The Sinner (Notorious 1)

Keeping an eye on you—I didn’t have to say it, and if that bothered Matt well too damn bad.

I reached up and gathered the long silky fall of my hair into a ponytail then I curled it around itself, tucking it and wrapping it until it was all but gone, vanished into a tight knot at the back of my head.

“And do not mess up my garden.”

3

Savannah

Everyone thought libraries were quiet.

I totally disagreed. In all the years I’d spent hiding, studying, teaching and working in libraries, I’d found each and every one of them loud. Filled with sound, actually. Like one of those seashells you pressed to your ear.

There was an endless ocean of sound in the Bonne Terre Public Library.

The click and whir of the big black ceiling fans. The silky brush of paper over the gleaming oak counters. The hum of computers. The scratch of pencils. The whisper of shoes across the old wood floors. On the second floor, a toddler shrieked and a mother quickly shushed him. There was the quiet beat of my heart and, of course, the not-so-quiet whispering of the high school students at the computer bank.

Owen Johns and his friends.

It was always Owen Johns and his friends.

Summer school had been moved from the high school to the library so they could finally fix the roof of the gymnasium. This meant I had been looking at the smirking faces of Owen Johns, Garrett Watson and their various hangers-on for a week.

And in the days since the Manor had been violated, their smirks were smirkier.

They did it.

I saw it in their eyes, the sour glee in their smiles, the dark triumph that wafted off them like stink from garbage. They’d torn apart my courtyard, my grandmother’s orchids. Those boys had taken black spray paint to our stone walls, forcing my hand, and now there was a man at the Manor.

Matt Howe was in my home, in my courtyard, and Matt Howe made my heart pound and my stomach tremble and it was nearly intolerable.

And it was all Owen’s and Garrett’s fault.

I knew it with an instinct I didn’t question. The O’Neill instinct—never wrong. The O’Neill impulses, on the other hand, too often lured by pounding hearts and trembling stomachs, were always disastrously wrong.

I stood at the counter and checked in the books from the overnight drop box. My hands didn’t shake. My face didn’t change, but I stood there, listening to their whispers, catching words like “she had a kid” and “he was married.” And contemplated my revenge.

A letter to their parents, perhaps? Regarding some obscenely overdue books of a high monetary value? Good, but not quite enough.

“You watching the love triangle?” whispered Janice, my assistant and Keeper of All Things Even Slightly Gossip-y.

“Love triangle?” I whispered, keeping my eyes on Owen, Garrett and Owen’s girlfriend.

“Owen’s girlfriend,” Janice whispered in juicy tones, “I don’t know her name, but I’ve been calling her The Cheerleader.”

It was true, the redhead seemed incomplete without pom-poms.

“But The Cheerleader has been watching Garrett when Owen isn’t looking.”

“Really?” I asked.

“And Garrett is not looking away.”

Now that had the makings of revenge.

The phone rang and Janice walked away to answer it while I contemplated warm thoughts of love triangles blowing up.

“Hey!” Fingers snapped in front of my face and I jerked out of my fantasy to find my good friend Juliette Tremblant, looking stormy and all too police-chiefy across the counter.

“Hey, Juliette. What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Juliette repeated, incredulously. Her black eyebrows practically hit her hairline. “You just hired some stranger to work at the Manor?”

“Word travels fast,” I said. It always did when it was about us.

“One of my guys heard it from Wayne Smith who heard it from his wife who was taking her morning walk down your road and saw Margot and some stranger on the front porch shaking hands.”

“Shh!” Owen and Garrett said, over-loud, over-annoying in mockery of my librarian battle cry.

“Excuse me?” Juliette turned to the boys, the badge clipped to the belt of her pants gleaming in the milky morning sunlight.

The boys went white and I tried hard not to smile.

“Sorry, Chief Tremblant,” they chorused and quickly returned to their work and summer school teacher.

“I need a badge,” I whispered.

“What you need is to have your head checked,” Juliette said, her voice lower. “I called Margot this morning, to see if it was true and she said you’d hired a drifter.”

“He’s hardly a drifter. He was wearing an expensive suit,” I said. “And it’s not like he’s not staying at the house. He’s going to get a room at the Bonne Terre Inn.”

“He’s still a stranger,” Juliette said.

“I have vacation starting tomorrow—”

“And you’re going to spend it babysitting this guy and your courtyard?”

“No, actually, I’m going to spend most of it doing research on extreme religious rituals around the world for the Discovery Channel, but I’ll be home.”