Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(104)

“Depends on if the owner continues to pay mortgage, property taxes, that sort of thing.”

Wyatt raised a brow. “If you were running from past sins, would you continue to mail in your property taxes?” He sat up straight, tapped the desk top. “That’s our search requirement. Tax lien. On a historic Victorian, going back to November, twenty-two years ago. Why not?”

“I’m on it.”

“You’re on it?”

“Sure.” Tessa was already digging out her computer. “What do you think us private investigators do? Death and taxes. Only two things no one can avoid, making them the best source of records.”

Her fingers started humming across the keyboard. Wyatt watched her work without asking any more questions. His job was biased toward search warrants. He didn’t want to know about hers.

“Most towns give you at least a year before they get too antsy,” Tessa informed him now. “Costs money to file a lien, so they opt for mailing out overdue notices for a bit. Not having an exact town makes it harder, of course, which is why search engines are worth their weight in gold . . .” She tapped more, frowned, tapped more. “I got homes, all right. Old homes, rich homes, valuable homes. But I’m not seeing any Victorians. Okay, let’s try twenty years ago. Nineteen. Eighteen.”

Fingers still tapping, face still frowning. “Shit.” Tessa paused, glanced up. “I’m not seeing anything. And yet . . . we have to be on to something. November, twenty-two years ago, Vero dies, Nicky disappears, maybe even a young man named Thomas takes off. It had to have affected operations at the dollhouse. It had to have sparked some sort of reaction by Madame Sade.”

Wyatt shrugged. “Search that. November, twenty-two years ago, historic Victorian. What the hell. Someone had to be called out for something, maybe even a report of a runaway?”

Tessa, typing away again. “Holy . . . No way. You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“What?” Wyatt was up, out of his chair, leaning over her shoulder in the cramped space. She gestured to her screen and he got it. Headline article. Not of a missing teen or a dead girl.

But a fire.

A hundred-year-old Victorian, one of the last grand summer cottages in the area, burning to the ground. November. Twenty-two years ago. With an unidentified body pulled from the smoldering ruins.

“The dollhouse,” Tessa murmured. “Gotta be.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“We’re heading forty miles north.”

Wyatt already had his keys in his hand. “Absolutely, but that’s not what I meant. Thomas. A husband who burned down his own home two nights ago. A man clearly experienced with gas cans.”

She got it. “He was definitely at the dollhouse all those years ago. He’s the one who burned it to the ground.” Tessa hesitated. “And now he’s taking Nicky back there? But if it’s gone, totally demolished, what’s left for them?”

“I don’t know. But I have a feeling for Nicky’s own sake, she’d better start remembering.”





Chapter 37




BY THE TIME the car crests the washed-out drive, my stomach is heaving and my head is on fire. Motion sickness, I try to tell myself. But of course it’s more than that. It’s dread and nerves and sadness and fear. It’s every dark emotion rolled into one, and my hands are shaking so badly, I can’t open the car door. I fumble with the latch again and again.

I swear I smell smoke, though I know that’s impossible. And I’m terrified that the moment I step out of the car, it will start to rain. I don’t think I could handle that. I don’t think I can handle this.

Thomas climbs out of the driver’s side. He fiddles for a minute with the rear passenger door, extracting something from the backseat. When I don’t immediately exit the vehicle, he comes around to assist me. I have to hold his arm to stand. I don’t look up, can’t bring myself to see his face. Instead, I keep my gaze on the sleeve of my husband’s coat; I am shaking uncontrollably.

I can feel them already. The shadows in the back of my mind. Slippery shapes and chilling whispers that scare me even more than Vero. I would have her back, grinning skull and all.

But she is quiet now. She gave me her best advice and I ignored it.

Or maybe, faced with this place once again, she is also too terrified to talk.

For just one moment, I wish love really did heal all wounds. I wish Thomas’s genuine care and nurturing had been enough to heal me. Somehow, he’d found the ability to move forward.

But I never have. He’s right; I was losing my mind even before I suffered three blows to the head.

Thomas takes the first step, my hand tucked beneath his arm. Slowly, I force myself to follow. I realize for the first time that he’s holding something in his left hand. A shovel, which he’d pulled from the backseat. Thomas is carrying a shovel.

I don’t speak. I march with this man who is my husband. It occurs to me we never had a formal wedding, never walked side by side down church steps, officially pronounced man and wife.

But now we have this.

A man. His wife. And our shared secret.

These grounds had been beautiful once. In the back of my mind, I know this. I could see the rolling green lawn from the house, especially from the tower bedroom, which had offered a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view. I’d spent hours alone, gazing at the vast grounds in back, not to mention a sweeping circular drive in the front, punctuated by a gurgling fountain. Rosebushes in the summer, mounds of rust-colored autumn sedum in the fall. The carriage house had stood to the left, already converted by that time to a three-bay garage. Another outbuilding had been slightly behind it. Caretaker’s cottage, or maybe a playhouse for the privileged kids of the family who’d first built the home a hundred years ago.