“No,” I said, and couldn’t help laughing. “It’s not weird.”

“Good.” His arms flexed beneath the short sleeves of his red T-shirt as he started to chop a pepper. I watched his hands as he worked, so adept and sure. It was riveting.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” I asked.

He lifted his hand and sucked a bit of pepper juice off his thumb. “When you cook for yourself for a hundred years, you develop some skills.” He nodded toward the dining area. “Could you grab me the wooden platter? It’s in the sideboard over there.”

“Sure.”

For some reason, I felt my heart rate thrumming in my wrists as I moved across the room, and I felt conspicuous. Fisher said something that made Bea and Lauren laugh and Liam blush. No one was paying any attention to me. As I bent to retrieve the platter from a low shelf, I noticed an old scrapbook open on top of the sideboard, its pages browned at the edges. The black-and-white and sepia-toned photos were held to the pages with black corner stickers. The book was flanked by a lit candle on each side, but they were both set a careful distance away from the book. I glanced at the first photo—a grainy shot of a lanky, smiling boy and a younger, round-faced girl in turn-of-the-century clothing—and dropped the heavy platter. It hit the corner of the sideboard with a serious clatter, but I somehow managed to grab it before it fell to the floor.

“God, Rory! Give me a heart attack!” Lauren said, hand to her chest.

“You okay?” Joaquin asked, coming up behind me.

“That’s you!” I blurted.

Joaquin nodded. “Yeah. That’s me and my sister, Maria.”

His sister. The one he’d killed in a car accident. His expression went distant for a moment as he eyed the photograph—not sad, exactly, just not here.

“How did you get this?” I asked. “Did you have it with you when you died?”

It seemed unlikely, considering he’d committed suicide alone in his attic. But the only things any of us had with us in Juniper Landing were those things we’d had on our person when we’d perished. Or in my and Darcy’s case, in our bags, since we’d been going into witness protection when Steven Nell attacked.

“No. It was my sister’s.” He took the platter from me, our fingers grazing. “I found it in the relic room about fifty years ago.”

He turned and headed back from the kitchen while my knees almost went out from under me. I placed one hand on the surface of the table and the other on the sideboard to steady myself.

“You found it?”

“Crazy, huh?” It was a light statement, but he didn’t say it lightly.

Slowly I tried to piece the implications of this together. If it was his sister’s and he’d found it in the relic room, then that meant that his sister had come through Juniper Landing when she’d died. When he’d accidentally killed her.

“So she…she had it with her when she died?” I asked, joining him in the kitchen.

“She must have brought it to church with her to show her friends,” he said as he wiped the platter clean of dust with a wet rag. His eyes flicked to my face. “I know. It’s freaky. I’ve had fifty years to contemplate how freaky it is. I killed her, she came here, and someone ushered her from here and tossed her stuff in the relic room only for me to stumble on it decades later when I was looking for a new needle for my turntable. I know.”

His hands started to shake as he wiped the platter yet again. I reached out and put my hand on his wrist, steadying him. He stopped moving.

“Does anyone remember her? Did Tristan…?”

I paused, his very name on my tongue causing my mouth to dry out. Joaquin shook his head. “No one really remembered her. I like to think it was because she was ushered straight to the Light.” His eyes shone as he looked at me, and he smiled. “She didn’t exactly have any unfinished business to deal with. That was all mine.”

My free hand fluttered to my chest. “Joaquin, I’m so—”

“Don’t.” He turned and put the platter down. “Seriously, don’t. It’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, but it is what it is.” He glanced across the room at the album and lifted a shoulder. “I’m glad I have it. It’s filled with good memories. And without it I’d have no images of anyone in my family, so…”

“Wow.”

For a moment, I couldn’t imagine the right thing to say. Joaquin stood still, his fingers pressing into the top of the kitchen island, the tips going white.

“Are you guys ever gonna bring the food in here?” Bea demanded. “I’m starving.”

I hurried to grab a bag of chips, then emptied it into a basket. Joaquin added the chopped vegetables to the platter and followed behind me.

“What were you guys talking about in there?” Fisher asked. “It looked pretty serious.”

Tags: Kate Brian Shadowlands
Source: readsnovelonline.net