The deliberate lack of intensity in her voice hit him almost as hard as her words, as the mental image she’d given him.
“I didn’t go upstairs.” That sounded almost like a question. “I remember dropping the flower, and then, all of a sudden, my mom and stepdad were there, and it was over.” This time, he heard her inhale, audibly, sharply. “I forgot about it. Blocked it out. And then a couple of years ago, I started hearing and seeing the name Hawthorne all over the news.”
It wasn’t a full two years ago. Grayson pushed down the urge to make that point. “My grandfather died.”
“There was a new heiress. Mystery. Intrigue. A real Cinderella story. Hawthorne. Hawthorne. Hawthorne.”
Grayson thought about what she had said—what she had been told. A Hawthorne did this. “You remembered.”
“In dreams, mostly.”
For some reason, that hit him hard. I almost never dream. The words very nearly escaped him. “You said you had two questions.” Grayson needed to keep this conversation on track.
“I said that I wanted two answers.” Her correction was cutting and precise. She wasted no more time in specifying the first. “What did your grandfather do?”
Grayson could have argued with her, could have pointed out that Hawthorne was not an uncommon name. But instead, he thought of a room in Hawthorne House filled with stacks and stacks of files. “I could not say.” He kept his voice just as curt as hers. “But probabilities being what they are, whatever Tobias Hawthorne did or did not do, it likely ruined your father financially.” That was all he intended to say, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he owed her more.
Couldn’t shake the thought of a little girl holding a single lily and a mostly eaten candy necklace. Staring at an empty staircase. A gunshot ringing in her ears.
“If you tell me your father’s name…” Grayson started to say.
She cut him off. “No.”
Annoyance surged. “What do you expect me to do without a name?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded… not vulnerable. Not angry, exactly. “The last thing he said, at the top of the stairs…”
“Words that didn’t even make sense,” Grayson murmured.
“What begins a bet?” she quoted. “And then he said: Not that.” The girl waited for Grayson to speak, but impatience didn’t let her wait long. “Does that mean anything to you, Hawthorne boy?”
What begins a bet? Not that.
“No.” Grayson almost hated to say that to her.
“I shouldn’t have called. I don’t know why I keep doing this.”
She was going to hang up. Grayson realized that simultaneously with another, more unexpected realization: He didn’t want her to. “It might be a riddle.” Grayson heard a little hitch of breath, then continued. “My grandfather was very big into riddles.”
“What begins a bet?” The girl’s voice took on a different tone now. “Not that.”
And then she really did hang up. Grayson kept holding the phone to his ear for the longest time. He realized that he was dripping water onto the mat, that his skin, still pink from the punishing heat of the shower, was now chilled.
Grabbing a towel, he turned the riddle over in his head, and then he texted Xander. Are you back at Hawthorne House?
The reply came almost instantly: Nope, followed by a suspicious array of tiny illustrated symbols: a party popper, musical notes, a flame, and a crown. But I have connections, Xander’s next text read. What do you need?
“Connections?” Grayson snorted—but that didn’t stop him from replying to Xander’s text. I need someone to look back through the old man’s List.
CHAPTER 38
GRAYSON
That night, Grayson dreamed of a labyrinth. He stood at the center, glass shards suspended in the air all around him. He couldn’t walk forward, couldn’t step back without one slicing into his flesh. In the shining surface of each shard, he saw an image.
The black opal ring. Avery. Emily. Eve. Gigi and Savannah—
Grayson bolted up in bed, a phantom fist locked around his lungs. He tossed back the covers and reached over to hit a switch on the wall. The shade covering the bedroom window slowly rose, revealing that the sun was high in the sky.
He’d slept late.
Grayson checked his phone. No updates on the old man’s List yet—and none from Gigi, for that matter. He considered reaching back out but fought the urge to do so. Patience was a virtue. He’d seen to it that she wouldn’t get anywhere with her search of any password-protected files. That gave him time.
Once he had a decoy key…
Once he had a more thorough understanding of the situation with the FBI…
Once Gigi was ready to hand over the files…
Then Grayson would make his next move. In the meantime, if his presence in Phoenix had caused Eve to pull her spy off the Grayson family and onto him—and the night before suggested that she had—all the better.
The next morning, as Grayson was swimming his twentieth lap in the hotel pool, Zabrowski finally got back in touch.
I’m here.
The time for waiting was over.
Grayson changed into dry clothes and walked to meet Zabrowski in an alley two blocks away. The first thing the PI did was hand over two envelopes, each containing one of the models Grayson had supplied and a matching metal key. Grayson inspected the keys, ensuring a visual match between the color of the metal Zabrowski’s contact had used and Gigi’s key.
Finding the keys suitable, he slipped them into his suit pocket and brought his gaze back to rest on Zabrowski’s.
“No luck on the paperwork for the twins’ trusts,” the man reported. “But I was able to get some answers about the investigation into Sheffield Grayson. They have him dead to rights on tax evasion and hiding significant streams of income offshore.”
“No wonder the IRS is freezing accounts. And the FBI?”
“Very interested in where some of that income came from,” Zabrowski replied. “It’s looking like embezzlement.”
“From his own company?”
“This is where it gets interesting. Turns out Sheffield Grayson only owned a thirty percent stake. His mother-in-law, who funded the thing, owned the rest.”
Grayson rolled that over in his mind and remembered something Gigi had said. “He sold the company right after the girls’ grandmother died. Assuming her interests in the company were included in one or more of the trusts she set up for her heirs, I’m guessing Sheffield Grayson was highly motivated to divest of the whole thing before the trustee started sniffing around.”
The trustee. Trowbridge. The pieces of this puzzle were starting to fit together in Grayson’s mind, but he didn’t have enough information to see the whole of it yet. “How hard are the feds pushing the investigation?”
“Unclear.”
“Have they had any luck locating him?” Grayson asked. That was as close as he could come to asking what he really wanted to know.
“None. Consensus seems to be that this guy is a slippery bastard.”
As long as Grayson made sure that stayed the consensus, Avery would be fine. “Do you have anything else for me?” Grayson asked.
Zabrowski reached into his car and then handed a file to Grayson, who flipped it open to see a familiar face staring back. Dark eyes. That scar through the eyebrow.
“Mattias Slater,” Zabrowski said. “Goes by Slate. Record is squeaky-clean, but his father’s isn’t—long list of charges, but only one set ever stuck.”
Grayson skimmed through the file. “Expensive defense counsel,” he noted.
“Until,” Zabrowski said with a significant look, “that last set of felony charges.”
The ones that stuck, Grayson thought. He wondered if Mattias Slater’s father had worked for the Blake family—for Vincent Blake. If so, that would explain the expensive lawyers. Until he ran afoul of the boss?
“What do we know about Mattias?” Grayson asked. “Personally?”
Zabrowski’s eyes narrowed. “In a day? Not much. His father’s dead. Mother filed medical bankruptcy last year.”
Grayson thought back to his confrontation with Eve’s spy. You don’t want to know, Mattias Slater had said, what I’ve done.