Going over the house with a fresh eye seemed to transform it for Gabriella. It was one thing to be here drinking coffee with her mother or painting the upstairs bedrooms. It was an entirely different thing to be investigating, running her hands over the walls or gently tugging on wall sconces in hopes that maybe a secret trap door would spring open like in the movies.

She’d managed to convince her mom that they would be fine if she went to work for a few hours like she’d originally planned. So now Gabriella was upstairs with Saskia while Bradley and Madelyn took downstairs. The other woman was ignoring Gabriella as she went into the closets and searched for loose floorboards. Honestly, Gabriella was fine with this. She’d left the checklist on the floor of one of the empty bedrooms and Saskia could check it whenever she wanted while Gabriella got her own work done.

On top of everything else, being here reminded her too much of Elliot and that was putting her even more on edge than Saskia’s presence. Everything in the house – even rooms she hadn’t been in with him – held some kind of memory. Had they ever been in this sparsely decorated and furnished guest room before? Probably not, but she couldn’t help thinking of him anyway. In the other room, she’d shown him the paint color and he’d shielded his eyes like the cheery yellow was far too bright. But then he’d kissed her, right there in that corner.

And then he’d dumped her because her job dealt with things he didn’t understand. And instead of trying to understand, he’d just left. No, he’d judged her, made accusations, and then left. But no matter how much she tried to tell herself this, the memory of laughing with him just one room over, in the room Saskia was checking right now, threatened to overwhelm her.

“Patrick’s going to be here after he’s done with his current case,” Saskia said, breaking the tense silence of their floor.

“Can’t wait,” Gabriella muttered.

God. She had sympathy for the girl, especially given her own situation. And Saskia couldn’t be much younger than she was, since Gabriella was only twenty-three. But how could she be so…

Shit, no. Gabriella didn’t have any moral high ground when it came to judging Saskia, did she?

“Have you found anything?”

Saskia sounded nervous when she asked, and Gabriella had to give her something for having the guts to keep working. “Not yet,” she said, trying to keep her voice a little kinder than it had been. “Any luck?”

“I found a loose floorboard, but there was nothing under it.”

Right, she’d found that one months ago. They’d covered it with the rug since it was a tripping hazard. That was before all of this, wasn’t it?

“I don’t think there’s anything in this room either,” she said. “Let’s get the last two and we’ll meet Bradley and Madelyn downstairs.”

She took her mother’s bedroom. They didn’t even need to discuss it. Saskia went down the hall to the oversized closet currently housing stacks of linens. Again, searching these rooms brought up nothing.

About thirty minutes later, they were downstairs again. Bradley and Madelyn were both in the living room. Bradley was making some notes on his phone and Madelyn was sitting on the floor, running her hands along the floorboards of the polished hardwood.

“No luck?” she asked Gabriella, reaching the wall and moving gingerly to the last row of boards.

“Nope.”

“Kitchen’s clear,” Bradley said. “I’ll take the basement. Gabriella, you take outside.”

“I’ll join you outside,” Madelyn said.

Gabriella glanced over at Saskia, who looked like she’d rather do anything else in the world than go into the basement with Bradley right now. Not that Gabriella could blame her. Bradley didn’t look thrilled either, but he nodded. “You,” he said, pointing at Saskia, “with me.”

She clearly wanted to argue, but someone with more authority was telling her what to do. Again, Gabriella felt that slamming blend of familiarity, contempt, and sympathy as Saskia followed him. Madelyn reached for her cane, then tried to pull herself to her feet without success.

“Can you give me a hand?” she asked Gabriella, holding out her hand.

Gabriella took it and gently pulled Madelyn to her feet. Madelyn winced, but didn’t seem to be injured any further by Gabriella’s help. “Thanks,” she said, steadying herself. “Alright, want to start out back?”

“This is going to take us forever,” Gabriella said as they started toward the back door, passing through the hallway where a few broken dishes were still sitting in a lingering dustpan.

“I know,” Madelyn said. “And the snow isn’t going to help. At least it isn’t too packed down, though. In case we need to start digging.”

They went out to the backyard, where Elliot’s father was still clearing out debris from a snowstorm a few weeks ago. Then Gabriella felt the air leave her body when she spotted Elliot way back in the far corner, just along the edge of the woods.

Elliot didn’t seem to notice her and Madelyn as they came out. Madelyn glanced over at him, then apparently saw the way Gabriella’s body didn’t seem to want to move any further. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“That’s him,” Gabriella whispered, praying her voice wouldn’t carry on the wind that was cutting through the yard.

Madelyn looked over, then back at her. “You can take the basement,” she said. “I’m fine out here. Send Bradley up or something.”

“No, they’ll kill each other,” Gabriella said.

“Yeah, that sounds like Bradley and everyone he’s ever met,” said Madelyn. “It’s okay, tell him to meet me out here.”

“No, I’ll stay,” Gabriella said, though she was tempted to take Madelyn up on her offer. “I have a job to do and I’m not going to let him take that.”

Elliot hadn’t seen them come out, he was still on the farther end of the property. But as Gabriella stepped off the stairs and Madelyn followed carefully behind her, his father looked up from where he was putting branches into an enormous wheelbarrow.

“Hi ladies,” he said with an easy grin.

“Hi,” Gabriella replied, smiling despite the way that her body was shaking. “Mr. Ramsey, this is Madelyn, my coworker.”

“Nice to meet you,” Madelyn said, swapping her cane to the other side so that she could shake Mr. Ramsey’s outstretched hand.

From across the yard, Gabriella saw Elliot turn. He paused as he noticed she was there. They made eye contact for a brief moment, then she looked away.

