His hands were still in the air. “Jackie, you’re starting to really freak me out.”
I took a step back, realizing I sounded like a crazy person. But I didn’t lower the speargun.
“I’m a little freaked out myself.”
A serious understatement.
“Can you please lower that thing?” he asked. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out his pale, worried face. His furrowed brow. His feet looked dry.
“Tell me again why you’re here. Why you decided to come sneaking around this late at night.”
“I came because I was worried! I haven’t been able to stop thinking about our talk this morning. That maybe Lexie was right. I stopped by Edgewood and talked to my grandmother about it. I really listened to her for the first time. She says there’s something dark down in the pool, something that’s been gathering force for a long time. And that the people who die in that water are trapped there forever. I know it sounds crazy, and I’m not saying I understand any of it, but—”
“Oh, I understand.”
And I did. Suddenly, it all made sense.
I thought back to all the interactions I’d had with him since returning, the spooky stories he’d told me, how dangerous he said the house and pool were.
“You do?” He looked astonished.
“I know who you are.”
“WhoIam?”
Pathetic, him playing dumb.
“You’re the great-grandson of Benson and Eliza Harding, the couple who owned the hotel.”
He said nothing. He didn’t deny it, but he wasn’t ready to admit to it, either. He took a step back, his eyes on the speargun.
“You didn’t want me to find out. Your mother came here today to try to makesureI didn’t, to get rid of any evidence.”
But I caught her before she got the chance.
Everything was falling into place. There was no haunted swimming pool here. No ghosts creeping out of the water. Only a family who wanted what they believed was rightly theirs.
“My mother? What?”
“It all makes sense now! God, I was such an idiot. How could I have trusted you?”
He shook his head. “Jax, I don’t understand what any of this—”
“You, your mother and grandmother, you think this land, the springs, all of it, should belong to you! That my great-grandfather got it unfairly, which maybe he did, but it doesn’t make what you’re doing right.”
“What I’m doing?” He was acting totally dumbfounded, an innocent wrongly accused. “What exactly are you accusing me of here, Jax?”
“Trying to scare me off like this. That’s what you did to Lexie, too, isn’t it? Tried to scare her? Fill her head with crazy stories about the pool, about the curse. You probably even got some girl to play the dark-haired woman. Some girl who’d come creeping out of the pool. Was she the one who broke into the house? Came sneaking around when Lexie was in bed? Or maybe that wasyou?”
The chills I’d had being out here alone were replaced by the heat of rage. Sweat formed on my forehead and arms. My hands shook from gripping the speargun so tightly.
“I would never do anything like that! That is crazy, Jax. Stop and listen to yourself. You’re not making sense.”
Fury burned through me. No way was he going to turn this around, to make me the crazy one!
“I can’t believe you messed with Lexie like that! Manipulated her. Used her illness to your advantage. God, were you getting her drunk on vodka, too? Was it you who talked her into going off her meds?”
“No!”
