Page 21 of Tourist Season

“ T HREE WEEKS BEFORE THE DEAL closes. Three fucking weeks .”

Harper gives a single nod. “Three fucking weeks.”

“And how many bodies?” I ask, even though I heard Harper perfectly well the first time she told me. My hard stare drills into the side of her face, but she doesn’t look away from the silty floodplain stretched before us, dark water flowing just beyond the reach of her headlamp.

She swallows. Clears her throat. “Sixteen.”

“ Sixteen fucking bodies. That’s almost a body per night, and it assumes we’ll have perfect conditions and zero mistakes.”

“Yes,” she says, her eyes glinting in the dim light as they roll. “Thank you for mansplaining math. Don’t know what I would have done without that groundbreaking contribution.”

I huff an irritated sigh. “I’m not trying to mansplain math to you.”

“How about you mansplain to me your surely elaborate plan of how you’re going to get Sam to leave instead? That would actually be useful.”

Right. That too. I’d already started keeping tabs on his whereabouts this morning so I could work out any behavioral patterns that I might be able to upend or exploit.

So far, I haven’t come up with many grand solutions except for maybe sabotaging his equipment and his vehicle. “I’m working on that,” I grumble.

Harper huffs. “I’m sure. Well, you’d better work faster, Ballmeat,” she says, thrusting the handle of a shovel into my chest with precision, even though she doesn’t turn or even look my way.

“We have a Sleuthseeker to drive out of town and exactly zero-point-seven-six bodies per day to exhume in the glorious three weeks we’ll be spending together, so we’d better get cracking. ”

She marches away toward the shallow slope that drops onto the swath of silt by the river where vegetation is sparse and landmarks are few.

I could kill her. Bash her over the head with the shovel in my hands and take my chances that she wasn’t bluffing about my book.

Disappear into the wilderness. Resign myself to never seeing my family again, further breaking the already shattered remains of their hearts.

At least they would know I served justice to those who deserved it.

My grip on the handle loosens just a little as I watch Harper lay her duffel bag on the ground, setting her shovel next to it.

She has her back to me, a pool of light tracking over the dirt as she surveys the space around her, as though she’s projecting her thoughts onto the ground.

She’s scared, but not of me, and not for herself.

She’s worried about the old man. So worried she’s willing to risk her life to wrangle me into her control. And I want to know why.

Though I hate the idea very much, I can understand why she might send her car off a cliff and fake her own death after a deadly hit-and-run.

I get why she’d hide in a strange little town for four years.

Self-preservation. But I don’t understand why she’d risk everything for an elderly man who might have killed his own daughter.

How could someone with no qualms about leaving me and my brother for dead be so loyal to him that she puts herself in harm’s way?

There’s something about Harper that pulls questions from the dark recesses of my thoughts, and they’re not the same ones I came to Cape Carnage to ask her.

Harper bends down and unzips the bag to rummage through the contents.

The fantasy that I’ve been living for these last four years is only a few feet away.

I’ve dreamt so many times about choking the confession free from her lips.

I take a few steps closer. In only a handful of heartbeats, I could have her under my control.

But instead, I lower the shovel, take a deep breath, and walk calmly toward her, making enough sound so as not to startle her.

I will get the answers I came for , I promise myself. I am here to deliver the consequences of the choices she made, ones that neither of us can escape. But I want to know all her secrets before I do.

“So,” I say as I draw to a halt next to her. “Where do we start?”

I squint against the light of her headlamp as she eyes me, her attention flicking to the shovel in my hand before returning to my face. I’m making her feel unsafe. I should probably be relishing the discomfort my presence is giving her. But I don’t.

I push the shovel into the dirt next to me and make a point to take a step away from it and fold my arms, and as though she’s giving me something in return, she turns off her headlamp, switching on a camping lantern instead.

“I figure we can start at the edge over there and work our way from left to right,” she says as she nods past me toward a cluster of granite boulders in the distance.

She pulls a tape measure from the bag and tosses it at my feet before rising with a spray bottle in one hand, the lantern illuminating her from below in a way that would make most people look like shit.