Gabriella had work to do. Her mom’s house was in danger, they had a small window before the case was irrevocably messed up, and she didn’t have time to focus on her hurt feelings or the mistakes they’d both made right now. It was a short relationship, she wouldn’t feel this way forever.

The words sounded good as she thought them, but it didn’t make the pain of seeing him any less. Still, she needed to prioritize.

“We’re looking for anything in the yard that might be an artifact from Virginia Richelieu, like we were talking about earlier,” she said as Mr. Ramsey shifted the branches in his wheelbarrow. “Not necessarily like buried treasure, but maybe even something she may have dropped. It’s a long shot, but have you found anything that might fit that description?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I haven’t seen anything like that,” he said. “If I had, I would have brought it to your mother. So would any of my boys if they found something in the yard. But maybe you could try a metal detector. Otherwise, you might end up digging up the whole property with no luck.”

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” Madelyn admitted. “Our teammates are down in the basement now, but if they don’t find anything, it’s probably on the grounds.”

“It’s only this front half of the yard,” Gabriella said, sweeping an arm around to demonstrate. “But hopefully they’ll find something down there first.”

“If you girls need any help, let me know,” Mr. Ramsey said. “I’m going to go wrap up the front yard now, but I’ll be here.”

He glanced over at Elliot, who was paying far too much attention to the work he’d been doing in that one small space for a while now. Then he gave Gabriella a bittersweet smile and began rolling his wheelbarrow away.

“Where do you think we should start?” Gabriella asked Madelyn.

Madelyn glanced around the yard. “Foundation,” she said. “You start looking at the foundation for anything. I’ll take the perimeter. We don’t have a metal detector, but we could come back with one if we need to.”

Gabriella couldn’t help glancing at her cane, and Madelyn immediately noticed. “Fair,” she said with a laugh even as Gabriella’s face heated up. “Alright, how about I’ll take the foundation and you take the perimeter?”

She didn’t seem fully steady in the snow, so even that made Gabriella a little uneasy. But if Madelyn said she could do it, it wasn’t Gabriella’s place to fight with her. So she nodded. “Sounds good,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Elliot was still at the far end of the yard and she knew she’d have to end up closer to him at some point. Thankfully, based on the way the land rose slightly, she was pretty sure she knew exactly where the end of the original yard was and it was just far enough away from him that she could-

Who was she kidding? Even as she walked the perimeter, unsure exactly what she was looking for, all she could think about was how close Elliot was. And how he’d never be this close again, not in the same way he had been for those months. But she had to admit to herself that, if she’d told him immediately about her work, he probably would have never been that close at all to begin with.

Gabriella moved slowly, looking carefully for any strange differences in the frozen grass where it was visible through the snow. The snow was uneven and she had to dig at a few points, pushing the dirty clumps aside as it soaked into the knees of her jeans and turned her hands red. She could feel Elliot’s gaze a few times, but when she looked up, he had returned to what he was doing, his plaid-clad back to her.

There was a knot of some kind in the ground, but it was too frozen to pull out on her own. Gabriella wished she’d brought a shovel as she kicked at it. Maybe her mom had one. Elliot probably did, but the last thing she was going to do was talk to him. Nothing was breaking this dense tension between them, so instead of doing that, she got up and brushed the snow off her pants. Maybe the shovel was in the basement, she remembered one at her mother’s old house. She’d head down there, try to keep Bradley from terrorizing Saskia, and bring the shovel back out to see what this thing was. It was probably just an old root, so-

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”

Patrick’s furious voice jolted through the cold air, making her jump. Over at the house, Madelyn stood up too quickly, catching herself on her cane as she nearly lost her balance. Patrick didn’t notice Madelyn as he strode into the backyard, coming straight at Gabriella.

“Your fucking mother put in a complaint against me,” he said, walking toward where she was standing, unsure exactly what to do. “She claimed I’m doing the investigation wrong, that since I’m not catering to your every little whim, I’m doing my job badly.”

He looked like he might actually hit her. His face was set with fury, teeth actually bared as he stormed over. Gabriella realized too late that she had nothing in her hand to defend herself if he did attack her. From the corner of her eye, she saw Madelyn coming over and wanted to tell her not to, to stay back and not take this hit. But she couldn’t get the words out.

“You selfish, spoiled child,” Patrick spat. “You don’t like how I manage my team? Fine. But to put my job at risk for it? Do you think I wanted this responsibility? Do you, you silly little bitch?”

She took a step back as he came closer, bracing for the hit if it came. She could see Elliot hurrying over, his rake in his hand as he moved faster than she’d ever seen. Patrick was so close that she could see the way his eyes were reddened, the tendons tight in his neck as he screamed at her.

“I have a responsibility to keep this place safe and you’re getting in the way of that!” Patrick continued. “I could kill you for this, you know that?”

He didn’t mean it literally, she knew he didn’t. But she was back in the woods, it was a warm June night, not the chill of a New Hampshire February.

“Get the fuck away from her!”

She turned to tell Elliot she had this, that he didn’t need to step in and be the hero now, but she couldn’t get a word out around the terror in her throat. Both he and Madelyn were still too far away. Patrick was in her face now, his breath coming at her in puffs of steam as he grabbed her jacket.

“This work is serious!” Patrick continued. “And sometimes it’s ugly. If you can’t handle that, Princess, then maybe-”

His words were cut off as he suddenly stumbled, releasing his grip on her as he fell. Gabriella backed away from him on instinct, even as he cried out in pain. One leg was bent awkwardly beneath him, holding most of his weight. The other seemed to have sunk into the ground.

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CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 17