King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,15

tomatoes and cucumbers and melons, now waited for her in the fridge. Beck had a deft hand with the knife – with more than just produce, she knew – and he instructed her in it until her cuts looked nearly as clean and precise as his own. When she glanced up at him for confirmation, he always had a smile for her, soft, fond, and secretive.

She washed dishes with Kay after every meal, and soon was helping with laundry. Doing her share of vacuuming and dusting and polishing. Cleaning took her into rooms as of yet unexplored: bedrooms decorated according to color schemes: pink ones, and blue ones and green ones.

“Yours is the rose room,” Beck explained. “It seemed fitting.” There were delicate roses in the wallpaper pattern, a rose garden depicted in the painting above the bed.

She saw his study, finally, a week into her time at the townhouse, when she was dusting. “Just knock and go in,” Kay said, cigarette bobbing from her lip as she scrubbed the downstairs bathroom sink. “If it were up to him, he’d be in dust up to his ears. If he’s got a problem with it, send him to me.”

Her knock on the polished oak door synced with the fast thump of her heart, a flutter of nerves in her belly.

“Yes?” Beck called.

“Kay sent me to dust.”

“Oh, right. Come in.”

He didn’t sound annoyed, but she still eased the door open and tiptoed her way in. No one had told her not to go into this room, but it had felt like a sacred thing. Off to my study. He’s in his study. Rose had imagined it: conjured images of book cases, and heavy tomes, and a massive desk with green glass lamps and orderly files in the drawers.

She hadn’t expected the massive flat-screen computer monitor hung up on the far wall, nor the haphazard array of modern desks set out in front of it, laid out with other, smaller monitors, several keyboards, a mouse or two, a half-dozen empty tea mugs. And, his back to her, Beck, in a faded pinstriped shirt with the sleeves folded back, broad shoulders pressed back into the chair as he stroked his chin and studied the screen: it was a map of some sort, various points picked out with red dots.

He half-turned toward her at the sound of the door, offering a fleeting, distracted scrap of a smile before turning back. “Hello. You won’t be a bother, don’t worry. Just thinking.”

She didn’t know where to begin. There were shelves, but low ones, against the front wall of the room, and over beneath the one window to the side, but they were loaded not with books, but three-ring binders and file folders, crammed in haphazardly. There was a low leather couch, too, a blanket sliding off one arm, and she wondered if Beck ever slept in here – she still hadn’t seen his bedroom, either.

She dusted the shelves, as quickly as she could, not wanting to linger in his private space: just the tops and the edges of the shelves. She didn’t dare move any of the folders in case he had some sort of wild organization system in place.

She moved to the desks, next. Gathered the empty tea mugs to take back to the kitchen; lifted books, papers, and keyboards to dust under them with the utmost care.

She lifted a folder and found a knife beneath; a wicked hunting thing with one serrated edge.

She glanced over her shoulder toward him, wondering if he’d seen her spot it, but he was staring at the map, hair gathered in one fist at the nape of his neck, chewing at his lower lip. Lost in thought.

She stuck the dusting wand in her back pocket, gathered the mugs, and left him alone.

That evening, when they stood chopping green beans together, when Kay was over setting the table, he said, softly, “I’m sorry my study is such a mess. I get distracted with work and fail to pick up after myself.” He sounded contrite; perhaps embarrassed, even.

“It’s definitely not the worst mess I’ve ever seen.” A glance proved his mouth had plucked upward in the corner in a faint wry smirk. She knew he immediately thought of Tabitha, just as she had. “What are you working on? It looked like a map.”

“It is.” He sliced a zucchini into perfect rounds and used the flat of the knife to scrape them off into a bowl. “Just a bit of a pet project.”

When