BINDWEED
Harper
I WAKE UP TO MY phone alarm’s relentless beeping, but it seems farther away than it should be. When I peel my eyes open, it takes me a moment to realize I’m not in my own bed. Another to figure out where I am. And one more to remember how I crawled in next to Nolan. My last memories from the night slowly surface. His heat at my back, the weight of his arm across my waist.
His hand over my heart. The one that’s only beating because he saved it, even though he’d waited years to snuff it out.
My palm lingers on my chest, but it doesn’t ignite the same hum in my flesh that Nolan’s touch does. It’s only an echo of his warmth.
I glance at the empty space behind me where he once rested, then roll out of bed, switching off the bedside lamp he must have turned on for me as I go.
When the alarm is finally silenced, I slide on my penguin slippers and take the phone with me as I stumble toward the holy grail summoning me downstairs. Coffee.
When I get to the kitchen to start the process for making a stovetop espresso, I find Nolan has already set it up for me. All that’s left to do is turn on the gas. On the counter is a handwritten note, the script sharp, the loops and tapered lines familiar from his scrapbook.
This thing is archaic. Don’t you want a Keurig? ~N.
I smile, grabbing the pen to write a note in reply, just in case Nolan comes back to the cottage while I’m out.
This “thing” makes coffee so thick I can chew it. Don’t take that
away from me. -H.
As the coffee brews, I get my breakfast ready and top off Morpheus’s bird feeder, which is now overrun by smaller birds who will scatter when he eventually returns from his escapades of stealing shiny objects or caw-cawing at tourists. When I head back into the cottage, I take my coffee and toast to the living room so I can indulge in some Surviving Love reality TV trash. But something out of place stops me on my path.
A sudden wash of memory layers over the chessboard as I stare down at the black knight. It’s not in its usual place. It faces my legion of white pieces from c6.
I stand unmoving for a long moment, but I’m not in my living room. I’m sitting in our van, the smoke of palo santo incense curling between me and Adam.
“How long did they say it would take?” I remember asking as I moved my white pawn forward to start the game.
I don’t remember which piece Adam moved next. I just remember his smile, like it was no big deal that our vehicle was broken down on a remote stretch of gravel road in nowhere land, Texas. We were supposed to be home in Lubbock in two days, and I know he was eager to see his parents after a year on the road, but he acted like it was just a minor inconvenience. He rolled with these ups and downs of life in our van, which we affectionately named Goonie. Adam could bob along in the current of life. And I thought I
could float along beside him.
I was wrong.
I blink away the image of his face before that smile can twist into a tortured grimace of desperation and terror. Those final moments that haunt me, like his scream does at night.
A knot tightens in the base of my throat as I set down my coffee cup. I polish the black knight with the edge of my shirt. It’s a need I find hard to explain. I feel like I can’t let Nolan touch this piece of my past, or the evil buried there could creep into the present and take him like it took Adam.
Only when it feels like the boundary lines between past, present, and future have been redrawn do I put the knight back in its rightful place.
I don’t turn on the TV, or eat my croissant, or even finish my coffee.
I’m not sure how long I sit there, fighting a battle I’ll never truly win, not when those days of horror stick to me like a shadow. I’m so caught up in my memories that I forget my most fundamental responsibilities—until an abrupt sound cuts through my torpor.
Oh dear god, how could I forget the fucking time?
“Shit,” I whisper, jolting up from the couch. I leave my food untouched on the coffee table and rush to the back door of the cottage. With the sound of the hedge trimmer as my guide, I run up the hill toward the fucked-up topiaries.
Arthur is balanced on the second-highest rung of the stepladder, his cane discarded on the grass as he wields the trimmer with both hands. I give him a wide berth just in case he startles and the machine ends up lodged in my face.
I come to a stop in his line of sight with my arms folded across my chest.
“Hi, Arthur,” I say.
It takes him a moment to turn the trimmer off and acknowledge my presence. “Harper, you have many talents,” he says as his gaze shifts from me to the topiary moose I accidentally decapitated the other day, “but shaping topiaries into works of art is not one of them.”
“Yeah, I tried to tell you that,” I reply. When I offer him a hand to help him down, he waves me off. “Jesus fucking Christ, Arthur. You’re going to hurt yourself. Get down, please.”
“No. Not until I fix this atrocity. We can’t win the best garden award with a headless moose. I shall make it into a pair of piping plovers.”
“No, you shan’t, actually,” I say, reaching up to snatch the handle of the hedge trimmer before he can turn it on again. But he’s strong for an octogenarian with bad knees and a Bdeficiency, among other things. He12 doesn’t relinquish the trimmer until I give it a bit of a twist. “You’re going to come down from there before you fall and break all your bones, and we’re going to have breakfast and your pills.”
