Page 6 of Shadow Secrets
Sutton put down the twenties, heart racing. The universe had apparently decided that today, of all days, every ghost she’d outrun was going to catch up with her at once.
The back door still seemed like a good idea. But the woman had found her here; it wouldn’t take much to locate her apartment down the street. She marched to the door, cracked it open. “Two minutes,” Sutton said. “Then you leave.”
The woman nodded and stepped inside when Sutton let her. She was younger than Sutton had first guessed—maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. Pretty in an effortless way that suggested good genes and better nutrition.
Nervous, though. Her eyes darted around the parlor before landing on Sutton. “I’m Ginger,” the woman said. “Ginger Galbraith.”
The floor tilted again, harder this time.
Virginia “Ginger” Galbraith, sixteen years old at the time, daughter of Vice President Harold Galbraith. The girl Penn had tried to kill.
The girl Sebastian Whitaker had saved.
She’d been all over the news for months after the shooting—a pretty teenager with red hair and a famous father, the perfect sympathetic victim for a twenty-four-hour news cycle that feasted on such horrors.
And now she was standing in Sutton’s tattoo parlor. On the anniversary, only hours after the man who’d saved her life had stood in the same spot.
The universe isn’t subtle today.
“Ninety seconds,” Sutton said.
Ginger reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. Her fingers were trembling as she swiped to a photo and held it out. “Do you recognize this?”
It was a photograph of someone’s inner left bicep, taken at close range. A tattoo—abstract at first glance, flowing lines and shapes that looked like decorative body art.
But Sutton saw linework the way a musician heard pitch—automatically, granularly, with an instinct for the hand behind the instrument. She knew this hand.
The weight distribution in the curves. The way the shapes locked together like puzzle pieces, creating negative space that wasn’t negative at all. The particular flourish at the terminal points—a tiny hook, almost a signature, that Penn used to put on everything he drew from the time he was fifteen.
“Where did you get this?” Sutton’s voice came out sharp and too fast.
“I saw it on someone,” Ginger said. “A man in Washington.” She swallowed hard, her composure cracking at the edges. “I’ve been looking into it. I think your brother was connected to an organization—a bad one. I think the assassination attempt wasn’t what everyone believes. I think Penn was?—”
Sutton held up a hand. “Stop.”
The parlor felt too small, the air too thin. In the span of a few hours, two people had walked into her shop and tried to rewrite the story she’d spent six years surviving. Sebastian Whitaker with his steady voice and his guilt-soaked eyes, and now this girl—this woman—with her Washington connections, a photograph of her dead brother’s linework on a stranger’s arm, and a wild theory.
It was too much. All of it, on today of all days, was too much.
“You need to leave.” Her voice was flat and final. “Whatever you think you’ve found, whatever theory you’re building—my brother tried to kill you. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s what happened. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry you’re still looking for a reason that makes it make sense, but there isn’t one. Like the news reported, he was obsessed with you.”
They’d said her brother had mental problems. That he’d fixated on Ginger, and when something had set him off, he’d tried to kill her because he couldn’t be with her any other way.
Sutton hadn’t believed a word of it. The world had.
For a moment, Ginger looked like she was going to argue. But Sutton’s expression must have landed, because she exhaled hard through her nose and pocketed her phone. “I’m staying in town tonight,” she said. “If you change your mind, I’m at the Ridgeline Motor Inn off Route 12. Room 7.” She walked toward the door. “I’m not making this up, Sutton. And I think they got it wrong about Penn—about his obsession with me. I don’t think it was that at all.”
Sutton nearly shoved her out the door, then locked it behind her and leaned her forehead against the cool glass. Through the window, she watched Ginger walk to the end of the block, stop under the streetlight, and tap her phone.
She didn’t leave. She stood there on the sidewalk in her expensive jacket, lit up like a model under the sodium glow, and started pacing.
Go home, Sutton thought. Back to D.C.
She turned away from the window and went back to finish closing.
She was reaching for the light switch when she heard the car. Sutton flipped the lights off and went to the window.
It was a dark sedan, headlights off, rolling east on the block at maybe five miles an hour. Ginger was still under the streetlight, phone to her ear, her back to the street. She didn’t notice it.
