Page 77 of She Doesn't Have a Clue
“I thought that was my big flaw, leaving,” Jake said, staring her down. “Which is it? Should I stay or should I go? I’m fucked either way, aren’t I?”
“Get out,” Kate said, vibrating now. With anger, and that big emotion. What a fool she’d been, considering this some new incarnation of herself. It had been the adrenaline and shock talking; she was still plain old Kate Valentine, and she always would be.
Jake gave a growl and stalked toward the door. He paused with his hand on the handle, and Kate’s traitorous heart leapt like it always did with him; like maybe things could end differently this time. But when he turned to her, his face was like stone.
“Good luck catching your murderer, Loretta,” he said, before jerking the door open and disappearing.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Well, wasn’t this a fan-fucking-tastic mess she’d made of things now. She could only stare at the door Jake had disappeared through, waiting for her brain to tell her what to do next. Waiting for Loretta to give her a single fucking clue about what to do now.
“It can’t go on like this, Loretta,” said Blake, running his hands through his wavy hair in frustration. “I can’t go on like this. You have to choose. Me or him. Us or not. You can’t keep leading me on, jerking me around, making me feel things for you and then punishing me when I do. You have to choose.”
“I choose myself, Blake, every time,” Loretta said, putting on a precise layer of alarming red in the dingy bathroom mirror at the Key Lime. “That’s what you and Geoff don’t get. I. Choose. Myself.”
“Then let us go, Lor,” Blake said. “If you want to be free, fine. But let us be free, too.”
She wouldn’t let the pain in his voice or the anguish so clearly etched on his face get to her; she couldn’t. Too many people were depending on her to save them. He thought she was free? Ha. She was just as trapped as the rest of them.
“You know where the door is and how to use it,” was her only reply.
And use it he had. But this time it hadn’t been Blake, and she hadn’t imagined it. She’d had Jake, and she’d let him walk away. And not even Loretta could save her now. Oh god, was she going to have to admit that Jake might be right? That she might be doing exactly what he’d accused her of—hiding in her fantasies, unable to face reality, more comfortable manipulating the fake lives of her characters and their emotions to suit herself. But now she couldn’t even manage that. Jake had ruined Loretta as thoroughly as he’d ruined her.
So what if she asked herselfwhat Loretta would dofar more than she asked what Kate Valentine would do? That “fantasy” had been paying her mortgage for the past two years. Of course, that “fantasy” had also landed her at her ex-fiancé’s wedding in an isolated manor during a storm with at least one murderer and several sociopaths. So maybe the argument could go both ways.
Her stack of suspects now felt childish and stupid as she stared at them in her neat, organized handwriting. Like they were in a Loretta story, with tidy backstories and clear motives that made them obvious suspects in a web of suspects that eventually led to a clear murderer. But that’s not how motives worked in real life; in real life, they were messy and overlapping and chunks of time went unaccounted for and everybody had a reason to kill everybody else but nobody cracked and fessed up. She ought to just hole up until the storm passed, catch the first floating craft out of there, and let the police sort it all out.
But Kate was tired of doing what she ought to do. Doing what she ought to do had kept her safe, but it had never made her happy. She’d rather walk into the storm-tossed sea than admit it, but Jake had a point. She couldn’t keep turning to Loretta to solve her problems. And it wasn’t like anybody else was going to find Rebecca’s killer or save Kennedy from another poisoning attempt. The closest thing Kennedy had to Loretta was Kate, so Kate would have to do.
Her gut was telling her she was still missing something. A suspect she’d overlooked, or a motive she hadn’t discovered yet. Everyone she’d investigated so far had good reason to kill Rebecca, or Kennedy, orRebeccaandKennedy. She’d even found the missing champagne glass, but she wasn’t convinced it had led her to the murderer like she thought it would. Cassidy had plenty of motive, but Kate believed her affection for Kennedy was real. She didn’t think Cassidy would try to poison her cousin, much less her half sister. Richie and Steven certainly had plenty to gain from getting Rebecca out of the way, but their attempts at sabotage had been clumsy and obvious. No way had Richie Hempstead had the foresight to bring a specialty poison for the weekend. And everybody else—Marcus, Juliette, Spencer, even Serena—all had alibis for the time of Kennedy’s poisoning. Plus, there was the matter of staging Kennedy’s poisoning to look like one of Kate’s books, which could mean that whoever wanted Kennedy deadalsowanted Kate to pay for it.
