Oliver ran a hand over his head and sighed. “Say you’re right. Maeve didn’t kill Callum. But since she’s the one behind this, then why does it matter who did do him in? We don’t need to answer that question for our ‘benefactor’ because we have her locked in the cellar. All we need to do is take care of her and go our separate ways. Leave the past in the past.”
Lorna dug her toe into the carpet, then kicked aimlessly at the air. “Do you really think she’s capable of pulling off something like this on her own?”
Oliver shrugged. “Why not? All it would take is a little planning. We know Maeve’s unemployed, so she’s got plenty of time on her hands. Although this would also take a fair bit of cash, and I’m not sure where she’d get that from. Course, she could have a rich dead uncle or something. Anyway, it would have to be someone who knew what life was like in Caldwell Street. I mean, Callum never did those Happy Wednesday notes for anyone other than us. And like you said, the police never investigated his death as murder. So other than the five of us, no one else knows what happened that night. That makes it a short list of people who . . .”
Lorna glanced suddenly at Hollis’s covered face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Hollis said the same thing last night. The last time we spoke. He said it’s a short list of people who would know all these details.” She approached Hollis and tentatively patted his pockets. Oliver’s lip curled at the thought of touching the body. “Hollis was making notes last night, but he wasn’t using his phone. He wrote them in a notepad. If he’d figured anything out before he . . . it would be in his notebook, not his phone.”
Oliver’s phone buzzed. All of her messages suddenly came through, at least one every half hour since 4 p.m. yesterday when he hadn’t returned to the house as usual.
Traffic bad?
Long line @ shop?
If @ shop get extra bottle. It is the weekend!
Why aren’t u answering?
Are u ok?
Useless. Your dad never this bad.
Do u hate me? Is that it?
Like your sister now? Never talk to me again?
I don’t need u. No one does.
He should delete the lot. But he couldn’t. Many times his sister—half-sister—had begged him to leave Mum to her fate. What was the word his sister had used? Codependent. Enabling. Easy enough for her to get away, though. She didn’t need their mother. She had a dad who adored her. A dad with money. Last time Oliver got the nerve to look up his dad, the old coot was on a fishing trawler somewhere near Alaska.
“It’s not here,” Lorna said.
“Huh?”
“Hollis’s notepad.”
But Oliver wasn’t listening. Mum had texted, so Mum had his attention. Callum had noticed, back in the day, the effect Mum had on him, after another phone call left Oliver scrambling to get home. Callum said it was good to love your parents, but you had to set boundaries. You couldn’t let them get away with disrupting your life, especially when it was hurting you. He’d had that look, one where Oliver could tell he was speaking from experience, but Oliver couldn’t remember if he’d said anything else. Oliver had never taken Callum’s advice.
When he looked up again, Lorna was gone. Ellie, too, was nowhere to be seen.
“Shit.” He hurried into the hall. “Lorna? Lorna!”
He turned and bumped right into her.
“Ow!” Lorna rubbed her shoulder. “Calm down. I’m taking a look in Maeve’s room. If your theory’s right and she killed Hollis, she might have hid his notepad there.”
“Don’t you mean our theory?” Oliver asked, but Lorna didn’t answer, already caught up in her search.
Flashes of Caldwell Street returned to him as he observed the mess in Maeve’s room. Her belongings had expanded to fit the available space like scum on the surface of a pond. Clothes scattered on the floor and furniture. Various face washes and lotions and cotton balls littering the bathroom. Papers scattered on the floor. Her suitcase closed but not zipped, the sleeves of shirts and legs of jeans sticking out like tongues. Oliver picked up the loose papers while Lorna made her way across the room to the desk.
“Credit card statements? Who brings those on a romantic holiday?”
“It could be what was in her envelope last night. The blackmail.”
He flipped through the pages. “None of these are in Maeve’s name. And they’re all maxed out. Cash advances.” He whistled. “Well, we wanted to know how Maeve could afford an evil plan like this. Mystery solved! She decides to use this as her ‘evidence’ that she’s being blackmailed, too, but like everything Maeve does, it’s backfired ’cause now we know she had the funds to book this place. What else did you think you could hide, Maeve?”
Oliver tossed the statements on the bed and picked through the suitcase while Lorna looked at a paperback book on the desk: a shirtless, longhaired, chiseled man in a kilt embracing a buxom woman in a tight-fitting green dress. Oliver was ready to make a joke about Maeve’s large cotton panties when he found a lacy red bra and panties.
“Oh, sick.” His lip curled. “These are Maeve’s? I do not want that image in my head.”
Lorna rolled her eyes and turned a page in the book. A cream envelope fluttered from the pages to the floor by Oliver’s knee. The creases and skin oil stains showed that it had been read and re-folded multiple times.
“What a surprise. Another envelope. Let’s see what this pathetic riddle says. ‘My dearest M Doll . . .’” His voice slowed as he realized what he was reading. “‘I can’t wait to finally meet you in person. I feel like we know each other more intimately than any two other people on earth, but it won’t be until I can entwine my legs with yours and taste . . .’ Nope.” Oliver dropped the letter onto the suitcase. “I’m not reading any more of that.”
Lorna picked it up and skimmed to the end. “It’s signed ‘Yours Forever, Tom.’”
“Who’s Tom?”
“The online boyfriend she said lured her here. Shit.” Lorna ran a hand through her hair. “All these body lotions. The lingerie. You pack all this for a dirty weekend, not for murder.”
“She could’ve staged it.”
Lorna raised an eyebrow. “You mean Maeve would’ve anticipated that we would suspect her and search her room? Maeve? A woman who couldn’t even predict it was going to rain when the sky went black and the wind picked up?”
“You have a point. What website did she say she met him on?”
“I’m not sure. SingleMingle, I think?”
Oliver pulled up the website on his phone, dismissing the notifications that asked him to download the app. “And his username. It was Kit something?”
“Kit_Snow0273.”
A few seconds later he had found it. Oliver showed Lorna the photo on his phone: a balding white man with a beer gut and the kind of smile that could make up for a less than attractive body. The kind of smile Oliver had perfected in his teens. But there was something off about the picture. The resolution was a little too clear, the lighting a little too perfect, for a candid selfie down the pub. He dropped the photo in Google. The image appeared multiple times. The fictional Kit_Snow0273 was part of a group shot of middle aged men in a stock photo, raising pints in a generic pub.