“Emma.” He put himself in her path.
“I just need some air,” she said. She started to step around him. He grabbed her arm, jerking her to a stop. She looked down at his hand, fingers dimpling the skin of her upper arm. Tight enough to balance on the edge of pain.
He let her go.
She was afraid of so many things; he had never been one of them, and he wasn’t now. But she couldn’t be here.
“When are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked.
Never, she thought. “Soon,” she said.
This time, he let her leave.
23
EMMA
Now
Wilson’s was a bar utterly without personality; it didn’t slouch into dive bar territory or manage the gloss necessary to be trendy. It was a bar you only ever ended up at because it was the only one open or the only one close by.
As soon as she opened the door she spotted the man she was looking for down at the end of the bar, pulling a pint. At forty, Logan Ellis had a few flecks of gray in his hair and more definition to his jaw, but little else about him had changed. Still good-looking in that slightly off-putting way, still with those pale eyes. His attention flicked up to her, and he raised a few fingers in a perfunctory greeting, not showing a glimmer of recognition. She made her way down to the other end of the bar and sat, watching as he delivered the beer to the only other patron in the bar before coming back her way.
Logan approached. A puzzled smile crossed his features, and he rested his hands on the bar. “Emma Palmer. My dad mentioned you were back in town.”
“I’m sure he’s thrilled,” Emma said.
He laughed, not unpleasantly. “Yeah, he’s not exactly your biggest fan. What can I get you? Club soda and lime?”
“Sure.” His father must have told him that, too. He set the drink in front of her. There were tattoos climbing up his arms, smudged with age. Clumsy images of demons and dice, an anchor with an unreadable banner. She caught the edge of the smell of him, musk and soap.
She took a sip, remembering that she hated club soda. Studied him while he studied her. Her ice clinked in her glass as she tipped it back and forth in her hand idly.
“Why are you here, Emma Palmer?” he asked. “It’s not for the drink and it’s not for the ambience, so what is it?”
“You and my sister,” she said.
“Me and your sister,” he replied with a half grin. “So you heard about that.”
“I was kind of hoping it wasn’t true,” she said.
“Can’t imagine someone like me with the perfect princess of Arden Hills?” he asked, and laughed. It was an unkind sound, like a crow’s warning call.
“Is that why you slept with her? You wanted to ruin the pretty princess?” Emma asked.
His face darkened. “No. Look. I liked her. I did. A lot more than she liked me, I think.”
Emma considered him. She’d met Logan a handful of times as a kid. Her dad wasn’t close to Ellis like he was with Hadley, but they were friendly. When Logan was a teenager, he’d been around the house a few times when they had dinner with the Ellises. She remembered a boy who couldn’t seem to hold still, constant motion and a tension in the air that made her nervous. He seemed more settled now, but there was still a taut feeling to the air. Something getting ready to snap.
“Were you at the Saracen house the night my parents died?” she asked.
He set his weight back a bit, surprised. “Jesus, you don’t beat around the bush.”
“Were you?”
“Playing detective?”
“Just asking questions,” she told him. “Please. Help me out?” she asked, and she didn’t have to fake the desperate plea in her voice.
Something shifted in his face—a look of sympathy or maybe pity appearing briefly in his eyes before he nodded reluctantly. He glanced over at the guy with the beer at the end of the bar. Dropped his voice. “Sure, I was there at some point.”
“And Juliette?”
He didn’t answer right away. She just waited, eyes locked with his. “She was with me for a while. She took off,” he said at last.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, irritation roughening his voice. “She wasn’t in a talking mood. We had an argument, sort of. She ran off on me.”
“And you didn’t see her again? You don’t know where she went?” Emma asked.
“No,” he insisted, but his eyes dodged away from her. He was lying, Emma thought—or hiding something.