Arthur scowls, taking an unsuccessful swipe at the trimmer. “I already had breakfast.”
“You could have called me, Arthur. I would have made it for you.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you in case Mr. Rhodes was still at the cottage.
Are you sure you don’t want me to cut off his hands?”
Blush creeps into my cheeks, and I catch a little twinkle of delight in Arthur’s eyes. He loves when he strikes a mark.
“I’m sure you’d enjoy that, but no thanks. Well, not this morning, anyway,” I say, finally guiding him down from the stepladder. With that little dig about Nolan, his memory is clearly more lucid than usual this morning.
Though I know I can’t place unfounded hope in the B12 Arthur’s been taking, it slithers into my thoughts anyway. What if his Alzheimer’s isn’t getting worse? What if it’s something that was treatable all along? Maybe he doesn’t need to be in a care home. He could stay right here at Lancaster Manor. I should tamp down these ideas before they sharpen into a future that will look real but cuts deep when it shatters.
“What are you wearing?” Arthur asks, pointing to my penguin slippers with his cane when I hand it to him and loop his arm through mine. “You
look ridiculous.”
“They’re comfortable. Sue me.”
“What will your new suitor think about them?”
I snort. “Suitor? You really are ancient.”
“That’s what I keep telling you.”
“Well, I don’t really care what he thinks about them.”
“Correct answer,” Arthur says, patting my hand as we start toward the manor house at the top of the hill. “Nonetheless, they are still atrocious. I can
buy you appropriate footwear.”
“Even Christina Riccis?”
“Stefano Riccis, for Chrissakes, you intractable boor.”
“I always wanted to be an intractable boor. Life goals, Arthur.” Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but I’m not just pushing his buttons with the little digs about shoes. I’m testing his boundaries. Probing his recent memories, the ones that are always the most fleeting and fragile. Between Nolan and now the Christina Riccis, it seems worth the risk when I clear my throat and venture, “Speaking of life goals, want to tell me a little more about what happened with the tourist man in the cemetery the other night?”
Arthur grumbles, stabbing his cane into the lawn with more force than necessary. “The vacuous gnat with the ill-mannered purse demon?”
The hope from earlier binds a little tighter around my bones. “That’s the one, yep.”
“Well, he deserved it. He hit me. He could have broken my nose, that brute.” Arthur points to his face with the handle of his cane, the carved wolf snarling at the dark bruises. “Horrible little man.”
“Do you even know his name?”
“I don’t recall that detail. It wasn’t important,” he says as he tilts his head up. Something in the way he shifts his eyes from my direction to the carved oak door of the manor house makes me think he doesn’t want me to pry too deeply into the other details of that night.
But I try anyway.
“So how did that all start, anyway? Was it with him hitting you in the head? And did he do that before you tried to inject him with midazolam, or after?”
Arthur guffaws, unweaving his arm from mine to lead the way into the foyer. “You’ve never needed all the details of my . . . adventures . . . in the past, Harper. Just as I haven’t needed the details of yours.”
“Yeah, but you’ve never been nearly killed on your adventures, as far as I’m aware. A little clarity is warranted, especially as a Search and Rescue operation is now underway for Mr. Evanston.”
Arthur’s gaze slices to mine and sticks. “Truly?”
“I don’t lie to you, do I, Arthur?” His brows lower into a thoughtful frown.
I touch his arm to stall his progress toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. “I’m only asking you because I’m trying not to break my promise to keep Cape Carnage safe. And the most important person to me here is you. I need to make sure this can’t be traced back to you. So could anyone have seen you with him? Could anyone link you with his disappearance? To the Lancaster family plot at the cemetery?”
Arthur’s frown subsides, the creases between his brows softening, their deep lines still etched into his skin from decades of scowling at all the intractable boors of Cape Carnage. He places a sun-spotted hand over mine and gently squeezes. “No one else saw us, Harper.”
We stand locked in an unwavering, unblinking stare. He’s trying to convince me. And I’m trying to be convinced. Arthur has never lied to me
before, even when it hurt to hear the honest truth. Like when he’d first told me the outcome of his initial appointment with a neurologist. “I’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” he’d said flatly over breakfast. He gave me a single heartbeat to process those words before he went on to talk about some asshole tourist he planned to murder with a new brodifacoum concoction he was tinkering with. Cold, unambiguous, unpolished facts.
Why should this be any different?
