17
AVERY
I hadn’t liedto Noah: I did have a lot of calls to make, a lot of stuff to do to get up to speed on the house and prepare it for sale.
But by the time I got back to the house I’d turned my thoughts from the kiss with Noah (in a word: hot) to Harold Pembroke’s murder.
I guess it said a lot about my life that thinking about a murder committed on my property was less complicated than the fact that I’d made out with two of my new roommates in as many days.
Powered by the long-awaited caffeine from the Common Ground, I started down the pathway at the back of the house, glad Noah had gone to the nursery so I could explore on my own.
I hadn’t been back in the yard since my arrival two days before but now it held a surreal kind of familiarity. It was easy to remember the way I’d felt the first time, innocently looking for the caretakers (who’d turned out to be hotter than sin) right before I’d stumbled on Harold Pembroke’s body.
The garden had seemed like a magical land unto itself, one filled with only beauty and light.
Now I couldn’t help feeling a sinister undertone on the property. Harold had been murdered in the gazebo, rising in the distance like a fairy-tale cake topper. Beyond it, the pond shimmered under the sun, a couple of geese honking and flapping their wings on the surface.
I passed the shed and the hedge maze and continued toward the gazebo. Goose bumps rose on my arms. I told myself it was because a small bank of clouds had drifted in front of the sun and not because two days earlier a killer had been on the property, maybe even at the same time I’d been looking for Beck, Noah, and Dane.
The gazebo was still wrapped with yellow crime-scene tape. It had already been processed for evidence but Sheriff Crowe had told Dane that the police might want to come back to the scene of the crime. I looked through the entrance of the gazebo to the place where I’d found Harold Pembroke’s body and had a flash of memory: Harold slumped against the railing, chin on his chest like he’d been sleeping, mud on the hem of his pants.
Mud… on the hem of his pants.
I walked around the gazebo, circling it slowly. An assortment of flowers had been planted up against the structure (by Noah?), and a small strip of grass separated the flower beds from the paved walkway.
I stopped between the pond and the gazebo. The geese had stopped honking and were gliding peacefully along the pond’s surface. Across the water, a copse of trees waved lazily in the spring breeze.
I had no idea what was on the other side of the trees, but from here it looked like Aunt Evelyn’s property was pretty private.
I continued around the gazebo, thinking about the day I’d arrived in Blackwell Hollow. It had been clear and sunny, theground dry, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t rained in the days before Harold’s murder.
I crossed the strip of grass to the flower beds next to the gazebo and bent to feel the soil.
It was barely damp, the kind of damp that was probably due to regular watering by Noah or an unseen irrigation system as opposed to a heavy rain.
I stepped back onto the walking path and used my phone to check the local weather. Knew it: the last time it had rained in Blackwell Hollow had been five days before Harold’s murder.
“What the fudge?” I muttered.
Where had the mud on Harold’s pants come from?
I left the gazebo behind and continued along the path to the part of the property I hadn’t yet explored. It only took a minute to realize it was far bigger than I’d imagined.
I passed a huge cutting garden bisected with gravel walking paths, a small glass greenhouse, and a fountain trickling with water, birds hopping along the fountain’s stone ledge. There was an old well, covered with moss, and every so often, stone statues nestled under bushes.
I passed the Buddha, Mother Mary, Shiva, and Kali. There were others too, busts of serious-looking men who might have been philosophers and more than a few nudes of both men and women. The sculpture collection alone was stunning — a gem within the gem of the property — and I felt a pang at the thought of selling the place. Aunt Evelyn had clearly put a lot into making the place so beautiful.
I felt again like Dorothy, transported to a technicolor world, realizing that the one I’d been in before hadn’t been so colorful after all.
And then my phone rang. It was jarring, a sound that didn’t belong in the old-world beauty of the garden, and I fumbled to silence it, then saw that it was my stepmom, Miranda.
I hesitated before accepting the call. Miranda hardly ever called me. There might be an emergency.
“Hi, Miranda.”
“Avery! Hello!” My stepmom was a tiny cheerful blonde — the exact opposite of my mom — who always sounded a little breathless, probably because she was always on the run with Luke and Evan, taking them to baseball or soccer practice or swimming lessons or one of the other activities that seemed to be on their endless menu of fun. “How are you?”
“Um… I’m fine.” I moved toward a weathered iron bench artfully placed in the shade of a giant oak tree. “How are you?”