridge, and filled two glasses, handing one to her. It wasn’t that hard to choose between this and my father, after all.
“I came up here because of this.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter that arrived a few weeks ago. Kinsley leaned closer with a curious frown. I handed her the paper and took a mouthful of my juice while she was reading. My eyes dropped to her soft lips as she mouthed the words, before putting the letter down on the counter.
“This is addressed to your dad,” she stated, and I nodded.
“It arrived a week into summer break,” I said. “He wasn’t home, and…it never made it to him.” Her eyes filled with questions, but she stayed silent, waiting for me to tell the whole story. I stretched my neck and rested myself against the kitchen island. “I was ten when I was last here, and Connor was eight,” I started. “It was the summer my mother disappeared.” Her eyescaught mine, the brown in them more than the green. “After a day of barely searching for her, the police declared that they believed she ran off. Apparently there were eyewitnesses, saying they saw her at the bus stop the morning after, but?—”
“You don’t believe that.” Kinsley finished the sentence.
I looked at the letter resting between us. “Who would leave without their things? In the middle of a family vacation.”
“And what did Joshua say?” she asked, and I lifted a brow. “Right,” she added a moment later.
My father wasn’t the kind of man you could talk with about these things…or nothing really for that matter. Not if he didn’t have personal gain from it.
I reached for the letter. “I tried to find out who sent this. But whoever it was, they made sure only they could contact us. That’s why I followed up on it and came here.”
Kinsley played with the edge of her dress. “Well, it seems like, someone wanted Josh here just as much as someone else wants us gone.”
I nodded. It seemed like it.
“So, you are here to, what?” she asked. “To investigate?”
Well, it was more complicated than that…then I realized where her question was leading to.
“You’re studying criminology and journalism, Kinsley. You’re not a detective,” I shook my head, pushing myself away from the kitchen island, “don’t mix them up.”
