“Old Simon’s will cleared probate and Daniel took possession of Whitethorn House on the tenth of September. On the fifteenth of December, ownership of the house was transferred into five names: Raphael Hyland, Alexandra Madison, Justin Mannering, Daniel March and Abigail Stone. Happy Christmas.”
It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best. I thought of Daniel at the table, broad-backed and solid in his crisp white shirt, the precise flick of his wrist as he turned a page; of Abby flipping bacon in her bathrobe, Justin singing out of tune while he got ready for bed, Rafe sprawled on the grass squinting up into the sun. And all the time, underpinning everything, this. I had had moments of envying them before, but this was something too deep for envy; something like awe.
And then I realized. N, plane fares, Over my dead body will Ned get a chance. Here I had been fucking about with music boxes and tin soldiers and trying to figure out how much your average family photo album was worth; here I had thought she had nothing to sell, this time.
If she had been negotiating with Ned, and the others had somehow found out: holy shit. No wonder his name had turned the room to ice, that afternoon. I couldn’t breathe.
Frank was still going. I could hear him moving, pacing up and down the room, fast steps. “The paperwork on that would take months; Danny Boy must’ve started it almost the same day he got the keys. I know you like these people, Cassie, but you can’t tell me that’s not bizarre as all hell. That house is worth a cool couple of million, easy. What the fuck is he thinking? They’re all going to live there forever in one big happy hippie commune? Actually, never mind what he’s thinking, what the fuck is he smoking?”
He was taking it personally because he had missed it: all that investigation, and the middle-class student wimps had somehow slipped this right past him. “Yeah,” I said, very carefully, “it’s weird. They are weird, Frank. And yeah, it’s going to get complicated down the road, when someone wants to get married or whatever. But, like you said yourself, they’re young. They’re not thinking that way yet.”
“Yeah, well, little Justin won’t be getting married any time soon, not without a major change in the legislation-”
“Stop being a cliché, Frank. What’s the big deal?” This didn’t mean it had to be one of the four of them, not necessarily; the evidence still added up to Lexie being stabbed by someone she had met outside the house. It didn’t even mean she had actually been going to sell. If she had made a deal with Ned and then changed her mind, told him she was backing out; if she had just been playing with him all along-loathing-yanking his chain to pay him back for trying to take the house… He had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to spit on his grandfather’s memory; what would he have done if a share of it had been so close he could taste it, and then Lexie had snatched it away? I tried to shove the diary out of my mind: those dates, the first N just a few days after that missing circle; the hard scribble, pen almost digging through the paper, that said she hadn’t been playing.
“Well,” Frank said, with the lazy note to his voice that means he’s at his most dangerous. “If you ask me, this could give us the motive we’ve been looking for. Me, I’d call that a big deal.”
“No,” I said promptly, maybe too promptly, but Frank didn’t comment. “Not a chance. Where’s the motive in that? If they all wanted to sell and she was blocking it, then maybe, but those four would rather pull out their own teeth with rusty pliers than sell that house. What have they got to gain by killing her?”
“One of them dies, his share-or hers-reverts back to the other four. Maybe someone figured a quarter of that lovely big house would be even nicer than a fifth. It more or less lets Danny Boy out-if he wanted the whole thing, he could’ve just kept it to start with. But that still leaves us with three little Indians.”
I wriggled round the other way on my branch. I was very glad that Frank was off target, but, illogically, the extent to which he didn’t get it was pissing me off. "What for? Like I said, they don’t want to sell it. They want to live in it. They can do that just as well no matter what percentage they own. You think one of them killed her because he liked her bedroom better than his own?”
