Darker Shades of Elise novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Wall

Rafe catches her in his back room, shows her where her print will hang, and she walks out to a woman waiting in her car.

"Don't touch the red one," Rafe said behind me. "She's still a little raw."

I turned so fast my elbow hit the lamp.

He stood in the doorway in his coat, rain on the shoulders, holding a paper bag from the all-night bakery.

He didn't look angry.

He looked like a man who'd found a guest early at his party.

"You said you didn't keep the files," I said.

"I said I didn't keep them on that card."

He set the bag on a stool and took out two coffees.

"I got you a cream and one sugar."

"I'm not drinking that."

"You will."

"You always do."

I didn't touch it.

He walked past me along the wall.

"Ten dots," he said. "Each one is a woman who paid."

"For what?"

"For time."

"Some paid a month, some paid a year."

He stopped in front of the torn photograph.

"Her husband got a package at his office."

"Nine thousand dollars late, that's all it was."

"Where is she now?"

"Portland, I think."

"She sends me a Christmas card."

He laughed, and I wanted to put the coffee in his face.

"Where are the files?" I said. "The real ones."

"Somewhere safe."

"Where?"

He tapped his temple and smiled, and I memorized the exact curl of his smile so I could hate it later.

"Why show me this?" I said.

"Because you came to my home at one in the morning with your husband's jacket on," he said gently.

"Because you were always the smart one, Felicity."

"I don't want you to be afraid of me, I want you to understand me."

He sipped his coffee and watched me over the lid.

I held my phone against my thigh with the camera up.

I had started a video when he said the word dots, and it was still running.

"You understand it now?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Good."

He pointed to a bare spot on the wall between a blonde woman asleep and a woman laughing on a fire escape.

There was a single pin in the plaster.

"That's yours."

"The light's good there."

My stomach turned over.

"You'll get your forty thousand together by Friday," he said.

"You'll be here Thursday at two."

"And you'll wear that green dress, because it makes your eyes look wet."

"Or you send it to Mitchell."

"Or I send it to Mitchell, and his mother, and the buyer, and the three women you've been running with since your father died."

"I have all their emails."

"I'm very thorough."

I looked at him for a long time.

I let my shoulders drop so he would see me give up.

It was the best thing I'd done onstage in four years.

"Fine," I said.

"Fine?"

"I'll bring it."

"I just need a few days."

He looked pleased, and a little disappointed.

"That's my girl."

I picked up my bag with a steady hand, and the coffee sat untouched on the stool.

I walked past him and down three flights of stairs without running.

The rain had started again.

It came down hard and quiet across the mill lot, over my car and the dock light and the empty road beyond.

My hands wouldn't work the key fob, so I stood there in the cold and tried three times.

"It sticks," someone said. "Press it against the glass."

A woman stood by the car next to mine.

She was in her forties, in a long gray coat, with no hat and wet hair.

I had no idea how long she'd been waiting there.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Do I know you?"

"No," she said. "But I know him."

She tipped her chin up at the lit window on the third floor.

"I was number six on his wall," she said. "He did the same thing to me."

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