Page 32 of The Wicked

He disappeared before anyone could say another word, and Brooke laughed.

“I just know he’s gonna detour via the Coffee House and come back with cookies, and he’ll probably chat for an hour too.”

“Good.” Blue poked her head through the door and crooked a finger in my direction as the bell above the front door tinkled. “I came here to talk to you.”

My good mood vanished in a heartbeat. “Y-y-you did?”

I’d been trying so hard to block the monster and the investigation from my thoughts. The nightmares were bad enough. Brooke glanced toward the group of customers that had just walked in, torn because she wanted to hear what Blue had to say more than I did.

“I’ll look after these people,” she said, leaving me with no choice but to walk toward the break room with all the enthusiasm of a condemned woman.

Blue handed me a mug of black coffee. I usually took milk, but if Paulo was going to spend an hour on his errand, I might as well drink it before it got cold.

“Did you find something?” I asked.

“Yes and no.”

I waited.

“The corporation in Delaware, that’s a struggle. Opaque. Whoever set that up doesn’t want anyone to find them, and short of hiring a world-class hacker…”

“Do you know any world-class hackers?”

Blue made a face. “Unfortunately not, and if there’s one positive thing to come out of this, it’s that there’s literally no evidence that the man you saw was at the Peninsula because he followed you. Maybe he dropped by to see a friend, or he was travelling to Portland and got thirsty along the way? But I did get curious about the beginning. Before the beginning, actually. Don’t you think it’s a weird coincidence that your mom’s boss died just a month before she did?”

“Mom said he died in his sleep.”

Peaceful, that was the word she’d used. It had stuck in my memory for all these years because her death had been anything but.

“He did. The official cause of death was heart failure, and that was what the papers reported. Tragic death, only fifty, blah, blah, blah. But when my old boss died, I inherited his contacts, and one of those contacts is a cop in DC. The part that got swept under the carpet was that Senator Colvin’s heart failure was brought on by an overdose of Seconal.”

“An overdose? He took an overdose?”

“Yeah. Could have been accidental. The difference between a normal dose of barbiturates and a lethal dose isn’t very much at all. And you could see why the family would want to hide it—death by suicide or by a grave error would have led to much more media interest than a heart attack, and who wants grief to be overshadowed by a media circus, especially when there are kids involved? Did you know his granddaughter found the body?”

“Madison?” A fresh wave of sadness rolled over me. “No, nobody ever told me that.”

“You knew her?”

“The Colvin family had a compound in Texas, kind of like the Baldwins do here. After Mike Colvin won his US Senate seat, he and his wife spent most of their time in DC, so my family did too, but there were times when we all had to go back to Texas. The Colvins used to let us stay in a cottage on the grounds to save my parents from renting a place. They were like family, I guess. So yes, I knew Madison reasonably well.”

Family was important, the senator always said. When he had the time, he used to take us both for ice cream on Saturday mornings, and I used to love playing at the big house. Madison had a dollhouse taller than me, plus her grandpa had bought her a puppy for her eighth birthday, a goofy little thing named Scooter, and I’d been a little jealous because I loved dogs and we couldn’t have one since Mom was allergic to fur. Dad would always make me change my clothes right after I got back to the cottage, but Mom would still sneeze.

Madison had been yet another loss in my life.

“Don’t you think it was weird that Colvin and your parents died so close together?”

“What are you saying? That their deaths were connected?”

“I’m saying that it’s worth keeping an open mind, especially with two hazy causes of death.”

The bell over the front door jingled again, this time accompanied by a cheery “Hi, folks.” Darla was back.

“We can’t talk about this, not here. Not now.”

“Later, then.”

Possibly. Or possibly not. I’d done my best to block that month from my memory. It wasn’t just all the death, it was the fighting. The tension. Mom losing her job had put a strain on everyone, and mixed up in the middle had been Grandpa’s eightieth birthday celebration. Our brief return to Baldwin’s Shore had put Dad in a foul mood.

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