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It was inevitable that this wouldn’t be a quick pop-in, like the last time they came to visit Maria. She’d already been gone two days—three now—and apart from the clues left behind in Ophelia and her abandoned car, there was no way to tell what happened to her. The sheriff was adamant that she’d be abducted by someone for reasons currently unknown, and as much as Lucas didn’t want to believe that that could be happening to his sister, he decided to act as though that was the truth.
Maria wouldn’t run away. A woman in her late twenties with a business she loved, a village she adored, and a man she couldn’t wait to marry… this wasn’t your everyday, ordinary cold feet. No way she bolted because she had second thoughts about becoming Mrs. Sylvester Collins. Something more sinister was at work—and now that she was back in Hamlet, with the ghosts that still haunted her, Tess was already wishing they could take the Mustang right back out of town again.
They couldn’t. She accepted that, even if she didn’t like it. And because Lucas was adamant about sticking around to help with the continued search—and, hopefully, some kind of ransom request that he would willingly pay—that meant finding somewhere to hunker down.
With the memories swirling around her fateful stay at the Hamlet Inn with Jack, Tessa couldn’t bring herself to book a room there. Three years later and—though she didn’t quite regret what happened—she wished there’d been another way to escape Jack in order to be with Lucas.
There wasn’t. Whenever she doubted that, Lucas was right there to remind her that Jack and Caity had to die. If they were still alive, Tessa’s husband and Lucas’s ex would’ve always been a complication that they didn’t need. Sure, there was collateral damage along the way—Deputy Walsh, for one—but while she might’ve regrettedthat, there was nothing she could do about it now.
But staying the night at the Hamlet Inn? She couldn’t do it.
That left Ophelia. A bed and breakfast set in the middle of the village, it was Maria’s labor of love. When she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, she decided to turn the De Angelis family home into a B&B for the odd visitor to Hamlet.
Tess had stayed there as well. After Jack’s murder, when her insistence that she find somewhere else to stay was genuine even if it was part of Lucas’s grand plan, Lucas “suggested” Ophelia. Partly because he wanted his lover and his sister to meet and get along, but also because it would be easier to conspire with Tessa when she was somewhere he had access to.
Technically, Ophelia was also Lucas’s home. He’d been born there, raised there, and only left when he got married the first time. Even after he finally divorced Caitlin, he moved to the other side of Hamlet to get as far away from his ex and the insidious village gossips as he could. He never lived in Ophelia again, though Maria offered them both an open invitation to stay whenever they were in town.
Tessa assumed that’s where they would be going. While Sly seemed a little uneasy about that, reminding them both about the locking mechanism that shut down at nine p.m. before opening up again at seven the next morning, it was Lucas who point-blank refused.
Without Maria there, he wouldn’t be spending a night in Ophelia.
No Hamlet Inn. No Ophelia. Tessa was beginning to think that Lucas expected the two of them to either spend the night at the station house or curled up together in the mustang—and maybe they would have, if it wasn’t for Sly using his radio to buzz Rick Hart.
Her first trip to Hamlet, Tess barely got to know the big, brawny deputy. A local who was working down at the barbershop, it turned out he was a Marine who had only recently returned home after almost a decade away. Caitlin De Angelis had roped him into helping investigate Jack’s murder and the “attempted murder” of Lucas after he was shot at.
In the years since, he’d become a full-fledged member of the Hamlet Sheriff Department. He was also the husband of Grace Delaney—Tess and Lucas’s former neighbor in Dayton, and the woman Tess sent to Hamlet two years ago to escape her stalker of an ex—and the father of her child.
Last winter, Grace invited Tess and Lucas to witness their wedding. By the time the pair were actually wed, poor Grace had been propositioned by the pastor, attacked by a young firefighter who believed he was in love with her, and then the ceremony itself was disturbed when a figure from her past returned.
After the way Lucas was there to save Grace from Dorian Reid, then supported the two of them when Grace finally married Rick, the deputy gruffly told her husband that he owed him.
Tess wasn’t so sure if Rick remembered his promise, or if this was just another example of how ‘Hamlet helps’, but by the time she was walking with Lucas outside of the station house, Sly had wrangled an invitation for Tessa and Lucas to borrow the Harts’ guest room for the time being.
Was there an ulterior motive on his end? Of course. In his own way, Rick was as protective of Grace as Lucas was Tess. With Maria missing and no idea if she was a target or simply a victim of circumstance, Rick was more than happy to have someone staying in the house with Grace and their baby while he was working alongside the other residents of Hamlet, searching for Lucas’s sister.
This wasn’t the only time someone had gone missing that Tess knew of. Their first Christmas together as a couple, Tess prodded Lucas to go home to Hamlet for the holidays. She went with him, of course, and was celebrating with Sly and Maria when the sheriff got the buzz that a four-year-old boy had been taken.
Hamlet helps… as though they were a well-oiled machine, the people of Hamlet all joined together that Christmas, creating search parties that fanned out all over the small town.
Lucas went with them. Tess stayed behind with Maria at her husband’s insistence, but Lucas and Sly went off as a two-man team—and eventually found the child in the custody of a drunkard dressed up as a dingy Santa Claus.
They found Liam Johnson. Tess had no doubt that, if Maria was still somewhere in Hamlet, they’d find her, too.
If she wasn’t…
She didn’t want to think what would happen if Mariawasn’t.
The Harts lived in a two-floor house closer to the gulleyside of Hamlet. There was a driveway out front with a truck parked on the left side, a small gray car to the right. A HSD cruiser was positioned along the curb, an easy exit if he was needed in an emergency.
Thinking along the same lines as Tess, Lucas parked on the opposite side of the street. That way he wasn’t blocking in Rick’s cruiser—but he wasn’t blocking his own exit, either.
There were three suitcases in the trunk of the Mustang. Lucas grabbed the two heaviest, then stepped aside. Tess took the smallest one, slamming the trunk’s lid back down.
Another memory flittered through her mind. It was a rainy night, pouring much harder than the slight drizzle that continued, and Jack was carrying all of their luggage into the Hamlet Inn. Tess offered to help, but he refused to, as though she was too weak to even carry a suitcase.
The case she had was the smallest one, but rather than insist on carrying them all, Lucas let her take it. Not because he didn’t want to, but because she’d complained about how often Jack would dismiss her countless times during their marriage and her affair with Lucas—and her new husband was adamant he wouldn’t make the same mistakes as Sullivan did.
As if he would…
