“I…” Nolan started, then trailed off. Chase had understood my unspoken brief, which was to emphasise our closeness, to make our relationship seem like something it wasn’t. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d faked it, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“As I said, Alexa and I tell each other everything.”
Not quite everything. Nobody knew what had happened between Nolan and me on our final night in Blackstone House, and nobody ever would. Some secrets were better left buried.
Nolan cleared his throat. “So, to answer your question about the house, it wasn’t in great shape either. I fixed up one wing, but the other is still a work in progress.”
“Which wing is the study in?” I asked, my stomach sinking an inch lower because I suspected I already knew.
Nolan gave a sheepish smile. “It’s not that bad.”
“On a scale of one to Blackstone House?”
“Let’s say a five?”
Fuck.
CHAPTER 5
ALEXA
Five, my ass. In terms of shittiness, the study was more like an eight. Okay, so the floor wasn’t rotten and the roof didn’t leak, but I’d already dumped four spiders out of the one window that opened, and the room smelled weird. Musty. Damp.
The house was an L-shape, and the longer, renovated wing was surprisingly habitable. Generic prints hanging on pale walls, bland but coordinated furniture, probably Marielle’s doing. Urgh. But the old wing? That was another story. Peeling paint, dark wood with fine, vein-like cracks in the varnish, the smell of damp, knickknacks stuffed into every nook and cranny. We hurried past closed-off rooms to the end of the house, and no wonder Nolan had just shut the door on the mess because where would he even start?
He hadn’t been kidding about the desk either. It was more of a conference table, an outdated monstrosity covered in haphazard stacks of paper, overflowing filing trays, more tchotchkes, and six empty coffee mugs, with the aforementioned laptop taking centre stage. Nolan cursed under his breath and picked up the mugs.
“These belong in the dishwasher.”
“That’s the problem device?” I asked, just to check, as I pointed at the laptop.
“When I saw the threatening note, I pulled the battery, and Brax told me not to turn it on again.”
“And you don’t have backups?”
“I thought I did, but something must’ve been set up wrong.”
Great.
Shelves lined the study walls, stuffed full of books, yet more trinkets, a globe, half a dozen baseballs, a rock collection, a set of Russian nesting dolls, several statues of Egyptian deities, and a bunch of old photos. The dust made me sneeze, and Marielle appeared to share my distaste as she handed me a tissue.
“Nolan, we should put this room next on the list. It’s crying out for a redesign.”
Naturally, that meant I had to defend the chaos. Double urgh. “I think it has character.”
“You do?” Nolan seemed surprised.
“Half of these books are probably out of print, and modern decor can be so sterile, don’t you think?” In my peripheral vision, I saw Marielle narrow her eyes, and I hid my smile by leaning in to look at a photo. “Are these your grandparents?”
He nodded. “I don’t remember my grandma. She passed away when I was four, and apparently, that’s when this place began to go downhill.”
“She was the businesswoman?”
Another nod. “That’s what the folks in town say, anyway. She died, and then all the shit with Dad happened, and Grandpa was never the same afterward.”
All that shit with Dad. A bland, succinct way of saying his father had been outed as a serial killer when Nolan was ten. Old enough to remember the hell his family went through, too young to have had any control over the situation. And then Blackstone House had taken a can opener to those old wounds. Nolan had been the first suspect in Ruby’s murder, the obvious choice because of his genes.
But I knew he hadn’t done it. The police had narrowed her death down to a three-hour window, and for those three hours, Nolan had been in the basement with Dawson and me, apart from a couple of times he went upstairs to the kitchen to fetch drinks and snacks. But he was gone for ten minutes at most, and nobody could do that much damage to a woman in ten minutes.
