Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (17 page)

“Not all girls,” I muttered.

“Another illusion of femininity shattered.” Jason’s tone was distracted as his eyes swept over the lone guard posted at the entrance to the house.

“Shut up. Both of you.” I’d be fine once we made it to a flat surface. Despite the fact that my legs were still shaking, I let go of Kyle’s arm. In the past month and a half, I had survived a murder attempt and life as an inmate inside a werewolf rehabilitation camp. One evening in formal wear should be easy. Theoretically.

The guard greeted us with a polite nod as he opened the door and stepped aside.

I paused to study the door’s four intricately carved panels as I followed Jason over the threshold. Each panel had been handcrafted in Europe and depicted a different nature scene. My eyes swept over mountain vistas and lush forests before coming to rest on a carving of a river. A trout jumping out of the water. Cattails and reeds. A small bird in flight. I reached out and traced the edge of the bird’s wing. It was a kingfisher, the same bird used in CutterBrown’s logo.

With a deep breath, I stepped into the house.

Waves of conversation crashed over us as we entered the foyer. A huge photograph of Amy stood on an easel next to the staircase, and two tall vases overflowing with calla lilies framed each side of her bright, smiling face. It was a lovely picture—provided you didn’t know the smile was fake. Amy’s real smile always filled her eyes and this smile hadn’t even come close. Genuine-looking smiles were one of the few things she had never been able to fake.

I glanced away from the photo because staring at it was too hard.

Instead, I tried to focus on the ebb and flow of voices and the subtle strands of classical music coming from a string quartet in the living room.

My gaze slid to the stairs. We needed to get to Amy’s room, but a velvet rope was strung across the bottom step.

“Jason Sheffield!” A man with a bald head and too much girth for his suit latched on to Jason, pumping his hand enthusiastically. “Your father didn’t tell me you would be here. There are people I want you to meet.”

The scent of alcohol followed the man like exhaust from an engine, and as he tried to draw Jason into the living room, he tripped over his own feet. Bystanders scrambled to get out of the way as he crashed to the ground. A few didn’t move quickly enough.

“Come on.” While everyone’s attention was diverted, I unlatched the rope at the bottom of the stairs.

I glanced back when Kyle and I were halfway to the second floor.

Jason met my gaze and nodded. He mouthed something that might have been “Be careful,” but I was too far away to be sure.

The noise of the party faded as Kyle and I stepped into the shadows on the landing. Small lamps with Tiffany shades glowed on half-moon tables placed at regular intervals in the hall, but the overhead lights were dark.

Thick carpet muffled our footsteps as we made our way to Amy’s room. This was only the second time I had been up
here since her death, and the place filled me with a mixture of sadness and déjà vu.

Despite all of the people downstairs, the house felt empty. It was almost as though Amy’s presence had been the thing that had given it life.

“Wait!” Kyle’s voice, low and urgent, stopped me in my tracks as I reached for Amy’s door. Before I could ask what was wrong, he held a finger to his lips. With his other hand, he drew me past Amy’s room and to a door at the far end of the hall.

The master bedroom.

Kyle stopped when we were a few feet from the door. I stood just behind him, leaning into him as I tried to make out the murmur of voices on the other side.

“—isn’t the time and place,” said a smooth, masculine voice. A voice that belonged to Amy’s father.

“When is the right time, Ryan?” said a woman—a woman who was definitely not Amy’s mother. Her voice rose in frustration. “You won’t return my calls and you ignore my emails. I flew in to see you and you wouldn’t give me five minutes of your time.”

“Because there isn’t anything left to say. You made your decision.”

“You didn’t give me any choice!”

“You had a choice.” Mr. Walsh’s voice was so cold that it sent a shiver down my spine. “You chose to leave.”

“After Van Horne, can you blame me? It’s like you became an entirely different person. You threw everything we had away.”

My heart thundered in my chest.

Van Horne was the name of one of the other camps. One of the worst camps. It was what they threatened us with at Thornhill: step out of line and you’d be sent to Van Horne.

