I walk over to the bed and sit, opening the bedside table. A book sits inside. A familiar book. Eden’s Passion. The second book in the series. I flip through the pages. There are no bookmarks or notes but there is a dogeared page. I open it up.
“What’s that?” Finn asks.
“Lady porn,” I reply, flashing him a tight grin. “One of the Eden books.”
“I guess it’s another sign she was here.”
“Yeah.”
He sits next to me, the bed sinking beneath us. “What’s this one about?”
“Um, if I remember correctly, Eden finally finds out that the man that adopted her is really her father. Her lover isn’t her uncle but her brother, and she’s pregnant with one of the men’s baby. She doesn’t find out whose until book three, when the baby is stolen by her step-mother.”
“Jesus, those books are really twisted, you know that?”
I nod, looking down at the cover illustration. Eden, beautiful but dark, stands in the middle holding her swollen belly. The other characters stand around her menacingly, obsessively, eyeing both her and her unborn child.
“They’re an escape,” I say, “a dark, gothic fantasy.”
“It’s strange to me, because Rose was like the sun—everything gravitated toward her.”
I look down at the picture of Eden, the object of so many people’s desires, including mine to an extent, and wonder if maybe all that attention was just too much.
15
Kenley
The ride back to Thistle Cove is quiet. Ezra sits in the front this time—eyes trained out the window. His jaw is clenched so tight I wonder more than once if he’ll crack a tooth. As we enter the town limits, Ozzy speaks up from the back seat of the car.
“How are we going to deal with this?”
I glance at him in the rearview mirror and say, “I think Ezra gets to decide.”
He shifts, finally, proving he’s not a statue. “I don’t want to confront him. Not yet.”
“You want him to get away with it?” Finn asks.
“No. My father is very good at covering his tracks. If we tip him off, he’ll weasel his way out of it.” He glances at me. “If he’s the one behind the stuff at Kenley’s, it could put her in danger.”
“You don’t think he’s behind the flowers? The gift?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It doesn’t seem like his style, but what the hell do I know? If it is, it’s another reason to stay quiet. It would be better to catch him in the act.”
“We’ve already seen Chandler get away with this. Mr. Baxter is in good standing right now. He offered the reward when Rose was missing—” Ozzy says.
Finn interrupts. “Because he knew he wouldn’t have to pay it out?”
“Maybe? But he shifted it to a scholarship in her name, and I bet you anything he’s behind paying for the senior retreat.”
“So he’s been doing damage control this whole time,” I say, stopping at a light across from Kendrick’s. School is out and kids from the elementary and middle schools walk down the street toward the ice cream shop.
“It explains why he’s been around so much lately,” Ezra says, shaking his head bitterly, “And I thought maybe he’d finally taken an interest in being a father. I should have known better.”
I reach out and take his hand. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
He looks over at me, eyes dark and full of anger and pain. “Yeah, me too.”
Because of that conversation, we sit on what we know.