By the time the SUV passed the gates of Hawthorne House that afternoon, I was still shaken. To my surprise, Zara met Jameson, Xander, and me in the foyer. For the first time since I’d met Tobias Hawthorne’s firstborn, she looked less than perfect. Her eyes were puffy. Stray hairs were stuck to her forehead. She was holding a folder. It was only an inch or so thick, but even that was enough to stop me in my tracks.
“That’s what was in the safe-deposit box?” Xander asked.
“Do you want an overview?” Zara replied crisply. “Or would you prefer to read it for yourself?”
“Both,” Jameson said. First, we’d take the big picture, and then we’d comb through the actual materials, looking for subtle hints, clues, anything Zara might have missed.
Where’s Grayson? The question came into my mind unbidden. Some part of me had expected him to be here, waiting. Even though he’d barely spoken to me since the interview. Even though he’d barely been able to look at me.
“Overview?” I asked Zara, forcing myself to focus.
Zara gave a slight dip of her chin—assent. “Toby had been in and out of rehab for a year or two at the time of his disappearance. He was obviously angry, though at the time I didn’t know why. From what my father was able to piece together, Toby met two other boys at rehab. They all went on a road trip together that summer. It very much appears that the boys partied—and slept—their way across the country. One young woman in particular, a waitress at a bar where the boys stopped, was quite informative when my father’s investigator tracked her down. She told the investigator exactly what Toby had been snorting, and exactly what he had said the morning after they had intercourse.”
“What did he say?” Xander asked.
Zara’s tone never wavered. “He told her that he was going to burn it all down.”
I stared at Zara for a moment, then shifted my gaze to Jameson. He’d been there when Sheffield Grayson had claimed that Toby was responsible for the fire. Even after reading the postcards and seeing the kind of guilt Toby carried, some part of me had still thought the fire was an accident, that Toby and his friends were drunk or high, and things got out of control.
“Did Toby happen to specify what he was going to burn down?” Jameson asked.
“No.” Zara kept her reply curt. “But right before they got to Rockaway Watch, he purchased a great deal of accelerant.”
He set the fire. He killed them all. “Was that in the police report?” I managed to ask. “What Toby said about burning it all down—did the police know?”
“No,” Zara replied. “The woman Toby said that to—she had no idea who he was. Even when our private investigators tracked her down, she remained entirely in the dark. The police never found her. They never had motive. But they knew about the accelerant. From what the arson investigators were able to tell, the house on Hawthorne Island had been thoroughly soaked. The gas had been turned on.”
I felt my hand pressing to my mouth. A sound escaped around my fingers, somewhere between a horrified gasp and a mewl.
“Toby wasn’t an idiot.” Jameson’s expression was sharp. “Unless this was some kind of suicide pact, he would have had a contingency plan to make sure that he and his friends weren’t caught in the flames.”
Zara closed her eyes tightly. “That’s the thing,” she whispered. “The house was soaked in accelerant. The gas was turned on—but no one ever lit a match. There was a lightning storm that night. Toby might well have been planning to burn down the house from a safe distance. The others might have helped him. But none of them actually set the fire.”
“Lightning,” Xander said, horrified. “If the gas was already on, if they’d soaked the floorboards in accelerant…”
I could see it in my mind. Had the house exploded? Had they still been inside, or had the fire spread quickly across the island?
“For months, my father believed that Toby truly had died. He convinced the police to bury the report. It wasn’t arson, not technically. At best, it was
attempted arson.”
And they’d never gotten to finish the attempt.
“Why didn’t the police just blame it on the lightning?” I asked. I’d read the articles in the press. They hadn’t mentioned the weather. The picture they’d painted was one in which a teenage party had gotten out of hand. Three upstanding boys had died—and one not-so-upstanding girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“The house went up like a fireball,” Zara replied evenly. “They could see it from the mainland. It was obvious it wasn’t just a lightning strike. And the girl who was there with them, Kaylie Rooney, she’d just gotten out of juvenile detention for arson. It was easier to deflect blame toward her than to try to pin it on nature.”
“If she was a juvenile,” Xander said slowly, “the record would have been sealed.”
“The old man unsealed it.” Jameson didn’t phrase that as a question. “Anything to protect the family name.”
I could understand why my mother’s mother had called Tobias Hawthorne’s fortune blood money. Had he left it to me in part out of guilt?
“I wouldn’t feel too sorry for Kaylie Rooney,” Zara said coldly. “What happened to her—what happened to all of them—it was a tragedy, of course, but she was far from innocent. From what the investigator was able to piece together, the Rooney family runs just about every drug that comes through Rockaway Watch. They have a reputation for being merciless, and Kaylie was almost certainly already elbow-deep in the family business.”
