Page 70 of The Lies We Conjure
The words have been lodged in my throat for more than an hour. I’d kept them at bay for the entirety of my hike with Evander to the Pool. The entirety of our fruitless search of the waters and surrounding area. No master relic.
But now, as we point ourselves toward a site that was on my group’s list, I can’t hold back anymore. It’s very clear that we’re not going to get to interrogate the others, so I choose to interrogate my cousin. I may have been relieved when he turned the spotlight of his suspicion off me in the kitchen, but that doesn’t give him a pass to hold on to lies of his own.
If we’re a team, his omissions need to be out in the open just as much as mine do.
Evander lowers his water bottle and turns, hiking boots scrapping pebbles out of the dirt. His expression is immediately a brick wall, as is his body language. Hands on hips, legs planted, chin raised. Even the straps of his waist pack full of supplies seem braced and tense. “Excuse me?”
His tone invites nothing but an apology. He won’t get it.
I cross my arms over my chest. “What did you do last night?”
Evander’s brows shoot up.
I tilt my head. “I was in the office, you were somewhere else. Winter checked your room, you weren’t there—and your bed was made, which you don’t ever do yourself at home. The maids are quarantined, which means your bed was last made yesterday.” That muscle in his jaw twitches. “I knew the second I saw you on the trail this morning that sleep wasn’t how you occupied your time.And you didn’t hit Mercy’s Point until daylight. So, what did you do?”
A snatch of mountain breeze rushes between us, rustling pines and lifting the hems of our shirts, both Walton-Bridge lacrosse gear—his is an actual jersey, mine is a T-shirt—that prove in more ways than one that we know how to be on the same team. Something I hope he remembers after insinuating several times that I’d forgotten.
I stare him down with the same medicine he’s given me. Closed expression, unwavering gaze, posture like a steel beam pounded deep into the dusty earth.
I expect him to walk away from me. To start hiking and toss some bullshit excuse back my way.
I don’t expect the truth.
“I searched Ursula’s suite.”
I cover my surprise with a question. “For?”
“A diary, a letter, something with a lock. Anything that could be a hint or a clue to what happened to her.” The knot in his throat bobs. “I… I just couldn’t believe this could happen without a paper trail.”
He gestures in the general direction of Hegemony Manor, referencing the empty drawers. The rows of books without even a scrap of loose paper, an unexplained margin note, not even her ledger for the present year. Nothing. Evander shakes his head. All of it gone—either by Ursula’s hand or her killer’s.
“Someone,” he says, “knew about the stipulation in that will. Someone had known long enough to plan the murder and remove any shred of physical evidence from Ursula’s personal effects.”
“Or the spell removed everything but the will,” I say. It’s possible. With a spell as strong and encompassing as the one tied to Ursula’s murder, nearly anything is possible.
“She wouldn’t have done that.”
I raise a brow in question, but otherwise wait him out. Evander will tell me—this is his opportunity to brag about being the oathed heir to the favorite grandchild.
He doesn’t disappoint.
“That woman wrote every single thing down. Not just for herself, but for me.”
There it is.
He starts walking again, and I don’t comment, just speed up so that we’re smushed, side by side, in the thin ribbon of trail playing hide-and-seek with the afternoon sun.
“My training was always underscored in written examples, journal entries, maps, documents, ledgers. Ursula had a mind like a steel trap but kept notes that were set in stone. She felt it was her duty to the lines to keep meticulous records, draft copies of her correspondence and the original replies from other High Families and clans of note. I know she left me something. Nothing makes sense otherwise, unless all her paperwork was stolen by her murderer, and even that doesn’t make sense because access is impossible without her key or ours.” We both know her key dissolved the moment she died. “So, I did the only thing that made sense to me, and opened up her suite, searching for something the killer may have missed.”
It’s a long monologue for him. Which means it’s not fully true.
“You thought she left you instructions, didn’t you?”
Evander is pointedly watching the uneven trail. He doesn’t look at me. “Instructions?”
Stealing from the playbook Winter used hours ago, I take a long step right in his path, cutting him off. His head pops up as he nearly runs into me. We’re toe-to-toe, a large rock shelf behind me, a step up, a natural barrier. “Oh, don’t play dumb. You thought she left you a cheat sheet. If she wasn’t murdered, she still would’ve had to transfer her knowledge of the master relics’ locations to you as part the final step in your inheritance of her title. You knew she wouldn’t leave that in her office, and checked her suite.”
With every word, color rises from the neck of his red jersey up his throat.
