BULBS
Nolan
“I FEEL LIKE THIS IS information I could have used earlier in the evening,”
Harper says as she sinks her shovel into the silt with more force than is probably necessary. We’ve managed to work quickly at exhuming the last of Arthur’s Ballantyne River murder victims, with two sets of bones already packed away. Maybe we could have left the remaining two for tomorrow night now that Sam and Vinny aren’t around to potentially spy on us, but with the close of the property sale imminent and the possibility of more Sleuthseekers showing up any day, Harper and I agreed to keep going as late as necessary tonight to get the job done.
“I was busy getting hit in the face with a fucking shovel.” I make a show of wiping my nose with the edge of my finger, though I doubt it’s still bleeding. Harper throws a scowl in my direction before shifting her focus back down to the hole. “Didn’t seem like a good time to bring it up when I was eating your pussy either.”
Harper grumbles something indistinct. If the lantern light were a little brighter, I’m sure I’d be able to catch a blush climbing her neck. “I don’t
think it’s a good idea.”
“Eating your pussy?”
“Shut the fuck up. You know I mean this Search and Rescue shit that Yates has roped you into. Eating my pussy is always a good idea.”
I grin, moving a shovelful of earth onto the tarp. “Look, I don’t love it either, but maybe taking control of the search for the tourist guy that Arthur killed has some benefits.”
Harper snorts derisively. “I fail to see how being in the center of police
and press presence is going to help.”
“Your faith in me is inspiring,” I deadpan, tossing a shovelful of silt onto her boot. “I can try to misdirect the search, as long as I’m careful. Keep the volunteers away from places like this. Maybe find some opportunities to plant some of that tourist’s belongings, if we can. And I already got some useful intel out of it—I know more about what happened to Vinny
Meschino.”
Harper’s eyes snap to mine. “Really?”
Though I’ll never admit it to her, Harper’s half-hearted text message breakup was actually useful. I was so pissed off that I dove headfirst into my new leadership role, mining all the details I possibly could from Yates and the other locals. “Yep. Yates encountered him at the distillery after investigating a call from Mr. Talbot down the road about flashlights in the building. Apparently, he was worried it was copper thieves trying to steal from the construction site,” I say. “Yates figures they got into a fight at the inn first. He thinks Vinny must have followed Sam to the distillery and pushed him over the railing before trying to kill him too.”
“Yates,” Harper echoes, shaking her head. “I still can’t believe Sheriff
Yates killed Vinny.”
“That’s what he said.”
“I didn’t get that kind of ‘I’m gonna attack a sheriff’ vibe from Vinny at all. When I hit him in the head at the inn, he’d just hung up the phone with Sam, and he didn’t seem super enthusiastic about meeting him at the distillery to interview you under duress.”
“Maybe not, but he was still on his way to get that story regardless. He knew Sam had taken me hostage. If he truly gave a shit about the law, he would have called it in to the police.”
Harper chews her bottom lip, her attention drifting toward the river as she leans her weight on her shovel. “So . . . if Vinny attacked the sheriff and Yates believes he probably attacked Sam too, does that mean we’re safe?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Harper. Who knows what he could still find or figure out. He did spot the bloodstain in the parking lot and sent a crew to test it, so I’m not convinced that he’s totally inept.” I thrust my shovel into the soil, striking a now-familiar sound—the type of polyethylene rye sack that
Arthur used to dispose of each body we’ve found so far. The bones seem to whisper from the grave: You are not safe at all. “I’m moving into the cottage,” I declare.
Harper’s eyes dart to the shadows and, for a moment, I expect her to give me a flat no. Fuck, that would sting. I’ve rolled the possibility around in my mind all day but facing it now sends my heart into a frenzy. Even if she turns me down, I can’t entertain it, not when her safety is on the line. She may know that too, because she says, “For how long?”
I rub my chest. I guess that’s better than a no, but it wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic response either. “Until I know the worst has passed,” I say, dropping my hand to my side. “I’ll keep my reservation at the Capeside Inn for now, just in case it’s really too much for you. But I really think it’s safer this way. If the Sleuthseekers turn their attention from Sam’s and Vinny’s deaths to completing their work on La Plume, I want to be with you. You know Arthur will be their number-one draw if they do.”