But a thought sprouts in my mind—that even though he’s probably telling the truth, the secrets we share are like bindweed: They wrap around us and squeeze. Nolan and I could spend every day tearing bodies from the ground or planting false evidence to lead the search away from Lancaster Manor, but there will always be more secrets ready to grow in their place.
I swallow, as though I can feel those tendrils close around my throat.
“Okay,” I finally say.
We head to the kitchen, where I make Arthur a soy chai latte, which he declares is nearly as good as A Shipwrecked Bean’s. Nearly. He tells me stories about a hard winter twenty years ago, when the pipes froze in the manor house and the new handyman in town came to fix them. The guy spent his time talking about all the women he wanted to fuck and then tried to scam Arthur into installing new pipes in the mansion. He’s been buried beneath the water heater ever since.
Then Arthur recounts some of the Beauty and the Beast performance we saw the other night, which is a good sign. The newer memories are always harder for him to recall. He even assures me that he already took his medication. I verify it, just to be sure, because I always count his pills. And when I help him to the sitting room, he doesn’t need that much help at all.
My smile is a little brighter when we play the score from La forza del destino by Verdi in the background as we plan refinements to the garden. My shoulders feel a little lighter when we decide how we’re going to “take down that wretched banshee Sarah Winkle,” as Arthur declares. Maybe I shouldn’t let Arthur’s lucidity buoy me in these dark waters. But it does.
Eventually, Arthur shifts our sketches aside and navigates to his favorite recliner for his midmorning nap. I lay a blanket over his lap, and when I’m sure he’s comfortable, I head back to my cottage, thoughts still swirling of
what the near future might be like if Arthur’s symptoms are under control. If we have more time.
I contemplate texting Nolan, even going so far as pulling my phone out to see if he sent me something first. I’m just starting a message when I enter the open back door of my cottage, realizing I must not have closed it when I rushed toward the topiaries.
“Murder,” my own voice says from the living room.
I clutch my chest, my knees buckling with surprise. “Fucking Christ on a bike, Morpheus.” The bird caws from the coffee table, eyeing me with his inky gaze before he tears off a piece of my mangled croissant. “That was mine. And if you shit on the furniture, I’m going to pluck you bald.”
“Pretty murder bird,” he says, hopping to my mug to take a sip of the abandoned coffee.
“For the love of god, not the caffeine.”
“Murder.”
“Fine, I won’t pluck you. Just get the fuck out, and take your stolen food with you.” I make my way over to him slowly to start ushering him back toward the door. But Morpheus has other plans. He tips over the coffee mug before bounding to the chessboard where he struts between the white and black pieces.
By the time I’ve rushed to the kitchen for a tea towel to throw on the spilled coffee, he’s knocked over half the pieces with his tail, chattering about murder and cookies as he goes. It’s not until I have the croissant remnants in my hand that he finally lands on my wrist and I’m able to take him outside with his prize.
With a deep sigh, I head back to the living room and clean up the coffee and crumbs, and then I reset the board for a new game. Pawns. A rook. The same black knight from earlier today. I don’t move the white pawn two spaces like I do when I think I can stand up to traumas of my past that trail after me like a wraith. I’m no longer ready to play.
I’m about to head to the shower when my phone buzzes from my pocket.
But it’s not Nolan, like I thought it would be. It’s a Discord notification.
The Sleuthseekers.
I swallow, the blood draining from my limbs.
I open the app and start scrolling through the new messages I couldn’t make myself read last night in the general chat. My blood thunders in my ears as I go to the page about Sam’s recent death. I grip my phone tighter, unsure of what I might find as I skim the posts, gradually climbing my way to the most recent entries. But all I see is speculation. Questions about what might have happened to Sam and Vinny. Theories about whether the police are covering up something sinister. A volley of thoughts about what happened at the Lancaster Distillery. Nothing seems concrete, however. Nothing overly terrifying.
At least, not until I get to the message sent to the group by the user KnightofTruth only a moment ago.
It’s an image of a printed photo on a piece of paper, a picture of the back of a woman walking down the sidewalk. I know exactly where the photo was taken—on Main Street, here in Cape Carnage, half a block south of Maya’s Magical Mixtures. I know exactly when it was captured—fourteen days ago.
There’s a handwritten note at the top of the paper:
Looks upset, maybe crying, walking fast, leaving Maya’s Magical Mixtures.
KnightofTruth sends another message to the group as I stare down at my screen, my heart rioting. I just found out Sam had this picture in his possession before he died. That’s definitely his handwriting. She must have been important to his investigation. Anyone know who this is?
No, a few others chime in.
But I do.
It’s me.