“I need to go back to the scene of the crime,” Kate said out loud, testing the sound of it. It sounded… good? She needed to understand the evidence. She’d also done enough research for Loretta to know that often it was the hundredth time an investigator walked the scene that put all the pieces together for them.
Someone had obviously made a run on the wine cave since the last time she’d been down there; several of the racks were empty, and there were foil wrappings littered all over the place. Kate hadn’t registered much about the place the night before—Kennedy’s dead-at-the-time body and all—but now she realized how extensive it was. It must have spanned half the length of the house, the deeply polished wooden racks going back forty to fifty feet. It was also obvious it wasn’t originally built to house wines. Large wooden shelves stacked all the way up to the ceiling must have been used to store contraband barrels of whisky and rum.
She pressed into the depths of the cave, toward a line of refrigerated units in the far reaches, their motors quiet, their doors heavily padlocked. She spotted the coveted Dom Pérignon behind one of the glass doors, and absently reached for the padlock to give it a tug, just to check. She’d never had Dom, and she’d always wondered if it really did taste ten times better than her ten-dollar sparkling wine.
But when she tugged on the padlock, the unit moved slightly. Shefrowned, tugging a little harder, and it rolled forward a full inch. She bent down, looking for wheels, but the unit seemed solidly set on the floor. She shined her light on the floor, pulling once more, and realized it was because the unit itself wasn’t moving—the floor was. The entire unit was set on a rotating disc, opening to reveal a secret passage behind it.
“How many hidden passages does one manor house need?” Kate wondered. But her voice wasn’t the only sound filling the space—somewhere deep in the darkness of the secret passage was a thumping sound, with occasional high-pitched whining sounds. Like someone… crying out for help? Or in pleasure? It was hard to tell.
She shined her flashlight into the space to get a better feel for it, and realized it was also more extensive than she’d first realized. It followed the wall behind the refrigerated units in both directions, dusty and narrow with exposed wooden beams and stone floors and not much else. And there again was the thumping sound, the whining coming through more clearly as a melody. Music. There was a wooden lever at about head height on the opposite wall, and Kate had firsthand experience with how it must work. She pulled it down, and the section of wall slid silently open. At least she wasn’t braced against it half-naked this time.
A wave of warm, humid air hit her as she stepped through the hidden door into a tropical paradise. The space must have been at least as large as the wine cave, cavernous with massive stone pillars holding up the edges. The walls were a kaleidoscope of aquatic colors—deep turquoise and brilliant blue and seafoam green with gold and red accents. Every square inch of the place was decorated in tile motifs, with sea nymphs frolicking in the waves and gods with their tridents commanding schools of fish and pods of dolphins.
An Olympic-size pool took up the majority of the space, with private alcoves for changing and showering, as well as a hot tub big enough to hold thirty people, with a gold statue of Poseidon as its crowning glory. Even down here, in a complete absence of sunlight, there were Rebecca’s fronds and potted plants, making the whole place feel worlds away from the dreary weather outside. Kate could have been in Tahiti or Jamaica down here.
The pool room. She’d found the site of Rebecca’s murder.
And floating in the middle of the murder scene—which boasted a tile floor in a repeating floral motif—were Richie and Steven on matching slices of inflatable pizza. They both wore sunglasses despite the fact that there was very little light from the few large flashlights they’d set at the edge of the water, and they spun in lazy circles around each other.
“Hello,” she said.
“Jesus!” Richie exclaimed, upending himself off his pizza slice and dropping into the water with an unceremonious splash. Steven’s only reaction was a single harrumph as Richie resurfaced. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“What are you doing down here?” Kate countered.
“We’re celebrating,” Richie said, wading to the edge and lowering the volume on a Bluetooth speaker. He tossed his glasses and held out a hand expectantly to Kate. When she didn’t move, he huffed impatiently. “Towel?”