Page 66 of The Hawthorne Legacy
I closed my eyes and focused on the memory, not his lips. Skye’s bequest had led to True North, one of the Hawthorne family’s many vacation homes—mine, now. I tried to remember the pages I’d flipped through the night of the auction. Patagonia. Santorini. Kauai. Malta. Seychelles…
“Cartago, Costa Rica.” I opened my eyes. “Tobias Hawthorne owned a house there.” I pulled out my phone and looked up the latitude and longitude of Cartago, then turned my phone’s screen toward the boys. “It’s a match.”
I tried to remember what the Cartago house looked like, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was the surrounding vegetation and flowers, lush and bright and larger than life.
“We need to go to Costa Rica.” Xander didn’t exactly sound put out about that.
“I can’t,” I said, frustrated. I’d had to fight to go to Colorado. There was no way that Oren and Alisa would sign off on international travel—not when I could only spend two more nights away from Hawthorne House this month.
“Xander’s not going anywhere, either.”
For a second time, I found myself turning toward the doorway of the pod. Thea stood there.
“Are you just letting anyone in?” I called to Eli.
The reply I got was muffled, but I made out the words “not my job.”
“Rebecca needs you,” Thea told Xander. For the first time since I’d met her, she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked almost mortal. “She didn’t come to school today. It’s her mom. I know it is. Rebecca won’t answer my calls, so it’s going to have to be you.” It was clearly killing Thea to ask him, but there she was.
I expected Xander to put up a fight. How many times had he said that this was his game? But Xander just stared at Thea for a moment, then turned back to Jameson. “I guess you’re going to Cartago.”
Jameson glanced at me. I was fully prepared for him to ask me for another plane. Instead, the expression on his face shifted. “Can you call Libby and Nash?”
CHAPTER 56
It makes no sense,” I told Max that afternoon. “Jameson never lets up on a puzzle. What’s his angle here?”
Nash and Libby had agreed to go to Cartago. I was sitting in my bedroom, staring at the photograph of the Cartago house. A quartet of columns held a tile roof over a large porch, but the house itself was small, less than a thousand square feet.
“Maybe he doesn’t have an angle,” Max said.
My eyes narrowed. “He’s Jameson Hawthorne. He always has an angle.”
A sharp knock at the door cut off whatever Max would have said in reply. I went to answer it, annoyed that a part of me couldn’t think about Jameson without thinking about the way it felt when his lips brushed lightly against my neck.
I opened the door to find someone holding a tall stack of fluffy white towels. The towels blocked the person’s face, and my mind went to the bloodied heart that someone—likely a staff member—had left in my room. I took a step back. My heart rate jumped. Then Eli stepped into view. “She’s clear,” he told me.
I nodded and stepped back. The person holding the towels walked past me. Mellie. She didn’t say a word to us and made her way into my bathroom.
“I will never get used to someone else doing my—” I didn’t get to say the word laundry before a gut-rattling scream tore through the air. My body responded before my brain did, launching me into the bathroom just in time to see Mellie slamming closed the doors to my bathroom armoire.
“Snake,” she wheezed. “There’s a snake in your—”
Eli pulled me back into the bedroom. I heard him making a call, and less than two minutes later, my room was flooded with guards.
“What the elf!” Max demanded. “Did she say snake?”
“Rattlesnake.” Oren took Max and me aside. “Dead—no actual danger.”
I met his eyes and said what he wasn’t saying. “Just a threat.”
Someone wanted me scared. Who—and why? Deep down, some part of me knew the answer. An hour later, I went back to Toby’s wing. Max went with me—and so did Oren.
The entire wing had been bricked up again.
I turned back to Oren. “The Laughlins did this.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the wall—or the snake. They don’t want me asking questions about Toby.
“The threat level has been assessed,” Oren told me. “It will continue to be assessed, and we will respond accordingly.”
