The Unkindness of Ravens, M. Hilliard [romantic books to read txt] 📗

and put on some lights, then headed for the kitchen. Comfort food time. I pulled out my laptop to do some more digging while I ate my grilled cheese. Various news sites had developing stories about the body of a woman found in Raven Hill, but the information was sparse. The police were keeping a tight lid on things, which would make the board happy.

I did a more detailed study of Joanna’s social media, but found no convenient death threats. Ditto the library page, though Joanna was involved in some heated discussions about the new building proposal. I jotted down the names in those threads. She was also involved in a long debate on the PTA page regarding the message sent to children about healthy food choices if chocolate milk was offered in the cafeteria. Joanna was pro-chocolate. As a child-free city girl, the things suburban parents got upset about mystified me, but I added the names from that thread to my list, and circled the ones that overlapped.

At the end of this exercise, I didn’t have anything I thought would motivate a murderer, chocolate milk aside. Midsomer County we were not. Was the fact that it happened in the library related to why Joanna was killed, or was it convenient? Planned or opportunistic? If it was the latter, it must have been someone she knew, or someone with a reason for being there late or after hours. Joanna would have noticed anything out of the ordinary. She noticed everything.

Maybe that was it. She was a detail person. She noticed everything, and she filed it away. She never forgot. If she thought it was important, she never let it go. What had she seen that someone didn’t want her to know?

I always thought you’d marry Ian. Her voice whispered through my mind.

So did I, Joanna, at least for a little while. That mad, hot love affair my senior year had ended badly.

Ian wasn’t a subject I wanted to revisit, but denial and avoidance were beginning to fail me. The dreams had started after Christmas, the first I’d spent at home since Danny died. Seeing everyone from the neighborhood where we grew up, Danny’s parents at midnight Mass—I thought I was keeping it together. Then my mother started nagging me about all the stuff I had stored in the basement.

“You’ve got to go through all those boxes eventually, Greer. You can’t avoid it forever.”

Watch me, Mom.

I didn’t want to open those boxes full of tangible reminders of my old life, but the box I really wanted to keep a lid on was the one in my head, where I’d stored the memories of Ian, and of Danny, the murder, and the trial. Everything that went on in the months before I left New York for Philadelphia and graduate school. The first morning I woke up in my new apartment, in a city where no one knew me, I felt a guilty, giddy sense of freedom, and decided I would never think about the whole ugly mess again. It was a new life, a new me.

Or so I thought.

I shut the laptop and went to the kitchen. Sherlock had his opium pipe; I had my martinis. I was a fan of the traditional five-to-one ratio, stirred, with a twist, and as ice-cold as I could make it without actually chilling the gin. By the time I gently twisted the lemon rind over the glass and dropped it in, the familiar soothing ritual had calmed me down.

I moved out onto the porch, leaving the lights off to enjoy the peaceful twilight. I could make out the manor roofline through the trees, a dim glow in the top story. The police were still there.

Three years since that scene in the living room. The end of my enviable life in Manhattan. The perfect marriage to the handsome boy from my old neighborhood, the one I met in high school and reconnected with after college. He was in finance at what turned out to be a lucrative start-up. Or would have been lucrative, if he’d lived through the IPO. I had a six-figure job in marketing at a prestige brand cosmetics company. We shared a light-filled two-bedroom apartment on the East side. Active social life.

I’d been bored insensible.

It’s not that I didn’t love Danny. I did, but he had always loved me more. What seemed like a feature turned into a bug. It’s a great responsibility, being loved like that. Danny was busy and distracted with the new venture. My job had gotten stale. I needed a change. I needed something. Ian Cameron was unfinished business. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. In my defense, Danny was supposed to be with me that night. But he wasn’t, Ian was, and there was an open bar. An empty conference room. A closed door. An unanswered question.

“Haven’t you ever thought about it, Greer? What you would do if we were both free?”

Only twice. Whenever Ian got divorced. And the third time on the long taxi ride home. Right up until I walked in the door and found my husband dead.

It’s not like I made it happen. I didn’t wish it, even for a second. I didn’t.

A fox barked. The short, sharp yips snapped me back. I blinked into the darkness, aware of the silence of the nearby woods. The nocturnal creatures had gone quiet. I heard the rhythmic footfalls of an approaching jogger. Not uncommon at this time of year, but unusual on this little dead-end street. I sank back into the deep shadows of the porch. Word would be out by now, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The jogger paused, lingering at the edge of the woods. Lost? I thought of slipping to the corner and peeking around, but then I heard the crunch of gravel. The driveway and path leading to the stairs up my apartment. A rattle as someone pushed at the gate.

Pierre began to bark furiously downstairs. No one he