Page 68 of A Heart So Haunted
That face was the same face I’d stalked online: Ivan’s ex. The girl I’d thought about messaging. And she was right there.
“Hello,” she greeted, her expression faltering when I didn’t move. Casual, holding my breath, I approached the counter. “Can I help you find anything?”
A wet fish floundered in my throat. Think, Landry.Speak.
“Yes, actually,” I choked. I eased up to the desk but stopped a healthy distance away. Like a barrier. “I’m looking for anything you have on the name Belfaunte?”
Irene’s nametag shimmered in the fluorescents. A line formed in the middle of her chin. “I recognize that name.”
Because Aunt Cadence brought it up to you, maybe. Because you know something?A few moments passed, and all I could think of was how close she stood. She’d dated Ivan. She’d talked to Aunt Cadence, if the thread was hers. It had to be.
If it wasn’t—and if it was? It matched. All of it made sense.
But none of it made sense.
“Belfaunte, you say?” Eyes danced to me.
“Yes, ma’am.” I held up the copy of the deed, in case she needed the spelling.
I suddenly felt underdressed in my worn shorts and T-shirt. Plaster speckles dotted my forearms. If she eyed them one more time, I’d launch into a detailed explanation as to why I had paint all over myself, how I didn’t usually look like this (though I usually did), and how I wasn’t inept at showering.
“Articles, obituaries …?” The monitor reflected in her glasses as she searched. “Belfaunte is an old name.” The mouse clicked; her tongue poked at the bottom of her lip.
“Hadrian,” I said. Then, thinking of the second name I’d seen on the deed, “Or Howie?”
I looked around as Irene continued clicking, typing, then clicking some more. The library teemed with childish chatter. An instructor urged the children to settle around a circular table. Not far off, a college student had their head hung over a mass exodus of textbooks and paperwork from their emptied backpack. Summer classes in full swing, it seemed.
Irene made ahmmin the back of her throat.
“Hadrian owned Harthwait when it was well over a thousand acres—” She stopped. Her expression remained even. “I know exactly which house you’re talking about.”
I bit my cheek, slightly expectant, as the printer started to spit out papers.
“The woman who owns it comes in all the time searching for information on the place.”
I swallowed a ball of sand. Of course she used present tense—how would she have known unless she’d seen the paper?
“Cadence Caldwell was my aunt. She passed away a little over a month ago.”
Irene’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m—I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” Her cheeks tightened as she bent for the papers. She shuffled us farther down the counter, next to a display that screamed in rainbow colors:Summer Reading Sign Ups Are Here!A stuffed elephant leaned against the exclamation point. Beside it, a stack of business cards. Irene flipped through the papers, and I leaned in to the card stack.
One of them had Ivan’s face on it.Wasleck Real Estate Group.
My tongue grew leaden. If she had his cards on display, that meant they were at least cordial to each other.
“This is some of what I got,” she said. She tapped a page. I gravitated to the paper.
Sure enough, there he was.
“This is Howie.” Upside down, Irene pointed to a man with long, white-blond hair. It looked to be a commissioned portrait of sorts. Without a doubt, he matched the man I had seen in the attic whipping the boy. Whipping Hadrian.
His nose was strong, his chin and jaw cut, and from the side, his throat rose and dove in all the right places. A serene, serious expression donned his features. The date at the bottom looped to readDecember 12, 1876.
Her finger drifted to another. My eyes skimmed. This one was of Harthwait, centered at a distance, sometime in 1894.
“The land was sold off gradually after Hadrian died, it looks like,” Irene murmured, picking up one of the other pages, bringing it forward. A map, hand drawn in careful detail. “This shows the plots after 1891. See how they’re broken up by dotted lines and have parcelnumbers? There’s probably a key somewhere. Let’s see who did the map …” She squinted. “Commissioned by Silas Haste. Probably a friend of the family if Mr. Belfaunte didn’t have any kin left.”
“Does it say how he died?” I whispered. A child’s laughter pealed through the air.
