Page 17

Eve

Damsels and Distress

Harper placed her backpack in the trunk of my car, and then we were off, tearing down the empty road toward yet another ghost town.

With one hand on the stick, the other on the wheel, I sent covert glances over at Harper, who was staring down at the locket picture with an expression I couldn’t read.

She’d finally scraped her hair into a messy-looking ponytail—at least, messy for Harper—and she was drumming her fingers against her lips, looking bare and even more tempting without her usual red lipstick.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She was quiet. Then, “Priscilla Blackburn is your aunt. Which makes her Monty’s aunt. And it appears as though she didn’t just steal a bunch of diamonds and run off. She escaped with Adeline…the woman she loved.”

“Yes,” I said softly. “Yes to all of it.”

“That’s why this is so personal to you. This is the secret you’ve been keeping from me.”

“This is the secret we’ve been keeping from everyone ,” I clarified.

“Based on the evidence that we have, our great-aunt Priscilla was a queer woman who risked it all for the woman that she loved. Monty and I have spent a lot of time hoping that they made it, that they survived. It’s why we’re so protective of it. ”

“And what about the actual diamonds?” she asked.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, noting what looked like rain off in the foothills. We’d left the city limits already, the land around us expanding into grassland prairie.

“Diamonds or not, what Monty and I are searching for is answers. Like you said the other day, we’re also fervently hoping for indisputable clues as to who she really was.”

Harper turned her head, and I felt her studying my profile. “You want to know if she and Adeline were their own tiny revolution.”

My throat tightened. The brief look I shared with Harper felt as charged as the electricity building in the sky overhead.

“You got it, Hendrix.”

Harper smiled fully at me then—what felt like her first real smile, and it was more impish and crooked than I would have expected from someone like her. It was like taking a punch to the sternum. But in a good way.

Whatever emotion she saw written across my face had her blushing.

I tore my focus away from her and back to the road.

“You said you’d been keeping this secret from everyone,” she said, breaking the silence. “Does that mean…your family? Your friends? Because if I’m going to pursue this story, this all becomes public knowledge.”

“I know that,” I said, nodding.

“Does…Monty know that?” she asked.

Guilt curdled in my stomach. “Let me worry about Monty. She’s keeping secrets from me, too, anyway. Can’t say she’ll be that surprised.”

My tone came out more petulant than I’d intended, but Harper didn’t push.

“Monty was basically disowned by my family while she was still a tabloid oddity in the nineties,” I explained.

“Later she told me she only ever came home to Princeton to see me, to make sure I was okay. She was the original troublemaker—loud, cocky, gay as hell. My parents are elite academics, obsessed with their image, and Monty’s always been… too rough around the edges.”

Harper snorted. “Does ‘rough around the edges’ mean ‘gay in a way that makes them uncomfortable’?”

“Yeah, yeah it does. Too angry, too outspoken, too in-their-face,” I said with a wry grin. “How’d you guess?”

“My dad isn’t an academic necessarily, but he’s part of that same crowd.

I’m very familiar with that kind of surface-level support.

‘Love is love’ but nothing deeper than that,” she said, a trace of hurt in her voice.

“No curiosity in learning more about me or about how being queer shapes my view of the world. My father has no real interest in disrupting the status quo.”

I followed highway signs toward Haven’s Bluff and the Kept King mine. We were now the only car on the road in the midst of the growing storm.

“It’s super fucking shitty,” I said quietly, “when you realize they don’t really want to know you. All of you.”

“It really is,” she replied. “Shitty, too, that your parents abandoned Monty at a time when she could have used the extra support.”

“I don’t think she ever forgave them for that,” I said, then swallowed the rest: or for what they did to me .

“All of that is to say,” I continued, “if we find anything at all in regards to Priscilla and make it public, it’ll be a fight with my parents either way.

If you think me and Monty are obsessed with the Blackburns, you should see my family.

Dad loves being related to William Blackburn, and it’s a banger of a story at their stuffy dinner parties.

A turn-of-the-century American innovator and his scheming thief of a wife? Their guests eat it up.”

“Of course they do,” Harper muttered. “The man stripped the land of its resources, hoarded inherited wealth stolen from enslaved people, and had not a single qualm about his workers dying in unsafe factory conditions. People like your parents probably think he’s a hero.”

I shook my head. “Yes and it’s absolutely reprehensible.

It’s why Priscilla and Adeline were always these symbols of courage after Monty told me the truth.

Just like you said, there are people like your dad, like my parents, like William, who uphold the status quo because it benefits them.

And then there’s Priscilla and Adeline, Monty and Ruby, breaking the rules because they know it’s all fake. ”

Optics were king in my parents’ world. If you weren’t showing up with high-profile promotions or glamorous literary awards, then you were totally fucking worthless to them. Life was about impressing others and making them desperately crave your accomplishments.

How would it change things if they knew Priscilla was just like me and Monty? Queer and radical and free ?

Thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. I changed gears, picked up speed, trying to stay ahead of it.

“So what’s the Kept King mine and why are we going there right now?” Harper asked, turning to look out the window. “And on a scale of one to ten, how haunted is it? I’m not sure I can do another actual ghost town again.”

I hadn’t forgotten her reaction back at Devil’s Kiln, the way she’d trembled in my arms, her very tangible fear. My mom died suddenly when I was fifteen.

“No ghosts this time, though it does have a reputation for having some pretty bad vibes,” I admitted. “If you want to stay in the car—”

“ God no, being alone would be even worse,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll stay with my knight in shining armor, thank you.”

“I’m assuming I’m the knight in this scenario?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

I gave a lopsided grin. “Always did have a thing for damsels.”

Harper gazed wistfully out the window. “And I always had a thing for women who trust reporters and respect the upstanding institution that is journalism in this country. But some dreams just aren’t meant to be.”

I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh. “It’s a goddamn shame.”

Harper sent me a sly look, flirtatious almost, before refocusing on the task at hand. “But what’s the rush? Did you see something on X Marks the Spot that made you think it was time to move?”

I glanced in the rearview again and gave Harper a quick summary of my Jensen theory, what I knew about the mine and Monty’s journals. “And because they were searching here around the time they were splitting up, I got the feeling she believed they’d missed something major.”

“But what if the diamonds found there in the eighties were Priscilla’s, and that’s all there ever was?” Harper asked.

My muscles went taut, thinking about what Monty had written. “Let’s hope not, because that would mean we’ve all been on a giant wild goose chase this whole time.”

We drove in semi-tense silence the last few minutes, down a pothole-strewn road. The town itself was eerily still, with no sign of other cars or people. The few remaining buildings were rotting, and it didn’t take long until we were pulling up to the spot on the map where Monty had circled.

The old head frame was still partially erect, rising above us like a giant wooden insect, and you could just make out the entrances of some of the tunnels. Visibility was impaired by the massive chain link fence, though, at least eighteen feet high.

I slid out of the car, then walked up to the fence with my head craned back. A square sign slapped against the metal, the only sound besides the wind, rattling the gate.

The sign had a blood-red skull-and-crossbones displayed prominently in the middle. The text surrounding it read: Warning! Danger! Stay out! Stay alive!

Harper appeared next to me, saw the sign, and said, “Oh, absolutely fucking not.”