I’ve been putting off talking to my dad about my mom and any potential connection between her disappearance and Fiona’s murder. It always seemed like the most far-fetched of our theories, and I don’t want to hurt him if I don’t have to.
But maybe it’s time to pull that Band-Aid off.
I blink again. Swallow. Turn on my heel and start toward the road.
The sky is getting darker by the minute. The wind is picking up. All signs of an imminent summer thunderstorm. Stupid lying weather app.
I’m only a block away from the studio when the skies open up.
I wrap my arms around myself, but there’s no point. I’m soaked through in moments. At least on my bike I would’ve been home in ten minutes. On foot, it will take at least thirty. And in this rain—
Thunder booms overhead. I start to jog. My Converses are soaked. My bare legs are freezing. I notice a car out of the corner of my eye and keep going.
The car pulls up beside me and honks.
I look over to see Seth in his black BMW, gesturing for me to get in.
I don’t hesitate. I fling open the passenger-side door and throw myself into his car.
Inside, the rain is instantly muffled, pounding on the roof. Seth has the heat on, thank God. I hold my hands up to it, shivering, as he pulls off his hoodie and hands it to me.
“Th-thanks.” I wrap it around me. It’s big and warm and smells like him. “How did you—”
“Saw the storm coming. Know you have no car.” Seth pulls out from the curb and drives slowly down the empty street through the pounding rain. “Why didn’t you at least ride your bike?”
“I d-did. Someone stole it.” I tell him about locking it to the bike rack and coming back and finding just the wheel.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to lock your bike by the wheel?”
I pull his hoodie more tightly around myself and glare. “Most of the time I don’t even lock my bike up at all.”
“Well, you should have.”
“Thanks so much.” I stare out the window at the blurry houses going past. Maybe I should be acting more grateful for the ride, but my mind is still on Mrs. Rodriguez.
We’re on my street. But then Seth drives right past my house.
“What are you—”
“I want to talk to you,” he says, glancing at me. “My house is empty. No one’ll be home for hours.”
“I’m f-freezing,” I object.
“I have clothes.” He turns onto Bier’s End. “Come inside.”
24
We run through the rain from the Montgomerys’ oversized detached garage—it was once a stable, for actual horses—to a side door. In the mudroom, I shed my soaking Converses and pad on wet feet to the kitchen.
I’ve been inside the Montgomery mansion before, just not in a long time. When we were little, we’d dart in to grab snacks in between our treasure hunts, pretzel sticks dipped in Nutella or butter cookies in tiny paper wrappers from those big blue tins Seth’s grandma used to have. The kitchen is enormous, taking up the whole of the back of the house. Unlike the rest of the mansion, it was actually renovated in the past hundred years, and has this solid nineties vibe. In the past I had glimpses of the dining room (huge, with a table that could seat twelve people), and the living room beyond that (all mahogany and velvet furniture and mirrors, like something out of a castle). But I’ve never gone farther, never even gone up the stairs.
The kitchen is dark, as is the rest of the house. “Where’s your family?” My hair drips on the tile floor.
“In the city. My mom had some meetings, my aunt was taking Marion shopping, my dad and uncle are at work, obviously, and Kendall said something about her ‘side business.’ Which is probably just posing for Instagram photos.”
We pass through the kitchen—I’m sad to see no blue tin of cookies on the counter—to a small, spiraling stairway on the opposite side of the room.
“The servant staircase,” Seth says.
I roll my eyes.
“We don’t actually have servants,” he clarifies. “That’s just what it used to be for.”
I’m still shivering as I follow him up two flights of stairs and down a narrow, shadowy hallway with half a dozen closed doors. He opens one to reveal a small, gray-lit room, with only two windows looking out onto the backyard, where the rain is still coming down in buckets. It patters overhead, louder than downstairs. A full-size bed sits beneath one window, neatly made with a blue bedspread. There’s also an antique-looking dresser, nightstand, and desk, along with an incongruous modern desk chair. A book sits on the nightstand; a closed laptop is on the desk alongside a set of binoculars. Framed art hangs on the walls, mainly sketches and paintings of old castles. Of course.
There’s also a photograph of Seth and Thatcher. In it, they’re both a few years younger. They’re somewhere tropical—some rich-people resort, probably—look tanned, and have their arms around each other, laughing. They look so carefree, so happy.
“That was in St. John,” Seth says from behind me. I turn to see him holding a folded set of clothes. “Thatcher loved it there.”
“You didn’t?”
He shrugs. “I like…rockier places. Old castles and stuff like that. But that was a really great trip, actually.” He’s gazing at the picture with such sadness.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m sorry I made this past year so hard on him.”
Seth meets my eyes. “I’ve already forgiven you for that.”
“Still. It was the last year of his life, and I spent so much time accusing him—”