I told Libby I was staying home. I tried to form the words to ask her about Drake’s texts and came up dry. What if Drake’s not just texting? That thought snaked its way through my consciousness. What if she’s seen him? What if he talked her into sneaking him onto the estate?
I shut down that line of thinking. There was no “sneaking” onto the estate. Security was airtight, and Oren would have told me if Drake had been on the premises during the shooting. He would have been the top suspect—or close to it.
If I die, there’s at least a chance that everything passes to my closest blood relatives. That’s Libby—and our father.
“Are you sick?” Libby asked, placing the back of her hand on my forehead. She was wearing her new purple boots and a black dress with long, lacy sleeves. She looked like she was going somewhere.
To see Drake? Dread settled in the pit of my stomach. Or with Nash?
“Mental health day,” I managed. Libby accepted that and declared it Sister Time. If she’d had plans, she didn’t think twice before ditching them for me.
“Want to hit the spa?” Libby asked earnestly. “I got a massage yesterday, and it was to die for.”
I almost died yesterday. I didn’t say that, and I didn’t tell her that the massage therapist wouldn’t be coming back today—or anytime soon. Instead, I offered up the only distraction I could think of that might also distract me from all of the secrets I was keeping from her.
“How would you like to help me find a Davenport?”
 |
According to the internet search results Libby and I pulled up, the term
Davenport was used separately to refer to two kinds of furniture: a sofa and a desk. The sofa usage was a generic term, like Kleenex for a tissue or dumpster for a garbage bin, but a Davenport desk referred to a specific kind of desk, one that was notable for compartments and hidey-holes, with a slanted desktop that could be lifted to reveal a storage compartment underneath.
Everything I knew about Tobias Hawthorne told me that we probably weren’t looking for a sofa.
“This could take a while,” Libby told me. “Do you have any idea how big this place is?”
I’d seen the music rooms, the gymnasium, the bowling alley, the showroom for Tobias Hawthorne’s cars, the solarium… and that wasn’t even a quarter of what there was to see. “Enormous.”
“Palatial,” Libby chirped. “And since I’m such bad publicity, I haven’t had anything to do for the past week except explore.” That publicity comment had to have come from Alisa, and I wondered how many chats she’d had with Libby without me there. “There’s a literal ballroom,” Libby continued. “Two theaters—one for movies and one with box seats and a stage.”
“I’ve seen that one,” I offered. “And the bowling alley.” Libby’s kohl-rimmed eyes grew round. “Did you bowl?” Her awe was contagious. “I bowled.”
Libby shook her head. “It is never going to stop being bizarre that this house has a bowling alley.”
“There’s also a driving range,” Oren added behind me. “And racquetball.”
If Libby noticed how close he was sticking to us, she gave no indication of it. “How in the world are we supposed to find one little desk?” she asked.
I turned back to Oren. If he was here, he might as well be useful. “I’ve seen the office in our wing. Did Tobias Hawthorne have any others?”
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The desk in Tobias Hawthorne’s other office wasn’t a Davenport, either. There were three rooms off the office. The Cigar Room. The Billiards Room. Oren provided explanations as needed. The third room was small,
with no windows. In the middle of it, there was what appeared to be a giant white pod.
“Sensory deprivation chamber,” Oren told me. “Every once in a while, Mr. Hawthorne liked to cut off the world.”
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Eventually, Libby and I resorted to searching on a grid, the same way Jameson and I had searched the Black Wood. Wing by wing and room by room, we made our way through the halls of Hawthorne House. Oren was never more than a few feet behind.
“And now… the spa.” Libby flung the door open. She seemed upbeat.
Either that, or she was covering for something.
Pushing that thought down, I looked around the spa. We clearly weren’t going to find the desk here, but that didn’t stop me from taking it all in. The room was L-shaped. In the long part of the L, the floor was wooden; in the short part, it was made of stone. In the middle of the stone section, there was a small square pool built into the ground. Steam rose from its surface. Behind it, there was a glass shower as big as a small bedroom, with faucets attached to the ceiling instead of the wall.
“Hot tub. Steam room.” Someone spoke up behind us. I turned to see Skye Hawthorne. She was wearing a floor-length robe, a black one this time. She strode to the larger section of the room, dropped the robe, and lay down on a gray velvet cot. “Massage table,” she said, yawning, barely covering herself with a sheet. “I ordered a masseuse.”
“Hawthorne House is closed to visitors for the moment,” Oren said flatly, completely unimpressed with her display.
“Well, then.” Skye closed her eyes. “You’ll need to buzz Magnus past the gates.”
Magnus. I wondered if he was the one who’d been here yesterday. If he was the one who’d shot at me—at her request.
“Hawthorne House is closed to visitors,” Oren repeated. “It’s a matter of security. Until further notice, my men have instructions to allow only essential personnel past the gates.”
Skye yawned like a cat. “I assure you, John Oren, this massage is
essential.”
On a nearby shelf, a row of candles was burning. Light shone through sheer curtains, and low and pleasant music played.
“What matter of security?” Libby asked suddenly. “Did something happen?”
I gave Oren a look that I hoped would keep him from answering that question, but it turned out that I was aiming that request in the wrong direction.
“According to my Grayson,” Skye told Libby, “there was some nasty business in the Black Wood.”
