HP.
Harold?
I walked closer to the wall, trying to get a handle on what I was seeing. The initials were next to the infrastructure marks: the street lights and stop signs, the proposed water access.
I didn’t get it right away, but after a minute or so, it started to make sense.
A pit of dread formed in my stomach as I scanned the image.
Assuming there was no one else on the town council with Harold’s initials — and after attending the town meeting I had no reason to think there was — the proposed street lights and rerouted water access had been sketched and initialed by Harold Pembroke.
This wasn’t opposition. It was collaboration.
Harold had beenhelpingHearthstone, sketching out possible ways they could get around the town’s objections to the development’s impact.
I shook my head in the empty room, suddenly creeped out by the concrete walls and the fact that I was alone in the basement. If I was right, I’d had it all wrong.
The whole town had it all wrong: Harold hadn’t been against the Hearthstone project.
He’d been for it.
37
AVERY
I headed straightfor Sugar Pine Creamery. I had a lot of questions and none of them were well formulated enough for me to be ready to talk to Beck, Noah, or Dane. They didn’t even know I was nosing around Harold’s death.
Except when I got to the ice cream shop, it was dark inside, theClosedsign hanging on the glass door.
Darn it.
I eyed the Crumb next door. Beck would be there making more doughy goodness while Malcolm — if he was working — bopped toBakery Beats.
No, I wanted to talk to Lena on this one.
I shot her a text and was relieved when she answered right back. She closed the shop on Tuesdays, but she gave me her address in town and told me to come over.
According to my phone it was less than a ten-minute walk from Main Street, so I started moving, turning off Main and entering an unfamiliar residential neighborhood that must have run behind Aunt Evelyn’s house on Foxglove Lane.
The houses were more modest here, but they were all neat and well maintained, a pretty row of Arts and Crafts-stylehouses, bungalows, and cottages, all with freshly cut lawns and colorful flower beds.
The afternoon sun had just started to dip in the sky, but it was still warm, a sure sign of the impending summer. I tried to imagine myself back in the city, the sound of horns honking and people yelling instead of birds singing and lawn mowers humming.
It was almost impossible. My other life seemed a world away. Even more confusing, I wasn’t sure I missed it.
I thought about the promotion I’d been promised late last year, but instead of excitement, I only felt resignation, like it was a consolation prize instead of the position I’d coveted since I’d first started at Livable Cities.
I wasn’t thinking straight. Harold’s murder and my sexual experimentation with Beck and Noah — not to mention my lingering hunger for Dane — were like hypnotic fog in my brain.
I needed to focus.
I was approaching the blue dot on the map that was Lena’s house when I spotted a familiar figure bounding up the steps of a narrow two-story Victorian with yellow paint.
I did a double take, wondering if I was seeing things.
But nope. It was Dane.
My heart skipped a beat at the sight of him, looking as yummy as ever in dark jeans and a T-shirt that showed off his cut biceps and tattoos. His face was tan under his short dark hair, and his watch shimmered when it caught the sun.