One Week Later…
Gina had a sledgehammer, and she knew what to do with it. Okay, she didn’t really know what to do with it, but she’d watched enough home renovation shows to look like it as she hefted the damn thing up and took aim at the half wall dividing the attic of her historical—fine, desperately in need of serious love—Victorian home into two rooms and cutting the flow of the space. The metal head of the sledgehammer made a satisfying thunk as it bashed through the poorly-constructed half wall for what felt like the millionth time that morning.
Arms aching from the effort of swinging the fifteen-pound hammer, she took a step back and set it down to admire her work. The half wall was toast.
Sure, there were still odds and ends she’d have to yank out of the floorboards, but the sun pouring in from the stained glass window on the east wall into the large open space left dots of color across the dusty hardwood floor that made her smile despite the mess.
The attic would be perfect for the new headquarters of Consider It Done Wedding Planning. She’d meet clients downstairs in the salon with its own door to the wide front porch, but this is where the magic would happen. The planning, the plotting, the everything coming together—that would be done here. If only she could take care of her other problems so easily.
Yeah, so she was doing a little home renovation therapy. Who would blame her? It had been seven days since she’d hightailed it through that hotel lobby, and she could still hear the cackling laughter from those asshole cops at the bar chasing after her.
Instead of thinking about it, though, she’d taken the DIY approach and pictured the cops’ faces on every piece of drywall she’d smashed through. Okay, she might have a little of her brothers’ Sicilian temper and lust for blood herself, she’d just figured out how to channel it better.
Now she no longer saw the jerks’ jeering faces in her dreams. Instead, she only saw Ford’s—and that was kind of worse, because she also heard his clit-whistle of a throaty groan every damn time she collapsed in bed at night. That was just unfair.
Had he been in on the whole humiliating charade and just played it off as being a total surprise to him? Possible, but she couldn’t get herself to believe it.
Anyway, it was nicer to pretend he hadn’t been. A girl like her needed the fantasy of a good man who didn’t lie or use people, who wanted her just because he did. All she had to do to make that happen was to bring her late-night fantasies to a grinding halt the moment before he told her he hadn’t left his hotel room key for her.
Kinda depressing thinking there, Regina.
Her inner voice wasn’t wrong. She swiped her water bottle off the floor and took a long drink. Time to keep moving forward and fixing up the home she’d inherited from her grandfather. The courts had declared a few months ago that the man she’d adored growing up and had been missing for twenty years was now officially deceased. And thinking about that was just going further down the rabbit hole that only led to sniffles and tubs of Rocky Road, which she wasn’t going to do because her life had been sad enough up until now. Things were finally going to change for her. She refused to let her looks or her family or her perpetual spinsterhood—hello, too much Austen on the bookshelf—stop her from doing what she wanted any longer.
It was time to make a new life for herself, and it started with renovating her grandfather’s home that had been sitting vacant for umpteen years by getting rid of the random boards still left standing after her spin with the sledgehammer. Her grandfather would have been proud of his girl finishing the renovations that he’d started so long ago. It may not be the usual tribute to a grandparent, but it was one he would have appreciated.
“Alexa,” she called out to the electronic hockey puck plugged into the wall near the stairs. “Play my renovation playlist.”
Instead of her normal happy, female singer-songwriter tunes, the alto growl of chicks done wrong who weren’t gonna take it anymore boomed through the speakers. Now this she could get her hammer swinging to.
Chin high, shoulders back—and gait lopsided because the sledgehammer was heavy—she marched back over to the half wall. In the movies, this is where she would have gone to town on what was left of that wall, smashing it to smithereens and turning in a circle triumphantly to view her accomplishment. Her life was a different kind of movie, though, because instead of the hammer coming down and taking out the two-by-four, it went flying out of her hands—thanks to a mixture of palm sweat and condensation from the water bottle—and sailed across the room, landing with a thud on the floor on the unfinished side of the attic.
“And you wonder why you don’t have your own home reno show,” she muttered to herself as she crossed the room to see the damage she’d inflicted.
Stepping carefully because there weren’t any floorboards laid across the insulation on this side of the attic, she held her arms out for balance and tiptoed across the crossbeams to the east wall where the sledgehammer lay in a puff of pink-wrapped insulation. The light coming in through the stained glass window danced across the insulation like mini-rainbows on a pink sky. It would have been pretty if it hadn’t been another reminder of the amount of work she still had to do on the house.
As she was reaching for the hammer, a glimmer caught her eye. It was different than the other colored spots from the window, more solid and golden. She leaned forward. The sparkle was coming from a spot under the bent corner of the insulation. A tool dropped into the space between the beams?
She moved the hammer over and pulled back the insulation, careful not to tear the wrapping so she wouldn’t inhale the probably poisonous strands inside, and revealed a narrow strip of open space that, though dark, seemed to go on down to the basement, judging by the cool, still air wafting up from it. The space had to be the top of one of the walls, which were built with tight crawl spaces inside them. She’d learned about that the smelly way, when a squirrel who’d been squatting in the attic found its way into one and couldn’t get back out. The exterminator had given her all the gory details.
Did squirrels collect shiny objects? Maybe it had left behind some doodads? She grabbed her phone from her back pocket, slid her thumb across the screen to turn on its flashlight, and shined the piercing beam into the darkness.
Four spindly sticks lay in a line, one with a gold ring around one of them. That’s weird—
Realization slammed into her, knocking her back onto her ass. She didn’t care, she just did the crab walk on her hands and feet in her rush to get away from the crevice between the walls, because it hadn’t been four sticks. They’d been bones. Finger bones. And the ring? It had been her grandfather’s.
…
“Hartigan,” Captain Grant hollered across the Waterbury detectives’ bullpen as he stood in the door of his office. “In here. Now.”
Ford’s shoulders jerked closer to his ears before he could stop the reflexive reaction. This wasn’t good. Not being called into the captain’s office, but that bark of an order usually meant a shit assignment was incoming.
The last time he’d gotten that, it was after the deputy chief’s son had gotten picked up on a pot bust. That case had been radioactive. They’d given it to Ford because he wasn’t the kind of cop who gave a rat’s ass about whose kid a perp was. Rules were rules, and they were meant to be followed.