I frowned, an uneasy weight settling in my gut. “How could henotknow? Why would Holly have told us and not him? She knew it was a problem.”
Lucan had knit his brow with a deep enough furrow that it was visible in the darkness. “She might have figuredwe’dtell him. Safer to let us do it in case he reacted badly.”
“How were we supposed to know we needed to? She never asked us to.” My frown tightened into a scowl. Our stepmom at the time hadn’t struck me as all that nervous when she’d informed us that she’d sent Anthea packing after catching her intruding in Dad’s office.
I brought up the memory of Holly’s sharply pretty face framed by that long hair she’d dyed such a pale blond it’d nearly been white. I’d been so pissed off to find out that Anthea had been using us, that she must have been playing seductress to distract us and get easier access to our private rooms, that I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to Holly’s reaction. But I had the vague impression of her seeming triumphant, like she was pleased with herself for catching the spy.
Wouldn’t she have wanted to brag to Dad about how she’d helped him, if that was the case? She’d always been wheedling him to tell her more about his business operations so she could offer advice, wanting him to involve her more in all areas of his life. I was pretty sure her hassling him about that stuff was half of the reason he’d divorced her. The other half being that she’d aged out of his preferred range.
“Is itpossiblethat she exaggerated what she saw?” I said slowly, giving the ball a slow fling Felix’s way. “She got excited enough to threaten Anthea into leaving and crow about it to us, but when it came to telling Dad, she realized that making that kind of accusation about one of his close friends’ daughters might be a step too far if she wasn’t totally sure what’d gone down?”
“She did like to puff herself up,” Felix remarked. “I could picture that.”
“I definitely wouldn’t say itisn’tpossible,” Lucan said. “But if that’s what happened, if Holly accused Anthea and she wasn’t really doing anything wrong, why didn’t Anthea complain to her dad about it and get Abram to sort everything out with Dad? The fact that she kept quiet about it suggests she had something to feel guilty about.”
He had a point, but I couldn’t shake my growing apprehension. “We don’t know what Holly said to her when she kicked her out. And we do know that Abram was kind of a prick. Anthea might not have felt comfortable admitting to him that his friend’s wife even thought she’d violated their trust.”
If what she’d said about her dad arranging her marriage and being willing to hurt her worse than her husband had if she hadn’t stuck with it was true, then it wasn’t at all difficult to imagine her balking at running off to tattle.
Lucan let out a faint huff. “This is all speculation. We can’t arrive at definite answers this way.”
“But it has given us a better idea of what questions we need to ask.” I paused and caught the ball when he whipped it my way. “And who we need to ask. Holly’s out to pasture. Even if we tracked her down, I don’t think she’d admit to exaggerating. The only other person who knows what went down is Anthea.”
Felix guffawed. “She hasn’t really seemed to be in a confessing mood.”
I swallowed thickly. “We haven’t really given her a chance to open up, have we?” She’d only said as much as she had tonight because I seemed to have pushed her past her limit. “Maybe we need to set animosities aside and have an open conversation. Find out what her story is about what happened back then.”
“So she can lie some more?” Felix muttered.
“So we can at least know what she would say and judge whether it’s a lie or not,” Lucan put in with a nod. “You’re right. That’s our best route to get at the truth. And considering how things are going between us and the Nobles, it’s probably better we sort that out sooner rather than later.”
How things are going… Those words brought back the other thing Anthea had said that’d struck me, the part that’d been buried under my confusion after her outburst. She’s said something about us going to war against the Nobles.
“Have any of you heard about Dad making a move to hit back at the Nobles?” I asked abruptly.
Felix rolled his eyes. “Like I’m part of any of Dad’s business decisions.”
Lucan shook his head. “As far as I know, Dad’s still pressing Ezra for an explanation and compensation, but he doesn’t want to burn bridges too quickly given the long alliance.”
Then we needed to ask Anthea what had made her mention that too. Too many things didn’t add up—or if they did, it was to form a picture I didn’t like at all.
I tucked the football under my arm. “Let’s go hash this out with her now. No time like the present.”
We tramped inside, leaving the ball by the back door so I didn’t look like a dork carrying it to this interrogation. Anthea wasn’t in the kitchen, one of her frequent haunts in the house, but she had said she’d just gotten back from getting dinner.
When we marched up to the guestroom where she’d been staying, we found it empty. A faint whiff of her scent, tart and resiny, lingered in the air, but there was no sign of the woman herself.
“The screen’s still in the window,” Lucan observed. “She didn’t go out on another stealth mission. It’d be early to go sneaking off by that route anyway.”
“Her purse is here.” Felix walked over to the bed where it lay and shamelessly riffled through it, holding up her phone and wallet before tucking them back inside. “It doesn’t seem likely she’d have left the house for regular reasons without that stuff.”
The tension in my gut coiled tighter. “Then she’s around here somewhere. It’s not that big a house. Come on.”
As we hustled out of her room to make a more thorough search of the building, I couldn’t shake the memory of her agonized expression as she’d hurled those last words at me. She’d been awfully upset. Without realizing it, I’d stirred up a whole lot of pain.
She hadn’t done something stupid in that emotional state, had she? I wanted to think nothing could get the better of Anthea Noble all that easily… but I’d never thought anything could rattle her as much as I’d seen her just an hour ago.