Page 32 of The Last House Guest
Most of the Loman rental properties were located along the coast. A view drove up the cost of rent nearly twofold—even more if you could walk to downtown. To compensate, the homes on the overlook were more spacious, typically renting out to larger families. And with school starting up soon, these were usually the first homes to go vacant.
I had all the keys with me, each labeled with a designated number that corresponded to a specific property. By this point, I knew them all by heart.
Someone had broken in to the home called Trail’s End last week at the edge of downtown, smashing a television. Someone had sneaked inside the Blue Robin up here, looking for something. And someone had lit the candles at the Sea Rose, down by Breaker Beach.
I was starting to see the pattern not as a threat to the Lomans but as a message.
Someone knew what had happened that night. Someone had been at that party and knew what had happened to Sadie Loman.
As I drove up the lane of the overlook, I saw a dark car parked in front of the Blue Robin, lingering at the curb.
A shadow sitting inside. Eyes peering in the rearview mirror.
I parked behind it, waiting, my own car idling in a dare. Until Detective Ben Collins emerged from the car. He walked in my direction, frowning.
“Funny seeing you here,” he said as I exited the car.
“I have to check the properties each weekend. Before the new families arrive,” I said.
“Someone staying here next week?” he asked, thumb jutting at the Blue Robin.
“Yes.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Move them. We’re gonna need to see inside.”
My heart plummeted, but I clung to his words. “Are you reopening the case?” I asked. Maybe he believed me after all.
Detective Collins stood back, assessing the house—quaint and unassuming, like a birdhouse hidden amid the trees. “I was trying to see how someone might leave without notice. There’s a path behind the house, right?” Not answering my question but not denying it, either. He believed it was possible, then, that something else had happened that night.
“Right. To the bed-and-breakfast.” You could walk it in five to ten minutes. You could run it much faster.
“Show me inside?”
I led him in the front door, watched as he peered around the vacant space. He hadn’t been one of the officers who’d come to get Parker that night. But he’d taken the call from the Donaldsons about the break-in earlier this week.
“Show me where you found the phone,” he said.
I opened the door to the master bedroom, pointed to the now closed chest at the foot of the bed. The pile of blankets sat beside it, untouched. “In there,” I said. “I found it in the corner. Seemed like it had been there a long time.”
“That so,” he said. The lid creaked open as he peered inside. He stared into empty darkness, then closed it again. “Here’s the thing, Avery,” he said, pivoting on his heel. “We got a good look at her phone, and it’s really nothing we didn’t know.”
“Other than how it ended up here?”
He paused, then nodded. “Exactly.” He paced the room, peering into the bathroom where I’d once cleaned the floor alongside Parker. “There was one thing I noticed, though. In all those pictures on her phone, you weren’t there.”
I froze. Sadie and Luce; Sadie and Parker; Connor; the scenic shots. Everything but me.
“I thought you were her best friend,” he said. “That’s what you told me, right?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not in her pictures. She didn’t respond to your text that night. And we got a lot of conflicting information during the interviews.”
I felt something surging in my veins, my fists tightening of their own accord. “She didn’t respond becausesomething happened to her.And I’m not in the pictures because I was busy that summer. Working.” But I could feel my pulse down to the tips of my fingers as I wondered if there had been rumors—about the rift, about me, about her. I thought no one had known—I thought Grant had kept it quiet.
“About that. Your work,” he continued, and my stomach dropped. “Luciana Suarez provided us with some interesting details. This was her first summer in town, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. She’d started dating Parker the fall before.”
