What if that someone was you?
“What happened to Mason?” Sloane asked, her hands worrying at each other in her lap. “His parents died. His family didn’t want him. Where did he go?”
The question struck close to home for Sloane.
“A local couple took the Kyle boy in,” Marcela said, taking another sip of her tea. “Hannah and Walter Thanes.”
“Do they still live in Gaither?” Lia asked casually.
Marcela set her teacup down on the tray. “Hannah passed away several years ago, but Walter is still local. He runs the apothecary museum down on Main Street.”
YOU
You know better than to enjoy the quiet moments. You know better than to watch Laurel sleeping and think, even for a moment, that she’s just a child.
“She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?” Five’s voice is like oil on your skin.
He’s holding the knife.
“What are you doing here?” It pays sometimes to be haughty, to remind the sadists that you may be at their mercy, but they’re at your mercy, too.
“I had some interesting news from an old friend.”
You don’t take the bait.
Five smiles at your silence. “It appears the FBI has made an appearance in Gaither.” He drags one finger over the edge of his knife blade. Lightly. Carefully.
You give him a dead-eyed stare. “What the FBI is or is not doing is none of my concern.”
“It is,” Five replied, pressing the knife blade into the tip of his own finger and drawing blood, “when it involves your daughter.”
The others met us outside the apothecary museum.
“Sterling’s conflicted about letting us on the front lines, Judd has that look on his face that he gets when he’s thinking about Scarlett, and Agent Starmans desperately has to go to the bathroom,” Michael murmured to Lia and me. “In case you were wondering.”
I glanced over at Agent Starmans, who quickly excused himself to use the facilities inside. Judd reached into his back pocket, pulled out his worn leather wallet, and handed Sloane a rumpled twenty-dollar bill.
“Donation,” he told her. “For the museum.”
As Sloane closed her hand around the bill, I let my eyes meet Agent Sterling’s. You hate that I’m the one who has a plausible reason to be asking questions. You hate that people in Gaither will talk to me. But more than anything, you hate that you don’t hate putting us in the line of fire nearly as much as you should.
Dean reached for the door to the museum, then held it open for Sterling. “After you,” he said, a gesture an onlooker would have taken for Southern chivalry, but that I recognized as an unspoken promise: we’d follow her lead.
Sterling entered first, the rest of us on her heels.
“Afternoon, folks.” Walter Thanes stood behind the counter, looking as much a relic as anything housed in these walls.
Sloane held out the bill Judd had given her. Thanes nodded to a wooden box on the counter. As Sloane slipped the money into the box, I forced myself to turn away from the man who’d raised Nightshade, and perused the shelves.
Hundreds of bottles with faded labels lined one wall. Rusted tools sat on proud display in front of beakers made of cloudy glass. On the counter beneath them there was a thick leather-bound book, the pages yellowed and the ink faded with age. As I took in the handwritten title scrawled across the top, my heart stilled in my chest.
Poison Register—1897.
I thought of Nightshade, of the poison he’d used to kill Scarlett Hawkins—undetectable, incurable, painful. I pushed down a shudder as a presence beside me cast a shadow over the page.
“To buy medicines that could prove poisonous, patrons were required by the apothecary to sign for them.” Walter Thanes ran the tip of his finger lightly over the entries on the register. “Laudanum. Arsenic. Belladonna.”
I forced my attention from the open page to the old man.
Thanes smiled softly. “The line between medicine and poison was quite thin, you know.”
That line appeals to you. Immediately, my brain went into overdrive. You find poisons enthralling. You took Nightshade in when he was just a boy.
“Was the museum an actual apothecary at some point?” Agent Sterling asked, pulling our suspect’s attention away from me.
Thanes clasped his hands in front of his body as he crossed the room toward her. “Oh, yes. My grandfather ran Gaither’s apothecary as a young man.”
“A dying art,” Sterling murmured, “even then.”
Those words registered with Thanes. He liked her, liked talking to her. “Quite a brood you have here,” he commented.
“My niece and her friends,” Sterling replied smoothly. “Cassie and her mother lived here when Cassie was young. When I heard the whole group was planning a trip to Gaither, I thought they could do with some adult supervision.”
Lia sidled up beside me, giving every appearance of being entranced by an old-fashioned scale the exact color and texture of a rusted penny. “Fun fact,” the deception detector said under her breath. “The part about adult supervision was true.”
Behind us, Thanes processed Agent Sterling’s statement. “I suppose that would make you Lorelai’s sister.”
Hearing my mother’s name on his lips had a visceral effect on me. I wanted to turn to face him, but my feet were cemented to the ground.
You knew my mother.
“Do you have any children?” Agent Sterling asked, the question completely natural—and completely benign—on her tongue. I made my way along the outside wall, turning so that I could sneak a look at the old man’s reaction.
“Anger,” Michael murmured, coming up behind me and speaking directly into my ear. “Bitterness. Longing.” He was quiet for a moment. “And guilt.”
The fact that Michael mentioned guilt last told me that it was the faintest of the three. Because it’s faded over the years? I wondered. Or because you’re constitutionally incapable of feeling more than the slightest twinge?
“I had a boy.” The old man’s answer to Sterling’s question was clipped and gruff. “Mason. Took off when he was about seventeen. It just about broke my wife’s heart.”
A glance at Lia told me that she hadn’t detected a single lie in those words.