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What the hell was I doing here in this depressing apartment, this ode to inertia and giving up?
I had to snap out of it.
There was no way I was letting Knox Liquors go down like this. Hunter was probably going crazy right this minute trying to hold off a takeover, and he couldn’t accomplish it alone. He needed my help.
And I needed to make things right.
I shot off a quick e-mail to work cashing in every single vacation day I had, and grabbed my keys. I was going to save Hunter.
Whether he wanted me to or not.
#
My car screeched into the driveway of the manor house, and I got out. I shut the door softly, my heart hammering its way up to my throat. I was half-expecting Hunter to come storming out of the manor and demand that I explain my presence, and if that happened I had no idea what I would say. My self-confidence in the righteousness of my mission had started to erode after fifteen minutes of driving, though not enough to turn back around.
Not enough to abandon Hunter.
It could never have been enough to abandon Hunter.
The grounds were strangely quiet, the still air of the evening broken only by the occasional call of a bird from the woods. The far-away burble of the stream, a breeze rustling the grass. I’d expected to find Hunter in full war mode against the Douchebros, barking orders into a cell phone, dictating lists to Martha, striding back and forth across the grounds as the workers still loyal to him scurried to do his bidding.
But it was all so quiet it could have been abandoned centuries ago.
I rang the doorbell to the manor house three times, trepidation growing in my stomach. When no one answered, I put my hand on the doorknob, expecting to find it locked.
It turned under my touch.
“Hunter?” I called as I entered. “Martha? Anybody?”
My voice echoed back to me, the only thing in the house besides the spiders skittering across the cobwebs above.
“Okay, this is about three times more creepy than I expected,” I muttered, closing the door behind me.
It creaked like a ghost’s moan, because of course it did.
I wandered through the house, occasionally calling out but finding that my voice grew softer and softer as I did so, as if I were afraid of someone actually answering back. I knew I was being silly, but I couldn’t help myself: the Gothic architecture looked so much more imposing in the half-light—even flipping on the switches didn’t help, since at least half the bulbs seemed to have been burnt out and never replaced. There was a fine film of dust over everything. What had happened to all the servants? Had Hunter reassigned them all to help save the company?
Had Hunter packed them all up and left?
No. No, Hunter would never do that. Hunter would never give up.
I was just letting my imagination run away with me, letting myself get overly influenced by all the darkness and all the eerie creaking sounds of a wooden house naturally settling into its foundations on a cool summer night.
I hoped.
Eventually, the maze of hallways led me to the back of the house, where I saw Martha sprawled out on a lawn chair beside the pool, sunning herself—for a certain value of sun; it had nearly set—in a skimpy red bikini, her damp curls fanning out across the plastic of the chair, a martini on the table next to her.
It was so normal and reassuring I thought I might cry.
Martha spotted me as I slid open the glass door. “Ally!” she cried, leaping to her feet with a happy smile and enfolding me in a warm hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you!”
I felt the tension seep out of my shoulders as I hugged her back with relief flooding my heart. I hadn’t realized until just this moment how worried I’d been that for all her conciliatory phone calls, Martha would side with Hunter and not want to forgive me. I’d lost my almost-boyfriend, I didn’t want to lose a friend too. “It’s good to see you too, Martha. But what’s going on? Where is everybody? The house is deserted.”
Martha rolled her eyes. “Paid vacation. Most of them have jetted off to Cancun, but someone has to stay behind and make sure the property doesn’t get overrun with mutant alligators or drunk teens or whatever, so I volunteered. I mean hey, I get the pool all to myself and Amazon delivers right to the door, so it’s practically a vacation. Only downside is my boytoys hate driving out this way, so I have to work extra hard to make it worth it.” She grinned. “But oh, do I make it worth it.”
I was confused. “Hunter’s in Cancun?”
“Oh, no, no,” Martha said, shaking her head. “Hunter’s gone fishing.”
She said it with a load of significance that I didn’t understand. “Is that…a metaphor?”
“Nope,” she said with a sigh. “I wish. Nah, he’s holed up at his lodge by the lake, brooding like a goddamn sparkly vampire. Has been for weeks now. It’s what he always does when he feels cornered. He pouts.”
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