“I can help you, Ryan. I want to help you. Maybe it’s stupid, but I still care about you. I came here tonight because people are talking—and not just at CBP. There’s even a rumor that your son was behind the breach in January, that he was the leak and that the board is losing faith in you.”

Kyle and I were both so intent on the conversation that it took us a moment to realize the woman’s voice was drifting closer to the door.

I grabbed Kyle’s arm and beelined for Amy’s room. We tumbled inside just as the door to the master bedroom opened.

Kyle eased Amy’s door almost all the way shut, leaving just enough of a gap for us to see a small slice of hallway. He stood behind me, so close that his chest was flush to my back.

“There was no breach.” Ryan Walsh’s voice held an unmistakable threat, a threat that contradicted the calm, quiet man I knew. “Stephen wasn’t behind any leak.”

“Ryan, I really think—”

There was a yelp followed by a thud. “I don’t care what you think.” The voice still belonged to Amy’s father but it was so hard that it was almost unrecognizable. “You gave up the right to an opinion the second you walked out.”

I held my breath and eased the door open another inch. Amy’s father was standing a few feet away, his back to us.
Behind him, I could just glimpse a brunette in a curve-hugging red dress. Her back was to the wall, her body pinned in place by Ryan Walsh’s arms.

My stomach rolled. For a horrible moment, I thought he would hit her, but then she pressed her lips to his.

I thought of Amy’s mother and winced. She was downstairs, coordinating a gala in memory of her dead daughter while her husband was kissing another woman just outside their bedroom.

Amy’s father pulled away.

“I want to come back,” said the woman, voice breathless. “Leaving was a mistake. I want to come back.”

“You think it’s that easy? You think things can just go back to the way they were?” Ryan Walsh let out a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “I’m giving you five minutes to leave before I call security and have them toss you out.” Without waiting for a response, Amy’s father turned on his heel and strode away.

Behind me, Kyle tensed as we got our first real glimpse of the woman in the red dress.

A ringing sound filled my ears as she reached up to adjust her glasses.

Though I had only encountered the woman a handful of times, I saw her face behind my closed lids on nights when memories of Thornhill made sleep impossible.

The woman who had signaled out wolves for torture in Thornhill’s detention block.

The woman who had tortured Serena.

A
GASP ESCAPED MY THROAT BEFORE I COULD STOP IT
.

The woman’s brows pulled together as she turned toward Amy’s door. “Is someone there?”

Kyle tried to ease me back, tried to place himself in front of me, but I couldn’t move. Every cell in my body had turned to stone.

The woman took a step forward and only the absence of light in the room kept her from seeing us.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” A deep male voice stopped her as she reached for the doorknob. “I was told to escort you downstairs.”

She frowned and glanced over her shoulder, then looked back at Amy’s door, hesitating as she ran a hand over her glossy brown hair.

“Ma’am?”

“Of course,” she murmured, turning and heading for the stairs as the owner of the voice followed in her wake.

I was pressed so closely to Kyle that I could feel the tension drain out of him as he reached around me and softly
shut the door. He stepped back, but I still couldn’t move.

I flashed back to a Saturday, years ago, when Mr. Walsh had helped Amy and me create a diorama of the Globe Theatre for history class. Halfway through the evening, he had ordered a pizza big enough to feed a troupe of actors and rented
The Lion King
. We ate pizza and worked on the miniature theater, and as we watched the movie, Mr. Walsh explained the ties the story had to Shakespeare. The whole time, I kept thinking,
This is what a family is. This is what a father is supposed to be.

Something inside my chest shattered.

It was one thing to believe in the possibility that Amy’s father could have known about Thornhill, but another to have proof—and what else could that woman’s presence here be?

Another thought occurred to me as I replayed their conversation in my head. She had said she wanted to come back, that she had made a mistake by leaving.

“Do you think he was cheating on Amy’s mom?” I asked Kyle softly.

I already knew the answer; his silence just reinforced it.

I thought of Amy’s life and how perfect it had seemed from the outside. How could so much have been wrong beneath the surface?

“Mac? Are you all right?”

I turned to Kyle. The room was so dark that he was just a jumble of shapes.

