I wrapped my arms around my knees. “She must have been one helluva lawyer.”
He nodded. “She was. After that, I never saw her again.”
“So this wasn’t a big romance?”
He shook his head. The story itself was longer than the story of how I’d found out, which I’d given up after approximately three minutes of “interrogation.” Trey hadn’t been surprised. He knew I didn’t have a withholding bone in my body.
“Why hide it?” I said. “You didn’t seriously think I’d be upset, did you?”
He continued buttoning his shirt. “No. And I wasn’t hiding it. It’s just that I’m still learning how to…reconnect? Is that the right word? When I’m talking about myself?”
I curled around the pillow. He was reconnecting his social network one person at a time, and reconnecting himself one story at a time—who he’d been before the accident, who he’d been after, and who he was now.
“Reconnect is the right word,” I said.
“Good. Because the person in that story doesn’t feel like me. But he was. I mean, I was. The same. And yet different. It’s the same feeling I get reading the OPS transcripts of my testimony.” Then he gave me a sidelong glance from under his lashes. “I was worried, you know.”
“About what?”
“That you’d think badly of me. For being…I don’t know.”
“Scandalous?”
“Yes. Perhaps.”
I propped my chin in my hand. “That’s a valid worry. I’ve never done anything so shocking in my whole life.”
Trey’s eyes tracked my face from eyes to chin, concentrating a good five seconds on my mouth. Then he gave me an inscrutable look and turned away, back to searching for his shoes. I smiled a little. I knew he’d seen the lie, but for whatever reason, decided not to engage. For the time being anyway.
“So now what?” I said.
“Now I go back to the check-in station.”
“Of course. You don’t wanna be derelict in your duty.” I kissed his bicep. “You especially don’t want to get caught sneaking over here for a booty call.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but he wasn’t annoyed. He started to put on his clip-on tie, but instead slipped it in his pants pocket along with his earpiece.
“Have you heard from Keesha?” I said.
“I have. She has the suspect in custody. During the interrogation, he confessed to all the burglaries, and the judge in Waldo has confirmed that he could not have been involved in the murder.”
“Which strengthens her theory that it was Macklin.”
Trey knelt beside the bed and stuck a hand underneath. “Actually, no. She’s decided that it was Nick Talbot.”
“What?”
He straightened, one sock in hand. “She said I was right, that no cop would have faked the scene so ineptly, not with a criminal who had such a precisely documented MO. Her words. The burglar agreed. He had, apparently, considered the Talbot home as a target and rejected it. Too much unpredictability, he said. Too many lovers coming and going at all hours, too much crazy. His words. He thinks Nick is guilty too.”
I took in this revelation. Trey continued patting around under the bed for his other sock.
“Did you tell her you’d changed your mind about Nick?” I said.
“I did.”
“And?”
“She hung up on me. Which is not surprising. I think I would have hung up on me too.”
Still shoeless, he sat once again at the foot of the bed. I finished buttoning his shirt. I took my time with it, knowing it would be the last time I’d see him until morning.
“Are the rest of the Talbots behaving?” I said.
“Portia eventually went to the bar at the main resort with one of the tech crew. Quint went back to his cottage alone, where he spent an hour on the phone with Talbot Creative’s legal counsel, who is meeting him here first thing in the morning. Nick and Addison have stayed in their cabin.”
“No further attempts on Nick’s life?”
“None.” Trey raised his chin and let me straighten his collar. “Though Finn was right—I did discover something interesting while working the valet stand. For someone who doesn’t believe anyone is trying to harm his brother, Quint came well-armed. He has a handgun in the glove compartment, a Ruger SR45. Loaded.”
“And he left it in the car?”
“Yes.”
“So he’s not expecting to need it.”
Trey leveled a look at me. “If he needs a weapon, he’ll use the one he had hidden in his golf bag. A Sig Sauer .357.”
I whistled low and long. “Whoa.”
“Indeed. He’s concerned about something.”
“Yes, but whatever it is, it has nothing to do with keeping his brother alive. Which is utterly unsurprising. With Nick dead, all the money in the trust will be his to manage.”
“At the moment, yes. But if the judge’s ruling stands and Addison is indeed Nick’s sole conservator—and if she and Nick are married, that is a likely outcome—then she controls everything.”
“Which means Addison’s motives to see him dead just doubled. Not only would she control his estate, the price of her screenplay would go through the roof.”
Trey didn’t argue. We’d both seen every motive under the sun—people killed for love, for fame, for money, for security, and for sheer unmitigated meanness. We were all born with a trigger. For some of us, it was as easily sprung as a rabbit trap.
“Oliver thinks Nick’s a killer,” I said. “Quint thinks he’s insane. Addison wants to control every second of his life. And who knows what Portia thinks except that I suspect she’d throw anyone and anything under the bus to ditch Moonshine and head back to L.A. on the next plane.”
Trey nodded. “Yes. That seems like a valid summary.”
“And Nick thinks it’s all fodder for the movie of the week that is his life. He is the only person not taking any of this seriously.”
Trey frowned. “What do you mean?”
So I filled him in on my conversation with Nick, including the part where he’d been lying to us. Trey took it better than
