Page 3 of Wicked Games

“Hey. I tried to call you earlier. You didn’t answer.”

“Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night, then I took a shower. Tried to eat. You know.”

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and I wonder if he calls just to try to keep some kind of connection to my sister, Hattie. I don’t mind, but it’s difficult, you know, to deal with someone else’s grief while dealing with your own. I’m thankful Seth Lockwood isn’t interested in playing friends. I don’t think my heart could handle his pain.

“Is there any news about the investigation?” I ask to cover the silence. It’s a little uncomfortable, but not. I don’t know how to explain it. I like Bill, but I don’t know him very well. He and my sister hadn’t been married long, though they’d been in a relationship for a couple of years.

He clears his throat. “No. That’s why I’m calling. Detective Crane wants someone to post on her blog. You know. Some kind of official, ‘Hattie’s gone and won’t be writing anymore.’ They want to monitor the comments. See if anyone leaves a clue, a hint about who could have—” He chokes.

“Do you know her username and password?” Bill would be the logical choice to write something like that. Her husband, saying goodbye to her readers.

“She didn’t give me that kind of information, Avery.”

He doesn’t say it with any bitterness or jealousy. Their occupations were completely different. Bill’s a plastic surgeon, and my sister, is, I mean, was, a blogger. She wrote about all the Ashfield dirt. But she did it with class, you know? Classy trash. It made her famous. And infamous. Bill wouldn’t have needed access to Hattie’s blog posts, stats, and comments, but if he doesn’t have her website information, that means only one thing.

“You’re the only one she gave that information to.”

Fuck.

She gave me her login information a long time ago. It might not even be accurate. She could have changed her password a hundred times since then. I never used it. Not once. Ever. I’m an essayist, for fuck’s sake. What would I care who she was writing about? I read her newest posts along with everyone else.

I blow out a breath. “I don’t even know what she was working on. Do you? Did she say anything? Mention anything, even in passing?”

“No. But she could have a draft saved.”

“The cops haven’t thought of that or they would’ve asked me to log into her website. Did they take her laptop? Look through her notes?”

“No, they didn’t. Avery, you know they don’t care. Crane’s only done what he has so we don’t complain. Everyone wants to catch the fuckers who kidnapped and killed Theo Lockwood.”

“Right.”

“They’ve been working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but the trail’s cold. It’s been four months.”

Four months is a long time, looking for a killer who could be in Mexico right now, snorting ransom money up his nose, but four months is nothing to a man grieving the loss of his family.

“Did he tell you what he wants me to say? Everyone knows what happened to her.”

But that’s just it. Nobody knows what happened to her. Shot down in an alley, her purse and jewelry missing. A bad deal, an exchange for information gone south. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because she liked to expose people’s dirty laundry doesn’t mean her death was retaliation or revenge. Ashfield has crime just like anywhere else. Druggies needing a buck, gangs, you name it.

“Just something along the lines of: We miss her. The investigation is ongoing. If someone knows something, call the tip line. Keep it simple. Say you’re a friend, Avery. Hattie didn’t want you mixed up in what she did. It should stay that way.”

“Yeah,” I say, but I don’t see the harm in letting it come out now. She didn’t want her content to have a negative effect on me or what I wrote. As an essayist in one of the most, I don’t want to say prestigious because prestigious isn’t what Bloomscene tries to be, but influential women’s magazines in the United States, they nurture an elegant readership. They’d gobble up the kind of blog posts my sister wrote but would never admit it. Hattie used to say she wrote five-dollar wine and I wrote twenty, but the fact is, more people buy the five-dollar wine, don’t they? “Do I need to talk to Detective Crane? Let him see it? Or just post it?”

Bill sighs, and it turns into a disgusted scoff. “Do what you want. We’re never going to find out who killed her, or why. Christ, Avery. I miss her so much.”

His voice breaks, and we’re back to sitting in silence. I don’t want to cry on the phone. I’ve done so much crying in the past four months that sometimes I think I’m all cried out, but then somehow I’ll find more tears on my cheeks, like earlier when Seth wanted to know about me and our neighbors.

“He’s here in Lakehaven Falls,” I tell him, just for something to say. I should go, get off the phone, but hell. It’s difficult to hang up on someone when they’re crying in your ear.

“Who?” he asks, trying to hold it together.

“Seth Lockwood. He’s renting the house next to mine.”

“Are you serious? How’d he look?”

The question annoys me, and it comes out in my tone. “How do you think he looked? Like a piece of shit like the rest of us.”