A frustrated groan cut off the argument. “Stop fighting.”
Hanna. She stood back, several feet away. She’d stopped walking and we hadn’t noticed. Now she hovered at the edge of the wildflower patch that ran parallel to the pool. A stone pathoutlined it. The kind made to look quaint, like ruins that had been there for centuries. The vibrant mix of purple and yellow was set apart from the rest of the lawn by a wood fence, entwined with vines. The shock of fall color served as a living reminder of life lost. Visible from the pool and the house and carefully tended, or it was until Xavier died.
“Sorry. It’s a hard habit to break.” I wasn’t wrong. Stella and I ran into each other over the years thanks to our ties to the Tanners and spinning in their orbit. What started as obligatory head nods and hellos turned into bitching and sniping after the disappearances. A sort of shorthand we used to vent our frustrations about mindless, unimportant things without taking harsher personal shots.
Stella studied Hanna, not even trying to hide a growing worry. “What’s wrong?”
Hanna continued to hold that paperwork in a death grip. “The wildflower garden.”
I had no idea what that meant. “What about it?”
“Remember the fountain.” Hanna said the phrase more to herself than to us.
“What are you talking about?” Stella asked.
“I was sitting at the fountain because I got this... Never mind. This is about Xavier. There’s a sticky note on the trust documents. The attorney didn’t know where it came from and says it doesn’t have any legal meaning, but I recognize Xavier’s handwriting. He writes,Youknow what the wildflower garden means.”
We all did. Sort of.
“He created it to honor Dea.” His dead wife. The same wife some people thought he’d murdered, which took something romantic and made it unbelievably creepy. Like everything else related to the house, I wasn’t a fan of the garden or the history. This much space and that much money corrupted people. “That raises all sorts of questions about what Dea really meant to him, but yeah.”
“No.” Hanna walked along the edge of the garden fence, talking in a voice that sounded distant, as if she wasn’t actually speaking to us. “That’s not right.”
Stella sighed. “Hanna, you need to clue us in here.”
Hanna turned back to the pool. “Xavier and I once sat at this fountain. We fought. It was vicious. He yelled and I finally saw the Xavier everyone else talked about.”
Well, crap. That sounded bad.
“Did he threaten you?” Stella asked.
“I was pregnant, but that wasn’t why he was so angry.” Hanna’s gaze skipped over the statute and down to the pool’s edge. Her voice started and stopped as she seemingly relived some conversation in her head. “He told me... I’d figured out that he’d... and... took his file...”
File?What did he do? A list of possibilities filled my head; every option ended in Hanna being alone and terrified. I could picture Xavier looming over her, controlling her, promising to make her life miserable. I didn’t have to hear the exact words to know he would have used every weapon, verbal and physical, to bend Hanna to his will, even if that weapon was Jeremy. Especially if it was Jeremy.
Hanna, lost in her thoughts, shook her head. “The wildflower garden wasn’t there. He didn’t plant it or add the path until years later. After Patrick and Victoria and the kids disappeared.”
Wait... No. “Really?”
Stella froze. “I don’t remember that being the timing.”
“We sat right there.” Hanna stared at the bench she’d been sitting on. Then she spun around to face the wildflowers again. “He pointed to what was then open area and...”
Tension swept over me, through me. Wrapped around me. “What?”
“He said that was the perfect place.” Hanna’s eyes focused and she stared at us with a look that could only be described as horror. “To bury a body.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hanna
Don’t forget the fountain.
That’s what the latest note delivered to my mailbox had said. Xavier. It was as if he’d reached up from the grave and penned a missive. Tormented me. Forced me to listen one last time. Pretended to help while he delivered yet another not-so-subtle threat.
The notes could mean anything. But the idea of someone alive, sneaking around and acting as his personal postal deliverer, proved to be too much for my usually steely nerves.
“I’m going to be sick.” I bent over, hands on my knees, and tried to breathe. A retching sound spun out over the open land. It came rumbling up from deep inside me, covering every inch, inside and out, with a frigid chill.
