Page 79 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
“I think it was from adoctor’s office or lab or something. It had the swirly-snaky-logo thing.” Maggie’s voice turned soft and almost fragile. “That’s why I noticed it. I was worried...”
“You think Eleanor might be sick?”
She kept her gaze turned down but shrugged. “Maybe? I mean it could have just been about her fall, but... I don’t know. It’s just that, looking back, Cece seemed especially eager to take the mail but Eleanor seemed just as insistent about keeping it.”
“Not to mention, if Eleanorissick and the new niece isn’t in the will yet, the new niece would want to know.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s ask James in the morning, okay? Maybe he knows where it went. At the very least, he should know if Eleanor’s health is failing. Okay?” He tucked that rebellious piece of hair behind her ear again.
“Okay.”
He let go of her shoulders and slipped his hand into hers and was just starting to lead her from the room when she stopped moving.
For a long time, Maggie just stood there, frozen—the beam of her flashlight shining through the doorway, a spotlight on those shelves full of prisms and magnifying glasses and crystals of every shape and size—catching the light and sending it splitting and bending until rainbows and spots that looked like diamonds filled the darkness. It was like standing in a kaleidoscope, watching the light turn colors and change shapes. Seeing everything differently.
Even the one little light that didn’t change at all.
“Maggie?”
“The Nursery Crimes.” She took a slow step forward, trancelike as she inched toward the shelves and the one dot of light that was tiny and blue and invisible until that moment. That little dot wasn’t the way light looked when refracted through a prism—it was the way light looks when reflectedthrough a camera.
“Maggie—”
“Don’t tell me you never readThe Nursery Crimes.” She spun on him like that was the real tragedy of the last few days. “A woman catches her own killer using a nanny cam just”—she reached for the digital clock on the shelf—“like”—she turned it over to reveal the USB drive in the back—“this.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Maggie
“Eleanor hid a camera!” Maggie whisper-shouted in the hall. Ethan was practically dragging her away from the office and the family bedrooms but, to Maggie, it felt more like floating.
“I see that.” He bit his lip like he was trying very, very hard not to smile. And failing. Like she was adorable and sweet and his favorite kind of candy.
“Thislookslike a clock! But it’s not!” She pointed to the little lens in the center. “That’s a camera!”
“So you’ve said.”
“Eleanor hid it!” Maggie whisper-shouted again. “And I found it!”
“I know. I was there when it happened.” He wore a patient, put-upon expression, like someone trying to get a drunk friend home from a bar or a three-year-old out of a bounce house. Which tracked. At that moment, Maggie felt like a combination of both.
“Eleanor just blew this case wide open!”
Ethan stopped walking. “Actually...”
In Maggie’s experience, there was a high correlation between men who use the wordactuallyand men who deserve to be hit in the ear with a snowball, but there was a warmth in Ethan’s eyes when he told her, “I’d sayyoujust blew the case wide open.”
Notwe.You.And it was all she could do not to jump up and down, maybe do a dance. Spike a ball of indeterminate purpose. At that moment, Maggie was high on adrenaline and kissing and the all-consuming rush of being right. Not to mention a steady dose of Ethan Wyatt pheromones, which should probably come with a warning from the FDA.
So she kissed him again becauseshe was going on instinct and didn’t allow herself to second-guess it. But there was something in the set of his shoulders, the feel of his hands on her waist, that made her pull back and look down at the nanny cam that was smushed between them. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not yournothingface. That’s yourwe might want to bury that before it explodesface.”
“I didn’t realize I had one of those,” he said, and Maggie tried not to roll her eyes.