If my worthless daughter had taught you the first damn thing about this family, you wouldn’t dare have dialed my number. The conversation I’d had that afternoon came back to me.
If that little bitch hadn’t run, I would have put a bullet in her myself.
If what Zara was saying about my mother’s family was true, that statement probably wasn’t metaphorical.
“What about the fisherman who pulled Toby from the water?” I asked, trying to concentrate on the facts of the case and not think too long or hard about where my mom had come from. “Did the file elaborate on that at all?”
“The storm was severe that night,” Zara replied. “Initially, my father believed there were no boats out, but eventually the investigator talked to
someone who swore that there was one boat on the water during the storm. Its owner was practically a shut-in. He lives in a shack near an old abandoned lighthouse in Rockaway Watch. The locals steer clear of him. Based on the investigator’s discussions with townsfolk, most seem to think he’s not quite well in the head. Hence, taking his boat out that night, in the midst of a man-killing storm.”
“He finds Toby,” I said, thinking out loud. “Pulls him from the water.
Brings him home. And no one’s the wiser.”
“My father believed that Toby had lost his memory, though whether this was the result of an injury or psychological trauma is unclear. Somehow this man, this Jackson Currie, managed to nurse him back to health.”
Not just the man, I thought. My mom was there, too. She’d helped nurse him back to life.
I was so busy thinking about my mom and reassembling that part of the story in my head that I missed the rest of what Zara had said. The name she’d said.
“Jackson,” Jameson breathed. “Heiress, the fisherman’s name was
Jackson.”
I froze, just for an instant. I hope you go far, far away, Toby had written, but if you ever need anything, I hope you do exactly what I told you to do in that letter. Go to Jackson. You know what I left there. You know what it’s worth.
Not Jackson, Mississippi.
Jackson Currie. The fisherman who’d pulled Toby from the water. “What I don’t understand,” Zara said, “is why Toby was so intent on
running once he got his memory back—assuming he got it back. He had to have known that our security could protect him from any threat. The Rooneys may run Rockaway Watch, but it’s a small town. They’re small people with a small reach, and the legal situation had already been taken care of. Toby could have come home, but he fought it.”
He didn’t come home, because he didn’t think he deserved to. Having read the postcards, I understood Toby. Wasn’t that how I would have felt if I’d done what he’d done?
A ringing sound jarred me from that thought. My phone. I looked down.
Grayson was calling.
I flashed back to the moment he’d kissed me. I’d kissed him back. Since
then we hadn’t even managed to look at each other. We hadn’t really talked. So why was he calling now?
Where is he? “Hello?” I answered.
“Avery.” Grayson lingered on my name, just for a moment.
“Where are you?” I asked. There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then he sent me an invite to switch over to a video chat. I accepted it, and the next thing I saw was his face. Gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, sharper jawline. In the sunlight, his light blond hair looked platinum.
“After some convincing, Max told me about what was written on your postcards,” Grayson said. “About your mother. Do you remember when I told you that I was in this? That I would help you?” He turned his phone, and I saw ruins. Charred ruins. Burned trees. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“You went to Hawthorne Island without us?” Xander was absolutely indignant.
He did this for me. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about that when, if he’d waited a few hours, we could have gone together. This didn’t feel like a larger-than-life gesture. It felt like Grayson running away.
Keeping his promise as far away from me as he could.
“Hawthorne Island,” Grayson confirmed in response to Xander’s accusation. “And Rockaway Watch. I wouldn’t call the locals friendly, but I’m optimistic that I’ll find our missing piece, whatever that might be.”
He was optimistic that he would find the answer. Had he even considered dealing me in?
“Rockaway Watch,” Xander said slowly.
The town’s name echoed in my mind. Rockaway Watch. My mother’s family. Suddenly, I had much bigger concerns than what Grayson’s behavior did or did not mean—and what it did or did not make me feel.
“Grayson.” My voice sounded urgent, even to my own ears. “You don’t understand. My mother changed her name and left that place because her family is dangerous. I don’t know what they know about Toby. I don’t know if that’s the reason they hated her so much—but they blame the Hawthornes for their daughter’s death. You have to get out of there.”
Beside me, Oren cursed. Grayson turned the phone back around and those gray eyes locked on mine. “Avery, have I ever given you reason to believe that I’m particularly averse to danger?”
Grayson Hawthorne was arrogant enough to consider himself
bulletproof—and honorable enough to see a promise through to its end.
“You have to get out of there,” I said again, but the next thing I knew, Jameson was sticking his head over my shoulder, yelling to his brother.
“You’re looking for a man named Jackson Currie. He’s a recluse, living near an abandoned lighthouse. Talk to him. See what he knows.”
Grayson smiled, and that smile cut into me, every bit as much as his kiss. “Got it.”
