Page 1 of The Wicked

1

SARA

Sara’s to-do list:

- Pick up more laundry soap.

- Send Marcin’s dad a b’day card.

- Scream into a pillow.

- Rewrite monthly budget.

- Look for a new job.

Once upon a time, someone had gifted me a T-shirt with the slogan “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come,” and that was exactly how I felt about going to Casa de Salsa tonight. I hadn’t worn the shirt, though. That would have been rude, and these folks were my friends. No matter how much I wanted to crawl into bed with a good book and a pint of chocolate chip ice cream, I’d smile and dance for hours rather than admit it.

I was good at that—hiding my feelings, I mean. Although I was good at dancing too, something that nobody in Baldwin’s Shore, the town that I lived in but had never truly called home, knew about. I’d been keeping secrets since I was a little girl. Mom had taught me well.

“The music sounds amazing,” Paulo squealed from beside me in the back seat as we cruised along the street outside the bar, looking for a parking spot. “Just wait until you see what these hips can do.”

“Yeah, I’ll wait,” Blue said. “I can wait forever.”

From what I’d seen so far, snark seemed to be Blue Carver’s default operating mode. She was a newcomer in town, a smart, abrasive private investigator who was like a dog with a bone when she sank her teeth into a mystery. The rest of my family hated her with a passion, which was enough reason to like her, although she didn’t seem too fond of me. I honestly couldn’t blame her. The Baldwin surname was a curse.

“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss.” Paulo rooted through his giant purse. “Look, I brought castanets for everyone.”

Darla glanced around from the driver’s seat. Since she was teetotal, she’d offered us a ride to Coos Bay tonight, and the fact that she’d been waiting outside the gates at the Baldwin estate earlier was the main reason I hadn’t chickened out of coming.

“Aren’t castanets for flamenco dancing, hun?” she asked.

“Uh… Are you sure?”

Blue snorted.

Up ahead, a station wagon turned on its blinker and pulled out into traffic.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Darla muttered, then set about reversing into the space. It took her three tries, which was six fewer tries than it would have taken me. However much I detested driving, I disliked parallel parking more.

“Nearly there. How far are we from the kerb?”

Blue cracked her door open to check. “We’re good.”

As soon as Darla turned off the engine, Paulo leapt out of the car, his sequinned black pants sparkling under the streetlights. Those pants were my worst nightmare. Between them and the see-through shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, everyone would be staring at him. Although maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing? At least they wouldn’t be staring at me. I much preferred to fade into the shadows, out of sight, out of mind.

Would there be a crowd in the bar tonight? Hopefully, there’d be a crowd.

I hadn’t danced for years, not since I left Virginia. When I was young, I’d taken ballroom and Latin classes and loved them, but those classes had come to an abrupt end along with the rest of life as I knew it three weeks before my tenth birthday. Ever since then, I’d been trying to piece my future back together, but each time I fit a few broken shards into place, more fell out.

Case in point? I’d finally made some friends in my not-so-hometown, but this afternoon, my twin cousins had fired me from the company I practically ran for them.

And I still didn’t understand why these people were suddenly being so nice to me. Why Brooke and Romi had started taking me out for coffee, why Paulo had made me a bracelet last week, or why Addy kept inviting me to parties I never attended. Even Blue was reasonably civil, and although I’d known Darla for years—she’d helped to care for my grandfather before he passed away—we’d never been super close.

If Brooke hadn’t been involved, I might have suspected I was the butt of a cruel joke. An elaborate April Fools’ prank, perhaps, although April first was still over a month away. But Brooke didn’t have a nasty bone in her body. Kindness was her superpower. After what my family had done to her boyfriend’s, she had every reason to avoid me, but last month, in a heart-to-heart over tacos at La Cantina, she’d promised that nobody held my appalling luck in the genetic lottery against me.You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family, she’d said, and boy, was that the truth. I’d had zero say in where I ended up after my parents died.

Paulo sashayed along the street ahead of us, his ass twinkling. Fun was his middle name. Blue looked more…resigned. Behind me, Darla dropped her car key and cursed under her breath—not proper cursing, just “heck”—and her muumuu billowed out as she bent to root around in the gutter.

No, I definitely didn’t want to be here. But sitting at home would be worse, even though I’d moved into the pool house at the beginning of the year. The building itself was beautiful—a single-storey guest suite fronted by Grecian columns that looked out over clear blue water—but no amount of elegant architecture could squelch the fact that the whole estate was bathed in bad vibes. Officially, the place was called The Lookout, but locals just called it the “Baldwin place,” and it always felt as if the ghosts of everyone my ancestors had wronged were hanging around, watching me. And maybe somebody else was too.

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