Yadira’s smile fell for a fleeting second, but then she nodded. It was the second time she’d reacted that way when I mentioned the shed.
“Okay.” She turned away with the broom and started sweeping. I headed to the mudroom, putting on a coat and boots, picking up a scarf, and walking to the doors while wrapping it around my neck.
I closed the doors behind me and when I looked up, Yadira’s eyes were on me. She quickly looked away and went back to sweeping.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
After the way Yadira looked at me, I decided not to go back into the mansion with the journals. I had no idea what she knew, but I didn’t want her seeing me carrying anything inside and alerting Roland about it.
When dinner was ready, I didn’t miss the looks she passed at me and then Roland, as if she had questions for us but didn’t want to intrude. Instead, she served and mostly stayed in the kitchen unless needed.
I was glad when dinner was over and Roland told me he was going bowling with Dylan and Felipe. Yadira was gone now, the kitchen spotless and the countertops clear, other than the dessert sitting on a gold platter on the island, covered with a clear dome. The house was vacant and clear of bodies other than my own, and relief swirled in my belly. I had other plans that revolved around an old shed and handwritten notes.
Perhaps if I’d had friends of my own in this town, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run to the shed so quickly. But I was a woman alone in a mansion with nothing else to do. I had no job and the hobby that I did have, I couldn’t really focus on at the moment because thoughts of my husband’s dead wife were consuming me. I wasn’t going to let it go until I knew more about what’d happened before her death.
On my way to the shed, I couldn’t help thinking about Dylan. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but nice guys made mistakes too. Did he sleep with Miley? Why would he do that after promising he wouldn’t? The only explanation I could think of was that he badly wanted to get laid, since he had been new to the area and Miley was his only convenient option.
Then I circled back to Melanie, and how desperately hard she’d tried to steer Miley away from Dylan. But if he’d broken his promise, clearly that meant he and Miley did something together. And if Melanie was writing about it, clearly that had upset her way more than it should have.
This wasn’t just about protecting her sister. Her sister was a grown woman who could make her own choices, addict or not, and a woman Melanie had ignored for seven days straight because she was ashamed of her. Not to mention she didn’t tell her husband—my husband—about her only sibling for years. There was so much more to this story and I needed to know everything, so I made my way to the shed to collect the next journal.
As I shut the door of the shed behind me, glancing downward so I didn’t miss the step, someone asked, “You found them?”
I gasped, leaping backward and pressing a hand over my heart.
“Oh, shit! Yadira!” I cried, finding her in the dark. “You scared me! What the hell? I thought you were gone!”
“I was, but I forgot the grocery list for tomorrow and came back.” She stepped forward, her head at a slight angle and a worried expression on her face.
“You found the journals.” She wasn’t smiling. In the dark her face was serious, almost frozen.
I clung to the journal in my hand.
She sighed. “I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen. I had hoped you would just throw them away.”
“You knew about them?”
“Of course, I knew about them. His mother found them along with some other books while clearing out her stuff in the closets, but I don’t think Miss Cathy knew they were journals, and if she did, she didn’t care. She just put them on the shelf with the books to get them out of the way.” Yadira rubbed her cheek. “I was helping organize the shed during times Miss Cathy wasn’t around. I read a couple pages but knew better thanu to read all of it. You shouldn’t be reading them, Samira. It’ll only cause trouble.”
“Well, why did you leave them in there? Why not throw them away yourself if you knew they’d cause trouble?”
“Because I figured Roland would have wanted to see them or that he would have come across them himself. I don’t know.” She shrugged hard, her shoulders hiking. “It seemed like something he was supposed to discover himself to make peace with . . . but not something the detectives were supposed to find, so I hid them when they started digging around after she died.”