“I’m fine,” I lied. I tried to pull in a deep breath, but my lungs felt tight. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Kyle caught my hand as I reached for the light switch. “Someone might see the light under the door,” he said, voice low.

I was pretty sure we were the only ones left upstairs, but he was right: someone could come back.

The touch on my hand fell away and I heard the rustle of fabric as he crossed the room and pulled open the heavy drapes.

Moonlight and the glow from the gardens below shone through the window, illuminating the empty space.

I blinked.

“We’re in the wrong room.” But as the words left my lips, my gaze fell on the purple-and-silver fleur-de-lis wallpaper Amy had picked out the last time she redecorated.

“All of her stuff is gone.” My voice was a choked whisper. The tightness in my lungs grew, as though someone had laced them up and was pulling on the strings. There were no posters on the walls. No furniture or pictures or mirrors. My shoes sank into the plush carpet as I walked to the closet and pulled open the double doors. It, too, was empty.

Everything that had made the room Amy’s had been stripped away. For a moment, it felt like losing her all over again.

I hugged myself tightly as I turned back to Kyle. “Stephen told me he was going through her things, but I didn’t think it would be like this. How could they get rid of her stuff? It hasn’t even been a year.”

I couldn’t read the look in Kyle’s eyes, but his expression
had slid into something hard and closed. “I don’t know, but we don’t have much time.”

He was right. I allowed myself one last look around the empty room and then forced myself to walk to the window seat. Even the cushions were gone. Amy had always stashed things underneath them—her diary, notes from teachers, pictures of Trey—but that hadn’t been her only hiding place.

If they find that stuff, no one will ever go looking for anything else.
That’s what she had told me, once, after I’d pointed out what an obvious hiding spot it was.
It’s misdirection, Mac. Let them find the little things so they miss the big stuff.

I wasn’t sure a diary counted as a little thing, but the theory had seemed sound.

Clumsily, I knelt on the carpet. I ran my fingers along the beveled wood that edged the seat until I found a small groove. I tried lifting up and pulling out, but the wood refused to budge. There was a trick to it, and it took me several moments before I found the right combination of angle and force. Finally, a small section popped out, revealing a gap that was no more than five inches wide.

Kyle began to pace as I pulled out a tangle of objects: a ring Amy had stolen from her grandmother’s jewelry box and been too ashamed to put back, a prescription for the birth control pills her parents hadn’t known she was on, parking tickets, and a wad of cash in a folded envelope marked
California Fund
.

“What did that woman mean when she said people thought Stephen was responsible for a breach in January?” Kyle’s voice was low and rough as his steps took him from
one side of the room to the other. “What breach? What people? And that stuff about Van Horne . . . was CBP experimenting on werewolves at more than one camp?”

“Stephen’s worked in his dad’s office as an intern every summer I’ve known him. Maybe he saw or found something he wasn’t supposed to. The Van Horne stuff . . .” I bit my lip as I struggled to remember everything the warden had said to me while I’d been in the camp. “Sinclair told me she had worked at other camps, but she never said which ones.”

“So maybe one of them was Van Horne. Maybe they started looking for a cure there and then moved things to Thornhill once Sinclair was installed as warden.” Kyle came to a stop and crouched next to me. “We need to find out what—exactly—that woman was talking about. We need to talk to Stephen.”

I made a thoughtful, noncommittal noise as I reached back into Amy’s hiding spot. After the way I’d freaked out at the cemetery, it would be a minor miracle if Stephen told us anything. Even if he was willing to speak to us, how could we trust him? How could we know he wouldn’t just turn us over to CBP? My fingers closed on a small jumble of metal, and I withdrew two keys: the key to Ryan Walsh’s study and a second, smaller key that I didn’t recognize.

The problem with formal dresses? They never had pockets when you needed them. I hesitated a moment and then tucked the first key into my bra. Just one more secret between me and Victoria.

I glanced up in time to catch Kyle sneaking a glance at my cleavage.

Guilt flashed across his face, and despite the situation, I laughed before I could stop myself. It was so deliciously normal. Everything in our world was going to hell, but my boyfriend was still taking time to check out my chest.