Has Hawke seen this diary?
-alone, she writes again.
-alone
-alone
-alone
I picture the girl in the photo, breaching the surface of the water. The flowing river around her, surging in the storm, the current carrying her. It’s dark, she’s alone, worried to call out for help, because those who put her in the car could still be close.
Does the one who cast her out of the house even know what just happened to her? Could he be the one who did it?
I flip through the journal, seeing pages filled with the same lists, scribble marks, some things X’d out, but more like in anger rather than scribbling out a mistake. There are words carved into the margins and some pages written with script so small, it might take me a day to read a single page.
I set it back on the island and move away for a moment.
I don’t want to be played.
There’s no way to tell for sure if the journal is hers, someone else’s, or if it was forged as part of some bullshit story this Deacon and Manas are playing with my younger family members. There’s a reason Hawke doesn’t have copies of any of its pages on the murder map. As far as I can tell anyway.
But I get an idea, all the same, and head back out the secret entrance and into my bakery. Digging out the memoir my mom gave me more than three years ago detailing her and my father’s love story, I carry it back into the tower and set it down next to Winslet’s journal.
If it moves between now and my next visit, I’ll know someone is still finding a way in here.
But mostly…Carnival Tower seems a place for stories, and it seems like it belongs here.
I sweep the rest of the hideout again, looking for any clues. Underneath beds, around exercise machines, in cabinets and bureaus… Found some handcuffs, which on my first guess might be Kade’s, but I half-suspect Aro uses them on Hawke or Dylan on Hunter. I won’t ask.
The monitors in the surveillance room all glow with the live feed of High Street, Fall Away Lane, the alley behind my shop, and the exterior of JT Racing. There’s a view of Fallstown, some old firehouse I don’t recognize, and—I squint, looking closer—the parking lot at the summer camp.
He should have a camera on Frosted’s roof. It would monitor that entrance, at least.
Searching the drawers, I don’t see the phones they were talking about, but I do find blueprints. I smile, pulling them out. As I spread them open, a memory hits me—that day at Camp Blackhawk and Lucas’s ski resort dream laid out on the kitchen worktables.
I lock my jaw together, trying not to lift my eyes to the clock on one of the computer monitors. He must be about to head to theairport.
Why do men think there’s one rule for themselves and another for everyone else? Deacon and Manas sought revenge on Winslet for not loving their brother, and then proceeded to use her without giving her their hearts in return. Men in my family have been cruel and uncontrollable in their passion for the women they love, but their daughters—and their sister—need leashes.
What does Lucas do in bed with women that he would think Farrow Kelly or Noah Van der Berg were deviants if they wanted to do it to me? The fucking hypocrite.
Raising my eyes, I see the time.9:42
My heart jumps in my chest. It’s later than I thought.
He’s at the airport now.
It’s over.
I set the blueprints on Hawke’s desk, pass by the diary and my parents’ story on the kitchen counter, and walk out of Carnival Tower through the mirror in my shop. Walking out the backdoor, I lock up Frosted and head out of the alley, sliding my phone into one back pocket and my key in the other.
I’ve never walked this path. When I pass Lucas’s house, I’m always jogging. It felt less creepy, finding a way to visit something of his—some place he lived—if I did it under the guise of exercise.
But it wasn’t just a way to be close to him over the years that he was gone. It was something I had to do, like I was visiting a grave.
Lucas’s house sits a few houses down from the corner, every window dark, not even the porch light shining. I always loved this house. The neighborhood is something my father would call ‘spotty,’ but really, it’s just old. No HOAs to make sure people mow their lawns or keep from parking on the grass.
I start to turn onto his walkway—a blue craftsman with two massive white columns posted on either side of the wooden stairs sitting ahead—but a low rumble drifts into my ears, and I slow.
