The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)(80)

No one replied, because whoever Tobias Hawthorne may or may not have had in his pocket, there was no one in mine. Not without Alisa there to pull the strings.

Check. I could practically see the board, see the moving pieces, see the way that Vincent Blake was boxing me in.

“Lee-Lee wouldn’t want us to go to the authorities.” Nash seemed to have trouble finding his voice. It came out in a slow, deep rumble. “The optics.”

“You don’t care about optics,” I told him.

Nash took off his cowboy hat, his eyes shadowed. “I care about a lot of things, kid.”

“What do we have to do,” Libby asked fiercely, “to get Alisa back?”

I was the one who answered the question. “Find a body—or what’s left of one after forty years.”

Nash’s eyes narrowed. “This had better be one hell of an explanation.”





CHAPTER 72

The moment I finished explaining, Nash strode off ominously. Libby went with him. Strategizing our next move, I asked Xander where Rebecca and Thea were.

“The cottage.” Xander was rarely this solemn. “Bex was ignoring her mom’s calls, but then her grandma called, after Eve…”

After Eve got the truth out of Mallory, I finished silently. Forcing my mind to focus on that truth and what it meant for us now, I led the boys to my room and showed them the blueprints.

“These are in chronological order,” I said. “I used that chronology to find the construction project erected in the wake of Toby’s conception: the chapel. The altar was made of stone and hollow inside.” I swallowed. “A tomb—but no body hidden in it, just the USB, which your grandfather must have hidden there shortly before his death, and a message scratched into the stone by Toby way back when.”

“Not that you need another nickname,” Xander commented, “but I’m liking Sherlock. What did the message say?”

I looked past Xander to Jameson and… Grayson wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure when we’d lost him. I didn’t let myself wonder why.

“I know what you did, Father. ” I answered Xander’s question. “I’m taking that to mean that at some point after Toby found out he was adopted and before he ran away at nineteen…”

“He found out about Liam,” Jameson finished.

I thought about all the messages Toby had left his father: “A Poison Tree,” hidden under a floor tile; a poem of his own making, coded into a book of law; the words inside the altar.

The now-empty altar.

“Toby found the body.” Saying it out loud made it seem real. “It was probably just bones by then. He stole the seal, moved the remains, left a

series of hidden messages for the old man, and went on a self-destructive tear across the country that ended in the fire on Hawthorne Island.”

I thought about Toby, about his collision course with my mother and the ways their love might have been different if Toby hadn’t been broken by the horrific secrets he carried.

The real Hawthorne legacy.

I saw now why Toby was determined to stay away from Hawthorne House. I could understand why he’d wanted to protect my mother—his Hannah, the same backward as forward—and later, once she was dead and I’d already been pulled into this mess, why he had needed to at least try to protect Eve from everything that came along with the Hawthorne fortune.

From the truth and the poisonous tree. From Blake.

“The evidence I stole,” I said out loud, staring down at the blueprints, “is in the darkest hole.…”

“The tunnels?” Jameson was behind me—right behind me. I felt his suggestion as much as heard it.

“That’s one possibility,” I said, and then I pulled four sets of blueprints.

“The others are these—the additions made to Hawthorne House during the time span in which Toby must have discovered and moved the remains. He could have taken advantage of the construction somehow.”

Toby had been sixteen when he’d discovered that he was adopted, nineteen when he’d left Hawthorne House forever. I pictured crews breaking ground on each of those additions. The evidence I stole is in the darkest hole.…

“This one,” Jameson said urgently, kneeling over the plans. “Heiress, look.”

I saw what he saw. “The hedge maze.”

Jameson and I made our way to the maze. Xander went for reinforcements.

“Start at the outside and work our way in?” Jameson asked me. “Or go to the center of the maze and spiral out?”

It felt right somehow that it was just the two of us. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne and me.

The hedges were eight feet tall, and the maze covered an area nearly as large as the House. It would take days for us to search it all. Maybe weeks.

Maybe longer. Wherever Toby had hidden the body, his father either hadn’t found it or had chosen not to risk moving it again.

I pictured men planting these hedges.

I pictured nineteen-year-old Toby, in the dead of night, somehow finding a way to bury the bones of the man responsible for half his DNA.

“Start at the center,” I told Jameson, my voice echoing in the space all around us, “and spiral out.”

I knew the path that would take us to the heart of the maze. I’d been there before, more than once—with Grayson.