“Well, that’s a little much,” he said with a warm smile, which fell when he remembered the topic at hand. “Just … go handle your lady problem.”
———
“Why couldn’t you have smothered him?” I groaned, stretching to reach a spot on the ceiling from the pile of pillows Istood precariously upon. “There’d be less mess. We could pass it off as an accident. It would be so much easier.”
Down on the floor below, Harper’s ponytail sliced like a whip as she shot me a glare. “It was a crime of passion.”
“Of course it fucking was,” I hissed, reaching for the lampshade. “I didn’t think it was a crime of intellect.”
Even through the gloves my fingers burned, the chemical stain seeping beneath and the thick, drying blood sticky in a way I might never stop thinking about, a congealing texture unlike anything else I’d ever known. It took just over an hour to have the tiny room spotless. I got new linens before returning the cupboard key.
I’m not sure if David had questions about why it had taken me so long or if he’d expected lady problems like my own to take all night, but he nodded in thanks and slid the key into the drawer.
Back in the room, Harper was pacing—and even though I’d been doing that earlier, it concerned me.
“If you start muttering ‘out damned spot’ I’m calling the police.”
She turned, wringing her hands like she very much might feel a speck of blood there. “What do we do?” she asked, and I realized how much having a task, a thing to focus on, had reassured her. “I’ve done enough procedural dramas to know that bleach isn’t covering shit.”
“Enough to know the first suspect is always the spouse?”
Her hands fell to her sides, and she halted her pacing.
“At least do it in your own home next time,” I added, like that might help things.
“What do we do?” she repeated.
I don’t know why she kept looking to me for answers. But clinging to her need was keeping me calm, and it was clearly helping her to see me as a beacon of logic so that’s the dynamic we fell into.
“We give them no reason to suspect the crime happened here,” I said. “Go through Joel’s clothes and find something that I can wear to pretend to be him. A cap, a hoodie—something.”
“You’re not that good an actress.”
“Do as I bloody tell you,” I snarled, and she shut her mouth, even as that cocky smirk remained.
If she was smiling, though, at least some semblance of normality remained.
“I have a call to make,” I said. I wanted to take her hand again, wanted to reassure her, but that was difficult when she was being so damn Harper-ish about being vulnerable. “We don’t have to commit the perfect murder. We just have to tell the perfect story.”
———
“Hey, Caleb,” I greeted, and evidently I wasn’t feeling quite as calm as I was acting because my voice was honeyed, a heavy-handed saccharinity I’d never deign to flirt with. (It was Harper—old, CADS Harper with her fluttering lashes and tinkling laugh.)
“Heywoooood!”
It was difficult to remember, after scrubbing blood from a worn hotel carpet, that I’d won a BAFTA earlier that night. But Caleb could clearly think of nothing else. Good, he deserved his joy.
Perhaps I deserved this in turn.
“So, I’m not promising anything,” I said. “But, well, I’m a bit bored with this quiet reflective night of mine.”
“Of course you are because that sounds dull as shit. Come out! Join us!”
“I’m going to think about it. Have a few drinks here, see how I feel. I don’t know. Maybe. It would be so lovely to spend the night with you at any rate.”
Whichever way he took that was not on me.
“Come on, Heywood. Don’t we always have such fun together?”