Harper watches me for a long and silent moment before she nods. She might be happy that I’m determined to protect her. Or she might be worried that I’m chipping away at her sanctuary. I can’t tell from her stoic expression.
Both possibilities chew at my thoughts, consuming different pieces of me.
“How will you lead Yates and the volunteers on some kind of SAR goose chase, exactly?” she finally asks as we scrape the remaining silt from the bag.
Harper grabs the frayed rope that holds the bag closed and tugs it out of the hole. “Maybe a little trail of bones to follow?”
Her words settle into my brain, taking root without blooming, as though they don’t have the light to grow. I poke around the bottom of the empty hole, just to be sure nothing else is hidden in the damp sand, and then start backfilling it. “I don’t know, honestly. It was a pretty fucked-up day with Yates showing up at the inn, then the whirlwind tour of the station and briefing the volunteer fire crew and gathering all the equipment. I barely had time to get my bearings. But this might be advantageous for us if I play it right.”
“Maybe. But what happens if they figure out you’re the one derailing the search?” Harper’s question is one I can’t answer. It would be hard for anyone to come to that conclusion unless I make an obvious mistake. But I’ve made
misjudgments before. I’m looking at one of them. “Just . . . be careful,” she says when the silence stretches too long. “I know there are benefits to being on the inside, but there are huge risks too. I don’t like it.”
“Me neither, I can assure you.”
I catch Harper’s worried, doubtful frown as she turns away, and I realize she might not believe me. She’s smart not to trust me completely. I’ve given her plenty of reasons not to, after all.
I need to change that.
My thoughts slide into darkness as I watch Harper shove the bones into her expedition pack. How can I lead this search away from the tracks we’ve left all over this town? How can I keep her past and secrets safe? How can I protect her without destroying her carefully cultivated life?
The only viable answers I have right now are ones that will hurt her. Force her out of Cape Carnage. Make her break her vows to this town. Kill Arthur, whose growing impulsivity puts her at risk.
I might have no choice but to wound her to save her, but I’m not sure how much more pain she can endure. Or how much we can take when our relationship is growing from the cracks of a fucked-up foundation.
Harper turns to me with the laser measurer and a question in her quirked brows, and I snap free of my worried thoughts. “Last one,” she says, her voice low and quiet as she passes me the device. Her fingertips glide across mine when she lets it go, a touch that feels purposeful.
We complete our final exhumation in near silence. Words are hardly needed now, anyway—we’ve been through the process so many times before.
We pull the victim from their grave, nothing more than a sack of nameless bones, and hastily refill the hole.
And then we stand at the edge of the silt plain, casting a final glance over Arthur’s dumping ground.
Sixteen bodies we’ve pulled from the silt. Secrets once dormant, dug up before they could bloom. Don’t mistake advanced age for weakness, Harper had once said, after Arthur tricked me into retrieving his murder bag from its hiding place. Arthur has spent decades refining his craft. If anything, age has worked to his advantage.
Dismay constricts around my chest like binding weeds.
“So,” I say, scratching the stubble along my jaw, “I’m going to hazard a guess that this isn’t Arthur’s only playground.”
Though Harper tries to keep the cringe from her expression, it still settles in the corner of her eye when she squints across the floodplain. “Um . . . yeah.”
“Where else should I try to keep the search volunteers from nosing around?” I ask, turning to face her, though she doesn’t do the same.
Harper clears her throat. “Probably the old grain shed at the distillery.”
“The same distillery that the police are crawling all over? That’s just great.”
“And also the defunct silver mine off Emerald Lake Road.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah . . . and probably best to keep them away from Lancaster Manor too, obviously.”
“You don’t say?” I deadpan. “That’s where I was planning to set up the Search and Rescue headquarters.”
Harper finally turns to me with a flat glare. I’m not sure when I became addicted to bringing that fierce defiance to life in her eyes. But I am, and I think she knows it. “Let’s get out of here, Ballmeat,” she says, shoving her backpack into my chest. “I’m ready to go home.”
I sling our packs over my shoulders and lead the way through the dark, taking Harper to my SUV parked in the shadows of the dead-end lane just down the road. When we get back to Lancaster Manor, she takes the bones to the shed on the hill close to the manor house so she can put them through her woodchipper in the morning, and I unload the rest of our supplies before meeting her in the cottage.
