Page 98 of The Wicked

Brooke grimaced.

The bell over the front door jangled as I finished making the coffee, and I arranged three mugs on a tray for Darla to take out to the parking lot. I wasn’t officially working today, but I was grateful to have a safe place to hide out while the sheriff’s department tried to work a miracle. If I’d been stuck on my own at The Lookout, this situation would have felt a hundred times worse. Perhaps I’d get out my paints later? Dad always said that art was just emotions on paper, and that was another reason I knew he and Mom had been happy. His paintings had been filled with bright colours, a hug in a frame. No stormy skies or moody colours. He’d painted Mom often, but he hadn’t sold those pictures. No, they were tucked away in a safe deposit box, and the key lived around my neck.

Close to my heart.

I was in there too, plus a few self-portraits, sketches of our home, and several watercolours of Mom’s pet bearded dragon. Sir Duster of Dessau had been a gift from her mom for her fifteenth birthday, and I remembered him sitting on my arm when I was four or five years old. He was buried in our old yard in Virginia. Dusty had outlived Grandma Susan by three years, which I thought was why Mom had cried so much when he died. It was like losing another piece of her mother. Maybe someday, if I ever found a place I felt settled enough to stay, I’d adopt a pet of my own.

Darla poked her head into the break room. “It’s for you, hun.”

Tell me Garrett hadn’t… Oh, he hadn’t. Parker appeared, and Brooke picked up the tray.

“I’ll leave you two to talk.”

Great.

Parker leaned against the wall next to the door, hands in his pockets. “How are you doing?”

“Badly.” Why was he here? This conversation could have been an email. “Did you want something? I’m not planning on coming back to The Lookout any time soon, so you’ll have to do your own laundry.”

“I just wanted to see how you were.”

“Did the twins send you?”

They’d messaged me incessantly over the past few days, mostly with questions about Garrett. Not once had they enquired about my welfare.

“Nope.”

“Can you tell them if they text me one more time, I’m going to block their numbers?”

“I’ll pass on the message. Do you need anything from the house?”

“I could do with some more clothes,” I admitted, although I didn’t love the idea of Parker going through my underwear drawer. Yes, he’d been surprisingly nice to me lately, but there were certain boundaries I wasn’t about to cross.

“Write me a list, and I’ll bring them. Did you find whatever you were looking for the other day?”

I shook my head.

“Need any more help with the search?”

“No offence, but I don’t trust anyone with the surname ‘Baldwin.’”

“Can’t blame you for that. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite.”

Really? Had he forgotten his own last name?

“Oh, please. You’re one of them.”

“Am I?”

I ticked off the very valid points on my fingers. “You learned business from Grandpa. You work at Baldwin Estates with EJ, and you worked with Marianna too, before she went to prison. You hung out with Easton all the time. You go to parties with the twins.”

“Ever heard the phrase ‘keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’?”

“So are you saying they’re your enemies now?”

He paused for a moment, then kicked the door shut. “Yes.”

“And you expect me to believe it?”

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