Page 38 of It's One of Us

Good grief, Darby. Your imagination is really running wild these days.

Later, exhausted, Darby decides a nap is in order. She wraps the blankets around her and falls into a fitful sleep, startling at every creak, dog bark, engine whine, door slam. These are the sounds that have always comforted her before, and now they are ominous, frightening. A woman has died, been murdered, and while she hasn’t fixated on Beverly Cooke’s death, suddenly it is all she can think about. What it must have been like to know you were about to die. The panic, the fear, the hypoxia.

She wakes to the sounds of lapping water and shattering glass, but quickly realizes it was just a dream, just a nightmare. Her imagination on overdrive.

As she drifts back to sleep, she hears something from her dreams.

A woman’s voice.

A woman’s voice, calling for help.

17

THE WIFE

At the Jones build, Olivia shuts the door behind her and walks carefully between the stacks of flooring and paint buckets to the kitchen.

A flash of red. A hoodie, draped over the counter, next to a leaking to-go cup of coffee. The cup is perched atop her unfinished four-inch-thick slab of Statuario marble, and even from here she can see the dark ring that’s formed on the stone’s porous surface.

“No!” she cries, leaping for it, just as a head pops up from behind the island. She screams in surprise and knocks the coffee cup off the slab, where it immediately begins to soak into the subfloor.

“Oh my God, it’s ruined.”

And there goes the budget, and the timeline. They’d ordered this piece directly from the quarry in Italy, had it specially cut striato, so the veining formed a swoosh pattern that ran over the waterfall edge, and waited three months for it to show up, and now some idiot has managed to ruin it by putting his coffee cup on the raw marble? She knew they should have polished and sealed it the moment it arrived. They were waiting for the owners to decide on a finish.Never again.

“Hey, sorry.” The owner of the hoodie—young, bearded, rumpled, sweat-stained—calmly picks up his coffee cup. The stain is dry. He’s been there for a while. “I’m sure we can get that out. I can just buff it up.” He starts for his toolbox, which she notices is perched precariously on the edge of the island, ready to fall and ruin something else.

“No. Stop. Don’t touch it. I’m calling my guy. Who the hell are you, and what are you doing on my job site?”

“Griffin White. I work for Dave.”

“Which Dave? I have three.”

He mutters a last name that sounds like Hartwell, and she narrows her eyes. “Dave Hartwell is a carpenter, not an installer. Plus, he isn’t working this job. Who are you really?”

He doesn’t answer, only stares at her, his brown eyes unfathomable. His voice is cold. “Like I said, I’m Griffin. And I work for DaveCaswell. I’m supposed to be pouring footers for your porch.”

“Then you should be outside, not in here ruining my kitchen. How did you even get the code?”

His dark eyes are flat and assessing, like a snake. Pools of black in a bone-white face. He might be handsome if not for those awful eyes.

She points to the door. “Go. Now. And I’m letting Caswell know you helped yourself to my interior and ruined thirty thousand dollars in marble. You’ll have to pay for the damage. I’ll leave it up to him how to make it right. You better hope his insurance is up to date.”

When he doesn’t move, she waves a hand at him. “Leave. I have work to do.”

He takes his sweet time, gathering up the toolbox and putting on the hoodie. He retrieves the coffee cup from the floor. When she sees his back, she dials her counter guy, Eddie, who answers on the first ring.

“Oh, boy, do we have a problem.”

“Everything is fixable,” he replies. “What happened?”

Olivia hears the back door to the property open and close softly and looks over her shoulder to see the young man who just screwed up her day, her life, her career, staring at her again from outside the glass. The second she deals with this, she is calling Caswell and having the asshole fired. He gives her the creeps, standing there staring. Why the hell has he gone out the back instead of the front?

“Hold on a sec.”

She marches to the door and flicks the dead bolt.

He grins. His lips are chapped, and he licks them, slowly. They stand there a moment, locked in a battle of wills. Her inside, him outside. Both of them pretending he couldn’t just smash a rock through all that glass and put a hand around her throat. He flicks up the hood on his jacket and draws the zipper in exaggerated slowness, all the way to his neck.