“On a different subject, someone is complaining about Rufus’s bad behavior,” Flick commentated.
“Again, that didn’t take long.” Pippa smiled. “How long has the site been up, three days?”
“You certainly have a knack for choosing lost causes, Felicity,” Gina told her, smoothing the bed covers across her lap.
She really couldn’t argue with that. Flick ran through another couple of messages—someone was selling a boat, someone else had lost her driver’s license—half listening to Gina and Pippa’s conversation.
After five minutes Pippa looked up from the notebook on her lap, her pen tapping against the page. “Mom, I was doing your taxes and I saw a receipt for a storage locker in D.C.” Pippa flipped through the pages of the diary. “I think I put it in here to show you.”
Flick happened to be watching Gina and saw the panic that flitted across her face. Over a receipt for a storage locker? Why? Flick sat up slowly, noticing that Gina’s expression now registered mere puzzlement, yet her hand was clutching the bed covers in a white-fingered grip. “A storage locker?”
“Mmm,” Pippa replied and huffed an impatient sigh. “I can’t find it. I must have left it on my desk in the office. They must have billed you incorrectly Why would you have a storage locker in D.C.?”
“Why indeed?” Gina said, her voice vague. Okay, Gina was lying through her teeth, and Flick was surprised that Pippa hadn’t picked up on it. Then again, she was a lot more emotionally perceptive than her reserved, pragmatic cousin.
Flick started to call Gina on her great big fib, but her aunt’s slight shake of her head had the words dying in her mouth. Okay, very weird.
Gina closed her eyes and let out a series of puffs. “Pippy, honey, would you mind checking with the nurses to see when I’m due some pain relief?”
“You had a pill a half hour ago,” Pippa told her. “They won’t give you more.”
“Can you check? No, don’t ring the bell; it’s so rude! Be a dear and find a nurse, please?” Gina pleaded. Flick heard the order under her sweet words and when Pippa stood up, she knew that she had heard it too. Flick waited until Pippa was out of earshot before speaking again.
“Why are you lying, Gin?” she demanded.
“Goddammit.” Flick didn’t know if she was more shocked by the curse that fell from her well-spoken aunt’s lips or the admission of her guilt. Gina rubbed a hand over her face and looked ashen. Fear sloshed around Flick’s stomach like two-day-old margaritas.
“What’s going on, Gina?”
Gina tossed an anxious look at the door. “You can’t tell Pippa!”
“I tell Pips everything, Gin. You know that. We don’t keep secrets,” Flick protested.
“I need your help and I’m asking you to keep this between us, at least until I find a way to tell Pippa myself. I don’t think that you’ll fully understand, but Pippa will have a total meltdown.”
“Tell her what?” Flick used every inch of her self-control not to scream the words.
“There isn’t any time to explain,” Gina stated. “Take my house keys—they’re in my bag in the side cupboard. Hurry Flick, she’ll be back in a minute.”
Flick sent Gina a hard look as she stood up and dropped to her haunches, wishing Pippa would step back into the room so that Gina couldn’t shove her into this situation.
“I’ve never asked anything of you, Felicity. Not once,” Gina’s words dropped onto her head. “I’m asking you to go to the storage facility and inspect my lockers. And also unlock the third-floor bedrooms at the house. Take a look.”
Flick’s head snapped around and up. The third-floor bedrooms? Nobody had been up to the top floor of Gina’s house for years—there had been no reason to. After her boy cousins left home, Gina—as they’d been told—had packed up the rooms and closed up that floor. What on earth did she want out of those rooms? And did she say lockers? As in plural?
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Flick muttered as she opened Gina’s bag to look for her massive bunch of house keys.
“It’ll be self-explanatory,” Gina replied. “I’ll text you the directions to the storage facility.”
Flick stood up, tossed the keys into her own tote bag, and jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “I don’t like this, Gina.”
“Don’t like what?”
Flick held her aunt’s pleading eyes as Pippa stepped back into the room. She didn’t like having to make the choice between mother and daughter, between the aunt who’d been her mother in every way that counted and her cousin who was her soul sister.
“It’ll be okay, darling,” Gina murmured. “I just need some time. And maybe some help.”
“Time and help for what?” Pippa asked.