Page 6 of She Doesn't Have a Clue
Kate hustled after him, her suitcase bopping along on the uneven terrain and flipping over from the force of the wind. By the time she met him at the gate she was more than ready to be out of the oncoming weather, but as Jake rattled the gate it didn’t budge.
“It’s locked,” he said. “We’ll have to go around.”
“Around where?” Kate asked, looking at the long stretch of building on each side. She wasn’t keen to go exploring after the unfortunate shredded deer incident. A flash of movement caught her eye from inside the garden. “I think there’s someone over there.”
Kate could just see a young woman with blond hair in an ill-fitting blue dress, her face marred by dark drips of mascara down her cheeks. She’d been crying, obviously, but she didn’t look like she was crying now. She lookedpissed.
“Ah, great, we’ll just have them let us in,” Jake said, raising an arm to catch the woman’s attention. But Kate grabbed his arm, pulling him to one side of the gate and shushing him. “What are you doing?”
“She’s arguing with someone,” Kate said in a low voice, nodding at where the young woman gesticulated with sharp intensity. They couldn’t see who she was talking to, but Kate imagined the person was getting an earful. At one point the woman threw her arms wide, like she might consider tackling the other person.
“This feels an awful lot like snooping,” Jake said, though he didn’t move from where she’d pushed him against the garden wall. In fact, he seemed to lean in closer as the young woman grabbed the other person by the arm, snatching a handful of vibrant floral fabric. “On the other hand, it’s rude to interrupt.”
“Shh, I can’t hear them!” Kate said, crouching and leaning forward for a better angle. The other person—a woman, Kate assumed from the garb—snatched her arm out of the young woman’s grip, raising a hand and slapping the blond woman hard.
“Oh!” Kate and Jake exclaimed simultaneously, giving away their position.
The young woman’s gaze snapped to the gate. Kate grabbed Jake and darted back, pressing against the garden wall as her heart pounded. Shewasn’t quite sure what she was so worried about—sure, she’d committed a social faux pas, but it was their fault, really, arguing out in public like that. And she and Jake had a perfectly reasonable excuse to be there. Still, it wasn’t the successful start to the weekend she’d envisioned, getting caught snooping like this.
“Do you think they saw us?” Jake asked after a moment.
“I’m going to check.” Kate leaned around him, doing her best to ignore the press of his chest against her arm as she surveyed the garden. She half expected the woman to be standing there like a video game jump scare, streaky mascara guaranteed to haunt her dreams. But the gate was clear, the garden empty beyond it.
“They’re gone,” Kate said, strangely disappointed.
“That was awkward, wasn’t it?” Jake said, checking the garden for himself. “What do you suppose they were fighting over? Seating charts? Floral arrangements? Maybe they both brought the same dress for the ceremony?”
“I don’t think that had anything to do with the wedding,” Kate said with a frown.
“Ah, I see the gears turning,” Jake said. “Go on, then, what’s your theory?”
This was another bad habit of Kate’s. She couldn’t help but observe and theorize, like everyone around them was in the middle of their own murder mystery. After spending all day inventing suspicious conversations for Loretta, even the most mundane exchanges took on a tinge of the ominous to Kate.
It used to drive Spencer crazy whenever they went out in public, the way Kate wouldaccidentallyeavesdrop andcasuallywonder what the people at the next table over were plotting. He said she never really fully returned to reality after spending the day in fantasy Loretta land, and she learned to keep her theories and observations to herself. But now here was Jake, openly asking her what she suspected. Like Blake, who was always game to help Loretta put the pieces of her investigation together. But Jake wasn’t Blake, and he would tire of her suspicions as surely as Spencer had.
“My theory is that this is about to open up on us,” Kate said, waving at the steely gray sky overhead. “And unless you’re scaling this gate, we’d better find another way in.”
“Fine,” Jake said, heading down the hill. But he couldn’t help a final comment, tossed casually over his shoulder. “Coward!”
“I’m not a coward!” Kate said indignantly, slip-sliding down the hill after him. “I’m just not keen on being caught out by the… the Deer Shredder!”
Now there was an idea for a Loretta killer. The Deer Shredder. He graduated from torturing animals to torturing humans, and only Loretta could stop him before she became his next victim. Although after what Kate had just seen, she couldn’t imagine harming a poor defenseless animal. Even an imaginary one. So back to square one.Again.
She could see where the house had been beautiful once, with white plaster walls and red roof tiles and turrets and gables and whatever other architectural flair enormous houses came with. New money spent better than old money, though, and the Hempstead fortune was now several generations old. Which meant the Manor showed it.
Vines overgrew nearly every surface, turning the faded gray plaster into a sentient wall of green and brown. Tiles hung at slanted angles from the roof, one crashing to the ground as Kate and Jake scurried up the front lawn toward the safety of the house. It seemed that efforts had been made in recent years to repair much of the damage, though, as scaffolding covered the back half of the house and piles of fresh siding and paint buckets peeked out from under rain tarps.
The entrance to the house was at least covered, the massive wooden double doors protected by a cupola. Kate crowded close to Jake as they tried to find any small patch of the porch that wasn’t getting bombarded by windy rain. Her hand brushed his waist, his nose brushed against her ear, and they were altogether too close for comfort. A girl might try something, and Kate had already learnedthatlesson two years ago.
“I’ll knock on the door,” she announced, loudly and woodenly like a community theater bit player as Jake set the knife off to the side. She stared up at the elaborately carved door as she banged her fist against it,unwilling to face Jake. Which meant she had to study a panel that she realized depicted a deer with its throat being slashed open.
“What is with the deer?” she muttered, taking a step back as the door creaked open.
“Welcome to Hempstead Manor!” said a little man in a striped suit with an artistic goatee. He spread his arms wide, looking for all the world like Gomez Addams welcoming them to his haunted mansion. “You must be our last guest for the evening, and not a moment too soon. Look at the weather out there! Come in, come in!”
He ushered them into a long, dim hallway with tile floors and darkly paneled wooden walls covered in staid portraits, chandeliers made of antlers hanging low over their heads. The lights flickered, casting long shadows across each portrait until Kate was having flashbacks to university scholarship panels full of judgy white men.
“Pretty ballsy to have a portrait gallery as your entryway,” Jake murmured to Kate.