The Last House Guest(85)

I needed to get out of this room, but he was blocking the way.

He stepped to the side, and I instinctively moved back, toward the wall. “We’ll talk to Grant, work something out. Okay?” he said.

But he had it wrong. Of course he couldn’t do that.

“Sadie,” I said, finally understanding. Her flaw was my own—she’d trusted the wrong person. My life was her life. She must’ve taken this same path, landed at his name—and believed he would tell her the truth. “You killed her,” I whispered, hand to my mouth at the truth, at the horror.

He had been the man who had brought her to the party. The man no one had seen.

His eyes drifted shut, and he winced. “No,” he said. But it was desperate, a plea.

I could see it playing out, what she would do—three steps back, finding Ben Collins in the article, just like I had done. Asking him to pick her up, directing him to the party. Sadie, empowered by what she’d uncovered, believing she had everyone right where she wanted them—for one final, fatal strike. She’d hidden away the money trail; all she needed was him. The money she had stolen from the company—for this. For him. Never seeing the danger in the places where it truly existed. “All she wanted from you was the truth,” I said.

He blinked twice, face stoic, before speaking. “What good would that do now? I’d be burying all of us. And for what? We can’t change the past.”

For what? How could he ask that? For justice. For my parents. For me.

To say the truth—that Parker had been responsible for the death of my parents. Because inside that family was a perpetual power struggle, and Sadie must’ve finally seen a way to bring down her brother. A calculated, fatal move.

But something else had happened behind that locked door during the party. She had misjudged him. Had she pled her case, offered the money, believing he was on her side—before he struck? Or had they argued, the danger slowly shifting from words to violence, until it was too late?

“The blood in the bathroom. You hurt her,” I said in a whisper. Not a car inadvertently driving another off the road. But hands and fists on flesh and bone.

“She slipped,” he said. “It was an accident,” he repeated. “I didn’t know what to do, and I panicked. None of it would bring her back.”

But his words were empty, hollow lies. Sadie was breathing. He had to have known she was breathing. Otherwise, why bring her to the cliffs? The water in her lungs, the fact that it could look like a suicide, the placement of her shoes—the last step of his cover-up. His cool, crisp mind, planning to end one life in order to save what was left of his.

Had the Lomans turned him into a killer years ago? Making him complicit, shifting the line of his own morality until he could justify even this?

He flipped the flash drive into his palm again, tucked it in his pocket. “She told me there was someone else who had the proof. I always thought it was you.”

Only it hadn’t been me. It was Connor, though he didn’t know it. That must’ve been why Sadie had wanted him at the party, had brought them both there. Safety in knowledge, in numbers. In a crowd.

There was nothing left on the desk but the article about my parents’ accident. Like he was erasing all traces of Sadie once more.

“She was awake,” I said. “She tried to get out of the trunk. I have proof.” Something he could not destroy in this room.

Everything changed then. His face, the smoke, the crackle of flames.

“Your trunk,” he said, monotone. “The phone you found, the person you were fighting with, evidence in your trunk. The daughter of the family who just fired you. You do not want to do this, trust me.” As if I were a nothing. Powerless, then and now. The person he would blame. The person who would pay.

Now I understood why he kept questioning us about the party. Looking for who might’ve seen him or Sadie. Who might’ve seen him bringing her limp body out front. Who could’ve seen him throwing her from the bluffs, or returning my car after, or walking back for his own in the lot of the B&B.

And then I was there. He saw me on the cliffs while he was “finding” her shoes. His prints would be on them if he was the one who found them. He’d said the same thing about me when I’d brought him Sadie’s phone.

That was why he had asked me, over and over, about that night. Why he’d watched me so closely during the interview, looking for what I was hiding. He was terrified that I knew more than I was saying.

The last piece of the puzzle. The unspoken question he was asking that night: Had I seen him?

“Just tell me what you want,” he said, reaching for the article on the desk.

“Stop,” I said, and I grasped for it myself—such a stupid thing to cling to. I could find another one in print or in records. But it was the fact that something was being taken from me again, without my permission.

I had the paper in my grip, but he lunged in my direction, grabbing my arm.

Crystal-clear.

This man had killed Sadie for knowing the truth. I would not get a chance to prove my innocence, to present my side of the case. He had killed to protect himself—nothing more. And now I was the threat.

I jerked back, his fingers slipping away, and raced around the desk for the door. He lunged in my direction again, knocking the garbage can, the papers tumbling out in a trail of embers and flame. Catching on the ornate rug. His eyes widened.