“I’m glad those exhumations are finally over. It’s been a day. At least we got some evidence out of the path of discovery,” Harper says, flipping on a couple of lights as she makes her way to the kitchen. She takes a glass canister from a shelf next to the sink and scoops what looks like a mixture of peanuts and mealworms into a chipped coffee mug. “I’ll put food out for Morpheus now so he doesn’t start screaming ‘murder’ at the crack of dawn.
What time do you have to start your SAR stuff tomorrow?”
“I’ve gotta meet Yates at six at A Shipwrecked Bean for coffee,” I reply
with an apologetic smile, “so the crack of dawn, unfortunately.”
All she says is a muttered “damn,” and then she heads out the back door of the cottage, not bothering with the patio light as she slips into the dark. I stand in the middle of her living room, slowly turning and taking in the details that have become familiar, even comforting. The chessboard with the single white pawn that’s been moved ahead, still waiting for the next player’s move. The scent of the palo santo incense that she likes to burn. The gardening books lined neatly on the shelf, held in place by a pair of wooden raven bookends.
I pick up a black knight from the chessboard and turn it in the dim light. I have the urge to set it down not in its starting place, but in front of the line of black pawns. To see if she’ll play. But it feels wrong. Intrusive. So I set it back in the same square where I found it. These pieces of Harper have become soothing to me, but suddenly I feel like an intruder in their presence.
When she comes back inside, Harper does her best to be hospitable, though her movements seem wooden and her words unsure, as though she’s going through the motions of what she thinks she should say. Things like “Help yourself to anything in the fridge” and “The towels are in the cupboard next to the bathroom.” Following her around the cottage as she shows me where household necessities reside makes me feel even more like an interloper than the times I’ve spied from the shadows as she worked in her garden, or the days when I haunted her steps through Cape Carnage. I can only take a full breath when we stop by the bathroom and she declares that she’s going to take a shower, quietly closing the door behind her.
I brush my teeth at the kitchen sink. Gather my bags. Fight the urge to burn everything in my backpack of weapons that I brought to this town with the intention of using on her. And then I head upstairs while the water of Harper’s shower still patters against the curtain.
I’ve changed into a pair of thin sweats and am sliding under the covers when I hear Harper’s quiet footsteps ascending the stairs. She goes to her bedroom first, then she backtracks, knocking three times on the guest room door that I’ve left ajar. “Nolan . . . ?” she asks, the light from her bedroom down the hall framing her silhouette. “What are you doing in here?”
“You need to rest, and I’ve gotta get up early,” I say, turning enough that
she can see the reassurance in my faint smile. “You don’t need my alarm blaring in your face at five-fifteen.”
Though she remains silent, I can feel Harper’s surprise and confusion from across the room. When her bottom lip slides between her teeth and she drops her gaze to the shadows, I rise from the bed and make my way toward her.
She doesn’t meet my eyes until I take her hand.
“I’m here to look out for you, Harper. Not smother you. I want you to have your space, that’s all. As much as I can give you, anyway.” I squeeze her hand, then press a kiss to her cheek, lingering only long enough to catch the scent of soap on her skin before I turn away. “Get some rest. I’ll be here if you need me.”
When I sit on the edge of the bed and run a hand through my hair, she’s still watching, her gaze traveling up my body, traversing over the scars that were etched into my flesh the first night we met. When she finally meets my eyes, she gives me a single nod. “Goodnight, Nolan,” she says, and slowly closes the door.
It takes a moment before I hear her footsteps padding away down the hall.
And though she might leave me to my dreams, she always haunts them when I sleep.
The sound of her scream. The reach of her hand. The abyss of black water, the terror in her eyes as she sinks into the sea. I can never swim fast enough, kick hard enough. I can never grab her in time. Even underwater, I hear her
calling my name. Nolan. Nolan.
“ . . . Nolan.”
When my eyes snap open, it takes a breath to reconcile the woman in front of me with the one in my nightmares. Harper is crouched next to the bed, her hair in a loose braid over her shoulder, her brows furrowed as she watches me blink away sleep.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, sitting up. I check her over, at least what I can see of her. No blood. No bruises. Just a look in her eyes that says she’s unsure. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m fine, I just . . . ” She trails off, glancing toward the door as though she should slink back through it. But with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, she rises just enough to slide into bed next to me. It takes
my sleep-addled brain a moment to process what’s happening, that she wants a connection she’s not ready to ask for. I remain still, reluctant to spook her and drive her away as she settles under the covers.
