“I’ve arranged for more live-in help. It’s getting harder for Mum to handle him when he gets…” Tom became aware of Amelia’s gaze on him. “Well, you know how Eddie can get.” He was pretty sure he hadn’t told Ameliathatsorry saga last night.
“Not easy for her, I’m sure. Send her my best.” Tom went to follow the sergeant, but she waved him away. “No need to see me out. Lord knows I know the way.” She paused at the doorway, looking from Tom to Amelia. “I’m glad you’re not alone today, Tom. I bumped into Connor in the village yesterday and he filled me in on the latest. It’s a right shame, the whole sorry business. Can’t blame you for hitting the bottle, pet. But don’t go jumping off any cliffs, now!”
As she left, Tom sat heavily on a wooden bench in front of the open fireplace, pulling his coat around him. Amelia perched beside him and they stared wordlessly into the flames. He’d lit the fire while they’d waited for the sergeant. Most of the warmth was lost to the high, blackened ceiling, but if you sat close enough, it had a campfire appeal.
“Well, that was humiliating,” Amelia said finally.
“It seemed so real. Except for the…” He touched his forehead. It should come as a relief that they’d hallucinated the body, but his brain was still convinced it was real. He’d feel a lot better once he located Duncan. He’d swear a memory was trying to push through the fog of his hangover, a clue that would clear allthis up. “What were you going to say you saw, when she asked about the faces of the people carrying the rug?”
“I had a really strong image come to mind. But the two figures… They were … cyclops. Cyclopses? What even is the plural of cyclops? I can picture it, clear as the pattern on the rug, but now I’m wondering if I hallucinated that too. Is that what you remember?”
He shook his head, sniffing. Suddenly, he was desperately thirsty. “You know those super-ugly deep-sea fish with the long light-up lure?” He demonstrated by drawing a tentacle in the air, coming off his forehead.
“Oh yeah, like inFinding Nemo. Anglerfish.”
“That’s what their heads were. I would swear in a witness box that’s what I saw. I mean, I wouldn’t, obviously. But…” He shoved a hand into his hair, and remembered that he hadn’t rinsed off the shampoo. “Something happened, Amelia. I swear something happened. I feel like it’s in my memory somewhere, I just need to access it.”
Amelia raked her top teeth over one side of her lip. “Me too. She did say our memories would return. I’m getting snatches of things, but it’s all so mixed up. I’m not even sure I want to remember.”
Something vulnerable in her tone prompted Tom to reach for her. She scooted closer, and before it became a conscious thought, he had folded her body into his and wrapped his arms around her. He lowered his head and rested his cheek on her soft brown hair. She exhaled into the hug, sliding her palms around to his back. Like the way she’d taken his hand earlier, it seemed like a habit that had formed over years, not hours. How could they have come so far in one night they couldn’t remember?
“Let’s rewind,” he said. “Figure out how much of yesterday we do recall. The truth has got to be in our brains somewhere.”
He kissed her hair, and again it was an instinctive movement that came as something of a surprise. The body in the rug wasn’t the only mystery that could use an explanation.
Chapter 3
Amelia
Twenty-four hours earlier
Pemberley, it was not.
In fact, Amelia thought as she stared up at Sundew Abbey, it was like turning up to a first date and realizing the guy’s profile pic was several decades old.
She stepped out of her rental car and held up the flyer she’d picked up from the village inn.Visit Pemberley, it said, fluttering in the chilly January wind,set of the definitive Pride and Prejudice. She looked from the photo—a still from the TV show—to the building’s stone façade and back. They were the same imposing shape: a three-story neoclassical mansion so immense that Amelia had to strain her neck to peer to the top. They nestled into the same valley, beside the same river and forest.
But in the photo, the abbey looked like it’d been built yesterday, the limestone lit to a sun-warmed honey. In reality, the stone was the same listless gray as the skies above. Many of the decorative details once carved into it had worn away or sheared off. The roof over one of the building’s symmetrical wings had collapsed, exposing its ribs like a dark-timber whale.As Amelia stared, a large black bird rose from the architectural carcass and flapped away, screeching. Across the crenelated roofline, the balustrade was missing multiple teeth, and several statues had crumbled or toppled. A stone horse lay broken and mossy on the gravel drive below, beside an equally gravity-stricken family crest. Curtains billowed behind missing or broken panes. There was a smoky smell, stronger than could be justified by the puffs from the nearest intact chimney.
Amelia shivered. It was the tourism equivalent of being catfished. Dracula wouldn’t lower himself to living here, let alone Jane Austen’s most famous hero. It was less “a fine house richly furnished,” and more “no one to hear you scream.”
Could she have come to the wrong place? She leaned into the car and grabbed her phone. No signal of any kind. The map on the flyer showed a property called Wildwood Farm farther up the lane, but otherwise the only interruptions in the blank expanse of the moor were Moorleigh Village, and the abbey, with its estate and woodlands. The woman at the tearoom had warned her not to go “wandring” on the moor alone, which Amelia had no intention of doing, having read far too many gothic novels in her youth.
“You won’t get mobile phone coverage here, love,” said a gruff voice, behind her.
She squawked, and turned. The wind snapped the flyer from her hand and it sailed away. A grandfatherly man with thick shoulder-length gray hair stood on the lawn, holding a rake—a tableau of a tenant farmer from Austen’s time, but in denim overalls and a thick jacket.
“Sorry, love. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t.” As it was obviously a lie, she added, “I’m easily spooked.”
“I can give you the wi-fi password, if you like.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said hurriedly. The whole point of this vacation was to leave the real world behind, though with only a week left, she was on the cusp of declaring that a failure. Her body was here in England, but her mind was still in New York. Emotional jetlag. She tossed the phone onto the driver’s seat, shut the door and locked the car, quickly, as if the phone might escape. She dropped the keychain into her pants pocket, feeling liberated of the outside world.
“Tour guide shouldn’t be far off.” The man pushed back his sleeve to check his watch. “I’ll let you into the house. It’s brass monkeys outside today.”
“It’s what?”
