Page 21 of A Secret In The Garden

I wanted to scream and cry, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him know anything that was happening.

“Your parents are alive,” I repeated in complete shock. “How⁠—”

“Yes, but not tonight. It’s late and I’ll never sleep if I get into it now,” he said, stopping my questions.

A few layers between us had been peeled back, and I hoped I was one step closer to helping the ghost—of his mother? Of another ancestor? Regardless, if I could get him to open up to me more, with her help, I could figure out what had really happened.

I swallowed, suddenly feeling like I was standing on the edge of something I wasn’t sure I could handle. “Not tonight,” I whispered. The words felt like they might break apart in the air. He wasn’t telling me no—just not now. It was something.

He nodded. There was a quiet acceptance in his eyes, but also a flicker of…relief, maybe? Or perhaps just the same uncertainty I was feeling. He turned then, walking back toward the door without another word. My eyes trailed over his back as he left.

I stood for a long time after he was gone, my body aching, my mind still tangled in the conversation we had just had. I was suddenly terrified to go to my room, horrified by the thought of seeing the ghost woman again and unsure of what to believe.

If it wasn’t his mother, then who was it? And if it was Hester Blackwood and he was lying, then it was safe to say Jasper and I getting closer was more dangerous than I could have imagined. For some reason, the thought of him lying to me stung. I realized I desperately didn’t want him to be lying to me and didn’t want to admit that I was attracted to a fucking killer.

But if his parents weren’t dead, where were they?

Chapter 11

Eliza

I rubbed the soft fabric between my fingers methodically in soothing repetition.

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared over the top of the chair, out across the endless expanse of sky, looking through the nearly translucent safety of the sheers that blurred the terrifying image. I was terrified by the lack of anything but sky when I looked out, but this morning I was too exhausted to fear it—as long as it stayed on its side of the chair.

I glanced at my laundry basket of clothes, grateful that I had never unpacked them from their makeshift suitcases. The other one, filled with books and random things, sat next to it, ready to go in a second if needed. Even in my own apartment, most of my things were kept this way—in baskets or boxes that would be easy to carry out should something happen. I didn’t know why I did this, but I always had. Even in my childhood home, I had never taken up too much space, hoping I could fly under my mom’s radar and leave in a flash—if I was ever allowed. It never worked, but the habit stuck.

Tears threatened the back of my eyelids as my eyes fell closed. My palms were red and swollen with blisters from the wooden handle of my hoe; it burned every time my fingers moved. The simple act of letting the weight of my head drop sent searing pain down my spine and across my back.

I hadn’t even stood up yet.

If I quit and left now, I’d have nowhere to go. Not really. My mother had a key to my apartment—the apartment I would no longer be able to afford after I lost my job. And I couldn’t face my mother right now. This would be my last straw—if she laid into me about how much I’d fucked everything up, if she got angry enough to get physical, my body couldn’t handle it right now.

Nothing strange had happened last night—at least, not after I’d gone to bed. No see-through ladies in red had appeared, no odd creaks, not even a weird scurrying in my peripheral vision. I almost wished it had. Then maybe I could analyze it, ask her something…make sure I wasn’t just seeing things. When I was a kid, I’d always thought I saw things in my room, just at the edges of my sight, where the lines of certainty blurred enough to keep me guessing.

I wasn’t just going to take Jasper’s word and believe his parents were still alive, but it definitely made me more nervous and opened a million more questions. The number to the Clearview Psychiatric Clinic was still on my phone’s screen from when I had pulled it up last night, after briefly convincing myself that the ghost was probably a result of some sort of psychotic break I was having. But again, the locket quickly squashed that worry—she had not been a figment of my imagination.

I shouldn’t have believed a word he said, but I just didn’t get the feeling that Jasper was lying about his parents still being alive. Alive people couldn’t appear see-through at the end of your bed and communicate with you through magical lockets, but I had no guarantee the ghost was Hester. Every time I started to think that the trauma and stress had finally gotten to me and made me snap, my logic was caught on the locket. I was grateful for the grounding reminder, even if it was less than comforting. I’d taken it off last night, but it was still there, on my bedside table, real and tangible. I was afraid to open it, unsure of what I wanted to find inside. Even though there was this tug telling me I wasn’t mentally unwell and that it was all real, the exhaustion was not making it easy to think.

The thought of going into the conservatory this morning felt like I was preparing to walk into a losing war.

The only reason I hadn’t gotten in my car and driven off was the woman in red. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get past the look in her eyes when I’d followed her and went into the conservatory to find the locket. She needed me, like her life—her death?—depended on it. I could tell, and even if it wasn’t Hester, she still needed me.

I didn’t know what to think about how I felt about Jasper either. Sometimes I hated him and wanted to kick him in the shin or tell him how arrogant he was, and then other times I wished he’d notice me as more than just the botanist fixing his garden—and then sometimes I thought he had, and my stomach got all tingly at the idea of it—and sometimes, that all happened in one conversation with the man.

It really did take a certain kind of man to make you blush when they talked to a bird. I couldn’t deny how attracted I was to him, which made the whole situation even worse now. I was getting all hot and tingly over a fucking murderer—and not just any murderer, a millionaire, weapons-dealing murderer.

The memory of the woman as she stood at the end of my bed flashed in my head, and suddenly the blood drained from my head down to the soles of my feet.

The rumors were that Jasper had strangled his mother before shoving her over the cliffside.

The ghost had kept a hand clenched to her throat. Even as she guided me to the locket, her hand had remained around her neck.

Oh my god. He did it.

Of course he was lying. The realization sparked a new wave of determination in me, and I was up and out of bed. I needed to talk to him, interrogate him. I needed to stop being so stupid and naive just because we had some sort of chemistry and find the hole in his story.

I grabbed the locket off the antique table next to the bed and clasped it in my hands with a renewed sense of wonder. I was put here for a reason—to get to the bottom of all of this, and I wasn’t leaving here until I did. But I needed to keep Jasper at a distance too. I couldn’t seem to stop getting all silly around him, and the last thing I needed was to fall for a killer with an unlimited supply of money and power. If he killed me too⁠—