When I reach for the lamp on the nightstand, she stops my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispers.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and she nods against the pillow.
I lie back down next to her. Wrap an arm over her waist. Rest my palm across her heart. It takes only a moment to fall asleep with her scent and her warmth and her steady, deep breaths against my chest. And this time, I don’t dream of the sea. Or of my brother, or the blood that dripped from his mouth to pool on the road. Or the hospital, and all the hatred and vengeance that kept me alive. For the first time in a long time, I don’t dream at all.
I wake just before my alarm. Harper has barely moved, her inhalations slow and even. I take a moment to just look at her and memorize the smallest elements of her features. The precise curve of her nose. The tiny mole on her cheekbone. A blond hair that was missed by her dye. I almost buried these details in a shallow grave, I think.
I lift my arm from her side. Slide out of the bed. Tuck the covers in against her back and turn on the lamp, just in case she wakes. And then I pad silently out of the room.
After a quick shower, I stand at the kitchen window and watch Morpheus snatch peanuts and mealworms from the bird feeder as I eat a piece of toast and peanut butter. When I’ve gulped down the last of my tea, I take the spare key Harper must have left for me on the counter last night and head out to meet Yates.
The coffee shop is the quietest I’ve seen it when I arrive a few minutes before six. There are a few people I recognize—the three men who sometimes help Harper with the hanging baskets along Main Street, the woman who runs the general store and knows me by name for all the camping shit I’ve bought for Harper’s exhumations. None of the unfamiliar patrons give me Sleuthseeker vibes—there’s only an older couple with a pamphlet for the lighthouse and a family with two young kids. And of course, there’s Sheriff Yates, sitting at a table for two by the window. He salutes me with a croissant and a cup of tea already waiting at my empty space.
I plaster a smile over the groan that begs to escape from my lips and make my way toward him.
“Morning, son. I assumed after witnessing the industrial quantity of Earl Grey tea that you consumed yesterday at the station that you’d want the same,” Yates says, gesturing to the seat across from him.
I huff a laugh, pulling the chair back, its iron legs grating over the stone floor tiles. “Thank you, I appreciate it.”
“It’s the least I could do.” Yates rubs his shoulder, his arm still strapped against his body. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking on the search.”
“Happy to do my part.” I back up my lie with an expression that I hope conveys the appropriate amount of helpful earnestness, though I really can’t be sure. In reality, I’m both ready to do whatever it takes to fuck this search up, and scared shitless of getting caught doing it. But judging by Yates’s grin, none of my darker thoughts shine through the deception.
“So,” he says, eyeing me as he takes a long sip of his coffee, “are you all set with what you need? You’re sure about concentrating efforts at the woods northwest of Simmons Loop?”
“Yeah, seems to be popular with dog walkers, and Mrs. Evanston said her husband had taken their dog that way a few times.”
“That’s one thing I just can’t work out,” Yates says, scratching at his stubble as his gaze disconnects from mine, landing somewhere across the road. When his focus returns to me, his chameleon eyes seem lighter than before, like a faded reproduction of the early morning sky. “I just can’t fathom how a little dog like that would have made it all the way from the woods back to Maria’s Airbnb. That’s gotta be what, at least two miles of territory the dog is relatively unfamiliar with? At night, no less. In a town she doesn’t know. Quite a feat, don’t you think?”
“Closer to three miles, actually,” I say as I tear a piece from my croissant, giving Yates a nonplussed shrug as I chew. “But I checked the weather reports for when Mr. Evanston was last seen, and it was foggy that night.
Dogs scent better in the fog. She could have followed their path back to the house.” Yates hums in agreement, though I’m not sure he’s convinced by my logic. “We’ll still send plenty of volunteers to Widow’s Point and the area
around the lighthouse,” I tack on. “I’ll send a team down to the beach when the tide is low at five-thirty. They can search the trails at the Cape until then.”
