Do Your Worst(25)

A few minutes later, as she made herself comfortable at his desk—upon closer inspection, she saw he’d missed an opportunity to stack his jack on the queen of spades—Clark started taking down books from different shelves, opening cabinets to pull out maps and blueprints. The task seemed to anchor him, his movements sliding into something familiar. He proceeded to mount all his research in front of her until the pile grew so high, Riley couldn’t see over it.

“I’ve selected a representative sample from among relevant texts for us to start with,” he said, unfolding a battered folding chair from behind the fridge to sit beside her.

“A representative sample.” Riley stared at the stack and swallowed. “This isn’t all of it?”

Clark smiled, as if she were joking. “Hardly.”

It felt a bit like homework, which Riley had never been particularly good at. Her grades had been fine, solid, in high school, but she’d spent most of her study time angsting over a series of boyfriends—all of whom treated her like dirt—while painting her fingernails with Wite-Out.

As if sensing her discomfort, Clark pulled out a text for them to start with. “What are you looking for, exactly? I know what a backgrounder looks like for an archaeologist. I assume curse breaking is . . . different?” He tried to keep the judgment out of his tone and missed by a hair. Still, Riley appreciated the attempt at restraint.

“Look for something weird,” she told him. “Things or people going missing, mysterious occurrences, unexplained phenomena. Anything that doesn’t fit.”

They pored over the books and his notes together. She hadn’t expected him to help. Had sort of figured he’d sit around and make rude quips while she worked. But Clark showed her the timeline he’d constructed so they could narrow in on any major event that might have occurred on or around the property in the 1700s, and he drew her a sort of clan family tree for both the Campbells and the Graphms when she couldn’t keep all the names straight.

Hours bled together, the sun fading behind the tree line.

“What?” Riley said the third time Clark winced when she scribbled an idea on a Post-it note and stuck it inside one of the texts.

“Nothing.” He tore his eyes away as if from the scene of a car crash.

Of course, Clark kept all notes in a separate Moleskine with section tabs, where he recorded any ideas or findings with a corresponding label of title, author, and page number. Imagine having the luxury of so much time that you could justify doing something so needlessly slow when sticky notes were right there.

Clark argued with himself too, under his breath, “No, that can’t be right,” while running his finger beneath a passage.

Riley bit her thumbnail, smothered a smile, and didn’t say anything as she flipped to the next page.

Occasionally, one or the other of them would get up to stretch.

Clark groaned as he rolled his shoulders.

“You good?” Riley might have some Motrin in her purse.

“Fine.” He grimaced in a way that made him look decidedly the opposite. “Tweaked my back when I hit the ground trying to save someone from going up in flames.”

“Okay, relax. No one asked you to go all Smokey Bear. I could have just as easily stopped, dropped, and rolled without you.”

“Since I understood less than twenty-five percent of the words in those sentences”—gingerly, he returned to his seat—“shall I go ahead and assume there was a gracious thank-you in there somewhere?”

Riley rolled her eyes. Sheesh. You catch on fire one time, and they never let you forget it.

Eventually, when her stomach growling turned supersonic, Clark insisted on serving her what turned out to be a half-decent frozen pizza.

“Do you want a beer?”

Riley’s head shot up. Mr. No Fun had been holding out on her.

As if to demonstrate, he opened the fridge and held up two bottles of some kind of dark ale she didn’t recognize.

Her mouth watered. It was a tempting offer after a long, frustrating day. But Riley hesitated.

Having a beer with him felt too casual. Too familiar. Not a business arrangement, but something she might do with a friend.

“No, thanks,” she said.

He put them both back and brought her a glass of water she hadn’t asked for instead.

Riley took a sip and got back to work.

By nine o’clock, they still hadn’t found anything and her eyes had begun to tear from strain. She was already thinking about the route back to the inn when something in an agricultural journal caught her attention.

“Hey.” She nudged Clark’s hairy forearm. “What about this thing with the angel’s-trumpet?”

He knuckled at his eye. “Is that a euphemism?”

“It’s a plant.” She showed him the illustration.

“Pretty?” he said, obviously hoping that was the answer she wanted.

“No. Look.” She tapped the text below the drawing. “A particular varietal used to be native to this region, right around the castle. Usually, the flowers are yellow or pink, occasionally orange, but the ones that grew here were dark blue and extremely rare. Something about the nutrients in the soil. It says here that growers used to make a fortune cultivating it—that it was a show of wealth to have them on display—but then the plant went extinct.”