Page 65 of Deadly Little Scandals

“I know,” Sadie Grace said, rising up to the tips of her toes in arelevé. “It’s just—eep!”

I was about to ask her what that was supposed to mean when I felt something hard and round press into the small of my back.

As a child, I’d been obsessed with many things—lock-picking and medieval torture and mixing the perfect martini. But one thing I’d never educated myself on was guns.

ur new friends weren’t exactly chatty. So far, all we’d gotten out of them was a single word.

“Move.”

Apparently, we stuck out here about as much as Greer’s Porsche.

“She’ll want to talk to you.”

That was six more words, said as we were herded around the back of the house. Sitting on the porch was an old woman. She had her back to us, so I couldn’t see anything other than her bun—wiry, brown hair, streaked at least three-quarters gray. As we drew closer to the front of the chair, I took in her outfit: an oversize T-shirt, knee-length shorts that revealed legs with a farmer’s tan. She was barefoot now, but based on the tan lines, I assumed that was out of the norm.

Her skin was wrinkled and cracked, but it didn’t have that paper-thin look I’d seen on other people later in life. I hadn’t even seen her face yet, and I was already pretty sure that nothing about this woman was fragile.

There was a dog lying at her feet, a mix, by the look of it—part pit bull, part Lab. The dog lifted his head as we were shoved forward.

“He likes me,” Boone declared beside me. “The dog,” he clarified, in case that was unclear to anyone. “Dogs always like me. They’re very good judges of character.”

“We found these three sniffing around up front,” the person behind me said, lowering her shotgun. I hadn’t processed until this moment, listening to her voice for a second time, that she was female.

“Beth don’t need this,” the other one commented—also female, also not particularly fond of the lot of us. “She’s having a hard enough time already.”

“Is that her name?” Sadie-Grace asked. “The girl having the baby? Beth?”

The woman in the chair stood. Given that I was in possession of every ounce of street smarts that the three of us had to share, I prepared myself to handle this and shot Sadie-Grace and Boone looks that I hoped they would interpret to mean that they should cease talking, full stop.

Then the woman in charge turned around, and I realized that I was completely unprepared to handle anything at all.

“You have the look of our family about you,” she said, assessing me.

I barely heard a single word, because all I could think wasShe has Lillian’s face.

ou’re sitting up, Sawyer! That’s good.”

“You propped me up.”

“And you didn’t fall over this time. Glass, full!”

“Did you hear that?”

“I would like to say that I didn’t, but…”

“You did.”

he woman with my grandmother’s face gestured for us to sit. Dumbly, I did, and Sadie-Grace and Boone followed suit.

All three of us stared at her.

“I take it my beloved sister never mentioned that she had a twin?”

Lillian and Davis Ames had both referenced the town they grew up in. I knew that Lillian had met my grandfather at a party at the Arcadia hotel, but I hadn’t connected the dots that the town where she’d grown up was probably close to Regal Lake.

I hadn’t spent much time, if any, thinking about my grandmother’s family.

“Lillian never shared that little tidbit,” I confirmed.She never mentioned any siblings at all.