“I knew you were the right man for the job,” Yates says, seemingly reassured. I give him a tight smile, returning my focus to my plate. I’m still looking at the half-eaten pastry when the sheriff slaps his palm down on the table hard enough to rattle the plates as he declares that I’m truly a Tennessee boy from “the Volunteer State.” A tiny pot of jam slides off the edge, and my hand darts out to catch it before it can crash against the floor. “Sorry about that. Great reflexes, son.”
“Thanks,” I reply, setting the jar back on the table.
“Did you play ball in college?”
“Rugby, actually.”
Yates’s eyes crinkle at the corners with what seems like amusement. “Ah, yes, I could see that. I was more of an arts man in college, believe it or not.
But I played a little rugby myself, from time to time.” He pushes back from the table and drains his coffee mug. “Come on, we’d better get going.”
Yates waves to the barista, saying goodbye to everyone by name before leading the way out of the café. The sun is still low on the horizon, but the air is already sticky and humid, lying over us like a film. Yates wipes his brow with a handkerchief and slowly scans our surroundings as though taking stock of the familiar landscape to ensure everything is in its place.
“I’ll drop you off at the search command center and meet you there later,” he says when he seems to determine the street is to his liking. “I need to take Deputy Collins with me to the old Iver farm first.”
My thoughts immediately slice to Arthur, and the possibility that he had another dumping ground that Harper doesn’t know about. As much as I’d love for the old man to take the fall for all this mess and leave Harper to her freedom, I know they’re too intricately woven together for that idea to become a reality. My mind is still reeling when I say, “Iver farm . . . ?”
“Yeah. Strangest thing,” Yates says as he scratches his temple with a neatly trimmed nail. “Mr. Porter had some evidence bags in his car, marked up with Clarke Road on them. And that was the last searched location in the GPS of Porter’s rental.”
“What kind of evidence? Something he stole from the station?”
Yates chuckles, clapping a hand on my shoulder, right on the stab wound McMillan gave me with a metal spike just before Harper killed him in her garden. The muscle is still tender from the healing puncture. “I might run a small-town sheriff’s office, but I’m not about to let a troublemaker like Porter steal my evidence from under my nose.” He gives my shoulder another hard pat, like he’s magnetically drawn to the wound, and heads toward his truck, motioning for me to follow. “No, this is stuff he must have found and bagged himself. An incense holder, an odd-looking knife, and a Texas Tech sweater.
I haven’t been in the old Iver farmhouse since I busted some teenagers for getting drunk out there last fall, but I don’t remember anything like that kicking around.”
The occasional car. The country song Yates starts whistling. The scrape of his cowboy boots against the asphalt. All these sounds dampen as my fears crack like flares against the confines of my skull.
“You know what?” I say just as the sheriff reaches the driver’s door. “I don’t mind walking to command. It’s only a few blocks away. I don’t want to
hold you up from getting to the farm.”
“Are you sure? It’s no trouble.”
I wave a hand and force an untroubled smile. “Yeah. The walk would do me some good. It’ll clear my head and help me think through all the details.
Wouldn’t want to miss anything, you know?”
Yates grins, sliding his aviators on before he slaps the edge of the bed of the truck. “All right, son. Appreciate it.” With a final nod, he gets into the truck. A moment later, a country song pours out of the open windows, and he rolls away from the curb. I start walking in the same direction, keeping my steps even despite the tremble in my legs. The ever-present pain of my injuries from the hit-and-run seems to fade beneath the veil of panic.
The moment the truck turns a corner and disappears, I whip my phone from my pocket.
I open YouTube. I scroll through my recently watched videos until I find the one I’m looking for. I press play.
“Hey everyone, I’m Autumn Bower, and this is Autumn and Adam’s Vanventures,” Harper says, her smile warm and welcoming even though her arms are crossed to protect her body against a cold-looking wind. Her blond
hair whips across her face. “Come inside our 1985 Chevy G20, affectionately known as Goonie. I’ll show you how we stay warm when the weather is chilly.”
Harper drops her arms. She motions to the camera.
I pause the video on the shot of her Texas Tech sweater.
I look up from my phone, staring into the heart of Cape Carnage. A pit seems to open inside me, ready to swallow me whole. Because I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to plant enough trails to lead away from Harper Starling when Autumn Bower is right there, begging to be resurrected.
