And she supposed that should have tracked. After all, look at the way he’d treated her. But . . .
“You kept the picture.” Tucked away out of sight, but close enough he could reach for it, even in the dark. “Guilty people don’t like reminders of their crimes. But when you get betrayed,” she said, speaking from experience, thinking of how breathless she’d been the night they’d kissed, and then again, for a different reason, the morning after, “you can’t let yourself forget.”
“He broke my heart.” There it was again. That look. The one that had always made her ache. A fallen angel reaching, rioting against all he’d lost. All that had been stolen from him for daring to strive.
Riley had never had a friend who understood her work. Who she trusted with her reputation. She had clients, sure, but no coworkers. Not since Gran. But it didn’t matter. She had her mom, and she knew what it was like to lose someone you never expected to leave.
“He took a punch for me once.” Clark laughed, the sound jagged. “It was at some terrible house party in Oxford. This guy thought I’d hit on his girlfriend. I hadn’t—I didn’t even know who she was—but he got in my face, hollering about laying me out, and Patrick jumped in to smooth things over.” Clark’s eyes were the gray-green of a forest after a storm. “The next thing I know, he’s on the ground, blood pouring from his nose, asking me if I’m all right.”
Part of Riley wished she didn’t know this. That she could go back to thinking he was nothing more than a privileged rich kid. It had been easier when Clark was simply an asshole who’d hurt her, instead of someone who’d been hurt—had lost his reputation and one of the most important relationships in his life to a con. She had never lied to him, but she understood a bit more now why he couldn’t see that.
Clark bent over his desk, started shuffling papers around. “I’ll clean this up so we have a place to work.”
Right. Trying to give Clark a moment to collect himself, the way she would have wanted, Riley retreated to the remaining door. She assumed she’d find some kind of bathroom through here, but she didn’t expect the large orange tabby that hissed at her from the lid of the closed toilet seat, as if to say, Can’t you see this is occupied?
“Oh, god. Sorry,” Riley blurted out before she could think better of it. And then, turning to Clark, “You have a cat?!”
“No.” He looked up innocently.
“Umm . . . hello?” She swept her arm toward the very large, still-hissing feline.
“Oh.” His gaze softened a few degrees. “That’s not mine.”
“And yet you don’t look surprised to see it.” The cat licked its paw lazily. It was missing half of one ear. A fellow scrapper if Riley ever saw one.
“She lives around here somewhere.” Clark gestured to the surrounding woods. “I feed her occasionally, when I have leftover tuna, and sometimes she naps inside when the weather is unpleasant.”
“Uh-huh.” Riley closed the door slowly. Clark as a cat person made sense. He too was prickly, standoffish, and arrogantly territorial. Personally, Riley preferred dogs. They were simple and devoted. You always knew where you stood with a dog.
A few minutes later, as she made herself comfortable at his desk—upon closer inspection, she saw he’d missed an opportunity to stack his jack on the queen of spades—Clark started taking down books from different shelves, opening cabinets to pull out maps and blueprints. The task seemed to anchor him, his movements sliding into something familiar. He proceeded to mount all his research in front of her until the pile grew so high, Riley couldn’t see over it.
“I’ve selected a representative sample from among relevant texts for us to start with,” he said, unfolding a battered folding chair from behind the fridge to sit beside her.
“A representative sample.” Riley stared at the stack and swallowed. “This isn’t all of it?”
Clark smiled, as if she were joking. “Hardly.”
It felt a bit like homework, which Riley had never been particularly good at. Her grades had been fine, solid, in high school, but she’d spent most of her study time angsting over a series of boyfriends—all of whom treated her like dirt—while painting her fingernails with Wite-Out.
As if sensing her discomfort, Clark pulled out a text for them to start with. “What are you looking for, exactly? I know what a backgrounder looks like for an archaeologist. I assume curse breaking is . . . different?” He tried to keep the judgment out of his tone and missed by a hair. Still, Riley appreciated the attempt at restraint.
“Look for something weird,” she told him. “Things or people going missing, mysterious occurrences, unexplained phenomena. Anything that doesn’t fit.”
They pored over the books and his notes together. She hadn’t expected him to help. Had sort of figured he’d sit around and make rude quips while she worked. But Clark showed her the timeline he’d constructed so they could narrow in on any major event that might have occurred on or around the property in the 1700s, and he drew her a sort of clan family tree for both the Campbells and the Graphms when she couldn’t keep all the names straight.
Hours bled together, the sun fading behind the tree line.
“What?” Riley said the third time Clark winced when she scribbled an idea on a Post-it note and stuck it inside one of the texts.
“Nothing.” He tore his eyes away as if from the scene of a car crash.
Of course, Clark kept all notes in a separate Moleskine with section tabs, where he recorded any ideas or findings with a corresponding label of title, author, and page number. Imagine having the luxury of so much time that you could justify doing something so needlessly slow when sticky notes were right there.
Clark argued with himself too, under his breath, “No, that can’t be right,” while running his finger beneath a passage.
Riley bit her thumbnail, smothered a smile, and didn’t say anything as she flipped to the next page.
Occasionally, one or the other of them would get up to stretch.
Clark groaned as he rolled his shoulders.
“You good?” Riley might have some Motrin in her purse.
“Fine.” He grimaced in a way that made him look decidedly the opposite. “Tweaked my back when I hit the ground trying to save someone from going up in flames.”
“Okay, relax. No one asked you to go all Smokey Bear. I could have just as easily stopped, dropped, and rolled without you.”
“Since I understood less than twenty-five percent of the words in those sentences”—gingerly, he returned to his seat—“shall I go ahead and assume there was a gracious thank-you in there somewhere?”
Riley rolled her eyes. Sheesh. You catch on fire one time, and they never let you forget it.
Eventually, when her stomach growling turned supersonic, Clark insisted on serving her what turned out to be a half-decent frozen pizza.
“Do you want a beer?”
Riley’s head shot up. Mr. No Fun had been holding out on her.