But not Harper. She’s hauntingly beautiful, ethereal in the bluish glow of the lantern and the moonlight.

Even more so when she starts spraying a mist above the crown of her head, the droplets shimmering as they fall over her hair.

“What is that?”

“Bugfucker.”

I snort a laugh. Her lips don’t even twitch as she mists a cloud of spray around her head. A mosquito lands on my neck long enough to pierce my skin and I slap it. “Seriously?”

She shrugs. “Maya likes to get creative with her names. But she has a PhD in chemistry from MIT, for fucksakes. Everything she makes is fucking incredible. This is the good shit.” Harper mists her arms, her eyes never leaving mine, as though she’s ready to turn the nozzle on me if I so much as twitch in a way she doesn’t like.

I’m pretty sure she would flay the skin right off my face with her fingernails if she could, judging by the merciless glare she pins on me. It’s murderously adorable.

No, it’s fucking not. What the actual fuck?

I shake my head, maybe hoping to clear my wayward thoughts, maybe hoping some of the cloud of citronella-scented droplets might drift closer to cover my skin in the light breeze.

“I’d like some,” I say.

Harper’s eyes narrow to thin slits of malice. “Where’s yours?”

“At the inn.”

“You’re telling me you do Search and Rescue for a living , and you come to a nighttime body removal party at a body of water without bug spray?”

I swat at another mosquito, but two more land on my body in the time it takes to kill just one.

“First of all, you’re playing fast and loose with the word ‘party.’ Second, when you said, ‘Pick me up at ten o’clock and help me with something for Arthur,’ you left out the part about digging up dead bodies by a fucking river. So. Can I have some? ”

A snide little smirk flickers across her lips. “Not so good with manners, are you? Maybe if you’d said ‘please’ in the first place, I would have given your book back when you asked for it.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“You’re right. And I’m not feeling so inclined to give this to you either,” she says as she sprays down the front of her body, her eyes still locked to mine.

Blood roars in my ears. I don’t know if it’s rage, or the enticing boldness of her challenge, or the way the mist coats the exposed skin of her chest to shimmer on her collarbones.

Maybe it’s all three that set me aflame.

My jaw presses tight as I take a step closer. “I could take it.”

She’s mere inches away, staring up at me with total defiance, her full lips set in a determined line. “And I could spray you in the face. That worked so well for you the last time.”

I inch closer. She still doesn’t shrink from me.

Instead, she slides the spray behind her back in a way that almost dares me to take it.

To reach around and fold her in an embrace and pull it from her hands.

No matter how hard I try not to, I imagine the feel of her against me.

Her warmth. The rise and fall of her chest against mine. The cadence of her heartbeat.

Her hard stare bores right into me, digging through every layer until it feels like she’s embedded herself into my heart, piercing me from the inside out.

“Please, Harper,” I finally say, not missing the way her gaze finally drops to my lips and lingers there when I let her name slowly roll from my tongue, “can I have the bug spray?”

Her words come out a little breathless when she says, “Will you complain less if I give it to you?”

“I’m sure I’ll find something else to complain about, don’t worry.”

One hand slowly comes from behind her back to lift the bottle into my peripheral view. “I can’t wait to find out what joys you’ll bring next.”

Our fingers graze as I take the bottle from her.

An electric hum sizzles in my skin even after that momentary touch has passed.

And I wonder if she felt it too. If she did, she gives nothing away.

As soon as she releases the bottle, she’s bending to grab the lantern and tape measure with one hand, the shovel with the other. “Follow me,” is all she says.

I pick up the duffel and my shovel, covering myself in the Bugfucker mist as Harper leads the way toward the boulders that sit on the rise at the end of the plain. When we arrive there, she sets her shovel and lantern down, then passes me the end of the tape, keeping the wheel in her hand.

“Do you have a map?” I ask.

She slices me with a glare. “I am the map. Six meters from the middle of the biggest rock. There should be a little line,” she says, running her finger over the surface of the boulder. “It’s here.”